The Fasting Doctor: “Fasting Cures Obesity!”, This Controversial New Drug Melts Fat, Fasting Fixes Hormones! Skip Breakfast!

0:00:03 This calories-in-calories-out model doesn’t work at all.
0:00:06 If you’re trying to lose weight, what you need to do is
0:00:07 Dr. Jason Hung,
0:00:09 the founder of intermittent fasting,
0:00:11 whose influential work could beat the key
0:00:14 to a healthier and even longer life.
0:00:17 Every continent is seeing this increase in obesity,
0:00:20 but we put the blame on the individual.
0:00:22 The problem is there’s something wrong
0:00:24 with the message we’re giving people,
0:00:25 and I can go over a few examples.
0:00:29 First of all, exercise is really good in a number of ways.
0:00:31 But in terms of weight loss,
0:00:33 it’s actually a very, very small effect.
0:00:37 The whole idea that you need to eat as soon as you get up
0:00:38 is just false.
0:00:41 We know from twin studies that 70% of your risk
0:00:43 of becoming obese is due to genetics,
0:00:46 but it doesn’t explain why the population
0:00:47 became much more obese.
0:00:49 And we know that you can’t cure obesity
0:00:51 by saying eat fewer calories.
0:00:54 It’s about fixing the hormones that are behind the calories.
0:00:56 If you want to lose body fat,
0:00:59 you actually need to extend the period of time
0:01:00 that you’re not eating,
0:01:02 so you do some intermittent fasting.
0:01:05 There’s all this data showing that fasting activates
0:01:08 the body if it increases your energy and your concentration.
0:01:12 A treatment available to everybody for free,
0:01:13 and it will be healthier for us.
0:01:15 – So I need some advice then.
0:01:16 What does your fast look like?
0:01:18 What food should I be giving my body?
0:01:19 And in what proportions?
0:01:22 – The first thing you got to do is…
0:01:24 – I’ve got to talk to you about these new injections
0:01:27 people are getting to lose weight.
0:01:28 – I think.
0:01:33 (upbeat music)
0:01:39 – Dr. Jason.
0:01:41 – Hey, Stephen, how are you?
0:01:43 – I’m really, really good.
0:01:45 This book here, “The Obesity Code,
0:01:48 “Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss.”
0:01:51 Why did you write this book?
0:01:54 What was the sort of driving motivation
0:01:56 behind committing what must have been
0:01:59 a very long part of your life to this subject matter?
0:02:03 – It was actually a very interesting
0:02:05 sort of journey of discovery for me.
0:02:08 So I did my training in nephrology,
0:02:09 which is kidney disease,
0:02:10 so I’m a kidney disease specialist.
0:02:13 And I thought about weight loss sort of very conventionally,
0:02:16 sort of calories in, calories out,
0:02:18 just watch what you eat sort of thing.
0:02:20 And that’s what’s taught to all doctors
0:02:24 is that it’s extremely unhelpful for people.
0:02:26 It doesn’t work at all.
0:02:27 It doesn’t work for patients
0:02:29 and it doesn’t work for doctors even, right?
0:02:31 So doctors who want to lose weight,
0:02:35 they don’t use calories and calories out
0:02:36 because it doesn’t really work.
0:02:37 And we all know this.
0:02:41 Every person has sort of counted their calories
0:02:44 and almost all of them fail to succeed.
0:02:48 So the whole point was how to get people to lose weight.
0:02:50 And so I started to look into the literature
0:02:52 and I started to read about it and so on.
0:02:54 I got very, very interested in it.
0:02:58 And again, I started to become very unhappy
0:03:01 with the discussion about calories and calories out
0:03:06 because the whole point was that people had this idea
0:03:08 that it was energy balance, right?
0:03:11 And there’s this sort of energy balance equation
0:03:16 which is calories in minus calories out equals body fat,
0:03:16 right?
0:03:19 Because body fat is a way to store calories.
0:03:24 But that’s not a very helpful sort of description
0:03:27 of how to approach the problem, right?
0:03:30 The problem is not that people didn’t realize
0:03:32 that they had to eat fewer calories
0:03:35 or increase their calorie expenditure.
0:03:38 The problem was why were they eating more calories
0:03:40 than they could expend, right?
0:03:45 And it’s because the body is being told to store energy,
0:03:48 right?
0:03:49 That’s the way it is.
0:03:50 That’s why you’re taking in more calories
0:03:52 or you’re storing more calories
0:03:54 is because your body has hormones
0:03:56 that tell you to store calories.
0:03:59 So there’s a hormone called insulin, for example.
0:04:01 And if you give people insulin,
0:04:04 so inject them with insulin,
0:04:06 which is a drug for type two diabetes,
0:04:09 almost everybody gains weight.
0:04:11 So if you give somebody insulin, they gain weight.
0:04:13 If I gave you insulin, you would gain weight.
0:04:15 It has nothing to do with the, you know,
0:04:18 your willpower, for example.
0:04:19 If I gave you insulin, you would gain weight.
0:04:20 Why?
0:04:23 Because I’m giving your body the instructions
0:04:24 to store energy.
0:04:26 – So you’re saying that weight gain
0:04:27 and obesity in particular,
0:04:31 isn’t a function of calories in, calories out.
0:04:34 It is a function of hormones.
0:04:35 – It’s a function of hormones.
0:04:38 And it’s sort of, you have to think about it
0:04:40 in sort of levels, right?
0:04:42 So calories and calories out is true.
0:04:45 So body fat is a storage, it’s a way to store energy,
0:04:49 which is calories, equals calories and calories out.
0:04:50 But that’s not the real question.
0:04:53 The question is why are you storing more calories
0:04:54 than you’re expending?
0:04:56 And it’s because you’re telling your body to do so.
0:05:01 So for example, if you take another equal,
0:05:02 I’ll give you an analogy.
0:05:07 Say alcoholism is alcohol in minus alcohol out, right?
0:05:09 Same idea.
0:05:12 Or if you have a room, it’s the number of people,
0:05:15 how full it is, is how many people enter the room
0:05:16 or exit the room, right?
0:05:19 So same idea, right?
0:05:20 It’s absolutely true.
0:05:22 So alcohol in minus alcohol out.
0:05:23 – Equals how drunk you are.
0:05:24 – Equals how drunk you are.
0:05:25 So alcoholism.
0:05:30 So can you simply cure alcoholism by telling an alcoholic,
0:05:33 oh, just drink less alcohol than you expend?
0:05:37 It’s like, yes, you can say that and it’s absolutely true,
0:05:39 but it’s not useful in any way.
0:05:41 Because you’ve never gotten to the really,
0:05:44 the deeper understanding of why that person
0:05:46 is taking in more alcohol, right?
0:05:47 You have to get to that next level
0:05:50 and say, you know, it’s like going one level deeper.
0:05:51 Why?
0:05:52 Why are they drinking more alcohol?
0:05:56 Well, maybe they’re depressed, maybe they’re addicted.
0:05:57 Deal with the addiction.
0:06:00 That is the way to deal with alcoholism.
0:06:03 You can’t cure it just by saying drink less alcohol.
0:06:06 The same way you can’t cure the obesity
0:06:08 by saying eat fewer calories.
0:06:10 Because you’re not understanding
0:06:14 why the body is storing more energy.
0:06:15 With the amount of information we now have,
0:06:16 the amount of science we have,
0:06:18 when would expect that obesity levels
0:06:20 would be coming down?
0:06:24 – Yeah, unfortunately, if you think about
0:06:26 the way most people think about it,
0:06:27 it’s mostly still in calories.
0:06:29 Even in the academic centers,
0:06:31 they all think about sort of calories,
0:06:34 how to get calories down, how to reduce calories.
0:06:37 And I always say, well, it’s not about the calories, right?
0:06:39 It’s about fixing the hormones
0:06:40 that are behind the calories.
0:06:43 Like, ’cause you can choose to eat fewer calories.
0:06:44 Yes, that’s true.
0:06:47 But you have to ask yourself,
0:06:50 why are people eating so many calories, right?
0:06:52 Well, it’s because they’re hungry.
0:06:54 You can’t choose to be less hungry.
0:06:57 And therefore you have to really talk
0:07:00 about controlling the hunger and controlling the hormones,
0:07:02 which are behind the calories that you eat.
0:07:05 And that’s gonna be much more successful to you.
0:07:07 If you take two different foods,
0:07:10 equal number of calories, and you eat them,
0:07:14 the hormonal response to those calories
0:07:15 are completely different.
0:07:19 So you eat two slices of white bread and jam.
0:07:21 All that energy, so insulin spikes up
0:07:24 because it’s very high in refined carbohydrates.
0:07:26 All that energy goes straight into your body fat,
0:07:30 and you’ve left none of it for energy for your day.
0:07:32 By 10.30, now you’re ravenous,
0:07:35 and you go get yourself a low-fat muffin.
0:07:38 Again, pure carbs, insulin spikes up,
0:07:40 all of that goes straight into your fat stores,
0:07:43 why? Because you told it to.
0:07:46 Remember that when you eat white bread,
0:07:49 or muffins, or refined carbohydrates,
0:07:50 you’re gonna have this insulin spike,
0:07:53 which is going to tell your body to store energy.
0:07:56 If you eat an egg, you don’t get that spike in insulin.
0:07:58 So that energy that you’ve taken,
0:08:01 those calories are there, you can use it.
0:08:02 And so what happens?
0:08:03 Well, that keeps you full during the day.
0:08:05 If you’re telling your body
0:08:08 to immediately store those calories as body fat,
0:08:09 well, guess what?
0:08:10 Over time, you’re going to gain body fat,
0:08:13 ’cause you told your body to do that.
0:08:16 If you eat the egg and insulin’s not spiking up,
0:08:18 well, you haven’t told your body to store that energy,
0:08:21 so it’s gonna be around for you to use all day long.
0:08:22 And you won’t be hungry.
0:08:23 And you’re not gonna be hungry,
0:08:26 because your body’s like, why do I need to eat again?
0:08:31 Because you basically have taken the energy that you need,
0:08:33 I’ve got it available, right?
0:08:36 It’s sort of like if you go to the grocery store, right?
0:08:39 You can store food in the refrigerator.
0:08:40 Suppose you go to the grocery store,
0:08:44 put all your food away, lock it away in the refrigerator.
0:08:46 Now you have nothing to eat, right?
0:08:48 You’re gonna say, oh, I need to go out
0:08:50 and get some more food, right?
0:08:51 Same thing with your body, right?
0:08:53 So if you take food,
0:08:56 but you’ve also spiked up your insulin,
0:08:57 you’re gonna lock away all those,
0:09:01 that energy immediately into your fat stores,
0:09:03 it’s not gonna be available for you to use.
0:09:05 Well, you’re gonna say, I’m gonna go out and get more.
0:09:07 So you haven’t controlled the hunger
0:09:09 that’s going to lead to the caloric intake,
0:09:12 which is gonna lead to the weight gain.
0:09:14 People look at this through an evolutionary lens
0:09:16 and say, we just didn’t have this much food,
0:09:21 so it’s the abundance and ease of access to food.
0:09:22 It’s the fridges that we now have.
0:09:24 It’s the, we never had fridges in our home.
0:09:26 So people point at it and go, well,
0:09:29 that’s why people are gaining weight
0:09:32 and we’re suffering with obesity at epidemic levels,
0:09:35 which is because there’s more supply.
0:09:36 And the brain is taking advantage of it
0:09:38 because once upon a time,
0:09:41 if we didn’t eat that jam and toast,
0:09:42 then we would have, you know,
0:09:44 maybe not have been able to find food
0:09:46 for another two weeks or something.
0:09:48 – Yeah, I don’t think that’s the whole story
0:09:50 because if you think about it
0:09:54 and people, again, make that assumption
0:09:59 that we don’t have any control over our body fatness, right?
0:10:00 So they say, well, it’s available,
0:10:02 so you’re gonna take it, right?
0:10:04 In fact, that’s not true
0:10:09 because we actually have a number of different hormones
0:10:12 that tell us to stop eating, okay?
