---
title: 'Fast Training Week - Q&A'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=LOTCxCrtfWY'
video_id: 'LOTCxCrtfWY'
date: 2026-08-03
duration_sec: 1308
---

# Fast Training Week - Q&A

> Source: [Fast Training Week - Q&A](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LOTCxCrtfWY)

## Summary

In this Q&A session, Dr. Mindy Pelz explains the benefits of a 48-hour fast, focusing on dopamine receptor reset and antioxidant upregulation. She clarifies that most benefits occur after the fast, not during, and provides guidance on how often to fast, emphasizing hormonal considerations for women.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to Fast Training Week** [00:03] — Dr. Mindy Pelz welcomes viewers to Fast Training Week and asks about their longest fasts, encouraging comments.
- **Six Fasting Windows** [00:46] — There are six timed fasts ranging from 13 to 72 hours, based on research and practical experience. These are detailed in her book 'Fast Like a Girl'.
- **48-Hour Fast Definition** [02:41] — A 48-hour fast means no food for 48 hours, keeping glucose stable or decreasing. At the 48-hour mark, two key benefits occur: dopamine system reset and antioxidant upregulation.
- **Dopamine System Reset** [03:12] — Fasting for 48 hours resets dopamine neurons, opens D2 receptor sites, and creates new dopamine receptors, leading to increased happiness potential without spending money or taking pills.
- **Antioxidant Upregulation** [05:15] — At 48 hours, antioxidants are upregulated from the Krebs cycle, which helps slow the aging process.
- **Benefits Occur After the Fast** [06:18] — Most benefits of a 48-hour fast happen after the fast, not during. During the fast, you may not feel joy immediately; the dopamine reset and other benefits manifest in the days following.
- **Mental Health Benefits During the Fast** [07:44] — During the fast, GABA increases as ketones rise, promoting calmness. At 24 hours, intestinal stem cells reboot, increasing serotonin production, which improves mood.
- **How Often to Do a 48-Hour Fast** [11:07] — For mental health challenges, some may do 2-3 day water fasts weekly or biweekly during severe crises. However, variation is crucial; don't do 48-hour fasts every week without incorporating shorter fasts.
- **Women's Hormonal Considerations** [12:16] — Women should avoid 48-hour fasts the week before their period. Post-menopausal women should not fast every week and need hormone-building days. Fasting must be timed to the hormonal cycle.
- **Importance of Fasting Variation** [13:26] — Variation in fasting is essential to mimic ancestral feast-famine cycles. The thrifty gene hypothesis suggests constant eating contributes to insulin resistance and diabetes.
- **Benefits of Shorter Fasts** [16:10] — Shorter fasts also have benefits: 13-15 hours stimulate growth hormone, 17 hours induce autophagy, 24 hours reboot intestinal stem cells, 36 hours increase fat burning, and 72 hours reboot the immune system.
- **Mindset and Encouragement** [20:25] — The health game is about going to the edge of hard to adapt. The mantra 'my body's got this' helps push through difficult moments during fasting.

### Conclusion

The 48-hour fast offers significant long-term benefits, particularly for mental health and aging, but these benefits are realized after the fast. It's essential to incorporate fasting variation and consider hormonal timing, especially for women, to maximize benefits safely.

