You can biohack without overhauling your lifestyle in favor of being the Healthiest Person Alive.
So put down the 3-hour morning routine, and maybe turn off some of your metrics-trackers. They're not the key to longevity.
Our founder and CEO Warner Jenkins has already built a solid foundation of health practices, and once he felt secure in that base, he started experimenting to see what advanced tools could integrate into his life. And after 5 years of experimenting, he's learned that strategic 24-72 hour extended fasts can deliver fantastic benefits (like GI resets and even enhancing athletic performance) without interrupting a busy daily life.
Extended Fasting: The One "Extreme" Practice Worth Doing
Warner thinks wellness extremism is just that — extreme. There's no point in optimizing your life if you're not enjoying it. That's why he's homed in on one advanced practice that delivers outsized returns: extended fasting.
He developed his protocol through an MBA approach: he tested incrementally, measured outcomes, then gradually scaled. It's the same approach that's core to Nordic Wave's philosophy. It was in part a response to his autoimmune healing journey, where he found medicine healed symptoms but not causes.
Fasting became a valid alternative way to care for himself — he found it was a great tool for mental clarity, GI health, and cellular repair.
Extended Fasting and Its Benefits
Extended fasting entails any fast where you don't eat (or eat very, very little) for 48 hours straight or more. Extended fasting isn't intermittent — it's a long, uninterrupted period of fasting.
In intermittent fasting, you alternate between eating and fasting in an established pattern.
In alternate day fasting, you're in fact fasting intermittently, on a specific pattern: you alternate between days where you eat normally, and days where you fast, usually on a 24- to 36-hour cycle.
Extended fasting benefits include:
- Reducing inflammation
- Encouraging cellular repair
- Resetting your metabolism
- Boosting your brainpower
"When you fast, you get into autophagy," Warners says.
Autophagy is a cellular repair and cleansing process where damaged cells, pathogens, and proteins are broken down and recycled.
It's a main goal of extended fasting: Because your cells aren't working on digesting food, they run around your body and clean out dead cells, repairing broken ones. A cold shower or cold plunge can help with that process.
"I truly believe your body has all the tools to repair," Warner says. "You just have to get it in a state to be able to do that repair." He'll sometimes go to medically supervised week-long fasting clinics — he suggests TrueNorth in California — where professionals monitor your health, mind, and progress as you move through the experience.
Building Your Fasting Practice
Warner shares his extended fasting routine, which takes you from 24 hours to 72 hours. (A 16-hour fast would likely be considered intermittent.)
- Start with 24-hour fasting (do this once or twice)
- Progress to 36-hour fasting
- Work up to 72-hour fasting (as a once-annual ultimate reset)
Extended fasts can be a healthy way to restart your immune system and metabolism.
If you want to go beyond your current baseline health practices, but still want to enjoy life (not let optimization overtake it) then extended fasting fits your lifestyle. It's powerful, evidence-based, and free.
When you build up your fasting protocol, moving gradually from 16 to 72 hours, you'll experience stunning cellular benefits without interrupting your daily routine.
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