0:10:14 So if you eat,
0:10:17 you cannot simply keep eating and eating and eating, right?
0:10:18 If you go to an all you can eat buffet,
0:10:22 at some point you have to stop because you’re full, right?
0:10:26 So there are systems, very powerful systems
0:10:28 within our body that tell us to stop eating.
0:10:33 So you eat food, there are stomach stretch receptors,
0:10:35 for example, so as your stomach stretches out,
0:10:38 it sends a signal to your brain and says stop eating.
0:10:41 If you eat a lot of protein,
0:10:44 it activates a hormone called peptide YY,
0:10:45 which tells you to stop eating.
0:10:48 If you eat a lot of dietary fat,
0:10:50 you activate a hormone called cholecystokinin,
0:10:52 which again, tells you to stop eating.
0:10:54 And these are very powerful.
0:10:56 If you look in the wild, there are no obese antelope,
0:10:59 there are no obese lions, why?
0:11:03 Because how much body fat you carry
0:11:05 is actually very important.
0:11:08 If you are obese as an antelope, you’re gonna get eaten.
0:11:10 If you are an obese lion, you’re not gonna catch any food.
0:11:12 So therefore it’s gonna correct itself.
0:11:14 – So if I overeat now,
0:11:16 my body will basically overcompensate
0:11:19 by burning off the extra calories.
0:11:22 – Absolutely, so if you eat a huge meal, right?
0:11:24 You eat, you know, you go to a big wedding
0:11:26 or something like that, you eat a huge meal.
0:11:29 The next day, you’re probably not that hungry.
0:11:31 If you eat a giant steak,
0:11:33 so you’re activating all these satiety hormones,
0:11:37 peptide YY, cholecystokinin, you’re eating all this food,
0:11:41 well, you may not be hungry for the next day.
0:11:45 – So that means that my body has some kind of baseline weight.
0:11:49 – Yeah, it will know whether you should eat more or less.
0:11:54 So there’s a, this concept called the sort of body set weight,
0:11:56 which is a sort of thermometer.
0:12:00 That is your body sets a weight that you should be at.
0:12:04 And if you go above that weight, or if you eat too much,
0:12:07 it will activate hormonal systems to bring it back down.
0:12:08 If you don’t eat enough,
0:12:12 it will also activate hormonal systems to bring it up.
0:12:15 So it’s like a thermostat that you have in your room,
0:12:17 for example, you set the room temperature.
0:12:22 If it’s too hot, the room activates the air conditioning.
0:12:24 If it’s too cold, it activates the heat.
0:12:26 Your body actually acts the same way.
0:12:30 If you gain too much body fat, your fat cells, for example,
0:12:33 will produce leptin, which is another hormone.
0:12:36 The leptin tells your body to stop eating.
0:12:37 – That’s really interesting.
0:12:39 So in the case of a beast people,
0:12:41 their set point must just be really high.
0:12:43 – Yes, and that’s the crux of the matter.
0:12:46 Why is that set point being overridden?
0:12:49 Just like if you have a room that’s too hot,
0:12:51 and you look and you say the thermometer is set
0:12:54 for room temperature, why is it so hot in here?
0:12:56 Then you can say, okay, well, what’s the problem?
0:12:58 And the problem is not, you know,
0:12:59 heat in versus heat out, right?
0:13:02 That’s a very simplistic way.
0:13:05 Same thing, if your body has too much body fat,
0:13:08 you got to then think about why are you overcoming
0:13:13 the normal compensatory mechanisms that are happening,
0:13:15 that are stopping you from eating?
0:13:18 A lot of it relates to processing of foods, of course.
0:13:20 So if you take out, so remember,
0:13:23 I talked about stretch receptors in the stomach, right?
0:13:28 So you eat natural foods, there’s a natural break.
0:13:30 It stretches the stomach, you stop eating.
0:13:32 Well, what’s one way?
0:13:35 Pull out all the fiber, process the foods,
0:13:37 turn it into say a very fine dust.
0:13:40 That means it’s absorbed extremely quickly
0:13:41 into the blood stream.
0:13:45 So that means that pure, you’ve got pure carbohydrate,
0:13:49 basically main lining it into your IV, like an IV.
0:13:52 Your glucose spikes way up, your insulin spikes way up.
0:13:54 Completely unnatural, right?
0:13:57 If you eat pure carbohydrate instead of eating it
0:14:00 with proteins and fats, it’s gonna go,
0:14:03 it’s gonna shoot way high, that’s unnatural.
0:14:07 And that’s gonna overcome the natural tendencies
0:14:08 for you to stop eating.
0:14:13 So you’ve basically overcome that protective mechanism
0:14:17 because you’ve ultra processed the carbohydrates.
0:14:20 If you don’t eat any protein, if you don’t eat any fat,
0:14:22 you’re not activating peptide YY,
0:14:24 which is the satiety hormone.
0:14:26 You’re not activated cholecystokinin.
0:14:28 All of a sudden, you’re eating, you know,
0:14:33 500 calories of white bread, but you have zero satiety.
0:14:37 Or if you drink a Coca-Cola or a soda, for example.
0:14:38 I’ve always, you know, thought about this.
0:14:42 It’s like, how can you take 1,000 calories, for example,
0:14:43 in one of those giant sodas
0:14:46 you get at the ball game or something,
0:14:48 and don’t feel full at all.
0:14:51 Whereas if you took a steak that’s 1,000 calories,
0:14:53 you’d be like, I’m pretty full.
0:14:54 I don’t really feel like eating.
0:14:55 You drink the soda.
0:14:57 You’re like, I really feel like eating
0:14:59 some chips or popcorn or something.
0:15:00 Why?
0:15:03 Because it has zero satiety.
0:15:06 – Interesting, so if I’ve got a baseball stadium,
0:15:10 what I wanna do is I wanna make sure people get a soda
0:15:13 because then they’ll also buy the chips.
0:15:15 But if they just eat the chips, you know,
0:15:16 maybe they won’t buy anything else.
0:15:21 But the soda’s gonna increase my revenue
0:15:23 because it’ll basically just pass right through them.
0:15:24 – They’ll pass right through them.
0:15:27 They’re gonna store all that energy, those calories,
0:15:28 but they’re gonna want more
0:15:30 because you haven’t made them full, right?
0:15:33 So the whole point is that you have to think more
0:15:35 than about the calories.
0:15:37 There’s more there than just the calorie story.
0:15:39 There’s this whole hormonal balance.
0:15:41 – You’re saying that overeating isn’t just a choice.
0:15:43 It’s a hormone-driven behavior.
0:15:44 – It’s a hormone-driven behavior.
0:15:45 I mean, the whole thing about obesity
0:15:47 is quite interesting to me
0:15:50 because if you think about obesity,
0:15:52 if you think about in the United States,
0:15:54 which is where I get a lot of my data from,
0:15:59 you know, you have maybe 70% of people overweight or obese
0:16:00 and it’s going up every year.
0:16:03 It’s been going up every year since 1977.
0:16:05 And if you think about that,
0:16:09 it tells you that the problem is not willpower.
0:16:11 The problem is not the people.
0:16:13 The problem is the environment that they find themselves in.
0:16:16 The food environment that they find themselves in.
0:16:18 ‘Cause you can take an analogy.
0:16:20 Say you have 100 children, one of them fails.
0:16:23 Well, that might be the child they didn’t study.
0:16:25 What if 70 of them fail?
0:16:28 Would you say it’s each and every one of them’s fault?
0:16:32 Or would you say it’s more likely that it’s the teacher’s fault?
0:16:34 I think it’s more likely that it’s the teacher’s fault.
0:16:39 So if we have 100 Americans and 70 of them are obese,
0:16:43 the problem is likely not an individual willpower problem.
0:16:47 The problem is likely that there’s something wrong
0:16:48 with the message we’re giving people,
0:16:50 the information we’re giving people
0:16:52 and the food environment that we’re finding ourselves in,
0:16:55 which is dominated by the sort of calories
0:16:56 and calories out thinking.
0:16:58 And what’s really unfair, of course,
0:17:03 is that we put the blame on the obesity or overweight
0:17:06 on the individual.
0:17:08 And we say, well, they let themselves go
0:17:09 and they didn’t watch themselves.
0:17:11 They weren’t careful, it’s their fault.
0:17:13 And that’s the stigma that comes
0:17:15 with this whole calories and calories out thinking
0:17:17 because we say it’s their fault
0:17:18 because they could choose what they eat.
0:17:21 It’s like, yes, they could choose what they eat,
0:17:23 but they didn’t choose the food environment
0:17:26 that is telling them to eat all this ultra-processed food
0:17:28 that is making all this ultra-processed food available
0:17:29 to them that is telling them
0:17:32 that all this ultra-processed food is good for you.
0:17:34 – So leptin is this hormone
0:17:39 that essentially brings down my hunger, makes me less hungry.
0:17:40 Is it therefore possible
0:17:44 that people are becoming leptin resistant?
0:17:45 – There is leptin resistance.
0:17:47 The question again is why?
0:17:49 And the way to think about it is
0:17:50 it’s sort of this sort of balance, right?
0:17:53 So insulin, if you give people insulin,
0:17:55 like if you think about causes of obesity,
0:17:57 what causes people to gain weight?
0:17:59 Well, if I give you insulin, you’ll gain weight.
0:18:01 If I give me insulin, I’ll gain weight.
0:18:02 So insulin causes weight gain,
0:18:03 whereas leptin will cause the opposite.
0:18:05 So it’s sort of the seesaw.
0:18:10 Body fat is nothing more or less than a store of energy, right?
0:18:13 And you only store energy when your body tells you.
0:18:15 Our entire body runs on hormones, right?
0:18:18 Nothing happens without the hormonal system being activated.
0:18:20 So insulin is pushing us to gain weight.
0:18:23 Leptin is pushing us to lose weight.
0:18:24 And what’s happening is that one
0:18:26 is sort of overcoming the other.
0:18:28 Insulin is overcoming the leptin.
0:18:30 – If obesity isn’t about a lack of world power
0:18:33 and it isn’t just a case of people being lazy
0:18:34 or all those things that sometimes
0:18:37 some people stereotypically assert,
0:18:40 I’ve also heard the counter-argument
0:18:42 that obesity is a function of our genetic makeup
0:18:47 and we inherit obesity from our parents, you know.
0:18:49 Is there any truth in merit in that?
0:18:52 – It’s yes and no.
0:18:57 So yes, there is a very strong sort of genetic predisposition
0:18:59 to obesity.
0:19:02 So if you take, you know, somebody with a family history
0:19:05 and look at the genetics, about 70% of your risk
0:19:08 of becoming obese is due to genetics.
0:19:10 And we know that from twin studies, for example.
0:19:11 – What do we know from twin studies?
0:19:15 – If you take twins and raise them sort of
0:19:18 in different environments, you know,
0:19:20 they actually turn out very similarly.
0:19:23 So we know that there’s a genetic component to obesity.
0:19:27 So when they sort of do the calculations,
0:19:31 they say about 70% of obesity is sort of genetically related.
0:19:33 – So if you take a twin that comes
0:19:36 from originally a family that were obese
0:19:39 and you put them with a family that are not obese,
0:19:44 the child will still likely become obese,
0:19:46 even with the family that are not obese.
0:19:51 – So this was done and obviously they had twins
0:19:53 that were sort of separated at birth,
0:19:55 compare them after they’ve grown up
0:19:58 and say what’s the sort of correlation
0:19:59 between the weight of the two?
0:20:01 And it’s about 70%.
0:20:04 So you have somebody who’s very overweight
0:20:06 and you know, twin A goes into one family,
0:20:08 twin B goes into a second family.
0:20:12 You know, twin B is gonna be more prone to gaining weight
0:20:14 even if they’re with a thin family, right?
0:20:17 So the environment has some role,
0:20:20 but the genetics have a very large role too.
0:20:23 – 70% of obesity. – About 70% is genetic.
0:20:27 So there is, however, the part that’s important
0:20:32 is that that doesn’t explain why we have obesity
0:20:35 in the last 40 to 50 years
0:20:38 because the genetics of the world population
0:20:40 has not changed.
