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Know Thyself

E172 - Dr. Alan Goldhammer: The Science of Fasting: How to Heal the Body and Rewire the Mind

Know Thyself

André Duqum

Self-improvement, Education

4.8658 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 88 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dr. Alan Goldhammer, co-founder of TrueNorth Health Center, joins us to reveal the science and psychology of water fasting, detoxification, and healing the body through nature’s intelligence. Drawing from 40 years of clinical experience with over 20,000 supervised fasts, he explains why many chronic illnesses—hypertension, autoimmune conditions, metabolic disease, and even depression—respond when the body is given a chance to reset.


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Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

___________

00:00 Intro

04:25 The Body’s Innate Ability to Heal

08:45 TrueNorth: How Water Fasting Is Done Safely

13:10 Dopamine, Pleasure, and Modern Addiction

17:40 The Food Environment That Makes Us Sick

22:00 The Problem With Hyper-Processed Eating

25:47 Ad: Boncharge

26:20 What Happens to the Body During a Fast

30:55 Detoxification and the Healing Crisis

35:10 Who Should and Shouldn’t Fast

36:16 Ad: Mudwtr

39:30 Refeeding: The Most Important Phase

44:00 Case Studies: Reversing Chronic Disease

48:25 Weight Loss vs. Health Restoration

52:40 Why Most Diet Advice Fails

56:55 The Discipline of “Nothing”

1:01:15 The Psychology of Cravings

1:05:40 How Environment Shapes Behavior

1:10:05 Living in Alignment With Natural Law

1:14:20 How Much Is “Enough” for a Healthy Life?

1:18:40 The Simplicity of Whole Plant Foods

1:22:00 Conclusion

___________


Episode Resources:

https://www.healthpromoting.com/

https://www.instagram.com/truenorthhealthfoundation/


https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/

https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast

https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Isn't it interesting that the Jews and the Jain, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Christians, don't all agree on everything.

0:07.8

But they all have a deep respect and longstanding tradition regarding fasting.

0:12.4

It turns out we're able to do something with diet and fasting that's not traditionally done in medicine.

0:19.2

And that's helped people get well.

0:21.1

Today we're in a situation where it's so common to be overweight to have these diseases

0:27.2

of excess that we think it's normal.

0:29.3

It's really a difficult challenge to teach people how to get healthy in a world designed

0:34.1

to make them fat sick and miserable.

0:36.0

Fasting's like rebooting a computer. You know how your computer doesn't work, and then you get frustrated, you turn it off, and you don't know why, but when you turn it back on, it's working again. I think there's three things that are really important. The idea is to fast as short as possible, but long enough to resolve the problem or achieve the goal. And then perhaps the most critical part of fasting is actually

0:55.3

as beneficial as fasting isn't sick people. It's even more helpful in healthy people.

1:06.5

Alan Goldhammer, thanks for being here. My pleasure. For over four decades, you've been helping people heal through fasting and lifestyle intervention.

1:16.1

What originally led you down this path and has made you so committed to it for all these years?

1:22.2

Well, you know, I was a kid on the spectrum and was interested in playing basketball and wasn't that good. And I wanted to

1:30.9

be better. And so I started reading some books trying to see if there was maybe I could get an edge.

1:36.3

And one of the books I read was a guy by Herbert Shelton who said that health had causes,

1:42.6

just like disease has causes. So if you wanted to be healthy, if you wanted to

1:46.3

function at your best, you had to do the things that resulted in that outcome. And he talked about

1:52.0

diet and sleep and exercise. And he also talked about fasting as a way of kind of undoing the

1:59.4

consequences of dietary access. And that just for some

2:02.4

reason really struck me as interesting. And so I just got very, very interested in that,

2:08.7

and I began to pursue that. It didn't do much for me in terms of my athletic prowess, but it did

2:15.5

kind of lead me down a path, which I continue to follow. In fact, I remember I was

...

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