Ep 147 - Dr Jason Fung | NEW Scientific Way To Burn Fat [EAT THIS]

"Count your calories, cut your calories, and if it doesn't work, it's your fault. It's really just moronic. If you simply cut your calories, your hunger goes up, so you're gonna want to eat more. How do you get a 99.7% failure rate without the advice being bad?" Dr. Jason Fung, the founder of Intermittent Faster. He'll reveal the fastest way to lose weight with his three golden tips for effortless fat loss. "Now in the United States, we have a situation where 70% of people are overweight or obese. Is it really their fault? Each one individually decided to gain this weight that they didn't want? I don't think so. All these different things that go into behavior, and they're like, "No, it's all about calorie." The question is, why has that body fat thermostat, which is the one that controls how much body fat you carry gone up? And the answer is hormones, right? So if you simply give somebody insulin, they're gonna gain body fat. People who start fasting, they notice their appetite has just gone up. So Dr. Fung, do you think a high fat diet is good for weight loss? Any natural fat, I wouldn't be afraid to use as much as you want. Certain foods are more fattening than other foods. It's about much more than calories, and that's exactly what we're going to get into today. If you're trying to lose weight, chances are you'll fail, and it's not opinion. It's what the data shows. Because most diets don't work long-term, and that's not your fault. It's not willpower. My guest today is Dr. Jason Fung. He spent decades treating millions of patients with obesity and diabetes, and studying insulin, fasting, and hunger. We're about to share the three golden rules of weight loss and 51 practical ways that you can change what we eat, how we eat, and why we eat, because this isn't just about hunger. So Dr. Fung, my first question. In your new book, The Hunger Code, you say that calorie restriction offers a 99.6% failure rate. Why do you think doctors, media, and bodybuilders still say to eat less, move more, and count your calories? Well, I think it's because if you repeat something often enough, people assume that it's true. It's much like, for example, for decades, people demonized fat. So from the 70s to about the 2000s, foods like nuts and avocados and olive oil and salmon were considered really, really bad for you and leading to a heart attack until people started to realize, hey, when people eat lots of nuts and stuff, they have actually less heart attacks. So everybody believed it just because everybody kept saying it. So everybody assumed that everybody else must know. So it's this sort of self-perpetuating thing. And the thing about calorie restriction is that everybody's tried it. I barely know a single person who hasn't done it, but has anybody been able to lose weight long-term with it? Very few. And that's what the data shows. So that's that he shows the success rate in terms of getting to a normal weight, primarily from calorie counting. This is through a very, very large sample size. And it jives with what common sense in your own personal observation has told you. People struggle to lose weight. And there's two sort of things. Either the advice to cut calories and focus on calories is bad. But the other alternative is that the advice is good and the people are bad. So the reasons for failure are one of those two. And I think it's because the advice is bad for a number of reasons that I outlined in the hunger code and the obesity code. Whereas almost everybody else assumes that that advice is good and people are bad, right? And that leads to all sorts of fat shaming and also if you're overweight, you have weak willpower, right? And I don't think that's it at all. I don't think people have changed that much in the last 50 years. I think that advice to count calories, to restrictor calories and this change to ultra-process food has really caused this shift towards obesity. And it's not specifically their fault. But yeah, I think it's just because people repeat it so often. And it's really a matter of this sort of very sort of superficial simplistic thinking that goes along with calories. The way I look at it is that you have to, if you want to really cure a problem, you have to get to the root cause, not to the sort of superficial cause, right? And there's a concept in logic called the three wise. Which is that if you really want to understand the heart of a problem, you have to ask the question why sort of three times. So for example, if you're to a child, or to ask you, why do I have to go to school? You know, a lot of parents would say because you need to learn stuff. To which the child says, why do I need to know the capital of Uganda, right? How is that going to help me in my life? And the truth is that it's probably not going to help them in their life. And if they needed to know it, they could look it up in like three seconds. So that sort of first level understanding, that sort of first order of, you know, why, you know, trying to get to the root cause doesn't give you a satisfactory answer, right? So then you say, okay, so now you have to go to the deepest questions, right? So it's like, so why do I have to learn stuff? Which you might say, well, you can get a better job. And then the child might ask the third, why do I need to get a better job? And it's like because you'll make more money, right? And you'll be happier. So now the child can understand, hey, I should go to school now and I can make more money later, right? So that sort of makes sense. And it's the same thing with the calories, right? So the calories is sort of that sort of very superficial understanding. So if you say, why am I gaining weight? And it's like because calories in is greater than calories out. And that is true. So then people, if you stop at that first, why, that's the sort of superficial understanding, really sort of because you will learn stuff, answer, right? And it doesn't give you a satisfactory solution because you really haven't dealt with the root cause. So you might say, okay, so why is calories in greater than calories out? And it's like because you're hungry, right? Now that's a much more satisfactory answer because if you deal with the hunger, then you won't need as much, right? But that's a more lasting solution. If you simply cut your calories, right? So you have hungry, you have calories, right? If you simply cut your calories, your hunger goes up. Now you're constantly fighting with yourself, right? You're eating less, but you're hungrier. So you're going to want to eat more day after day, week after week, year after year, right? And it basically just fails because you're always fighting with your body. Now if you consider, what if you're to lower hunger? Well, you would also eat less, but now look, you're not fighting with yourself constantly, right? And that's the lesson of ozempic is that you got to focus on the hunger, not the calories. If you focus on the calories, you almost always fail. And that's what the science has said. And even though everybody thinks it'll work, even though you think the answer of calories in greater than calories out there for just eating fewer calories, is that you're as useful, the science says it's not. And every single person already knows that it's not. It doesn't work. So why do you keep persisting on it? Because the sort of experts, the doctors and all those sort of, they're not dietitians, the ectricians, they can't admit that they're just wrong about this whole understanding of how things go. So then instead of saying the advice is wrong, they say the advice is good, the problem is you. You didn't want it enough. If you, and they keep pointing the figure at basically, they're blaming the victim. So instead of trying to get them to this sort of deeper understanding of what's going on, they simply blame the victim, right? You need help. You need more willpower. You need something to help you. Like, no, the problem is the advice was just bad, right? How do you get a 99.7% failure rate without the advice being bad, right? And I always think that it's obvious that the problem is the advice, right? If you have, for example, a school and you have a classroom and one