0:20:42 So if we’re seeing more obesity now,
0:20:45 and remember this is not a USA problem,
0:20:47 it’s a worldwide problem.
0:20:49 We see it in Asia, we see it in Europe,
0:20:51 we see it in America, we see it in South America,
0:20:54 we see it everywhere, we see it in Africa.
0:20:58 So every continent is seeing this increase in obesity.
0:21:01 Therefore, it’s not due, this recent change
0:21:05 within the last 50 years is not due to a change in genetics.
0:21:06 So while, yes, it’s true
0:21:09 that there is a strong genetic component,
0:21:14 that explains my risk of, say, obesity compared to yours,
0:21:17 but doesn’t explain how the population
0:21:19 of the United States, for example,
0:21:22 all of a sudden became much more obese in general.
0:21:25 So you’re saying this is really about a predisposition,
0:21:27 which basically means your genetics
0:21:31 make you more or less likely, for some reason,
0:21:32 which is a genetic reason,
0:21:37 to become obese when you make certain lifestyle choices.
0:21:42 But that is a predisposition, which means that,
0:21:43 and I guess your work asserts
0:21:45 that the predisposition relates
0:21:49 to your hormones response to the foods that we eat.
0:21:54 – So really it’s really a genetic response to foods,
0:21:55 which is based on your hormone response.
0:21:57 – We all have a certain genetic
0:22:00 sort of predisposition to obesity, right?
0:22:01 So all of us have a certain risk.
0:22:03 Some people, obviously they eat whatever they want,
0:22:04 and they don’t gain weight.
0:22:05 We all know people like that, right?
0:22:08 And some people sort of look at a muffin and they gain weight.
0:22:11 So you have that genetic predisposition.
0:22:15 So that explains the difference between two people,
0:22:16 but it doesn’t explain the difference
0:22:18 within an entire population.
0:22:21 Like if you take the entire population of the earth,
0:22:23 or even of America or whatever,
0:22:26 the genetics haven’t changed sufficiently
0:22:28 of that entire population
0:22:31 to say why there’s more obesity now than before.
0:22:34 – So we’re inheriting our parents hormone response.
0:22:38 – Yeah, but the hormone response that we have
0:22:42 is going to be dependent a lot on genetics,
0:22:44 but the food choices we’re making
0:22:46 are different than our parents.
0:22:47 So they’re eating different things.
0:22:51 If you think back about what your grandmother ate and stuff,
0:22:52 it’s different than the food environment
0:22:54 that we find ourselves in right now.
0:22:58 And that food environment is creating this sort of,
0:23:03 is sort of increasing the risk over time.
0:23:07 That’s the sort of what we need to try and figure out
0:23:09 and why we need to have a deeper discussion
0:23:11 as opposed to calories.
0:23:13 Because we’ve been having this sort of calories discussion
0:23:15 for 30, 40 years.
0:23:17 It just hasn’t been very helpful.
0:23:19 – You call it a deception.
0:23:20 You say in part two of your book,
0:23:23 you say the calorie deception.
0:23:25 And you say there are five wrong assumptions
0:23:26 about obesity and weight loss.
0:23:30 The calorie in, calorie out are independent of each other.
0:23:32 So we won’t trigger one another.
0:23:35 This interesting point about the basal metabolic rate
0:23:36 being stable.
0:23:38 Is that in essence because people,
0:23:41 people will often say I have a low metabolism.
0:23:42 It’s kind of like a word in culture.
0:23:47 If someone is obese, often the diagnosis is
0:23:48 they have a low metabolism.
0:23:49 Is there any merit in that?
0:23:50 Is that true?
0:23:51 – Oh, absolutely.
0:23:52 The question.
0:23:54 So when you think about, so body fat,
0:23:56 you think about the energy balance equation.
0:23:59 Body fat equals calories in minus calories out.
0:24:00 This often leads people to say,
0:24:02 well, just eat 500 fewer calories
0:24:05 and you’ll lose a pound of fat per week.
0:24:08 It’s unquestionably false
0:24:11 because every single study that we’ve done
0:24:14 over the last 50 years,
0:24:17 shows that if you eat 500 fewer calories,
0:24:21 then over time, depending on what foods you’re eating,
0:24:24 eventually your body will just burn 500 fewer calories.
0:24:25 So that’s your basal metabolic rate,
0:24:28 the number of calories that your body is expending
0:24:29 in one day.
0:24:33 So we see this in almost every single study.
0:24:36 We’ve known about it for like 80 years at least.
0:24:40 You eat fewer calories, your body burns fewer calories.
0:24:42 Well, that’s going to limit how much weight
0:24:44 you’re gonna lose, right?
0:24:46 So this idea that just eat fewer calories
0:24:49 will automatically lead to weight loss
0:24:52 is completely false because we know
0:24:55 that eating fewer calories leads also
0:24:57 to burning fewer calories.
0:25:01 So you eat 500 less, your body burns 500 less
0:25:03 and you’re not losing any body weight.
0:25:06 – So I go on a diet, let’s say,
0:25:08 ’cause I’m trying to lose weight.
0:25:12 My metabolism lowers to meet the calorific restriction
0:25:14 that I’ve imposed on myself.
0:25:16 What then happens when I come off the diet?
0:25:19 Does my metabolism stay?
0:25:20 – Generally, yes.
0:25:21 – Low?
0:25:21 – Yeah.
0:25:23 So that’s that yo-yo dieting effect.
0:25:26 So say you start with 2000 calories in,
0:25:28 2000 calories out, you’re not gaining weight,
0:25:29 you’re not losing weight, right?
0:25:31 Now you decide, okay, I’m gonna go on a diet.
0:25:33 So you go down to 1500 calories,
0:25:36 thinking that you’re gonna burn 2000
0:25:39 and the body fat’s gonna provide 500, right?
0:25:42 That’s how you balance that equation.
0:25:44 However, if you eat the wrong foods
0:25:46 and you’re eating all the time,
0:25:47 so you’re eating 10 times a day,
0:25:49 eight times a day like people say you should,
0:25:51 you’re eating low fats or you’re eating tons of carbs,
0:25:53 you’re spiking your insulin,
0:25:57 insulin prevents you from burning body fat, okay?
0:25:59 So again, we’ve known about this for 80 years.
0:26:02 So now you eat 1500 calories
0:26:04 but you’re keeping your insulin levels really high.
0:26:07 So fewer calories but lots of high-carb foods,
0:26:10 eating all the time, insulin stays high.
0:26:14 You’re taking in 1500, your body is now burning 2000
0:26:16 but you can’t burn any body fat.
0:26:19 So the calories that are stored in your body fat
0:26:22 cannot be sort of taken out.
0:26:24 It’s like it’s in the bank and the bank is closed.
0:26:25 You can’t take it out.
0:26:27 So what’s gonna happen?
0:26:30 Well, you don’t have a balanced equation.
0:26:31 So that cannot happen.
0:26:34 So what happens is that in order to balance that equation
0:26:36 because your insulin levels are high,
0:26:39 you’re eating 1500 calories coming in,
0:26:41 your body can only burn 1500 calories.
0:26:45 Your metabolic rate has just now gone down by 500 calories
0:26:48 and guess what, you’re not losing any body fat.
0:26:51 So that’s an example of how the whole,
0:26:54 the calories idea is completely wrong
0:26:57 because if you continue to do that,
0:27:00 what’s gonna happen over time is that you get tired
0:27:02 because you’re burning fewer calories.
0:27:05 You don’t have enough energy to generate body heat.
0:27:08 So you’re cold, you’re tired, you’re hungry.
0:27:11 So you say, okay, I’m gonna go to 1800 calories.
0:27:13 So now you’re eating 1800 calories
0:27:15 but you’re only burning 1500 calories.
0:27:17 Guess what, you gain weight.
0:27:19 And you say, but how can I gain weight?
0:27:20 I’m eating less than I did.
0:27:23 Yes, you are eating less than the 2000 calories
0:27:24 you used to eat.
0:27:26 You’re eating 1800 but you’re eating the wrong foods.
0:27:29 It’s very high insulin foods.
0:27:31 So therefore you’re going to gain weight.
0:27:36 In fact, everybody says that and all the nutritionists,
0:27:38 all the doctors, they just don’t believe them.
0:27:39 They say, you’re lying, you’re cheating,
0:27:41 you’re eating more than you think.
0:27:43 – So this explains something that happened
0:27:45 with one of my friends, which I’ve always puzzled me.
0:27:48 He swears by the calories in calorie out thing.
0:27:49 I’ve spoken about him a few times.
0:27:51 He posts about it online as well.
0:27:54 And he actually managed to get a pretty much
0:27:57 like six pack abs, pretty much.
0:28:00 And at the time it appears that he was eating
0:28:02 a lot of Domino’s pizzas, a lot of pizzas.
0:28:04 And I was thinking, how’s this guy eating all these pizzas?
0:28:07 But he’s using his calories in calorie out thing.
0:28:10 And then when the pizza stopped,
0:28:12 there was this yo-yo effect.
0:28:15 Where he managed to get to basically
0:28:17 what I described as a six pack, they’re abouts.
0:28:21 And then stopped eating, stopped the diet per se.
0:28:23 And then there was this big yo-yo effect,
0:28:25 which I imagine is what you’ve said there.
0:28:27 What he’s done is he’s lowered his metabolism.
0:28:30 Then when he goes up just a little bit.
0:28:31 – It all comes back.
0:28:33 – It all comes back and then some.
0:28:34 – And then some, yeah, absolutely.
0:28:37 – So this form of dieting is actually
0:28:39 over the long term probably gonna make you gain weight.
0:28:41 – Oh, it’s very detrimental.
0:28:43 And that’s what yo-yo dieting,
0:28:44 we all know it’s very detrimental.
0:28:47 But think about it differently, right?
0:28:50 So let’s take a different example with the same calories.
0:28:51 Which is why I keep saying,
0:28:53 you have to think about more than the calories.
0:28:55 You have to think about what the hormones are
0:28:57 because that’s the instructions to your body.
0:28:59 Food contains calories, energy.
0:29:01 But it contains instructions as to what to do.
0:29:03 So let’s take an example.
0:29:05 You’re eating 2000 calories in, 2000 calories out.
0:29:08 Now you go on a diet, you take in 1500.
0:29:11 But what you do is you do some intermittent fasting.
0:29:14 When you fast, insulin is going to fall.
0:29:15 That’s the whole point.
0:29:17 Insulin is a hormone that goes up when you eat.
0:29:19 It goes down when you don’t eat, right?
0:29:21 So when you eat, insulin goes up.
0:29:23 Your body wants to store energy.
0:29:25 When you don’t eat, insulin goes down.
0:29:27 Your body says, I have no energy,
0:29:30 I have no food coming in, please take it out of storage.
0:29:32 So now you take 1500 calories,
0:29:33 but you do intermittent fasting.
0:29:35 So you’re allowing your insulin levels to fall.
0:29:38 Now 1500 calories are coming in.
0:29:40 Insulin levels are low.
0:29:43 Your body wants to burn 2000 calories.
0:29:44 It says, well, insulin levels are low.
0:29:47 Let me take 500 calories from my body fat.
0:29:48 Guess what?
0:29:49 You have 500 coming from your body fat.
0:29:51 You have 1500 coming from your foods.
0:29:52 You burn 2000.
0:29:56 It’s a balanced equation.
0:29:58 So instead of the opposite situation,
0:30:00 so and you see that the calories are the same.
0:30:04 You went from 2000 in to 1500 in,
0:30:05 but what the difference was,
0:30:06 so you allowed insulin to fall,
0:30:09 which allowed you to burn body fat, right?
0:30:12 It’s the hormonal signal that says,
0:30:15 please take energy out, open up the doors
0:30:17 so that body fat can come out.
0:30:18 And this is the piece that’s missing
0:30:21 because people are all like, well, I’m this, I’m that.
0:30:23 And it’s like, well, why can’t you burn the fat
0:30:24 that’s on your body?
0:30:28 ‘Cause there’s 200, 300,000 calories of body fat.
