Chris James is the creator of the wellness brand A Healthy Alternative, who built his fasting and dietary protocols while trying to cure a decade-long undiagnosed infection that no specialist could fix. In this episode he joins me to explain how he helped his brother lose one hundred pounds in ninety days through water fasting, what he believes happens in the body during extended fasts, why he committed to distilled water, and how he tracked every detail like a researcher rather than a guru selling a quick fix.
Chris James is the creator of the wellness brand A Healthy Alternative. He developed his fasting protocols through years of self-experimentation while dealing with a decade-long undiagnosed infection that conventional medicine could not resolve, eventually committing to strict dietary changes and extended water fasting and documenting everything.
Chris says water fasting produced an average of about two pounds of weight loss per day for his brother over time, with heavier individuals often seeing more dramatic early results. He describes his brother, who weighed over four hundred pounds, losing roughly twenty pounds in the first four days before the rate settled.
Chris describes a window, roughly between days fourteen and twenty-one of an extended fast, where the scale slows or stalls but inches come off rapidly as the body shrinks and recycles old cells. He says he documented his brother losing four to five inches off his waist in a single day during this phase.
Chris says he became fascinated with how nature purifies water and committed to drinking a gallon of distilled water a day for two years. He says he never experienced mineral deficiencies, and that his brother's pre-existing electrolyte imbalances actually improved, while distinguishing between leaching inorganic versus vital minerals.
Chris recommends a seventy-two-hour fast as an optimal target. He says by day three autophagy is fully active and the body is in ketosis, and while shorter forty-eight-hour fasts have benefits, the seventy-two-hour window maximizes the payoff while staying achievable for most people.
Chris references research suggesting that after roughly forty-eight hours of fasting, human growth hormone in males increases dramatically. He connects this to muscle development and repair, and describes his brother building lean, strong muscle while training in a fasted state.
I have experimented with fasting myself, so when Chris started explaining what was happening in my body during those longer fasts, a lot of it clicked. What drew me to him was how scientific he is about it. He tracks data, documents results, and experiments on himself and his family like a researcher, not someone selling a shortcut. I wanted him to walk me through the mechanisms I had felt but never fully understood.
Chris did not set out to lose weight. He set out to fix an infection that doctors could not diagnose for ten years. He described what happened during his first extended fast and why it convinced him the root cause was dietary. Hear how that accidental discovery turned into a whole protocol in the episode.
The part that got my attention was Chris describing a window where the scale barely moves but inches disappear, something he calls hyperautophagy. He explained how he and his brother gamed it with a fasting and refeeding rhythm. Listen to him break down the exact pattern.
Chris drinks distilled water despite the common warnings about leaching minerals, and he has a specific reason rooted in how he thinks about hydration at the cellular level. He explained the distinction he draws and what he saw in his own family. Press play to hear the water science that changed his approach.
The day after we talked, what stayed with me was how much of what Chris described matched things I had felt during my own fasts but could not explain, the inflammation dropping, the joints loosening up, the clarity. He did not read this in a book. He lived it, tracked it, and helped his family with it.
Whether you want to lose weight, reduce inflammation, or just understand what your body can do, listen to the whole thing.
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Chris James is the creator of the wellness brand A Healthy Alternative. He developed his expertise through personal experimentation and meticulous documentation while dealing with a decade-long undiagnosed infection that traditional medicine could not resolve. After committing to strict dietary changes and extended water fasting, he helped his brother lose one hundred pounds in ninety days and assisted other family members in changing their health. He approaches wellness like a scientist, tracking data and outcomes to understand the mechanisms behind fasting, inflammation, and cellular regeneration.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 1001 with Chris James.
Chris: Hi, I'm Chris James, and I'm the creator of A Healthy Alternative wellness brand, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom: Chris James, Healthy Alternative, what's up, man? I got interested in your story — you helped your brother lose a hundred pounds. How did that happen?
Chris: He'd gotten up to around four hundred, four hundred twenty pounds. We were still pretty young, our late twenties, early thirties, and I could tell he was shortening his lifespan. He'd just had his son, and I could see where it was heading — that he might not be around for his kids and his wife. He's one of my best friends, so I reached out. He wasn't in a good headspace at first, and it took about three months of me talking to him, plus watching our other brother lose 50 or 60 pounds, before he thought, if John can do it, I can do it. He started with traditional weight loss and got down to around 490, but hit a plateau, so he asked me what to do next. I put him on a regimen, and over about ninety days he lost a hundred pounds. It was incredible.