## Transcript

i think we are all set youtube facebook let me know if you guys are there if you can see me it is fast training week and i am here to answer your questions about the 48-hour fast so
what would be really fun for me because i really like this fast it's very doable so i'm hoping you guys are uh experiencing this as well to know what the longest fast is that you have
done so regardless of what platform you're on just put it in the comments i will when i'm done going live here i go back and read these so i love seeing it
seeing it so let's dive in to the 48 hour fast so let's let me back up when i go into fasting what i like to do the vision of what we're trying to
accomplish with fasting and then get down into the details i find that if we're just in the details all the time um that often you can look at fasting like you would look at a supplement as it's like oh this thing you do once
every once in a while but you don't have context and where to put it and a health philosophy and a formula to put it in so let me start real high level for those of you some of you are new some of
you have been around for a while there are six different fasts that we know benefit us and they're all timed so fasting you can also look at fasting as it's time restricted eating that's basically what
it is you're taking your eating window and you are fasting within or you're eating within a very certain period of time throughout your day leaving the rest of the day for fasting these six windows range everything from
these six windows range everything from go from 13 hours to 72 hours these are based off of not only the research i've seen on fasting over the last several years but also in what i've seen works really well for you guys
so that's why i teach these six fasts women these six fasts are coming out in fast like a girl you can pre-order the book now i go into the science on these six fasts and i talk about how you can time
it to your hormones so i'm really excited for you guys to get that book um now this week we are doing the 48 hour fast and the 48 hour fast is going without food
for 48 hours and i know a lot of you ask about coffee and drinks and all of that and i've done a ton of videos on those our companion guide has comments on that but generally what the research shows
what the research shows is that at 48 hours without food which basically means glucose is not going up so glucose is either staying the same or it's going down for 48 hours that at
that 48 hour mark two things happen one one you start to reset your dopamine system now let's talk about this for a moment and why this is so important
that dopamine system often gets overused in this dopamine-rich world that we're in and one of the studies that i have seen people who are obese have
less reaction to dopamine so what they have to do is eat more to get the same joy out of their food because that system is so congested it's clogged it's
not working right receptors are blocked neuronal pathways are not working as efficiently and what the research shows is that when we go 48 hours without food it starts to reset those neurons it
starts to open up d2 specifically receptor sites for dopamine it also creates new dopamine receptor sites okay think about that for a moment if you can go 48 hours eight hours
without eating and create no new dopamine receptor sites new ones these aren't the ones that have been saturated these are the brand new ones then what that means is after the 48 hour fast you are locked and loaded for
more happiness you didn't spend any money you didn't have to take any magic pill to make that happen you trained your body to go into these longer fasts so you can have more of
these receptor sites this is what i love about fasting so that would be the first second thing about the 48 hour that i love is those of you that are trying to slow the aging process down research shows that at 48 hours they saw an up
regulation of antioxidants that are that were kicked off being spun off of the krebs cycle and these antioxidants are what we need to be able to slow the heat the aging process down
now why this is important the krebs cycle anybody of you that know the krebs cycle it's like the most brilliant concept of how our body makes energy but it's also how our body can use and make antioxidants
so when we go into a 48 hour fast what we're doing is we're resetting these dopamine receptors heights we're getting new dopamine reset receptors so we've brand new ones we've cleared the pathway of that neuron the axon of your neurons
we've opened up the dendrites we've cleared the whole dopamine pathway plus we start up regulating uh antioxidants to slow down the aging process who wants that like sign me up for that and it's not
so the question that i am here to answer for you is twofold the one question you all wanted to hear was do the benefits of a 48 hour fast happen
in the fast or does it happen after the fast and i'm gonna tell you that it happens mostly after the fast based off the research that i just told you
mostly it happens afterwards what does that mean let's talk about this this for a moment that means that you may that you may go into this fast and it may be hour 30
and you're like uh i do not feel joy i do not know what dr minnie's talking about because i am not feeling joy yeah it's quite possible because dopamine is the molecule of more and when you take food away it's not
like it's it's excited about that in the beginning in fact you might find that your brain is like i can't do this i need food i'm going to die all the monkey mind things that show up when we fast
so the benefit to mental health may not be in the 48-hour fast all the long-term benefits are after the fast which is amazing now i will tell you from mental health