0:30:30 Why can’t you access it?
0:30:33 It’s because you haven’t activated the right hormones
0:30:35 so that you can access it.
0:30:38 So now if you do intermittent fasting,
0:30:41 you eat 1500 calories, you take 500 calories out,
0:30:43 your body’s burning 2000.
0:30:45 Now all of a sudden, if you go off your diet
0:30:48 and you go back to 2000 calories, guess what?
0:30:50 You don’t gain weight, you don’t lose weight.
0:30:51 Same as before.
0:30:55 Whereas before you go even to 1800 calories, you lost weight.
0:30:57 But the difference was, not the calories,
0:31:00 it was always 2000 to 500.
0:31:02 The difference was you paid attention
0:31:05 to the hormones that you’re telling your body.
0:31:08 And the insulin is sort of the primary hormone.
0:31:09 There’s actually a lot more.
0:31:13 There’s cortisol is a very important hormone.
0:31:15 There’s other hormones.
0:31:16 – You mentioned burning calories there.
0:31:19 One of the thoughts around the calories
0:31:22 and calories out model is that you can just exercise.
0:31:25 And if you burn 1000 calories exercising,
0:31:27 then that gives you a little bit of a reserve there
0:31:29 to eat more, for example.
0:31:33 – Yeah, and it’s probably a very, very small effect
0:31:34 for a couple of reasons.
0:31:38 So we know that if you exercise,
0:31:43 and I say this, exercise is really good for you
0:31:48 in a number of ways, flexibility, strength, core,
0:31:49 all kinds of things.
0:31:50 Very, very important.
0:31:52 But in terms of weight loss,
0:31:55 it’s actually a very, very small effect.
0:31:57 Why? Because one, the amount of calories you burn
0:32:00 during exercise are simply not that high.
0:32:03 So if you look at, if you do walking,
0:32:06 I mean, if you did eight hours of high-intensity exercise,
0:32:08 yeah, you’re gonna burn a lot of calories.
0:32:09 But most people I deal with,
0:32:11 which are sort of middle-aged and higher,
0:32:14 you’re talking about sort of a quick walk
0:32:18 or 45, half an hour, three times a week sort of thing.
0:32:20 And if you ever go on the treadmill
0:32:23 and you ever watch that calorie counter on the treadmill,
0:32:26 you know, it goes up very, very slowly, right?
0:32:31 You’ll do half an hour and it’ll be up to like 120 calories
0:32:33 or something like that, right?
0:32:36 So that exercise really didn’t burn off very many calories.
0:32:37 It’s the amount that you’d get
0:32:38 in a couple of cookies, for example, right?
0:32:41 So it’s just, numerically, it’s just very small.
0:32:45 So if you’re taking in, if your body is normally
0:32:48 using 2,000 calories with your brain,
0:32:51 generating body heat, your heart, your lungs, your liver,
0:32:53 they’re using 2,000 calories
0:32:56 and now you go up to 2,100 calories.
0:32:59 Well, percentage-wise, it’s not a huge deal, right?
0:33:02 The other problem with exercise is that
0:33:06 it tends to actually cause you to eat more.
0:33:10 So again, we’ve had decades of study for this.
0:33:13 If you exercise, during the exercise,
0:33:16 you have reduced appetite.
0:33:20 So you have exercise, it’s called exercise-induced anorexia.
0:33:22 So in the middle of a basketball game,
0:33:24 you don’t suddenly go, “Oh, wow, I’m really hungry,” right?
0:33:29 ‘Cause your blood is flowing in your muscles and so on.
0:33:30 You’re not thinking about the hunger.
0:33:33 So hunger actually goes down during exercise,
0:33:35 but after exercise, we see this rebound.
0:33:38 So we see that people are actually more hungry after exercise.
0:33:40 And if you’re hungrier after exercise,
0:33:43 it’s gonna cause you to tend to gain more weight.
0:33:45 In fact, there’s this very interesting study
0:33:47 that was done a few years ago in Harvard
0:33:50 where they measured the sort of calorie difference
0:33:55 that you get for children in certain activities.
0:33:59 So they said, “Okay, what if the child is watching TV?
0:34:03 What’s the average caloric difference?”
0:34:05 And it was like plus 100 calories per hour.
0:34:07 So for every hour of TV,
0:34:10 they’re sort of positive 100 calories over time, right?
0:34:12 And that makes sense, you’re just sitting there.
0:34:15 When you look at mild exercise, it’s about the same.
0:34:17 It’s about positive 100 calories.
0:34:19 So the only way that happens
0:34:23 is that if that exercise is causing you to eat more, right?
0:34:25 And you say, “Well, why are you eating more?”
0:34:27 It’s like, “Well, because you’re hungry.”
0:34:30 Like the exercise is inducing you to eat more.
0:34:33 And that’s gonna make it difficult to lose weight.
0:34:34 – You say in the book in chapter four
0:34:38 that 95% of weight loss is diet.
0:34:41 – Yeah, and that’s the reason why exercise
0:34:45 is very hard to exercise enough to lose weight.
0:34:48 And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t exercise.
0:34:50 You really should exercise.
0:34:52 Everybody should exercise.
0:34:54 But if you’re trying to lose weight,
0:34:59 you still gotta focus on the main topic,
0:35:01 which is the foods that you eat,
0:35:02 which is not just the calories.
0:35:05 It’s about the types of food that you eat,
0:35:07 which is going to affect the hormonal balance
0:35:08 and also how often you eat.
0:35:09 If you’re eating all the time
0:35:13 versus if you’re only eating very infrequently,
0:35:16 then you’re gonna have a different hormonal balance
0:35:18 that is going to affect your weight as well.
0:35:22 – An American survey of more than 60,000 adults and children
0:35:26 revealed that in 1977, most people ate three times a day.
0:35:30 By 2003, most people were eating five to six times a day.
0:35:34 – Yeah. (laughs)
0:35:38 Yeah, this is the whole idea of sort of eating all the time.
0:35:40 And this I find fascinating
0:35:45 because it was this sort of inadvertent change in our diet
0:35:47 that we never talked about, right?
0:35:51 So in 1977, we told people eat lots of carbs, okay?
0:35:53 So we know that, that’s in print.
0:35:56 For sure, the American government said
0:35:59 eat 55 to 60% carbs, eat less fat.
0:36:02 What happened is that, in 1977,
0:36:04 people ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
0:36:05 No snacks.
0:36:08 If you wanted an after-school snack,
0:36:10 your mom said no, you’re gonna ruin your dinner.
0:36:12 If you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom would say no,
0:36:14 you should eat more at dinner, right?
0:36:14 No problem.
0:36:19 But what happened is that as we started to eat
0:36:21 sort of a lot of carbs,
0:36:24 what happened is exactly as what we discussed before,
0:36:28 you eat two slices of bread in the morning with jam.
0:36:30 You have no satiety, insulin spikes way up,
0:36:33 glucose spikes way up, but then it crashes.
0:36:34 – So you get hungry again.
0:36:36 Then you get hungry at 10.30.
0:36:38 So you go around looking for a low-fat muffin.
0:36:43 And it was because your sugars are going down,
0:36:46 your insulin’s going down.
0:36:48 So now you’re eating mid-morning snack,
0:36:50 then you eat a big plate of pasta,
0:36:52 then you get ravenous at like three o’clock.
0:36:54 So you go find yourself some crackers
0:36:55 or something like that, right?
0:36:58 And then so now you’re having a mid-morning snack,
0:36:59 you’re having mid-after-school snack,
0:37:00 then you’re having a bedtime snack.
0:37:04 And that’s the average American by 2003,
0:37:06 eating six, five, six times a day.
0:37:08 But they’re saying, hey, I’m eating so low-fat,
0:37:10 this must be the right way to eat.
0:37:12 This must be good for me.
0:37:14 So now the snacking becomes institutionalized.
0:37:19 Whereas pre-1977, snacks are an indulgence, right?
0:37:20 It’s not something good for you.
0:37:21 It’s something bad for you,
0:37:24 but hey, once in a while you indulge.
0:37:27 Then it becomes institutionalized
0:37:30 as something that every single one of us should be doing.
0:37:32 And we should never be without food
0:37:34 for more than an hour and a half.
0:37:37 Let’s think about this very simply, okay?
0:37:40 So if you eat, your insulin’s gonna go up,
0:37:42 your body’s going to store calories,
0:37:43 because you’re told it to.
0:37:45 If you don’t eat, or if you fast,
0:37:48 your body is, your insulin’s gonna go down,
0:37:50 you’re going to bring those calories back out of storage,
0:37:51 right?
0:37:52 So you’re gonna burn calories.
0:37:54 You eat, you store calories, you don’t eat,
0:37:56 you burn calories, very simple.
0:37:59 So why would you wanna eat all the time?
0:38:01 That makes no sense at all.
0:38:04 If you want to lose body fat,
0:38:06 you actually need to extend the period of time
0:38:08 that you’re not eating.
0:38:10 In other words, extend your fasting period
0:38:12 and get rid of all the snacks.
0:38:15 In order for you to have enough time
0:38:17 that your insulin is low, when insulin is low,
0:38:19 it’s gonna allow fat burning,
0:38:22 which is gonna allow you to pull those calories back out.
0:38:25 – You’re cited as being really the founder
0:38:27 of modern intermittent fasting.
0:38:28 And I’ve heard people talk about
0:38:30 intermittent fasting on this show
0:38:33 over and over and over and over again now,
0:38:38 but the internet says that it really came from you.
0:38:39 I know that intermittent fasting
0:38:40 has been happening for thousands of years,
0:38:43 but the idea of it as a tool for weight loss,
0:38:44 they say it came from you.
0:38:47 – Because in 2013, 2014,
0:38:49 really nobody was talking about it
0:38:51 from a medical standpoint.
0:38:52 Like what’s happening in the body?
0:38:53 Why is it good?
0:38:54 Why is it bad?
0:38:56 And really I was, for years,
0:38:58 sort of this one voice in the wilderness
0:39:02 that was saying, like, hey, this is a tool for us.
0:39:04 If you want to lose weight because it’s important,
0:39:07 then you can just set aside a period of time
0:39:08 that you don’t eat.
0:39:11 At the time, people thought it was extremely bad for you.
0:39:13 And I looked through all the literature
0:39:15 and I said, well, why is it bad for you?
0:39:17 And they had all these reasons.
0:39:19 There’s all these myths about intermittent fasting
0:39:21 and how it’s gonna cause you to gain weight
0:39:24 and be tired and hungry and all these sorts of things.
0:39:26 And I said, well, no, there’s actually a lot of data here
0:39:29 over the last, you know, 2,000 years
0:39:31 that we’ve used intermittent fasting.
0:39:32 And they’re simply not true.
0:39:34 And I can go over a few of those,
0:39:37 but that’s why there was nobody talking about it at the time.
0:39:40 And that’s where I started to sort of bring it into
0:39:43 the sort of public consciousness that this is a tool.
0:39:44 That’s all it is.
0:39:45 – Were you attacked for that at the time?
0:39:46 – Oh, absolutely.
0:39:50 Like I got, I got attacked from all sides.
0:39:52 I got, you know, doctors were coming after me,
0:39:53 dieticians were coming after me.
0:39:56 Everybody thought I was gonna do so much harm.
0:39:59 And the funny part was that, you know,
0:40:02 as I think back, as I spoke to a lot of colleagues,
0:40:04 a lot of colleagues would say to me, you know what,
0:40:06 I used to do that when I was in training.
0:40:07 We did that all the time.
0:40:10 We’d go 24 hours without eating because we’re in the OR,
0:40:13 or we’re in the ER, or we’re busy.
0:40:15 So we did that constantly and nothing bad happened.
0:40:18 And I remember thinking, you know what, as a doctor,
0:40:21 I actually tell people to fast all the time.
0:40:23 If you have to go for surgery, you need to fast.
0:40:26 If you’re after surgery, you need to fast.
0:40:29 If you do fasting blood work, you need to fast.
0:40:32 So why is it that I’m actually telling people to fast
0:40:33 all the time?