Tom: You mentioned losing weight was almost a side effect of your own health journey — what was that about?
Chris: I was around 236 pounds at my biggest — what I'd call skinny fat, not big by most standards, but that was the least of my worries. I had thinning hair, cognitive decline, heart palpitations, and an infection that had been getting progressively worse for about a decade. No matter how many tests or drugs, it wouldn't go away. My specialist eventually told me he'd given me every drug he had and that maybe what I was dealing with was dietary. At the same time, I was already studying natural health through the alkaline diet and fasting, so I decided to go all in — a hundred percent alkaline food and fasting, just drinking water, cutting out drinking and everything else. Over about five or six months I drank a gallon of distilled water a day and did several long water fasts — thirteen days, then ten, then eight, five, then another ten. On my very first water fast, the irritation from my infection went away completely. That told me whatever I was dealing with had something to do with what I was eating, which in a decade of dealing with it, I'd never even considered.
Tom: What kind of infection was it?
Chris: No one could ever pinpoint it. It was in my urethra, kind of like an itch you can't scratch. The original thought was an STI, but every test came back negative. At one point a doctor even suggested it might be in my head, since it was intermittent — just brief twinges that were slowly getting more frequent and lasting longer. I went from a general practitioner to a specialist, and nobody ever came back with anything conclusive.
Tom: Why were you drinking distilled water specifically?
Chris: I was studying water at the same time, looking at how nature purifies water through its own life cycle — dew, mist, distillation — and trying to mimic that. I knew there was a paper, I believe by Dr. Mercola, warning that distilled water leaches vital minerals, but that didn't resonate with me, so I decided to just try it myself. I drank a gallon of distilled water a day for about two years and never had any mineral deficiencies — nothing that was supposed to happen, happened. Interestingly, my brother, the one who'd been 400 pounds, did have electrolyte imbalances before he started fasting, and once he began fasting and drinking distilled water, those imbalances actually resolved — confirmed by blood work he had done mid-fast.
Tom: So what was your personal experience during those early fasts?
Chris: The number one driving force was relief from the infection. My heart palpitations actually got more intense at first when I started fasting, which was nerve-wracking, but through consistent fasting they eventually went away completely — even when I wasn't fasting. On my first fast I had intense cravings for foods I hadn't eaten or wanted in fifteen years, like Sloppy Joes and chocolate cake. I came to believe the body was finally processing out the chemical residue tied to those foods, and once I didn't give in, the cravings never came back — a decade later, they still haven't. As for weight, I tracked everything like a scientist: I lost about four pounds the first day, then averaged around two pounds a day on pure water fasting, no electrolytes, no salt, nothing but water. From about day four to day six I hit what I call the Goldilocks zone — euphoric, high energy, incredible clarity of mind, feeling like I could go on forever. That faded after a couple of days into a deep detox phase where I felt terrible, but it showed me we don't need to eat constantly to have energy or brain function — there's another energy source the body can tap into.
Tom: I've messed around with fasting myself and had similar experiences — on a sixty-hour fast, my sore wrists from calisthenics and power cleans just stopped hurting, and I could stretch deeper into my routine than ever. Is that the fasting itself fixing things, or is it that you're simply eliminating whatever food was causing the problem?
Chris: They're intertwined. You're very likely eating something that's causing inflammation, and fasting — especially water fasting or dry fasting, which I call an inflammation buster — is great at reducing it. A lot of people believe inflammation is at the root of most disease. In America we already have a low standard for food quality; even something as normal as pasteurization kills digestive enzymes, and if you can't digest something you're eating, you get inflammation. That's part of why I love raw food — heating food without killing the enzymes lets a lot of disease and inflammation resolve. Most people don't supplement with digestive enzymes either, so we get bloating and gas. When I started fasting, I noticed I wasn't gassy anymore, which made me start questioning what we consider normal — should bowel movements really smell foul? Is that natural, or just a sign something isn't digesting well?
Tom: So how did you develop an actual protocol for your brother?
