AMA #2: the Nothingburger — results from Peter's week-long fast between two weeks of nutritional ketosis — and answering questions on all things fasting

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way.
I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Welcome to this episode of The Drive. This is sort of a cross between what I would call an AMA and a show and tell. I think it's billed as an AMA, and we certainly do our best to kind of answer all the questions about this particular thing, but it was also a little bit of a, as I say, a show and tell, where I kind of go over in detail what this fasting protocol was all about. So this particular episode is very specifically about questions that folks have asked around why I did this, you know, for lack of a better description, this week of keto followed by a week of fasting followed by a week of keto. I call it the KFK sandwich, but Bob has referred to it as the nothing burger, which probably makes more sense.
So this was, again, kind of a first for us where we were kind of just spending a bit of time talking very specifically about this, you know, experiment I've done. And when I say experiment, I use that term pretty loosely. I mean, quotes, self-experiment, maybe, you know, N of one nonsense, whatever you want to call it. But hopefully, I provide at least some rationale for why this was interesting to me.
More importantly, what hypotheses could be generated, and ultimately, I think, where I'd like to be able to take this sort of insight, because my real motivation for doing this, I hope, comes across clearly. This was the first time Bob and I ever didn't record one of these things together. So any other time that we've done sort of interview slash AMA stuff, we're in person. So, you know, this was kind of working out some of the kinks of not sitting in front of each other, but I don't think that really turns into a major hiccup. And then this is gonna be one where I think if you don't have the show notes in front of you, you know, at the very least, you wanna go back and look at them. And the reason is there's just so much data that I end up putting out there. So there's sort of like, here's how my body weight changed, here's what my ketone levels were, here's the trailing averages of my blood glucose levels from the CGM, et cetera. And then, of course, I did a blood test every seven days. So on a three-week sandwich, that's basically four parallel sets of blood tests. And there's just a bunch of other stuff. So all of that's gonna be laid out in the notes. And so I guess the easiest way to ingest this info would be sort of sitting in front of your whatever device you would read this stuff on and looking at it. Alternatively, I think you can sort of listen to it and then kind of come back and skim the notes and they'll make more sense. So I suspect either one of those will be appropriate. I mean, again, I suspect next time I do some sort of goofy self-experiment, we'll continue to do that. That said, we are going to do another AMA. We'll record it next month, which will be in September. And by then we hope to have an AMA page on the website. We're in the process of trying to figure out how complicated it is to produce an AMA page of the caliber that I've seen on others like Sam Harris' site and really like. And the reason is I think that'll be easier for people than what we're doing now, which is basically people are tweeting us questions, cc'ing Bob, and then he's aggregating them in a spreadsheet. So not that efficient for Bob, and not that efficient for you, because how are you gonna keep track of what questions are being asked, if that matters? So hopefully by September, we'll have this new thing up and running. Folks can blast AMA stuff into that, and then we can also more efficiently aggregate it and probably tabulate it once people start voting and stuff, giving us a sense of what people like. I think that's about all I want to say going into this. I think the rest of this episode kind of speaks for itself. So I hope you enjoy this discussion about my little fasting experiment.