child fails, well, maybe it's a child's fault. They are playing too many video games, right? What if 70 children out of those hundred fail? Would you say it's an individual problem? Or would you say that it's a systemic teacher learning environment school problem? Because now in the United States, we have a situation where 70% of people are overweight or obese. I don't think so. The problem is more systemic. The problem is that the advice we gave was just not good. So if we get back to the third Y, right? So the second Y is calories and greater than calories out was because you're hungry. Then the third most interesting question in my mind is, why are you hungry? And that's really the focus of the book. And there's actually not one type of hunger. There's actually three types of hunger. There's the homeostatic hunger, which we think of as normal sort of hunger. But there's also hedonic hunger and conditioned hunger. All three of which play a key role in our eating behavior. Absolutely. I want to talk more about the hunger. That was a people to point, even for me. We're always hungry, even counting calories, and then you just keep eating, eating, eating, but you don't eat just because of physical hunger, which is the homestatic hunger. You eat for many other reasons, which we'll talk about, and the fixes around that. I do want to ask the next question, which is, you mentioned in the book about a body thermostat. Your body has a thermostat, which controls how your body burns and how much you eat. What is the body thermostat and what is controlling it? The body fat thermostat is really a homestatic mechanism, so this relates to homestatic hunger. If you have a thermostat, for example, in your house, it controls your room temperature say. You turn it up or you turn it down, and it will either activate the heating or the air conditioning or turn off. The point is that you maintain that steady room temperature, no matter if it's cold outside or if it's hot outside, it's still going to maintain that temperature. Some people say that our body fat is simply the excess of what we eat. If we eat a lot, then we'll store some. If we don't eat a lot, we'll burn some. Basically, there's no controlling mechanism. Since food is so easy to eat yet now, then we're all getting fat. That's a stupid argument. It's completely really just moronic. Because if you think about the natural world, you have lions and tigers and bears and whatever, right? Those animals in the wild never become morbidly obese. Why? Because their body has a mechanism to maintain that steady weight. It has to. If you're too fat as an animal, you can't catch prey or if you're an herbivore, you can't run away from predators. You're going to die. Period. There's never morbidly obese animals in the wild. Even when you have bears, for example, who hibernate, it's because their body thermostat has told them to gain lots of fat. They don't do it sort of willy-milly. It's not in the middle of summer. They're morbidly obese. But when they're gearing up for winter, all of a sudden, they gain all this extra fat. So, the point is that the percentage of body fat is no different than any other core, you know, physiologic mechanism. Like you can, for example, you know, hydration status. If you drink a lot of water, you're going to pee more. That's just the way it is. If you don't drink a lot of water, you're going to pee less. Why? Because the body wants to maintain that normal hydration status. You can't just say that hydration status is water and minus water out. Therefore, I must monitor and measure every, you know, ounce of fluid that I drink. It's like, no, because there's a mechanism that adjusts it up and down. So if your body weight has gone up, the question is, why has that body fat thermostat, which is the one that controls how much body fat you carry gone up? The question is not, you know, did I eat more calories? No, that's just the mechanism through which it acts. Just like the thermostat doesn't actually heat up the room or cool it down. It activates the heating or the cooling. This body fat thermostat, when it goes up, it tells your body you need to eat more and it acts through hunger. It makes you more hungry, right? If it goes down, if your body senses that, hey, I've gained too much fat, I need to go down, it'll kill your hunger. And that's been shown experimentally for like 50, 60 years, right? If you force feed somebody, a lot of food, they gain 10 pounds because you force fed them. Now what happens when you stop the experiment is that their hunger goes away for like weeks and weeks and weeks until they lose that weight. So the hunger goes down, but that's the mechanism of how it works. But it's this thermostat that goes up and down that you need to control. So if the room is too hot, for example, the room is thirsted at, you don't say, well, why is heat great in greater than heat out, right? That's just stupid. I ask, you'd ask, why did somebody turn up the thermostat, right? So it's same with the body fat. So instead of saying, where do I call these calories out, that's just the mechanism, right? If the body fat thermostat goes up, it's going to increase hunger, you're going to eat more. If you still don't eat more, it's going to ramp down your metabolic rate, right? So if you ramp down your metabolic rate, you're going to burn less and still gain that body fat that you're telling the body fat to gain, right? So that's why people say, well, I'll just eat fewer calories. Well, that's not going to work. The problem is your thermostat's up here. You're not eating because you got great willpower. So your body reduces how much it burns and you still gain that body fat. And guess what? This happens every single time. Every scientific study shows it. If you simply cut calories, what happens? Your metabolic rate goes down and you still gain that weight. So the question is, what brings it up and down? So certain hormones are going to raise and some are going to lower. So if you take insulin, for example, and you simply give somebody insulin, they're going to gain body fat because that raises the body fat. They're saying you give them cortisol, raises it up. If you give them GLP1, for example, which is like the drug ocephic, well, that's going to lower the body fat. If you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, that's going to lower it, right? So again, we have drugs that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. Nicotine is a classic example. What happens when you smoke? You lose weight. Why? That's been shown for 50 years. But why? Why is it that you lose weight? Because your hunger goes down. Same with other things that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. So the old drugs speed, for example, and fetamines. They cause weight loss. So does crack and stuff. And they're not good for you. I'm not saying that for you. But what I'm saying is that those drugs were used to be called anorexians. Anorexia related to loss of hunger, right? In other words, these drugs which stimulate the sympathetic tone reduce hunger. What it tells you is that that's one of the hormonal systems that affect this body fat nervous system. So all of these together. So the insulin, the cortisol, the sympathetic tone, the, you know, the, uh, G. L. P. one, G. I. P. Laptin, um, Barrow receptors in the stomach, the vagus, and all of these together raise and lower the thermostat. So if, for example, you, uh, gain weight and you say, well, why am I gaining weight? You have to look at all these, uh, sort of hormonal factors. For example, we all know, and it's been well documented that sleep, lot, lack of sleep will cause weight gain. Very, very common, right? But why? Lack of sleep does not have any calories. If you're focused on the stupid calories, then you're going to say, well, lack of sleep has no calories. Why would it cause waking? And the answer is the lack of sleep increases your cortisol, which raises your body fat thermostat which goes and tells you to eat more. So you get hungry. And then somebody says, aha, you're eating more. It's like, yeah, but why always focus on the why? Like don't just say you're eating more. Please eat less. Like that's just stupid. That's just like saying, oh, it's too