Chris: We were scientists in the beginning, trying a lot of things. His first fast was ten days, water only, just to see the results — which were far more dramatic than mine since he was twice my size. We learned that people who start heavier have an easier time with detox because fat suspends toxicity, releasing it more slowly. He also dropped weight faster — something like 20 pounds in the first four days alone, which was huge motivation. That led him to try a twenty-one day fast. Between days zero and fourteen his weight loss averaged about two pounds a day, but from day fourteen to twenty-one he barely lost any weight — one day he even gained a pound. Instead, he lost dramatic inches, at one point four or five inches off his waist in a single day. We learned that days fourteen to twenty-one trigger a specific state I call hyperautophagy, where the body shrinks and tightens and recycles old cells aggressively. Because that stretch was demotivating for weight-loss purposes, we switched him to a fourteen-on, two-off pattern — fourteen days fasting, two days refeeding on an alkaline diet, then another fourteen — which avoided that plateau week and kept his weight loss more consistent. We eventually learned that a single one-day break resets the cycle so you skip what I now call the fasting shrink week entirely.
Tom: What would he eat on those refeed days?
Chris: Mostly an alkaline diet of natural whole foods — quinoa, zucchini, some fish. I don't have a problem with meat myself; I just don't eat it because sourcing it well is difficult, and once in a while he'd have fast food too, which we didn't yet understand was so detrimental. When he did, he'd feel like trash — stomach pains, digestive issues — because the body becomes hypersensitive in a fasted state, so you really see how harmful that food is, versus if you'd been eating processed food for decades and just think a little gas and diarrhea is normal.
Chris: My whole family struggled with weight at different points. I think I stayed smaller because I witnessed my brothers gain a huge amount of weight after our parents separated and my dad remarried someone who cooked very differently — I was around nine to eleven at the time, and it stuck with me. My other brother didn't have that same visual experience and gained weight later, partly after his digestive system was affected by military food. My sister had genuinely bad habits — drinking a lot, eating out every day, never cooking at home. She did about eight weeks of fasting and lost a tremendous amount of weight, but coming off her fast she ate Popeyes chicken, and shortly after developed a pimple on her cheek that kept growing until it popped and left an actual hole she could put a pin through into her mouth. Everyone responds differently to different foods, but that's part of why I don't recommend approaching extended fasting the way we originally did — you can do it safely, but bad choices coming off a long fast can really harm your body.
Tom: I'm also interested in the anti-inflammatory effects and in autophagy — can you explain that for the audience?
Chris: Autophagy literally means self-eating — the body recycles damaged, mutated cells, breaking down what it doesn't need and rebuilding more efficient ones, like fixing up an old shack. When cells are inflamed, it's hard for water to penetrate them; most water we drink, whether bottled or tap, is what I call bulk water with a large molecular structure that struggles to hydrate an inflamed cell. Autophagy clears out that inflammation and cellular waste so you get better hydration and energy out of even ordinary water. On top of that, fasting for around forty-eight hours significantly increases human growth hormone, which helps with both muscle gains and system-wide repair.
Chris: My younger brother Jonathan was the one who started fasting with me originally and lost 50 pounds in six weeks, reversing his diabetic symptoms in the process. He became a fitness trainer and did what he called fasted lifting — bodybuilders at the gym, twice his size, would ask how he was curling such heavy weight. Because he was building muscle in a fasted state, his muscles developed differently — supple and flexible with tremendous strength when flexed, even though they looked unremarkable relaxed. He did a six-month program of fasting five days and eating two, sometimes fast food like Buffalo Wild Wings on his eating days, but because the fasts were shorter, the recoil wasn't as bad.
Tom: For someone who isn't significantly overweight but wants the anti-inflammatory and performance benefits, is forty-eight hours enough to get real autophagy benefits, or do you need longer?
Chris: You can get tremendous benefit from forty-eight hours if you're managing symptoms of a specific condition. Professionally, I recommend a seventy-two hour fast as the optimal minimum-input, maximum-output target — after about forty-eight hours, human growth hormone rises roughly 2000% in males, and by day three, autophagy is fully active and you're in ketosis, a complete shift in how your body functions. The seventy-two hour mark also gives your intestinal tract time to clear old material, which is why juice fasting over time can help remove buildup too, so your intestines are primed to absorb nutrients once you resume eating — much of our gut lining is essentially clogged with synthetic residue from things like margarine, which is nearly a molecule away from plastic.
Tom: What's the longest fast you've personally done?