what we do know are is twofold gaba so gaba goes up when ketones go up so if you guys hit hour 30 and you're like i hate this this is horrible
just check in with yourself for a moment and ask if your body feels a little more calm does your mind feel a little more calm there's a lot that goes up here in the mind and it's very possible
that a lot of your limiting beliefs a lot of your your fear around going without food a lot of the ways that you use food to create dopamine in your body a lot of those that might be what the monkey mind
that but if you're doing a keto mojo and you're looking at your ketones and your ketones are going up and it's hour 30 36
you might or even 24 you might notice that you're a little calmer because gaba because as ketones go up gaba goes up and gaba is the calming neurotransmitter the second mental health mood change
that you might notice in the journey to the 48 hours is that at 24 hours we know the 48 hours is that at 24 hours we know that the intestinal stem cells the cells the stem cells inside your gut will reboot themselves re-energize
themselves so now they will start to repair the inner mucosal lining of the gut okay that's awesome we now are getting at 24 hours more serotonin serotonin is the
neurotransmitter that just makes you feel yummy inside and like everything's going to be okay and makes you happy dopamine is the thing that gets you off the off the couch and makes you want to go chase something really joyful
serotonin is the one that's like hey it's good we're all good there's lots of joy here and gab is the one that's like hey calm down let's just calm and stay centered so on the journey to that 48 hour fast
serotonin is primarily made in the gut so the journey to 48 hours is helping to reboot your gut so that you can make more serotonin it's getting you ketones so you can upregulate gaba
and it's resetting the dopamine system and giving you new dopamine receptor so it's a it's it's there's a lot to answer that question because it's not
just as simple as most of the healing happens after your after 48 hours because there's still healing happening along the path it just isn't the dopamine healing the dopamine
healing the dopamine system it gets reset at 48 hours and then you have that leftover afterwards same thing if you think about serotonin in the gut remember you can go into a 24 hour fasting go into a 48-hour fast you
can reset your gut so it can make more serotonin but then you have to remember if you go back to eating processed foods the bad oils the sugars the refined then you're going to destroy the gut again and we're going to have a little
two-step forward one step back kind of scenario scenario so when we fast there is always healing going on and what we do when we bring food back
into the equation really makes or breaks how long that healing stays so let me know if that makes sense the second question that was asked that you guys wanted me to answer was how long should you do a 48 hour fast
so um if if mental health is is a big challenge for you and you like doing a 48 hour fast um you know i've seen people that i've coached uh do two to three day water
every week to two weeks when they were in a really severe health crisis now not everybody's gonna do that but if you've been given a bad diagnosis you're gonna be motivated to do that at no
matter what so if you know depression and anxiety um and lack of joy is a big deal for you and you go into a 48 hour fast and you
realize hey you know what the days after that i actually feel a little more that i actually feel a little more joyful then you do it as often as you want to and is safe now i want to put a couple of nuances on
this so women with a cycle remember we we don't we wouldn't throw a 48-hour fast at our bodies the week before our period
post-menopausal women we wouldn't go into a 48-hour fast every week if we did we would want to make sure that we had some some hormone building days we were stepping out of fasting on
the other days so for women the cadence with our fats have to be a lot different because we really need to protect our hormones and just because we want dopamine we want more serotonin we don't want to
uh progesterone because progesterone is what calms us so there's an art to this this is why i wrote this all out and fast like a girl and you guys will have it all in one book so remember women we still have to go in
and out of fasting variations and then the other thing i really want to point out if you get really excited about this 48 hour fast is what i want you to remember is that variation of fasting is always important
so just because we love fasting doesn't mean that we do it all the time so if you decide hey 48 hour faster like my new jam and you start doing them on a regular basis weekly
days of the week you're gonna need to not fast a day you're gonna need to bring your fast down to maybe 13 hours more intermittent fasting on someday you're gonna still need to kind of have that variation because what we're trying
to do with fasting if you if you're not familiar with this is that we're trying to mimic what our cave ancestors did years ago and i'll point something out on this because i think it's really fascinating
and fast like a girl there's something called the thrifty gene hypothesis and that is that our cave friends our cave ancestors that the way the the ones that
survived the harsh feast famine conditions of cave life they had a genetic mutation that pre-programmed them to thrive when they go without food
when we're in this day and age we're going against that genetic uh predisposition to thrive without food and the thrifty gene hypothesis it's a hypothesis it's a it's a theory says that one of the reasons we may have