hot in here. Let's, you know, turn on the air conditioning. Meanwhile, your thermostat turns on the heat. Now you're always fighting with each other. That's the same idea, right? So the point is that your body has this sort of homestatic mechanism. Every single system in the body has a homestatic mechanism. Every temperature is maintained, right? The hydration status, your electrolytes. If you eat more sodium, you're going to pee out more sodium, right? You go into a bright room and your pupils will die late. You go into a dark room and they'll shrink, right? Every homie, every system in our body has to maintain that nice natural level that we want it to be. And there's ways that we sort of activate mechanism to activate the brain to go back down. And there's no different than body fat because that's a crucial, crucial aspect of survival in the wild. We think that evolved to have this normal level of body fat, what's thrown it off, right? That's the question. And that's, you know, where we get into some of these other types of hunger that can also cause the problems. Absolutely. I feel like you need to have a good debate with, you know, like Lane Norton or some, I don't want to like, Pippu Lane Norton, but somebody that comes with the calories debate because what you're saying makes so much sense. And you're talking about homostatic hunger, which is the body thermostat. If you eat less calories, more calories, the thermostat inside is going to change. Don't worry about the calories. Think about the inside, what the effect of the inside is. Before we get to the other types of hunger, I have to ask about exercise because that also affects the body thermostat and the hormones. So can somebody exercise a lot and think they're going to lose weight? It can work, but it's very, very difficult. And, you know, the reason that it works is not because of calories truthfully. So the simple, you know, it's really sympathetic tone. So exercise, when you exercise lots, stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, which decreases your hunger, right? So we all know that if you're exercising, if you're in the middle of basketball or something, you don't think, oh, I'm really hungry now, right? Because that increased sympathetic tone in the heat of the game sort of thing reduces hunger. So that's the acute anorexia that you get with. exercise. However, after the exercise, you do get this rebound in hunger. That's why they say you're working up an appetite. The point is that if you do a lot of exercise, hours and hours a day, then you're going to affect your sympathetic tone, which you're going to have decrease your appetite and stuff. The problem with exercise is one, if you don't do a lot of exercise, then you're going to just not going to burn very many calories. You do half an hour a day, 45 minutes a day. It's going to be like 150 calories. I don't know if you've ever got those treadmills. I have a watch. I'm not wearing it now, but it's crazy. I do weight training three times a week. I walk 7,000, 10,000 steps. That's not the calories. It's the health. But do you know if you try to look at how many calories you've burnt? It's like 200 calories. Well, I can just eat that in two slices of bread, not saying I eat bread. But yes. Yeah, it's incredibly slow. Now, as Dr. Fung mentions, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, it's not about the calories. It is about what's happening inside your body. And the first step is to lower your insulin by dropping the carbohydrates. And he's one thing that you might notice. Some side effects like low energy, nausea, headaches and even cramping. But he's a really easy way to fix it. Be generous with your salt. Try using at least five grams of high quality salt every day. But if you still don't feel your best, try adding in electrolytes, one that has sodium, potassium and magnesium, because this is so important for your brain and how your body functions. And that's why I am so proud to have element as a sponsor of today's episode. Now, I like to use a high quality supplement like element because it has a proven science back mix of sodium, potassium and magnesium without anything artificial. And there's no preservatives. And I personally like to use the raw, unflavered option. It's a teal color every day. And it has a lovely salty taste. I put that in my morning coffee and I also put it in my water. And right now, element is offering my viewers this free sample pack on every order. So you're going to get eight single servings of element to try for free. So if you want this just head to drinkelement.com or it's like the primal podcast. Your body, as you increase exercise, you are going to burn more calories, but your metabolic rate is going to go down. And that's because your body becomes more efficient, which is generally good. So if you exercise a lot in your really good shape, what happens? Your heart rate slow. Everybody's calm and relaxed. Because your body is actually reducing the number of calorie burn. So it's become more efficient, which is good, but you're also not burning that many calories. So they've done a study where they've shown that if you increase anywhere past about 2500 calories, you can't really go more than that in terms of total loss of energy expenditure. Because what happens is that it sort of plateaus at about 2500. So as you do more and more exercise, your metabolic rate goes down and down. It's not a bad thing. So exercise is clearly a good thing for everybody to do. It's just that it's not that efficient for weight loss because of this sort of, again, it's this homeostatic mechanism. Your body doesn't want to keep burning calories and burning calories during exercise because it's going to use too much. So it's going to try and reign that in because the body is smart. And people who sort of focus excessive, only on calories. I always think it's not that they're wrong. The answer is very simplistic. It's sort of like it's back to the three wise. If I were to ask you why did the Titanic stink? Most people would say because of the hidden iceberg. That's actually correct, but it's the wrong answer. And it's because if you say the Titanic hit a iceberg, so therefore I'm going to tell everybody in the future don't hit icebergs. Well, that's good advice, but it's pretty moronic truthfully. The answer to the Titanic question, why did the Titanic stink? It's like it's hit a iceberg. But then you have to go again into the three wise. You see, why did the Titanic hit a iceberg? Well, it's because it couldn't avoid it. And why couldn't it avoid it? The answer then is because it was going too fast. So the solution that what you want to tell future captains is you need to slow down. You don't need to tell them don't hit icebergs. So the whole calories thing is sort of this very while it's correct, it's superficial. And telling somebody to eat fewer calories is like telling people don't hit icebergs. It's like that's not very good advice. It's not helpful in any way. Whereas telling somebody to slow down in, you know, bad weather is very useful advice to avoid hitting. So, you know, the problem with talking to people who are, you know, so steeped in this calorie sort of calories only thing is like one is that they are correct. Just like that don't hit icebergs. But they don't understand that they're seeing the problem at the shallowist sort of first order level and not getting to the deeper problems. And they're generally sort of aggressively sure of themselves. It's thermodynamics. It's like nobody's breaking any laws of thermodynamics. What we're saying is that if you don't deal with the hunger, you're not going to deal with the actual problem. The problem of overeating is really the problem of overhunger. And it's like, and they're saying, if you eat less, you must lose weight. No, that's absolutely incorrect. If you eat less, you could either lose weight or you could burn fewer calories. In either way, it's a balanced equation. So remember, calorie deficit can never exist. The energy balance equation is a balanced equation. That is body fat equals calories in minus calories out. That is true. But there's three variables that must balance it. So no deficit can ever exist. If calories in is greater than