Chris: A thirty-day hybrid fast, cycling through ten days each of juice fasting, water fasting, and dry fasting. Each has pros and cons: juice fasting eliminates hunger entirely but you only lose about half a pound to a pound a day; water fasting burns about two pounds a day but comes with intense cravings and heavy detox; dry fasting — no food or water at all, the traditional biblical fast — is easy the first couple of days since digestion fully rests, but detox symptoms hit hard after day three, making it hard to sustain. I learned that when dry fasting, all I wanted was water, so I'd switch to water fasting; when water fasting made me hungry, I'd switch to juice fasting to satisfy that and rehydrate well before returning to dry fasting. Cycling through that combination for thirty days was incredible — I lost around thirty-five pounds, had incredible mental clarity and energy working as an electrician on rooftops in the Texas summer, and my skin became noticeably soft and hydrated.
Tom: A lot of people notice things like eczema or psoriasis disappear almost immediately on even a forty-eight hour fast — conditions they've battled their whole lives, which often look like an internal version of a skin reaction. My daughter had gut issues, and the only way we figured it out was fasting her and reintroducing foods one at a time to isolate the trigger, though we still don't know the exact cause.
Tom: Tell me how this turned from experimenting with your own family into something available to everyone.
Chris: Once my brother John reversed his diabetic symptoms and lost all that weight, I felt we had to share it, so I started a YouTube channel called A Healthy Alternative. It started resonating — Jonathan's video alone got well over 100,000 views once I split it into parts — and people started asking questions, so a community began forming. Around the same time my brother John created what he thought was a private Facebook group for the family, but he accidentally made it public, calling it something like Fasting for Health, and random people started joining. I saw the opportunity, had him close it, and created a proper public group called A Healthy Alternative. Then my brother Steven's video about losing a hundred pounds in ninety days came out and got almost a million views, and the Facebook group exploded to around 64,000 people. I've always believed natural healing should be available as an alternative to the traditional route, not a replacement for it — it's cheaper and holistically better for a lot of people. As testimonials came in, I started recognizing patterns and teaching them, and members began sharing their own journeys on the channel, including a young guy named Justin Howe who lost 200 pounds and went on to do his own speaking engagements. Eventually I put together a free PDF guide and started hosting fasting challenges with five or six coaches, teaching different fasting methods depending on whether someone's a beginner or specifically interested in dry fasting for inflammation, at a scale I don't think anyone else operates at — anywhere from 500 to a thousand people per challenge.
Tom: Your channel has 189,000 subscribers, your brother's has 856,000, Justin's has 750,000 — how do you position yourself? Do you have medical training, or is it simply, here's what we do, and it's up to you?
Chris: I've always approached this as just a guy who was sick, experimented on himself, and shared what he found — then observed and advised others willing to try it. I considered going the professional certification route, but realized traditional credentialing comes with glass ceilings on what you're allowed to say, and a license that can be taken away if you say the wrong thing. Everything I share is personal or firsthand experience, and that can't be taken from me. People call that anecdotal, and it is, but I don't think we should discount anecdotal evidence — in some cases it's outpaced traditional outlets. There's no cure for diabetes today; medication manages symptoms, extends life, prevents complications, all of which is great, but I don't proclaim to cure anything. I can help people reverse the symptoms associated with it. It comes down to what you're looking for — symptom management or symptom reversal — and you go to the right professional for that, the same way you'd go to a lawyer, not a mechanic, for a legal problem. I consider myself a wellness professional without certifications, and honestly, I think that's part of why I get outcomes that some degreed counterparts can't. Dr. Jason Fung was one of the first credentialed doctors to make a big splash teaching fasting, and there are others like him for people who want that. But everything we teach is natural — everybody fasts in some form; you fast every night you sleep, animals hibernate, even a sick dog will refuse food and just drink water. We've just gotten away from recognizing what the body is naturally capable of.
Tom: Have you had pushback from people saying you're not a medical doctor?
Chris: Early on I got some, but it was never overwhelming, and my comment sections are actually overwhelmingly positive because I set out to build a welcoming space without a lot of hard stances — I have no issue whether someone's carnivore or vegan, I can work with either. The main criticism was people saying I was going to hurt someone, but I'm not forcing anyone to do anything; I'm teaching, the same way someone could teach knife skills on YouTube and not be responsible if a viewer cuts themselves. People don't want to take ownership of their own actions, and that's the real problem. No doctor has ever come to me with actual facts disproving what we do, partly because fasting research has mostly been done on animals, not humans.