0:40:35 And yet for weight loss, you shouldn’t fast.
0:40:37 That doesn’t make any sense.
0:40:39 And physiologically from a body standpoint,
0:40:41 it doesn’t make any sense.
0:40:45 One of the things people talked about was, you know,
0:40:47 it’s gonna make you eat more later.
0:40:48 It’s gonna make you more hungry.
0:40:50 Your basal metabolic rate is gonna go down.
0:40:52 This was one of the big myths of intermittent fasting.
0:40:55 That’s gonna cause the so-called starvation mode, right?
0:40:57 And this is the idea that your basal metabolic rate
0:41:00 will fall so low that when you do start to eat,
0:41:02 you’re gonna gain weight again.
0:41:04 So I said, well, let’s think about this.
0:41:07 You can do a study where you take somebody,
0:41:11 say you, for example, and you could fast them for four days
0:41:13 and measure how many calories they’re burning,
0:41:16 their basal metabolic rate on day zero before the fast
0:41:18 and measure them four days into the fast
0:41:21 and see how many calories you’re burning.
0:41:24 So on day zero, they say you’re burning,
0:41:25 say 2,000 calories a day.
0:41:27 On day four of zero food,
0:41:29 you don’t eat any food for four days.
0:41:31 They measure how much calories you’re burning.
0:41:34 Your body is burning 2,200 calories.
0:41:37 Your basal metabolic rate didn’t go down.
0:41:39 It went up.
0:41:42 Your body’s activating itself during fasting,
0:41:45 which is fascinating because if you’re trying to lose weight,
0:41:49 dropping that basal metabolic rate is death.
0:41:51 Like if you drop that metabolic rate,
0:41:53 it’s so hard to lose weight.
0:41:55 That’s what the calorie restricted diets did.
0:41:57 That’s what the low fat diets did,
0:41:59 the eating all the time did.
0:42:00 But when you actually fast,
0:42:02 your metabolic rate went up.
0:42:04 And we see this in study after study.
0:42:07 And the reason is actually basic physiology.
0:42:09 It’s actually medical physiology,
0:42:11 like first year medical school stuff.
0:42:13 When you don’t eat,
0:42:16 what happens in your body from a hormone standpoint
0:42:18 is that your insulin’s gonna fall.
0:42:20 You’re gonna allow your body
0:42:23 to start using the calories that are in the body.
0:42:26 At the same time, other hormones go up.
0:42:28 So the sympathetic tone goes up,
0:42:30 which is your fight or flight response.
0:42:33 Your cortisol levels go up because again,
0:42:35 it’s an activation and your growth hormone goes up.
0:42:38 Because those hormones are gonna start telling your body
0:42:40 to start pulling calories out.
0:42:43 So you’re actually activating yourself.
0:42:44 Think about it in the wild.
0:42:46 If you see a hungry wolf,
0:42:50 is that wolf just sort of, you know, all like lethargic?
0:42:52 No, he’s activated.
0:42:55 He’s actually more dangerous than any other wolf
0:42:58 as opposed to say a lion who just ate.
0:43:00 Because when you just eat, you just wanna lie there.
0:43:02 You know, you wanna digest your food.
0:43:03 You have no energy.
0:43:06 So people say, well, your metabolic rate’s gonna go down
0:43:07 if you fast.
0:43:10 No, the truth is actually the opposite, it goes up.
0:43:12 – You’ve got me thinking about food as an instruction.
0:43:15 I’m giving my body because if I eat this food,
0:43:17 it’s gonna have this impact on my hormones,
0:43:18 which is gonna have this impact on my body.
0:43:21 So if we view food as an instruction to the body,
0:43:23 we talked a little bit about the timings
0:43:25 of eating a little bit about fasting.
0:43:28 I wanna get into that a little bit more, but breakfast.
0:43:32 I read that you didn’t think most people need breakfast.
0:43:35 – Yeah, the whole idea that you need to eat
0:43:39 as soon as you get up is just false.
0:43:42 So there’s this whole thing about breakfast.
0:43:44 Now you will always break your fast.
0:43:46 Think of the actual word, right?
0:43:47 Break fast.
0:43:49 It’s the meal that breaks your fast,
0:43:52 which tells you that in the English language,
0:43:55 we accept that your body should have a fasting period
0:43:57 every day.
0:43:58 Why?
0:44:00 There’s a period of time that you’re supposed to feed,
0:44:03 you eat, insulin goes up, you store calories.
0:44:06 Then there’s supposed to be a period of time that you fast.
0:44:09 That’s after dinner, until the next day’s meal,
0:44:11 which is breakfast, right?
0:44:14 So say you stop eating at six p.m., you eat at eight a.m.
0:44:19 That’s a 14 hour period where your body is not eating,
0:44:23 it’s fasting, and therefore it’s gonna use calories, right?
0:44:25 But the word breakfast tells us
0:44:27 that that’s actually a normal pattern,
0:44:28 this normal cyclical pattern.
0:44:30 You feed, then you fast, right?
0:44:34 If you eat all the time, your body’s just gonna store energy
0:44:37 and never have a period to burn energy.
0:44:39 So, okay, well, what’s gonna happen?
0:44:41 You’re gonna gain weight.
0:44:45 I’ve read as well that breakfast eaters averaged 539
0:44:47 extra calories per day compared to those
0:44:49 that skipped breakfast.
0:44:51 And that’s a finding that’s consistent with other trials
0:44:54 that was on page 132 of the obesity code.
0:44:57 – Yeah, so the more often you eat in general,
0:44:59 the more calories you take in.
0:45:03 So if you eat three times a day, or six times a day,
0:45:06 then if you eat three times a day compared to two times
0:45:09 a day, for example, you’ll in general eat less
0:45:13 because it’s harder to eat that, you know, big meal.
0:45:15 So say you eat once a day versus three times a day.
0:45:18 If you eat once a day, it’s not always easy
0:45:22 to eat three meals worth of calories all in one sitting
0:45:24 because you get full.
0:45:25 – Do you fast?
0:45:27 – Oh, I do that regularly, yeah.
0:45:28 – And what does your fast look like?
0:45:30 ‘Cause I’ve heard of all these different types of fasting,
0:45:33 36 hours, 72 hours, 14 hours.
0:45:35 – There’s no rules for fasting.
0:45:38 You could do, you know, it could be 16 hours.
0:45:40 So 14 hours, remember, is sort of a baseline,
0:45:42 12 to 14 hours, right?
0:45:45 That just means you’re not eating after dinner.
0:45:46 That’s it.
0:45:48 And so if you want to lose weight,
0:45:51 that’s probably not strong enough to make you lose weight
0:45:54 because 12 to 14 hours is sort of just this baseline
0:45:56 that people had in the 70s.
0:45:58 So you can go to 16 hours, for example,
0:46:03 and you shrink that by either eating breakfast a little later
0:46:05 or eating dinner a little earlier.
0:46:06 But you can do more than that.
0:46:08 You can do, say, a 24-hour fast.
0:46:11 You could eat two meals a day, say, eat between 12 and six.
0:46:12 That’s a six-hour eating window.
0:46:15 Or you could eat once a day, which is like a 24-hour fast.
0:46:18 Or you could even go multiple days without eating
0:46:20 because, again, your body is smart.
0:46:23 Like, your body knows what to do.
0:46:26 If you have all those calories sitting on your body,
0:46:29 right, 100,000 calories sitting in body fat
0:46:30 and you don’t eat for three days,
0:46:32 well, you need 6,000 calories.
0:46:35 Well, you have 100,000, 200,000.
0:46:36 So what’s the problem?
0:46:37 Take it out of your body fat.
0:46:40 Let your body eat your body fat.
0:46:42 That’s what fasting is doing for you.
0:46:44 And it’s totally natural
0:46:47 because that’s what it’s there for.
0:46:50 That body fat is not there for looks.
0:46:53 It’s there for you as a source, as a store of calories.
0:46:55 So fasting just lets you use that.
0:46:57 There’s nothing wrong with it.
0:46:59 People talk about hunger, for example,
0:47:01 but, again, hunger is very interesting
0:47:03 because people think it’s the amount of time
0:47:05 that you haven’t eaten.
0:47:06 But it’s not true.
0:47:07 It’s actually hormonally mediated.
0:47:09 So if you think about hunger,
0:47:12 I actually found this really fascinating.
0:47:14 So if you look at studies
0:47:17 of when people are the most hungry and the least hungry,
0:47:21 on average, people are the most hungry at 8 p.m.
0:47:24 and the least hungry at 8 a.m.
0:47:25 So in the morning time,
0:47:28 you are actually the least hungry that you will be all day.
0:47:30 That’s just an average.
0:47:33 And at 8 p.m. in the evening time, you are the most hungry.
0:47:35 So 8 a.m. is the period of time
0:47:38 that you’ve gone the longest without food.
0:47:41 So why are you the least hungry?
0:47:43 It’s because it’s hormonally mediated.
0:47:46 When you wake up at 5 a.m.,
0:47:49 your body actually has this surge of hormones,
0:47:53 growth hormone, cortisol, and sympathetic tone,
0:47:56 which is already getting you prepared for the day.
0:47:59 It’s starting to release some of the stored glucose
0:48:02 from your body fat from your sugar stores at 5 a.m.
0:48:06 So your body has already prepared you for the day ahead
0:48:08 without you even doing anything.
0:48:12 That’s why people in general are not hungry at 8 a.m.
0:48:15 – I’ve got to talk to you about these new injections
0:48:17 people are getting to lose weight.
0:48:18 And the role that they must be playing
0:48:20 in our hormone balances.
0:48:21 What are those bloody things called?
0:48:22 – GLP ones.
0:48:23 – GLP ones.
0:48:24 There’s another name for it, isn’t there?
0:48:25 – Yeah.
0:48:26 Well, there’s the drug name,
0:48:31 which is Osempic is the American name.
0:48:34 And these are all in a class called GLP ones.
0:48:37 And essentially, again, very interesting
0:48:42 because they essentially really reduce the appetite,
0:48:44 which goes to show you that,
0:48:46 and people lose weight, like a lot of weight,
0:48:47 and they keep it off.
0:48:48 So 17% – I think very smart people
0:48:50 that are using them.
0:48:51 – Yeah, yeah.
0:48:52 – Like a billionaire friend of mine
0:48:57 that’s very big in a certain industry uses Osempic.
0:48:58 I know Elon Musk came out and said he uses.
0:49:00 – He said he used it, yeah.
0:49:01 He uses Osempic as well.
0:49:06 – I don’t have any problem with the Osempic
0:49:08 because again, if you think about it,
0:49:10 what it’s telling you that the lesson
0:49:13 it’s teaching you about weight loss
0:49:15 is that it’s not about controlling the calories
0:49:18 because the Osempic doesn’t burn in calories.
0:49:20 It’s about controlling your hunger.
0:49:23 It’s about that one level deeper.
0:49:24 Why are you taking so many calories?
0:49:27 So if you simply reduce the hunger,
0:49:29 you’re going to naturally eat fewer calories,
0:49:31 which is going to cause weight loss.
0:49:33 And that’s what the Osempic does.
0:49:36 It really reduces your appetite to very low levels.
0:49:37 How?
0:49:41 It’s this hormone called GLP1,
0:49:43 which is a natural sort of hormone.
0:49:45 It’s released mostly in the intestines
0:49:48 and the distal intestine and the small intestine.
0:49:52 And in response to certain foods, it goes up, right?
0:49:56 So when you eat, the body has a homeostatic mechanism.
0:49:58 So again, remember, you know,
0:50:00 people think that we’re just eating machines.
0:50:02 We eat until, you know, we explode sort of thing.
0:50:03 But that’s not true.
0:50:08 When you eat, you actually activate the GLP1
0:50:09 along with other hormones.
0:50:11 There’s multiple hormonal systems.
0:50:13 The GLP1 is the one we’re interested in.
0:50:16 You activate GLP1, which then sets into motion
0:50:19 the instructions for you to stop eating, right?
0:50:23 So the act of eating sort of sets in motion
0:50:25 that whole feedback loop to stop, right?