calories out, yes, body fat must go down or it must go up. However, if you simply reduce the calories in, you can affect either of these other two variables. So either you will, if you increase calories in or decrease calories in, so you're going to eat less, you're either going to decrease body fat or you're going to decrease energy expenditure. So if you switch the energy balance equation around and say calories in equals body fat plus calories out, what it shows you is that for every calorie you eat, you either store it as body fat or you burn it. But which one does it do? That's the key question. Not the equation itself. The equation is always right. But for every calorie you eat, you'll either store it or burn it. Which one you do makes a huge difference, right? It's just like if you have a dollar, you could either put it in the bank or you could blow it on a lottery ticket, right? What you do is very, very important. It's not the number of dollars because you could get a million dollars and blow the whole thing on lottery tickets or you could get a million dollars and save it, right? Very different outcomes, same number of dollars, same thing with calories. If you take a lot of calories, you can either store it as body fat or you burn it as energy. Which one it does depends on your hormones, not on the number of calories, right? And so it's often pointless, I find it often pointless to talk to calories people because I find that they haven't actually thought out the problem. Anybody who just is all about calories, I always think, yeah, you haven't understood the problem, so it's really difficult for me to talk to them because they don't understand where they sort of just fell off the rails sort of thing. They just don't understand the whole problem. So therefore they're always like thermodynamics. Calories in, calories out. It's inevitable. I'm like, no, it's not. That's your understanding. They're understanding the problem incorrectly, right? They're at the don't hit icebergs sort of level of thinking. Yeah, I could understand that. I wasn't saying to have a debate, but I guess it would be quite interesting because it just makes a lot of sense when you just mention the whole calories thing, the food thing, fix the body thermostat, totally makes sense and exercising. As a side question, it wasn't in your book, The Hunger Code, but do you think then that following a low insulin lifestyle, like low carb kind of or keto, does that work because it's fixing the body fat thermostat? Yeah, because insulin is one of the major ones. Now, carbohydrates is part of the issue, right? So if you eat more carbohydrates, you're going to stimulate more insulin, right? So again, for every calorie you eat, you can either burn it or store it, right? If you stimulate a lot of insulin, you're going to store it because that's what you told the body to do. So certain foods stimulate a lot of insulin and certain foods don't stimulate a lot of insulin. So what happens, right? Well, in one case, so say you eat white bread and jam, for example, so almost pure refined carbohydrate in the morning, you eat it, your insulin spikes way up. So you store all these calories. So you say you take 800 calories, 500 calories of white bread and jam, your insulin spikes way up, you store all this into your body fat. Well, by 1030, you're just some ravenous. Why? Because you have no energy. You're looking around for a low fat muffin, right? So you get your low fat muffin, again, pure carbohydrate. Insulin goes way up, all those calories go right into your body fat. And by lunch, you're ravenous again. Why? Because that's what you told the body to do. Now, for example, you eat steak and eggs. in the morning. Well, what happens? He don't stimulate a lot in the sun. The calories are floating around. You have plenty of calories to use for energy. And you're not hungry at 10.30. Everybody knows this. So why would we pretend it's different? Right? So say you eat 800 calories of staking eggs in the morning. You're good until lunch, maybe even until dinner, because you're so full. Right? Why? Because he didn't store those calories. Now you drink, say, an 800 calorie frappuccino. Same calories. What happens? Well, you could eat right away. Right? Because you didn't create any satiety. Why? Because all of those calories sort of went right into storage. So you're not full. In the case of the staking eggs, you left all those calories out. You didn't store it. So you're not hungry. In the frappuccino case, you're going to store all those calories right away. There's no satiety because there's no GLP1, GIP, for example, peptideYY, holocysticinein, which are satiety hormones that the other one stimulates. And you're going to be looking for food, right? And that's the whole point. It's not the calories. The number of calories is identical. The difference is that the hormones that are stimulated by these foods are different. So food contains both calories, which is the amount of energy and information. Information as to what to do with those calories, right? Just like the money. There's instructions. Do you start in the bank or do you blow it on the lottery ticket, right? So the point is that those instructions are the hormonal stimuli that happens. When you eat that food, certain hormones are stimulated. And the different, different, based on different foods. So what does this mean? Does this break laws of thermodynamics? Absolutely not. Right? You're not creating energy out of nowhere. What it means is that certain foods are more fattening than other foods. So frappuccino and brownies are more fattening than eggs. Well, that seems kind of logical, doesn't it? Isn't that pure common sense? Like, if you want to lose weight, you should stop eating those brownies. Because that's all sugar and stimulates a lot of insulin. Duh! You should eat broccoli. You should eat eggs, right? You don't need to cut those down. You don't need to count those calories because by the time you get enough of those eggs or broccoli or what are salmon or whatever, you're going to stop eating because your hormones have already told you that, right? Because they're like, hey, there's enough energy out here. There's enough calories floating around for us to use. You need to stop eating. It's about the hormones, not the calories, because the calories are identical. So if you simply eat the drink, the frappuccino and try and count it, what's going to happen? Well, you can control those calories, but you can't control how hungry you are. So you're just going to be hungry all the time. Then you're going to want to eat. That's going to kill your sort of eating behavior and eventually it's going to fail. And guess what? That's what happens everybody. When they count their calories and eat ice cream, it's not going to work. Okay, let's get to the next type of hunger. Hedonic hunger. So we already spoke about homostatic hunger. That's when you will hungry. You stop when you're full. But you mentioned that another type of hunger. Why people eat hedonic hunger? What does that mean? Yeah, so this is where it starts to get interesting because the research into hedonic hunger is actually increasing quite a quite quickly. So if you think about why you eat, it's not simply because you're hungry. And it's like, you think about dessert. Nobody eats dessert because they're hungry. You just had a full meal. You eat dessert because it looks good and it tastes good and makes you feel good. That's the whole thing about comfort foods. You eat it so that you feel better. So if you break up with your boyfriend girlfriend, you eat a whole tub of ice cream. Well, why? Because it's a comfort food because it's making you feel better. That is it's releasing dopamine and other rewarding substances. In your brain that make your mood feel better. So same with the hedonic hunger. It's just like, you know, you see, you finish your meal. You're not hungry, but you have this nice brownie or whatever. And you want to eat it because it looks good. And when you eat it, it gives you pleasure. That's normal. You can't just ignore these things because they exist. So in other words, hedonic, which means related to hunger is a very important cause of eating behavior. So hunger, you can