Tom: Nobody's approached you to formally study your results? I think of Wim Hof — he had no medical credentials either, but he invited researchers to study him directly during his cold exposure work, and hospitals and universities documented real physiological changes because of it. It seems like your community, with thousands of data points, would be a goldmine for that kind of study.
Chris: I'd never even considered that — I always assumed scientists would see me as more of a problem than an opportunity. There have been isolated cases, like a man in India studied by doctors decades ago who claimed to consume nothing at all, a so-called breatharian, monitored around the clock for two weeks with no food, water, urination, or defecation recorded. Results like that are rare, and for every success story there's another person who tried something similar with poor results. What I do have, though, is an enormous amount of informal data — thousands of people reporting their experiences, wearable trackers, body composition scales similar to a DEXA scan — enough that I can usually tell when someone's being dishonest about their results versus having a genuinely unique experience. For people who need a formal double-blind study, we're not that community, but there are doctor-run fasting facilities out there if that's what someone needs.
Tom: On a long fast, do you eventually just stop having bowel movements?
Chris: They slow down dramatically, but they don't fully stop. Most people think having a bowel movement every day is simply normal, but I compare the body to a full tube of toothpaste — apply pressure at the bottom and something comes out the top, even if the tube is completely full. The average American reportedly carries ten to twenty pounds of excess waste in their system at any given time. When you start fasting, a movement might happen the first day, then take about three days for the next one, then four, then a week, slowing further the longer you go. By around day fourteen you're mostly passing bile fluid, since most of your actual weight loss during fasting comes out through your breath — which is part of why sleep matters so much while fasting — with a little through urination and the rest through defecation. On my very first extended fast, around day twelve, I experienced what's sometimes called mucoid plaque — a large, mucus-like brown material that came out of my body, something Google at the time was calling completely fictional. It only happened that once for me; I believe it's a finite buildup that clears out and doesn't return unless you rebuild the same lifestyle that caused it. Other members of our community have reported similar experiences, sometimes describing it as rubbery or sheath-like, usually appearing on fasts of thirty days or longer, closer to the forty-day mark for people doing pure water fasting without any herbal support.
Tom: Where do you see this community going over the next five years?
Chris: We already host retreats and large challenges, but my next goal is a physical wellness center — with testing equipment, licensed staff to help interpret results, and eventually fasting beds. We'll never become a medical facility; it'll always be rooted in holistic wellness. The real challenge isn't proving fasting works, it's helping people actually follow through successfully, so my goal is to build programs, supplements, and tools that raise our success rate — if we're at fifty percent today, can we get to seventy-five? From there I want to expand to a facility in nearly every state, priced affordably since none of what we teach has to be expensive, and each one built around a garden, since fresh, real food and time outdoors play a huge role in people's success. I promote raw food specifically because of the digestive enzymes, and because so much of what's sold to us as food has been altered by pesticides and processing to the point that if bugs, sun, and water can't break it down naturally, it's unrealistic to expect your gut to.
Tom: One thing we didn't cover — how does your protocol let people lose this much weight without loose skin?
Chris: That fasting shrink week we talked about between days fourteen and twenty-one is autophagy at work, clearing out excess protein and skin the body no longer needs to support. Skin normally stretches to accommodate fat storage, which seems to have almost no upper limit, but tightening back up afterward is usually difficult because people are dehydrated. What I learned is that fasting on water specifically helps the body process water more efficiently, converting ordinary bulk water into what's sometimes called intracellular or fourth-phase water that cells can actually use — repairing dehydrated, damaged cells and replacing them with properly hydrated ones, which lets skin snap back with its elasticity intact as the weight comes off. Justin lost 200 pounds with no loose skin, my brother Steve lost 200 pounds with no loose skin, John lost about a hundred pounds with no loose skin, my sister lost fifty to seventy pounds with no loose skin. The one exception I've noticed is among people who lean heavily on juice or fruit-only fasting for very long stretches, say ninety days of fruit only — they tend to end up with a bit more loose skin, though nothing like a traditional weight-loss transformation. I've also seen another fasting group that built a specialty electrolyte drink to eliminate detox symptoms entirely, and while it made fasting easier, everyone in that group ended up with the more typical amount of loose skin that often requires surgery — so there does seem to be a cost to gaming the system that way.
Tom: Super interesting, man — you're doing great work. Go check out A Healthy Alternative on YouTube, 187,000 subscribers, and on Facebook too. Thanks for coming on, Chris.
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