more insulin resistance more diabetes right now is because we are eating all day long we're never putting our bodies into this fasted state we're never into this fasted state we're never mimicking feast famine cycling and that
is how we're genetically designed to be is to lean into longer fast and then to go into a place where we can eat good quality food and then longer fast and then eat good quality food so when you stop and you and you ask the
question of how many how often should i do a 48 hour fast um ask yourself like how often do the cave people do a 48 hour fast now this isn't totally another
interesting twist on this is they probably did a lot more in the winter time than they did in the summer time so if we really want to mimic where some of these genetic predispositions have come from it may be that we are doing
more of the longer fast in the winter and more of the shorter fasts in the summer again there's no theory on this this is just what i'm seeing in watching millions of people fast
so so the 48 hour fast let me just remind you that the shorter fasts have benefits too at 13 to 15 hours you're getting growth
hormone growth hormone is really really powerful for a lot of reasons um you know not only burning fat but it can help with sleep i have a new video that will come out next month on youtube about a hormone called a rexin and
about a hormone called a rexin and erection is actually can be stimulated in these shorter fasts and it can help with sleep so you'll have to stay tuned for that 17 hours we know we go into a state of
autophagy ish that's sort of the the range we know that at the range we know that at 24 we reboot our intestinal stem cells at 36 we start burning more fat at 48. we're now into resetting these dopamine
pathways creating more dopamine receptor sites and at 72 we reboot our whole immune system amazing that's you you're doing that as we go through this week and we do fast training week what i tried to do is
set it up showing you how you would move into a 48 hour fast how you would move out of the 48 hour fast so i gave you some parameters around that again if you're really dealing with a
for you to do give it a try really i mean there's what have you got to lose um give it a try and then the trick is to see how you did afterwards so it's not necessarily on the 40th hour are you
i got more joy it may be that the two to three days after the 48 hour that you start to experience more joy and it's some of this stuff especially when we're dealing with
mental health it can be very subtle so just really tap in and and ask yourself and see if you can notice so and a lot of you guys who have been fasting with of you guys who have been fasting with me put it in the comments let us know um
health that would be awesome because we have a lot of new fasters and you guys that have been around for a while you have you have a lot of wisdom to share and i want to make sure that everyone in
my community benefits from it now if you guys are needing more help with your guys are needing more help with your fasting lifestyle if you want to ask me directly more questions i'm doing this in a q a in my reset academy on
wednesday you can join us there join my academy and on wednesday i am doing a full q a session on zoom for my academy members specifically on the 48 hour fast where
we can go into more detail on this and help figure out how to customize it for because remember that just i'm giving you a big broad bit of information here now your job is to find where it works best for you
is to find where it works best for you this is not and women especially i'm i am yelling this as loud as i can we never ever ever should do health the same as any other human on the planet
we have our own hormonal profile our hormones are coming in they're coming the way we sleep the way we fast the supplements we take all of that needs to be timed to our hormonal cycle
so in my academy i'm teaching that so if you need more nuance you need more help with that come join us in in my academy and um those of you that are on youtube and facebook you can just put reset academy and my team will send you a link
we can't send links on instagram unfortunately but you guys on instagram can go up into my profile or my bio and find it there so share with me your results let me know how you all do and
you know really know that your body's got this your body knows what to do it's the [ __ ] mind it's the monkey mind that slows us down and and blocks us when the fasting gets hard remember that when it gets hard this
because i think this is really really powerful for you guys to realize the name of the health game is not to avoid hard things
the name of the health game is to go right up to the edge of hard so that the body can start to adapt if you've ever worked out with a trainer you've ever worked out with a trainer before at the gym you know this your
trainer doesn't sit back and make it easy for you your trainer makes it a little bit hard so your muscles can grow that's what you're doing with fasting so your body's got it the mantra i i put this on a video on instagram yesterday
it went on facebook as well the mantra that you're gonna tell yourself when it that you're gonna tell yourself when it gets hard is my body's got this my body knows what to do the ketones are coming and as soon as ketones kick in the calm
happens the hunger stops and you can get ahead of some of those difficult moments so i'm cheering you guys on so excited about what you're about to experience i can't wait to read your comments
and as always don't give up on yourself you are a miracle you're living in a miracle and your body knows exactly what to do you just never been given the manual so here's the fasting manual i'm handing it to you all now so hope that
handing it to you all now so hope that helps