get hedonic hunger. And the thing about hedonic hunger is that if you fill up on, you know, natural foods, right? It's very hard to eat too much, right? Because you're ready full, right? The key to hedonic hunger is that if you look at food companies and ultra-process foods, what they do is they try to maximize this hedonic hunger. Well, at the same time, minimizing this sort of satiety, which is the homeostatic hunger. Because if you simply, if somebody eats a full dinner of like, you know, roast beef and, you know, mashed potatoes and stuff, you can only eat a little bit of dessert, right? Just a little bit to get the taste. You can't just eat a lot of it. So if you're a processed food company, you can't make a lot of money selling those ultra-process foods because they can only eat so much as if people have eaten all these natural foods. So what you need to do is engineer these foods to have one, maximum pleasure. So you can change all the chemicals and taste. You get these text risers and the most fires, what you do is you try to minimize satiety. So what you do is you try to reduce protein, you try to reduce fat because both proteins and fats release satiety hormones such as polycystide YY and colisicine. Also, protein is a strong stimulus of like GLP1, which again is this satiety hormone. It also slows down the movement of food through the stomach. So all to keep you full. If you want to sell a lot of food, you want sort of all these chemicals, all these textures, all these, you know, things, but also make it very easy to eat and create no satiety. So if you think about snack foods and cookies and cheetos and stuff, right? Cheese puffs and stuff. Well, they have almost no satiety. You can go through a whole bag like it probably wouldn't be difficult to eat a whole bag of cookies, right? You buy bag cookies like I could probably eat them. I won't, but I could because they just don't have any satiety. You can keep eating them, right? Compare that to, you know, beef or eggs or natural foods. They have natural satiety mechanisms. But because these ultra-process foods have been engineered, not deliberately, they've been engineered to maximize profits, which means increase rewarding potential. So you get these, you know, you eat these foods and the dopamine sort of spikes way up. And there's different ways they can do that and minimize satiety so you can eat lots of them, right? And that's the key to the ultra-process foods. And that's why they're so dangerous because you can keep on eating them, keep on eating them. And you're never satisfying your homeostatic hunger while you're you keep going with the hedonic hunger, right? So you're feeling, you know, you get the pleasure of eating those ultra-process foods and then people say, what you go to the nutrition and say, oh, it's all about calories. Just count your calories. No, the problem was not the calories. The problem is that the ultra-process foods are working on your hedonic hunger while not satisfying your homeostatic hunger, which is a recipe for sort of disaster. And that's why if you look at the United States and United Kingdom, ultra-process foods are somewhere around 70% of the diet. And what's happened in that time while obesity has spiked way up. Now you look at a country like Italy where the percentage of ultra-process foods is much lower. I think it's around 20% and they love food there. They're famously in love with their food, right? Their pastas and their focacias and all that stuff. But they're not eating ultra-process foods, right? So while they may have these sort of insulin stimulating effects, they're still getting this atide effect and they're not getting the same, you know, problems that you see with the ultra-process foods. But the problem wasn't the calories, right? The problem was the processing. And sometimes these, the stimulation of hedonic hunger actually flips into food addiction, which is another area of tremendous research in the last 10 years. And people at first think, "Hey, that's crazy. You can't get addicted to foods. It's all natural." It's like that argument just doesn't hold. You know, yes, ultra-process foods are derived from natural foods. Well, tobacco is, you know, nicotine smoke is derived from tobacco plants and marijuana is derived from the marijuana plant. And morphine is derived from the poppy, which is a plant, right? So just because it's natural, it doesn't mean you can't get addicted. The key is the processing. You have to process these natural foods to create these addictive substances. And addiction just means that you keep eating these foods, even though you know it's bad for you. It doesn't mean everybody who takes it gets addicted. And not everybody who smokes gets addicted to smoking. But some people do, same with alcohol, right? Alcohol, which is a natural product, if you were to say so. Also goes, you have to not everybody who drinks alcohol becomes addicted, but some of them too. And it's the same with food. And it's not that people are addicted to food. Because again, I hear this argument sometimes, and I always think it's so stupid. You know, people say, well, you can't just stop eating food. It's like, I'm not saying you should stop eating food. I'm saying you should stop eating ultra-process foods, because that's the problem, right? It's not like, oh, you're addicted to alcohol. You need to stop drinking tea. It's like, why? I'm addicted to alcohol, because you need to stop drinking everything. It's like, no, don't be so stupid. If you're addicted to ultra-process foods, then you need to stop them. Because honestly, there are lots of people who say, I'm addicted to ice cream. I'm addicted to chocolate, chocolate hotdog. I'm addicted to pizza. I'm addicted to this. Does anybody say, I'm addicted to eggplant? No, not really. I'm addicted to beef. No, nobody's addicted to beef, because beef is delicious. I'm addicted to sushi. I love sushi, right? But I'm not addicted to it. It's not like, I'm going to keep eating raw fish until I become morbidly obese. But if you've ever watched those TV shows, like, you know, a thousand-pound life for those shows on television, you see that these people are clearly addicted. They can't even walk, and yet they can't stop eating. Why? Because they're addicted. That's it. That's the answer. Now, if you have an addiction, you need to treat the addiction, right? You can't just say everything in moderation. Would you say to a person who's addicted to heroin? Oh, just use heroin in moderation, right? Somebody who's alcoholic just have a little bit of alcohol. Like, you know, that's a recipe for falling off the wagon. You know that, right? Like, don't be such an idiot. The point is that if you have a food addiction, then you need to treat it with abstinence and support, right? That's the whole idea of alcohol, it's anonymous, and stuff, right? Support, community support, peer support. That's how you treat it. You don't treat it by saying to somebody, "Oh, you know, you should have, you know, a little bit of heroin." Then it's okay, because you've moderated it. And if you can't control it, well, you know, you need more willpower. No, it's an addiction. Treat it like an addiction, right? You need to say, if you're addicted to ultra-process refined carbohydrates, you need to cut them out. Because as soon as you get them, it's going to trigger you to want them, and you're going to take them, just like alcohol or heroin or any of these other addictive substances, right? So, you know, all of these topics, which are sort of new, or there's a lot more research, there's a Yale Food Addiction Score, which shows that, you know, like 20, 30% of these overweight people are actually addicted to foods. So, treat it like an addiction. Otherwise, you'll never be successful. Any more than the, you know, alcohol, taking a moderation, you'll be fine. Just use willpower. It's like, no, you can't just use willpower. It's an addiction. Yeah, that doesn't really work. But it's very well known that if you have alcohol addiction, obviously go to AA, but what about food addiction groups? So, that goes to hedonic hunger and golden rule number one of the hunger code to lose weight. Avoid ultra-process foods. Yeah, to the extent you can. So, try to