0:50:26 So this is homeostasis,
0:50:29 you’re just trying to keep things at a proper level.
0:50:31 – Does that mean if you eat slower,
0:50:33 you’ll eat less?
0:50:37 – There’s probably not, yeah, probably it’s true.
0:50:41 You know, although it’s probably mostly true
0:50:43 that if you eat really, really fast,
0:50:45 that you don’t have enough time
0:50:47 for this sort of homeostatic mechanisms to kick in.
0:50:50 So you don’t have enough time to stop eating.
0:50:54 But the GLP1s then go to the brain.
0:50:55 So they do certain things.
0:50:56 They help with digestion.
0:50:58 So they increase insulin response
0:51:00 and then they go to the brain.
0:51:03 It crosses the blood-brain barrier.
0:51:08 So the GLP1s gets released by the act of eating,
0:51:09 goes into the brain,
0:51:13 crosses and is active in the sort of mid-brain area
0:51:15 that tells your body to stop eating.
0:51:17 What these GLP1s do, of course,
0:51:21 is that it gives you the hormone
0:51:23 that tells you to stop eating
0:51:24 even though you haven’t eaten.
0:51:27 It’s sort of, that’s the way the drug works.
0:51:29 So then what people tell you is that, you know,
0:51:30 they’re just not hungry.
0:51:32 And if they’re not hungry, then they don’t eat.
0:51:34 And when they don’t eat, of course,
0:51:36 insulin falls and you start to burn calories
0:51:38 and lose weight.
0:51:41 But it wasn’t about controlling the calories.
0:51:43 It was about controlling the hunger.
0:51:46 That was the important part of it.
0:51:47 It’s the hormones, right?
0:51:51 Every successful drug to gain or lose weight, right,
0:51:53 is a hormone.
0:51:56 It’s a hormone base because that’s instructions to the body.
0:51:59 Food is energy and food is instructions.
0:52:02 You change the instructions and you change the hormone.
0:52:03 – This whole history of fiber thing
0:52:05 has been so interesting to me
0:52:07 because in the last six months,
0:52:09 so many of the nutritionists I’ve spoken to
0:52:10 have really impressed upon me
0:52:13 that we are fiber deficient.
0:52:15 And I’m wondering how that happened.
0:52:19 – Well, I think it was part of the processing thing.
0:52:21 So taking out fiber is a great way
0:52:26 to make foods more appealing, if you will.
0:52:32 So what happens is that if you take flour, for example,
0:52:34 and you have a lot of fiber in it,
0:52:36 then the digestion is slowed.
0:52:38 So what you get is a slower rise.
0:52:42 So you take flour and you put a lot of fiber in it.
0:52:45 Well, instead of having this huge spike in insulin,
0:52:49 which you’re gonna get as much slower spike in insulin.
0:52:51 When you have the huge spike in insulin,
0:52:54 it basically overloads your system
0:52:57 and it makes you feel, you know, gives you this big hit.
0:53:00 Sort of like if you have like cocaine, for example,
0:53:03 you know, it’s turned into a very fine powder,
0:53:06 then you snored it so you get this massive sort of spike.
0:53:09 Same thing with, you know, carbohydrates.
0:53:11 If you don’t have any fiber,
0:53:14 you pull all the fiber out by processing,
0:53:17 you get this massive sort of unnatural spike in your body.
0:53:19 It says, “Oh, that’s great, it tastes great.
0:53:20 “I really love it.”
0:53:23 And you get people who are sort of addicted to it
0:53:28 because that big spike is then going to release dopamine.
0:53:30 And dopamine is a pleasure hormone.
0:53:32 So you eat, you know, cookies
0:53:35 or whatever highly processed foods,
0:53:37 you get this sort of pleasurable response.
0:53:39 And that makes you crave it.
0:53:41 If you have a lot of fiber,
0:53:45 it acts almost sort of like an antidote to that carbohydrate
0:53:48 because you’re slowing down that release.
0:53:50 – What foods are high in fiber?
0:53:51 – Well, mostly unprocessed foods.
0:53:52 So the things like beans,
0:53:55 and if you’re having, if you’re eating whole grains,
0:53:57 for example, compared to others,
0:54:01 then it’s gonna have a reduction in the speed of absorption.
0:54:03 So it’s, again, not about the calories necessary
0:54:06 or even necessarily about the carbohydrates
0:54:09 because you’re still eating the same amount of carbohydrate,
0:54:13 but you’re slowing down the speed at which is absorbed,
0:54:15 which is going to change the instructions
0:54:16 that you give your body.
0:54:19 If you have a massive spike in glucose,
0:54:22 you get this massive dopamine surge, right?
0:54:26 And your body’s like, “You love it.”
0:54:27 Then the next time you’re like,
0:54:30 “Okay, give me that refined carbohydrate.”
0:54:31 – What about protein?
0:54:33 ‘Cause we tend to think a protein is something that,
0:54:35 you know, is super great for weight loss.
0:54:40 – Yeah, protein is probably sort of inter, it’s not bad.
0:54:43 I mean, the main thing is cutting down the carbohydrates.
0:54:45 But, you know, in the BCD code,
0:54:48 I really talk about cutting the processing down
0:54:53 because proteins usually don’t come as pure protein, right?
0:54:56 In nature, you never find like,
0:54:57 you know how you have like,
0:55:00 whey powder protein or whatever you get.
0:55:03 The only way you can do that is by processing
0:55:07 the heck out of food to get some kind of pure protein.
0:55:08 It doesn’t exist in nature.
0:55:10 Like, it almost doesn’t exist in nature.
0:55:12 Maybe there’s a few examples.
0:55:14 But when you eat meat,
0:55:15 you think, “Okay, there’s a lot of protein.”
0:55:19 But that’s actually a lot of fat in there too, right?
0:55:21 If you eat anything else that has protein,
0:55:23 it’s rarely all protein.
0:55:26 You know, very lean meats like chicken breast and stuff
0:55:28 are gonna be higher in protein,
0:55:30 but there’s still a lot of other stuff in there.
0:55:32 And it’s very rare that somebody will eat
0:55:35 just all pure 100% protein.
0:55:37 It tends to be hard to eat.
0:55:40 Like the fat brings a lot of flavor and so on.
0:55:43 So it’s a bit of an unnatural way to eat.
0:55:46 Sure, if you’re to eat a lot of protein,
0:55:47 it does spike insulin,
0:55:49 so it does have some effect to gain weight,
0:55:53 but it’s actually a very inefficient macronutrient.
0:55:55 That is, there’s three-note macronutrients.
0:55:59 There’s carbohydrates, there’s fat, and there’s protein.
0:56:02 Your body stores energy or calories in two ways.
0:56:05 There’s glucose, which is carbohydrate,
0:56:08 and it stores it as body fat, which is fat, right?
0:56:11 It doesn’t, protein is not a way for the body
0:56:12 to store energy.
0:56:13 So when you’re eating a lot of protein,
0:56:16 it’s very difficult for it to turn it
0:56:19 into a storage mechanism, like, you know,
0:56:22 so you eat glucose and you eat fat,
0:56:24 you can store glucose and you can store fat,
0:56:27 but you eat protein, but you don’t really store it
0:56:28 as a source of energy.
0:56:31 So if all foods then increase our insulin levels,
0:56:35 I guess the best solution is to fast.
0:56:36 Fasting is certainly one way,
0:56:39 but just changing the foods to other ones,
0:56:43 because if you look at the insulin release
0:56:45 in processed foods versus unprocessed foods,
0:56:47 there’s a huge difference.
0:56:51 So if you eat sort of highly refined foods
0:56:53 like white bread, for example,
0:56:56 then you’re gonna have a very different response
0:57:01 in insulin compared to sort of a whole food.
0:57:04 So unprocessed foods in general,
0:57:06 your body knows how to handle,
0:57:08 like we’ve been eating them for thousands of years,
0:57:13 but certainly any time you eat, your insulin is gonna go up,
0:57:16 you’re giving your body instructions to store energy.
0:57:18 So the solution is to eat less often.
0:57:20 – What if you do it juice fast?
0:57:22 – Juice fast, of course, is not a real fast
0:57:24 because you’re taking a lot of sugars.
0:57:26 – What do you think of juice fasting?
0:57:30 – And generally, I think it’s less effective
0:57:32 than regular fasting and it really depends
0:57:33 on how much juice you take.
0:57:35 If you take a lot of juice, you could easily get,
0:57:38 you know, thousands of calories plus a lot of sugar.
0:57:40 If you do it, you know, cucumber juice and stuff
0:57:42 that’s very low in sugar and kale juice,
0:57:44 then it could be very, very healthy for you
0:57:46 ’cause there’s vitamins and stuff there.
0:57:48 So it all depends on how it’s done.
0:57:51 However, the fasting is a way for you
0:57:53 to sort of clean out the body.
0:57:54 So you can clean out the glucose.
0:57:57 If you have excess body fat, you’re gonna use it, right?
0:57:58 So again, way to clean it out.
0:58:01 And then there’s this whole process called autophagy,
0:58:03 which is just fascinating.
0:58:05 And autophagy is this,
0:58:08 so it’s been very topical ’cause in 2016,
0:58:10 one of the key researchers was given
0:58:11 the Nobel Prize in medicine.
0:58:13 So it’s a very important process
0:58:16 that’s been relatively recently discovered.
0:58:17 What they discovered is that
0:58:19 when you don’t eat protein particularly,
0:58:22 but when you fast, your body activates
0:58:24 this thing called autophagy
0:58:27 and it breaks down some of the subcellular organs,
0:58:29 which sounds really bad.
0:58:30 – Subcellular organs.
0:58:33 – Yeah, so, you know, these are sort of like
0:58:34 the organs within the cell.
0:58:36 So it’s not like the liver,
0:58:39 but there’s something called organelles within a cell
0:58:41 and some of that is broken down.
0:58:44 So basically these proteins and so on within the cell,
0:58:45 your body gets rid of that.
0:58:48 And you think, oh, well, that sounds really bad,
0:58:49 but it’s not.
0:58:51 It turns out that it’s very, very good for you
0:58:54 because it’s an opportunity for your body
0:58:57 to get rid of all this old protein, old junky protein.
0:59:00 And at the same time, remember that you’re fasting,
0:59:03 your growth hormone levels are shooting up through the roof.
0:59:05 So like a, you know, two, three day fasts,
0:59:09 your growth hormone levels might go up five times.
0:59:12 So you’re getting rid of all the old stuff.
0:59:13 Then when you eat again,
0:59:17 you actually got growth hormone to produce new proteins.
0:59:19 So in essence, you’re getting rid of the old,
0:59:20 you’re bringing in the new.
0:59:23 It’s basically the process of rejuvenation.
0:59:26 Could this be a very important way
0:59:29 to get rid of some of the chronic illnesses of aging?
0:59:32 And there’s lots of data, you know,
0:59:36 talking about, you know, Alzheimer’s disease,
0:59:38 there’s talk of people talking about cancers,
0:59:41 there’s people talking about just general aging,
0:59:44 you know, Dr. Chris Palmer talking about mental disorders.
0:59:48 We’re all talking about insulin and overeating and diet
0:59:50 as a really important component
0:59:53 of not just diabetes and weight,
0:59:57 but all of these diseases, mental illnesses,
1:00:00 you know, chronic illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease,
1:00:03 neurologic illnesses, and there’s all this data
1:00:06 that suggests that autophagy and fasting
1:00:08 is a way to activate autophagy
1:00:11 could be actually extremely beneficial for you,
1:00:13 which is fine when we used to do it.
1:00:16 And, you know, what’s so interesting
1:00:21 is that people seem to have already known about it.
1:00:26 Like, you see it in almost every major religion.
1:00:29 There’s periods of fasting, right?
1:00:31 And it’s like, why did they do that?
1:00:33 Because it was good for them.
1:00:35 Through trial and error or whatever,
1:00:40 they realized that, hey, periodically abstaining from food
1:00:42 makes us stronger.
1:00:46 If you eat all the time constantly,
1:00:49 day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out,
1:00:51 that’s not that good for you.