avoid ultra-process foods, but I do want to under that, you mentioned certain things in your book. So, avoid refined carbs, eat foods in a whole form, which you mentioned. I want to ask you, you mentioned naked, avoid naked carbs. What are naked carbs? Naked carbs are when you take refined carbohydrates by themselves, and it really gets to more of the homeostatic hunger, which is that sort of insulin spike. Because, you know, the way that the body works is that the speed that you absorb substances makes a big difference. So, if you take carbohydrates, you will, so remember, carbohydrates are chains of glucose. You take that glucose, you chop it up, and then it goes into your blood, and your blood glucose goes up, and your blood insulin goes up. So, the point is that if you have a refined carbohydrate, and it gets absorbed into your body very quickly, then you're going to get a very quick spike in glucose and a quick spike in insulin. If you slow down how quickly those that glucose is absorbed, then you're going to get a much slower rise in glucose and much lower rise in insulin. So, the speed of absorption is important because, and it's the same again for all substances. So, if you look at tobacco smoke nicotine, you smoke it. Why? Because it gives you a very quick uptake through the pulmonary vessels into the blood stream. So, therefore, you get this big huge spike in nicotine, and that's what's addictive about the whole thing. Right? So, you could eat nicotine, but it's far less effective. So, you use it for nicotine gum when you're trying to wean somebody off, because you're going to get nicotine, but it's going to be slow, not peak. If you take heroin, again, people inject it directly into their veins. Why? Because you need that really quick hit. You could eat heroin, but it just doesn't do much. Right? Marijuana, you smoke. Like, there's everything. Again, you're trying to, what we're trying to do is fit sort of weight gain into the normal human physiology, as opposed to trying to separate it out and say, "Well, everything is irrelevant other than calories, which is sort of a dominant scientific hypothesis, which is bizarre to me." Right? So, how quickly you absorb is important. So, naked carbohydrates are absorbed very quickly, because there's nothing else to slow down the absorption. If you eat naked carbs, which is carbs by themselves, so, white bread and jam, for example, or muffin or something, what happens is that when you eat those foods, it doesn't go into your bloodstream. There's a process of digestion, then absorption, which affects the hormones, which affects your weight. Right? So, everybody thinks it's, "Oh, calories, weight." No, it's foods, which contain calories and stuff, digestion, absorption, hormones, and then weight. And if you understand better, you can do better. So, the point is that if you take a mixed meal, that is, if you eat vegetables first and then carbohydrates, when you eat those foods, it gets mixed around in the stomach. Right? So, and then it gets held there as a reservoir, and then it shoots out little bits into your test-dine for absorption. If you eat pure carbohydrate, like white bread and jam, what's mixing in the stomach is basically all 100% carbohydrates. So, then what comes out into the small intestine for absorption is basically carbohydrate. If you were to eat vegetables first, and then, say, vegetables and chicken, and then eat the bread, when your body mixes all up in the stomach, what comes out is like a little bit chicken, a little bit vegetables, and a little bit of carbohydrate. Right? So, the absorption is just much slower. So, they've done a study where, for example, they've changed the food order, where somebody eats sort of carbohydrates first, then the chicken and vegetables, and then they switched it, where they eat the chicken and vegetables first, and then the carbohydrate. Turns out, you lower the insulin levels by like 20-30%. So, eating those naked carbs means that you're basically giving yourself this really quick hit in terms of glucose and insulin, which can actually be quite addictive, actually, and that's why a lot of people love to eat potato chips and all this stuff. Right? Because you get that quick hit in glucose, you get this massive spike. So, you feel that sort of energy and all that sort of stuff, but it's not good for you because you get this massive spike in insulin, which causes you to basically store all that as body fat. Right? insulin tells your body to store body fat. It's not a bad, and it's not a bad hormone. It's just a natural hormone. It's just that you've eaten ultra-processed foods. And if you think about the traditional way of eating foods, like you eat them altogether, right? You don't eat them separately. You don't have snacks where you just have carbohydrate. You have meals where you have a bit of protein, a bit of vegetables, and a bit of carbohydrate, right? So, that's one of the ways that you can alter even though you're taking carbohydrate, you can alter how much insulin is released. You can alter the speed of absorption, which influences the sort of physiologic response or how your body responds to those carbohydrates, whether or not it stores fat, because it is changing the insulin secretion. As Dr. Feng mentions, health isn't just about counting calories. It's about removing the things that disrupt our biology. First, that's the food, especially ultra-processed food, filled with additives that interfere with our hormones, our metabolism, and insulin signaling. And most people understand that part. But what we talk far less about is a second source of chemical exposure, the products that we use every single day on our skin, but also on our hair. Ingredients like parabens and thallate don't just stay on the surface. They enter the bloodstream, disrupt your hormones, and affect the brain, contributing to long-term health issues, including insulin resistance. And when I found this out, well, that really made me stop and think, because as you know, I've healed so much through a high fat carnival lifestyle, but I realized I was still exposing myself to unnecessary chemicals through my everyday skincare and my hair care. And that's why we created the primal telebombs and soaps. And why? We've just launched our all-in-one shampoo and body bar. Everything that we make is completely chemical-free, using 100% grass-fed, grass-finished tellur, but naturally is rich in vitamins A, D, E, and K2. Without the preservatives, no artificial fragrances, there's just ingredients that your body recognizes. And I've been using the unscented shampoo and shampoo. body bar every day. It gently cleanses without stripping the skin or my scalp. And honestly, it has been a game changer. And if you're in the US, our USA store is now open, which means faster shipping and lower prices. And for the next 14 days, the primal offering up to 30% off our new shampoo and body bar, just use code shampoo at checkout or just head to the primal.com/shampoo. There's also a link in the first line of the description. So my next question is golden rule number two, which is fasting. Just don't eat all the time. Why is that so much better than calories? That was so fun in your book. It's normal. It is normal. And it's it's always so strange because when I wrote the fast, the complete guy to fasting, everybody thought fasting was like the worst thing you could possibly do. I'm like, you know, the very word breakfast breaks fast. Means that you must be fasting because you can only break your fast if you're fasting, right? It's part of the natural order. So the whole idea with fasting is that it affects a number of things, right? So you have homestatic hunger, hedonic hunger and conditioned hunger. So ultra processed foods affect sort of all three of those. You know, homestatic hunger because it doesn't create any satiety. It has the ultra processed foods had a lot of hedonic. And it's very habit farming too, right? So you get conditioned so that like, you know, you sit down in front of the TV and you suddenly want snacks, chips, cookies, that sort of thing. Always highly refined carbohydrates. You don't sit down in front of the television and go, "Ooh, I should really eat a piece of salmon," right? It just