1:00:53 There are periods that you should feast,
1:00:55 and there are periods you should fast.
1:01:00 So religions set days or weeks or months even
1:01:01 where you should fast.
1:01:04 So it’s like, whoa, why did they do that?
1:01:06 And are they just way ahead of us
1:01:08 in terms of understanding the human body?
1:01:13 Like, we get so enamored of our own intelligence
1:01:16 and science and so on that we think they’re, you know,
1:01:17 that they didn’t know what they’re talking about.
1:01:19 Maybe they knew more about what they’re talking about
1:01:21 and science is just catching up and saying,
1:01:23 oh, this process of autophagy
1:01:26 that you activate with fasting,
1:01:29 this could be really important for longevity,
1:01:30 for other things.
1:01:32 I’m not saying you should do it like every month or whatever.
1:01:34 If you look at the way that people do it,
1:01:36 they don’t do it like, you know,
1:01:38 they don’t do like five days a month or something.
1:01:41 They do it once a year or once every few months.
1:01:42 – How long does autophagy take to kick in?
1:01:44 Is it 72 hours, did you say?
1:01:48 – Nobody knows, but probably it’s,
1:01:50 and it depends on probably how much protein you eat.
1:01:54 Protein is the key sort of when you eat protein,
1:01:56 autophagy just stops.
1:01:58 So low protein, you can activate it
1:02:01 and it’s probably somewhere around 20 to 30 hours.
1:02:03 So you’ll see a lot of religions, for example,
1:02:05 they’ll have like a 24 hour fast, right?
1:02:06 One day that you’re not supposed to eat
1:02:08 or something like that.
1:02:10 And maybe that’s the way to cleanse your body,
1:02:12 not just of the glucose and the fat,
1:02:16 but also the excess proteins that are old, they’re junky.
1:02:19 I mean, you think about renovating your bathroom
1:02:21 or something like that, right?
1:02:22 The first thing you got to do,
1:02:26 you got to throw out the 1970s tub
1:02:27 and the avocado green toilet.
1:02:29 That’s the first thing you got to do.
1:02:31 You got to get rid of it.
1:02:34 You got to break down before you can rebuild better.
1:02:37 Well, autophagy might be that way to break down
1:02:39 some of the stuff that you actually
1:02:41 can’t break down any other way.
1:02:43 If your body’s full of all this junky protein,
1:02:46 you can’t get rid of it.
1:02:47 – Is there an evolutionary explanation
1:02:49 for the role of autophagy, do you think?
1:02:50 – I think there is actually,
1:02:55 I think there’s a huge number of reasons why people do it.
1:02:59 One of it, this whole idea that fasting
1:03:02 actually activates the body, for example,
1:03:04 is very interesting because I think it’s like,
1:03:06 if you’re a caveman, for example, or a cave woman,
1:03:09 and it’s winter and there’s nothing to eat,
1:03:11 if your body starts to shut down,
1:03:13 then evolutionarily you’re gonna die, right?
1:03:16 Because you have less energy, you can’t go out and hunt.
1:03:18 So our body’s just not that stupid.
1:03:19 So what it does is says, okay,
1:03:21 well, I’m gonna give you more energy.
1:03:22 So I’m gonna activate the body,
1:03:25 but then I’m going to change
1:03:27 where you’re getting your energy from.
1:03:29 You’re not gonna get the energy from the food,
1:03:30 you’re gonna get it from your body fat stores,
1:03:32 which is your stored food, right?
1:03:33 You stored food for a reason.
1:03:37 So that’s why I think some of the fasting
1:03:40 has a lot of evolutionary benefits
1:03:45 because it increases your energy, it lowers the glucose.
1:03:47 So if you look at the blood glucose,
1:03:48 the blood glucose goes down.
1:03:50 So in times of stress and so on,
1:03:53 your body actually naturally fast.
1:03:55 If you get sick, you get a flu or something,
1:03:57 you stop eating, first thing you do, right?
1:03:59 You just wanna drink some water and stuff.
1:04:00 Why?
1:04:03 Because your body wants to lock down the glucose
1:04:06 because the bacteria love glucose.
1:04:07 Your body can run on fat,
1:04:09 but the bacteria want the glucose.
1:04:11 So you fast to lock down the glucose.
1:04:13 So there’s a lot of evolutionary reasons
1:04:16 why the fasting might be good for bacterial infections,
1:04:19 taking care of things, increasing your energy,
1:04:21 increasing your concentration at a time
1:04:24 that when you’re not eating,
1:04:27 you’re actually getting more mental capacity
1:04:30 and more energy because you need it in order to go hunt.
1:04:31 Interesting.
1:04:33 What is the most interesting thing
1:04:36 or the most, use the word interesting,
1:04:37 a little fascinating.
1:04:40 What is the most fascinating thing
1:04:42 that we haven’t talked about?
1:04:46 I think to me, the most fascinating thing
1:04:48 is other than for intermittent fasting,
1:04:52 because a lot of the stuff we thought about, it was wrong.
1:04:53 In fact, the opposite.
1:04:56 But the most interesting thing, I think,
1:04:58 is in the field of type two diabetes
1:05:02 because it’s such an important disease.
1:05:04 If you look at the number of people
1:05:08 being affected with type two diabetes, it’s skyrocketing.
1:05:11 So we had, since the 1970s, an increase in obesity.
1:05:13 Then we had an increase in type two diabetes.
1:05:16 And I think the most fascinating thing,
1:05:18 the most promising thing I’ve heard in a long time
1:05:22 is that you can actually start to reverse this disease
1:05:25 by changing the diet.
1:05:27 And I think what’s interesting
1:05:29 is that you have to understand that type two diabetes
1:05:32 is largely a dietary disease.
1:05:35 And so we treated it with drugs for a long time.
1:05:38 And if you give drugs to a dietary disease,
1:05:39 well, you’re never gonna fix it
1:05:42 because you haven’t identified the core problem and fixed it.
1:05:46 You need to change the diet to fix that dietary problem.
1:05:47 Then the disease goes away.
1:05:52 And now we have data on intermittent fasting, for example,
1:05:54 and also low carbohydrate diets.
1:05:58 Dr. David Unwin published his data in the UK
1:06:00 on reversing type three diabetes
1:06:02 with reducing carbohydrates,
1:06:07 which is showing that you can reduce about 50% of the people
1:06:11 and put them into a completely drug-free remission state,
1:06:15 like basically cure 50% of those type two diabetics
1:06:18 who are at risk of cancer, at risk of heart disease,
1:06:20 at risk of strokes, at risk of blindness,
1:06:23 at risk of kidney disease, nerve damage, infections.
1:06:28 All these people you can fix just by changing their diet,
1:06:30 either cutting down their carbohydrates
1:06:32 or using intermittent fasting.
1:06:37 And it’s free and anybody can do it.
1:06:40 I’m not talking about a drug that costs thousands of dollars.
1:06:42 I’m not talking about a surgery
1:06:46 which is only available to the 1%.
1:06:48 I’m talking about a treatment,
1:06:51 which is intermittent fasting,
1:06:56 which is available to everybody in the entire world for free
1:07:01 and yet has the power to completely reverse their disease
1:07:03 and make them so much healthier.
1:07:05 So the question is, why don’t we do it?
1:07:10 – I couldn’t answer that question for you.
1:07:15 I try to do my part to tell people, but you know.
1:07:17 – Did you know I was gonna ask you that question?
1:07:18 – I know.
1:07:20 – I was gonna ask you, why don’t we do it?
1:07:25 Never what is systems, incentives, money?
1:07:26 – I think it is.
1:07:27 – I think it’s– – From Big Pharma.
1:07:33 – You know, the real reason is I think that people are slow
1:07:35 to catch new ideas.
1:07:38 Like when people hear about new ideas
1:07:41 and I’m talking about academic doctors and so on,
1:07:44 there’s an intrinsic resistance to change.
1:07:46 So I started talking about intermittent fasting,
1:07:49 say 2016 when the obesity code was published.
1:07:52 I talked about reversing type two diabetes
1:07:53 around the same time.
1:07:59 And they’re just very slow to say,
1:08:00 hey, this makes a lot of sense
1:08:03 because for them, they’ve invested so much
1:08:05 in this calories in, calories out model.
1:08:07 They’ve built their entire careers
1:08:11 on saying that it’s your fault that you’re fat, right?
1:08:13 It’s the foods that you ate.
1:08:14 It’s the calories that you ate
1:08:17 instead of trying to get to a deeper understanding.
1:08:19 So people are very reluctant to change, in fact.
1:08:22 I mean, it’s been 10 years and you see the public,
1:08:25 the interest in intermittent fasting has skyrocketed.
1:08:28 And yet most doctors still won’t prescribe it.
1:08:29 They won’t talk about it.
1:08:30 They know nothing about it.
1:08:33 There’s how much teaching do doctors get
1:08:35 about intermittent fasting and why it might be helpful?
1:08:37 Probably zero.
1:08:39 Like why?
1:08:42 We have this amazing tool
1:08:45 and people, doctors call it a fad, right?
1:08:46 It’s a fad diet.
1:08:48 Well, it’s been around for 2000 plus years.
1:08:51 That’s a long, long, long fad, right?
1:08:53 It’s proven effective.
1:08:56 If you don’t eat, you’re gonna lose weight.
1:08:57 What’s simpler than that?
1:09:00 If you don’t eat, you’re gonna use up your blood glucose,
1:09:02 your diabetes will get better.
1:09:03 What’s wrong with that?
1:09:04 It’s not hard to understand.
1:09:06 The diabetes code, I’ve got the diabetes journal
1:09:09 here in front of me and put simply,
1:09:12 it talks about step one being to put less sugar in
1:09:14 and step two being burn the sugar off.
1:09:15 Yeah.
1:09:18 And step one, which relates to putting more sugar in
1:09:23 is all about low carbohydrate diets, right?
1:09:24 Cutting down the carbohydrates.
1:09:26 Yeah, that’s one effective way
1:09:28 of cutting down the type two diabetes.
1:09:30 In fact, the American Diabetes Association
1:09:33 and their sort of nutritional journals,
1:09:36 they talk about having the most scientific evidence
1:09:37 of any diet.
1:09:39 There’s no diet with more evidence
1:09:41 for reversing type two diabetes
1:09:42 than cutting down the carbohydrates.
1:09:44 And then step two about burning the sugar off
1:09:46 and that’s where fasting comes into the picture.
1:09:47 Yeah.
1:09:49 I mean, if you think about it,
1:09:52 it’s not that hard to understand.
1:09:53 Everybody can understand it.
1:09:56 You don’t eat, you’re gonna lose weight, right?
1:10:01 I mean, it’s such a simple, powerful tool
1:10:05 but it threatens the whole apple cart.
1:10:08 All these doctors, all these professors
1:10:10 which have built their entire reputations,
1:10:13 all these systems that are in place for people.
1:10:15 Personal trainers.
1:10:18 Yeah, personal trainers work on a different level
1:10:21 because they talk about more exercise.
1:10:22 And calories and calories out.
1:10:25 I think when we talk about calories on this show sometimes,
1:10:27 I think the people that get quite offended,
1:10:30 tend to be personal trainers
1:10:34 because I think they would say they’ve got case studies
1:10:38 of telling one of their clients to monitor their calories
1:10:41 and they saw a reduction in weight.
1:10:43 So for them, that means it works.
1:10:45 There’s calories in calories out model.
1:10:51 Again, it is that, but it’s a simplistic understanding.
1:10:53 That’s my whole point.
1:10:56 It’s sort of like, if I were to say to you,
1:10:58 why did the Titanic crash, right?
1:11:01 And most people would say, well, I hid an iceberg.
1:11:02 Well, that’s very simplistic.
1:11:04 That’s not the right answer.
1:11:08 The right answer is, it was going too fast, right?
1:11:11 If you think the right answer to why did the Titanic crash
1:11:13 is because it hid an iceberg,
1:11:17 you’d say the solution is to hit less icebergs
1:11:20 which is the same as eat less calories or drink less alcohol.