doesn't really happen. Fasting is the same. So it's a very traditional thing, but it also affects the homeostatic hunger, the hedonic hunger. So obviously, you know, you're, you're, but mainly it also affects the conditioned hunger. So by, by making yourself creating that habit where you're, you're, you're giving yourself a period of time that you're not eating, it just becomes a habit. And habits are tremendously important because they take no willpower, right? So when you brush your teeth every day and you get in the habit, you don't think, "Oh, today I should brush my teeth." No, you just sort of automatically do it, but the benefits just keep going and going and going. And it's the same with the fasting. If you are used to not eating all the time, like if you've finished dinner and you are in the habit of not eating until breakfast or lunch the next day, well, you're not going to think, "Huh, should I eat? Should I not eat?" It's just the habit. You're just going to not eat. So therefore you're not going to get hungry. And that's the conditioned hunger and that fasting really breaks that. Of course, the hedonic hunger, it really breaks that. And the homesthetic hunger, people always think that if you fast, you're going to get so hungry, you're going to like eat, you know, everything in sight. You're going to eat your, you know, textbook or whatever, right? The truth is that that's not true because what happens when you don't eat is that you're getting your body used to pulling out the calories that it stored, which is body fat. You're feeding yourself on your body fat and it becomes just the habits. So your hunger starts to go down. So many people have started the fasting and you know, whether they do 16 hours or 24 hours or you know, even longer, right? There's people who go two days, five days. We do a five-day fasting reset at the fasting method, for example. And what they stay is often, oh, I think my stomach shrank. I'm just not that hungry. It's like, I don't think you're stomach shrank that much. But I think that what happened is that you've changed the hormones in your body so that when you're no longer eating your body very easily now pulls out the energy you've stored, which is body fat. You're just using it for what it was meant for. And by doing that, you're not hungry anymore because you've sort of fed yourself on your body fat. But if you never get used to that fasting, your body's going to have more trouble pulling it out because it's not used to it. So in fact, the homeostatic hunger, which is sort of counterintuitive, actually starts to go down. So people who start fasting, they notice their appetite has just gone way down. And sometimes some people go on, I remember there is this doctor that came to our clinic once and he says, I could never control myself when I was eating. Then I started fasting and cutting out the ultra processed foods. And I just don't feel like eating a lot of the time. It's like, yeah, perfect. Now you're losing weight by working with your body instead of against your body because you imagine those calorie counters who are like, just cut your calories from a hunger sky rocket. And it's like, why did you fail? Because you have no willpower. It's like, no, no, because you'd never fix the ultimate problem, right? By cutting calories is the don't hit icebergs advice, right? It's useless. It's like you got to fix the hunger. And so the ultra processed foods and the fasting are a key component. And these are not new rules that I just came up with. They're actually the oldest rules probably ever. You could ask your grandmother, you could ask anybody's grandmother. They would say if you're to ask them how to lose weight, it's like, one, don't eat all the time. And two, eat natural foods. Get rid of the junk foods. Get rid of the snacks. Right? That's the oldest advice in the book. Why? Because it's probably the most correct. This whole calorie counting advice has been around for 50 years. But the fasting advice has been around for thousands of years. Right? It's mentioned in the Bible, for example. Right? So therefore, at least a minimum of two thousand twenty five years old, this advice. And so, you know, there's this you know, there's this Lindy law, which is a term coined by Nassim Teleg, which is that for non-parascible things, the longer something survives, the longer it will likely survive, because, you know, because it's proven it's worth, right? So the point is that if you have advice that comes from thousands of years ago, it's still likely to be relevant now, because it was probably good advice, right? Don't eat ultra-process foods. Don't eat all the time. Very simple, very old advice. I want to ask the question, which is very different. So in the hunger code, it's very different from the obesity code for one reason. You focus also along with the hunger, the three types of hunger. But mindset and habits is so important and the community of you around your environment. Why is that so important as well? Yeah, I think that that's the sort of most important thing that we don't talk about for weight loss, because it really all depends on your community. People, I think underestimate how important it actually is. And this is not just your friends. That's the micro environment of your friends at family, but also the macro environment. So the thing is that if you look at people who move countries, for example, so that's an example where you take an individual and move communities. If you move, if you take a Japanese person in Japan, the risk of obesity is extraordinarily low. It's one of the lowest in the world. Now you take that Japanese person and plunk them down in San Francisco. Their risk of obesity just skyrockets almost as soon as they get there. And by a couple of generations, their risk of obesity is no different than the average Americans, which is, you know, three, four or five times that of a Japanese person in Japan. So the point is it's not the individual. It's the environment. If you look at, you know, somebody whose best friend becomes obese, their risk of obesity goes up by like 171%. If you take military families and you move them into a place that has a high obesity rate, their rate of obesity immediately goes up. Why? Well, it's because of two things. One is conditioning and one is social modeling. And that's the idea that the what is acceptable socially is determined largely by what you see around you. So if you go to a place where you're eating constantly, huge portions, a lot of ultra processed foods, snacking all the time, no fasting, that's going to rub off on you. If your best friend always switches their fries for a salad, so will you. If your friend is always going hiking, so will you. I now play basketball. Why? Because my brother plays basketball, right? So he's like, hey, you want to play. So now I do, right? But that's the whole point. That's the phenomenon of social modeling and social influence. That's why influencers are so important. That's why they're the big thing of the last, you know, 20 years. It's social media, social influence. But the point is that it's not an individual failing. It's a collective failing. So if you go into a community where everybody is fasting all the time and talking about it, it normalizes it and it rubs off on you. When I go and eat with my family, I eat relatively well. When I go out with my old high school friends, it's not good. The food choices are cool. But luckily, I don't do it that much. And you know, it's like the point is that it's not me that's changed. I'm the same person, but it's the environment, right? All of a sudden it's all, you know, pizza and french fries and, you know, let's watch the game sort of thing, right? But the point is that if it all rubs off on you, right? So you look at places like California where there's a lower rate of obesity compared to the rest of the United States. They also really emphasize fresh foods and natural foods and Whole Foods, California cuisine is sort of fresh and local. You go to a place like Colorado, which is in the mountain, and a lot of skiing, a lot of hiking, it rubs off. And their obesity rate is much lower. So it's not the focus on the food, for example. Let's focus on getting outdoors. So there's