1:11:23 That’s a very superficial understanding.
1:11:25 You have to get to the deeper level which is say,
1:11:28 why did the Titanic hit that iceberg?
1:11:30 It was going too fast and there was all these icebergs
1:11:32 and it was going too fast for where it was.
1:11:36 So then you say, it needs to slow down.
1:11:38 Now you’ve identified that deeper understanding,
1:11:39 same as with calories.
1:11:42 You can say eat less calories and for some people work.
1:11:43 But for some people it’s like,
1:11:45 why are you eating so many calories?
1:11:46 Is it because you’re hungry?
1:11:48 Why are you hungry?
1:11:50 Is it because all those calories that you’re eating
1:11:52 are going immediately into storage?
1:11:54 You’re eating white bread and jam and sugar
1:11:56 and all of it’s going directly into storage
1:11:57 which is leaving you hungry,
1:11:59 which is making you eat too many calories.
1:12:02 So in the end, yes, you are eating more calories
1:12:05 but that’s the sort of first order thinking
1:12:08 and not the second order thinking that we need to be doing.
1:12:10 And that’s what the Osempic and so on
1:12:13 starts to address is the hunger issue.
1:12:14 – And this is really what all your work addresses
1:12:17 and it’s really the first time I’ve heard someone talk to me
1:12:22 about obesity and weight gain through the lens of hormones.
1:12:24 Never really, I’ve never heard that before
1:12:27 and reading through your work was really illuminating
1:12:28 because it allowed me to change my frame.
1:12:32 And as you say, when we’re just focusing on the surface,
1:12:33 it’s very easy to fail
1:12:35 because we need to understand the first principles
1:12:37 of what’s going on underneath the surface
1:12:41 for that long-term success to a standard chance of occurring.
1:12:43 And I think everyone listening to this
1:12:46 who’s struggled with weight or obesity or whatever else
1:12:52 can relate to this idea that something’s not working
1:12:55 in, you know, if there was any diet that worked,
1:12:57 there wouldn’t be a thousand of them.
1:13:00 – Yeah, and I think the other thing is to understand
1:13:05 that it’s not the personal failing that we make it out to be
1:13:09 which is, I think, extremely unfair
1:13:12 because obviously there’s something within the system,
1:13:13 within the food environment,
1:13:16 within the system of how we’re framing it,
1:13:19 which is making a lot of people overweight,
1:13:21 but it’s not because they don’t have willpower
1:13:22 or because they’re weak
1:13:27 or these other number of reasons that we stigmatize obesity
1:13:30 because we look at it from that calories in,
1:13:32 calories out framework, right?
1:13:35 We say you’re eating too many calories, you must be weak.
1:13:38 As opposed to you’re eating too many calories,
1:13:41 what, why is it that you’re eating too many calories?
1:13:43 Why are you hungry all the time?
1:13:47 – In a word, then, if you had to describe what you think
1:13:50 about this idea of calories in, calories out,
1:13:51 what is that word?
1:13:54 – I would say that it’s shallow.
1:13:59 It’s correct if you don’t think about it too hard.
1:14:02 Anybody who focuses in on thermodynamics and calories
1:14:06 hasn’t really thought about the problem enough.
1:14:07 That’s what I think.
1:14:10 So in the end, it is correct, just like alcohol in,
1:14:13 alcohol out, hitting the iceberg.
1:14:14 Yes, it did hit an iceberg.
1:14:16 That’s why I said it, but it was going too fast, right?
1:14:19 Or alcohol in, yes, if you drink less alcohol,
1:14:21 you’ll cure your alcoholism,
1:14:26 but you won’t cure the PTSD that caused you to drink.
1:14:28 – Correct, but not helpful.
1:14:30 – Exactly, that’s exactly right.
1:14:35 It is correct, but it’s sort of not getting to that root
1:14:40 deeper cause that we need to in order to help people.
1:14:44 And that’s causing us to blame them.
1:14:47 So what we’re doing, which I think is very unfair,
1:14:49 is blaming the victim.
1:14:54 Like, do you think this person who’s trying to lose 50 pounds
1:14:57 needs you to tell them that need to lose 50 pounds?
1:14:59 Absolutely not.
1:15:02 That’s only gonna be the 10,000th time they’ve heard it.
1:15:04 – It’s interesting, ’cause one of our guests talked
1:15:08 about the role of compassion and kindness in weight loss.
1:15:11 And now through the lens of understanding cortisol,
1:15:15 now I can understand how kindness and gratitude
1:15:19 and being happy, you know, for lack of a better word,
1:15:20 can help us lose weight.
1:15:22 And when we’re not happy, when we’re resentful,
1:15:27 when we’re low in gratitude, when we’re bitter,
1:15:28 we’re more likely to gain weight.
1:15:30 – And other things help too,
1:15:34 because if you think about things like a sense of community,
1:15:35 it’s very important.
1:15:37 – Lowers cortisol levels.
1:15:40 – Lowers cortisol is a way for you to relieve stress, right?
1:15:42 Talking to other people.
1:15:45 We did, of course, limit that during COVID.
1:15:47 And of course we saw a lot of problems,
1:15:51 but one of them was loneliness and all these sort of things.
1:15:56 But again, I always think about, you know, people,
1:15:58 you know, the way they are.
1:16:00 So if you look at a lot of religions, for example,
1:16:04 it’s like, oh, they were so far ahead of us.
1:16:05 What did they do?
1:16:09 They brought people together every week.
1:16:12 Oh, you’re building a sense of community.
1:16:13 Fasting.
1:16:15 Oh, they all got together and fasted.
1:16:16 They all shared.
1:16:17 They’re lowering their cortisol.
1:16:19 They’re lowering their insulin levels.
1:16:20 They’re staying healthy.
1:16:24 And we in our big McMansions, right,
1:16:26 we eat the ice cream for dinner
1:16:30 and we live alone in this giant house.
1:16:33 And we wonder why we’re not as happy as, you know,
1:16:35 our grandparents or our parents before them
1:16:39 because they understood the power of some of these things
1:16:41 that we’re trying to get back to.
1:16:45 Like the weirdest thing is that I’m not trying to tell people
1:16:48 something that’s weird and unusual
1:16:50 and you never thought about this before.
1:16:52 I’m trying to tell them about something
1:16:57 that everybody in human history has been exposed to,
1:16:59 which is intermittent fasting.
1:17:03 That’s been a part of our human history,
1:17:04 whether it’s through religion
1:17:06 or whether it’s through inadvertent, whatever,
1:17:09 or whether it’s through his cleansing and purifications
1:17:10 and all this sort of stuff.
1:17:13 People have exposed it, even in the English language,
1:17:15 breakfast, break your fast.
1:17:17 You need to feed, then you need to fast,
1:17:19 then you need to break your fast.
1:17:22 So I’m not telling people anything different.
1:17:24 – Jason, thank you so much.
1:17:26 We feel like we could talk for hours
1:17:30 ’cause I’m so, there’s so many sort of,
1:17:31 I was thinking about it like spiderwebs,
1:17:33 but there’s so many little branches we could go off on
1:17:34 as it relates to hormones
1:17:36 and the impact of hormones on the human body.
1:17:39 You have this other book as well called the PCOS plan,
1:17:43 preventing and reversing polycystic ovary syndrome,
1:17:46 which is a, you know, a whole nother conversation
1:17:46 for another time.
1:17:48 But these books are so wonderful
1:17:51 because they provide a new lens on an old conversation.
1:17:53 And our conversation, that’s lacked the depth
1:17:57 that’s required to make any significant progress
1:17:57 on these subjects.
1:18:00 As we’ve seen, obesity levels and other issues with weight
1:18:01 have gone in the wrong direction
1:18:03 for the last couple of decades.
1:18:05 And I think it’s a more systemic understanding
1:18:07 of these issues that will give us any chance
1:18:07 of reversing it.
1:18:10 And that’s exactly what your work does.
1:18:11 Everyone knows where to find you.
1:18:12 Dr. Jason Fung will link all of your work
1:18:14 in the description below.
1:18:16 We have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:18:19 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest
1:18:22 without knowing who they’re leaving it for.
1:18:24 And the question that’s been left for you
1:18:30 is what is your greatest gift to the world?
1:18:36 – I think if, you know, I suppose it sounds very arrogant,
1:18:45 but I really hope that my work helps people
1:18:51 sort of reverse the type two diabetes
1:18:56 ’cause that is really sort of one of the most close things
1:18:58 that I deal with because I deal with it professionally
1:18:59 sort of every day.
1:19:05 And helps break the stigma of, not just the stigma,
1:19:07 but the understanding like, you know,
1:19:11 stimulates more thinking about weight loss,
1:19:15 how to lose weight more than calories and calories out.
1:19:18 I mean, it’s so sort of pie in the sky
1:19:22 because, you know, there’s a whole, you know,
1:19:25 worldwide sort of institutionalized,
1:19:29 fossilized almost, you know, thinking around calories.
1:19:31 It’s all about calories, that sort of thing.
1:19:35 So for me to upset, it seems ridiculous.
1:19:40 But I hope that I can at least start that conversation
1:19:43 to say, hey, let’s think about these things.
1:19:44 Let’s think about the hormones.
1:19:46 Let’s think about reversing type two diabetes.
1:19:48 Let’s think about all getting together
1:19:52 and helping each other to become so much healthier,
1:19:56 not through drugs and not through more surgery
1:20:00 and not with, you know, weird and new things
1:20:01 that you’ve never heard of,
1:20:06 but with the tried and the true sort of oldest thinking
1:20:08 that has been there, right?
1:20:11 It’s, to me, it’s, I sometimes think about this,
1:20:15 like crazy, like, why do I think I can even do that, right?
1:20:17 It’s just ridiculous.
1:20:18 It’s so much hubris.
1:20:22 But, you know, I can only try, right?
1:20:24 Because I see in my own practice
1:20:27 how much good it’s done for some people.
1:20:30 So it drives me to say, I need to bring it to more people.
1:20:32 I need to explain it to them.
1:20:34 If they want to be helped, they will be helped.
1:20:35 But if they don’t want to say this, oh, hey,
1:20:38 I’m not trying to force myself to do anything.
1:20:41 But, you know, that’s what I hope my greatest gift will be,
1:20:47 but at the same time, I sort of think that’s just, you know,
1:20:50 you’re crazy if you can think you can do that, but.
1:20:54 – Well, it’s the crazy ones that change the world, Dr. Jason.
1:20:55 It’s the crazy ones that change the world.
1:20:57 And even with, you know, your conversation
1:21:00 around intermittent fasting has changed many, many lives
1:21:01 that you’ll never get to meet.
1:21:05 I imagine many, many millions, many, many millions
1:21:07 because it’s even brought the conversation to this show
1:21:09 before you entered the room.
1:21:12 Many, many months and months and months and almost a year ago,
1:21:13 people started talking on the show
1:21:15 about intermittent fasting.
1:21:18 And that’s in many respects due to the work
1:21:20 that you’ve done to further that conversation.
1:21:22 And now your work continues to highlight the fact
1:21:26 that type two diabetes is a reversible disease in many cases.
1:21:30 And I think, again, that’s going to save, you know,
1:21:32 tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of lives
1:21:33 over the coming decades and years.
1:21:36 So thank you for what you do, Dr. Jason.
1:21:38 It’s a huge honor to get to sit with you today.
1:21:41 And I feel wiser and more enlightened.
1:21:42 And like someone has turned the lights on
1:21:45 in a certain part of my knowledge
1:21:46 because of this conversation.
1:21:47 So I thank you for that tremendously.
1:21:48 – Thank you so much.
1:21:49 It’s been great.
1:21:53 – Do you need a podcast to listen to next?
1:21:56 We’ve discovered that people who liked this episode
1:21:58 also tend to absolutely love
1:22:00 another recent episode we’ve done.
1:22:03 So I’ve linked to that episode in the description below.
1:22:04 I know you’ll enjoy it.
1:22:06 (upbeat music)
1:22:09 (upbeat music)
1:22:12 (upbeat music)
1:22:14 (gentle music)