less. But what it means is that your environment is actually massively important risk factor for weight loss or weight gain, where you live influences how much you weigh. And that's just because of where we are. So whether it's moving countries, Japan to America, or even within the United States, the different states of the United States, it's important. And if you don't recognize that importance, if all you do is keep carping on about calories, you'll never understand that, hey, it's not the calories. It's the environment that you live with, and which affects your mindsets and your habits. If your mindset is that I need to eat natural food, like if you live in some parts of California, I need to eat natural food, that's gonna rub off on you. And then you're going to make those choices. And all behavior change starts with the mindset, right? Because it's what drives behavior. So people think, oh, well, you can't change minds. So you can easily change mindset, right? It's just a matter of repeating it. So for example, years ago I drank coffee with two cream and two sugars. So Canadians called it a double double. It's a lot of sugar. - That's very sweet. - We tried it. - Yeah. - But anyway, 20 years ago, that's what I drank, 'cause a lot of people drank that. And then I started to learn more, and I started to think, oh, sugar's really not very good. It's a bit of a toxin, like especially in high doses, right? Not low doses, but high doses. So sugar is a poison. So then with that mindset of sugar is sort of a poison. I just didn't want that much sugar, right? So I eat probably like 75, 80% less sugar than I did. But the point is that if my mindset is that, oh, sugar is sweet and lovely, but I can't eat it. Now you've got this deprivation mindset. And now you're gonna fight with yourself all the time. Because you want the sugar, but you can't eat the sugar, 'cause it's not good for you, you're constantly fighting for yourself. What you do instead is you change the mindset. So now it's like, oh, sugar is a poison, right? So your mindset goes down. Now consumption goes down, but you're not fighting with yourself. Same with exercise. If you think of exercise as this is punishment for eating, you're never gonna want to exercise because you don't want to. If you think exercise, hey, this is fun, right? This is a game. So I play tennis, I play basketball, right? This is great. I love being able to get out there. Now all of a sudden, it's not a chore because my mindset has changed. So everything starts with the mindset. You can't just change, you can, but if you just change to behavior, but you don't change the mindset, it's not gonna lead to lasting growth. And the thing about mindset is that it's actually not that difficult. You just have to keep repeating it to yourself, thinking about it, ultra-processed foods. Now I go into a store, and look at the, so again, my mindset has changed in the last few years with ultra-processed foods. I think a lot of these chemicals that are in the ultra-processed foods are toxic. Like I think that they are. They mess with our hormones and therefore they're sort of toxic. So now I read an ingredient list. I'm like, whoa, carodine and gum, sand think gum, guar gum, this, that, I'm like, whoa, that's really toxic. So now I just put it down, whereas before I might have said, ooh, this nice boxed food is delicious. Now I'm like looking at the ingredients, I'm like, I don't want it anymore. I put it down, but the key is that I don't want it. I'm not like, I want it, but I can't have it because it's bad for me. I'm like, I just don't want it anymore because it's got all these chemicals, but it starts with the mindset, right? And that's where you really have to focus. That's where we do in the fasting methods, really focus a lot on communities, mindsets and habits because they're really actually the most important things for any type of behavior change. - Who do you think in the fasting method is your biggest success story? Given everything that we spoke about, so it's not just fasting, it's doing the mindset change, it's the homicetic hunger, everything. Who is your biggest success that you would say, oh my god, amazing story? - There's been a few. So Terry, who is actually our head of the coaching program, who's a PhD in psychology, she's actually done extremely well. Most of these people, most of these coaches, so Heather, Coach Heather and Coach Jill have also done extremely well. And it's because, and because of that, they've actually changed their careers and decided, you know what, I'm gonna help other people do this because it's actually impacted my own life so much. So all of them have not only lost, you know, it varies, but like, sort of like 50, 60 pounds sort of thing. They really turned their life around because of some of the lessons. And, you know, Jill was a nurse at a critical care nurse and so she sort of changed. And so I think she was getting towards the end of that career and said, you know what, I wanna really help people do what helped me. And same with Terry, who's sort of switched and also Coach Heather. So all three of them, like just blow me away with how, like, one, how much they've improved. And two, you know, really with their dedication because they've really changed their careers to help other people do what's helped them. And I always think these are all highly educated people, right? So two are nurses, one is a PhD. That information is not that they're uneducated and stupid. In fact, they're highly educated and very smart. But that information wasn't available to them. Why? Because if they just listened to the experts, all the message that they would have got is that count your calories, cut your calories. And if it doesn't work, it's your fault. That is the message we give every single person out there. Even PhDs and medical professionals. And it gets ingrained in you and you don't realize that hey, it's much more than calories. So I talk about insulin and cortisol and GLP1 and GIP and processing and digestion and absorption. And you know, vinegars and acids and, you know, mindsets and habits and stuff, all these different things that go into behavior. And they're like, no, it's all about calories. This is the most scientific thing ever. Like, no, I don't think so. It's a huge, multifaceted, multifactorial disease. And if you don't understand all the factors, you won't be successful in guiding your own weight loss. For one person, it might be food addiction. That is the problem. For the next person, it's mindless eating. It's for the next person, it's insulin and refined carbohydrates. You can't treat everything, right? If you have food addiction, treat the food addiction. Don't just say, if you're calories, right? You think about the problem like this, right? And this is the whole expert problem, which is that every, you know, to the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail, right? So it's like food addiction, if you're calories, ultra-processed food, if you're calories, you know, refined carbohydrates, if you're calories, mindset problem, if you're calories, right? Environment, if you're calories. Like, how is every single answer, if you're calories? Like, how can that possibly be? There's hundreds of different factors that go into weight loss and weight gain because that's human physiology. That's how the human body works. It's not that easy. It's just like trying to cure cancer. It's not that simple. So weight loss weight gain is this very complex web of, you know, hormones, behaviors, you know, dopamine. There's neurologic behaviors. There's sleep. There's this. There's that. And yet every single answer is eat your calories, right? Yeah, okay. (laughs) Okay, I've got a quick fire game for you. You have to give a one or two word response, okay? Are you ready? (laughs) What do you think is the best meal to skip? Dinner is probably the best. The easiest is probably breakfast. That was more than two words. Okay, that was good. Next question, what is the best fasting window for beginners? Breakfast. Okay, what is the best foods that people should eat in a fasting window that are low insulin? You can list five of them, best foods. Best foods would probably be like large bulky vegetables. So leafy vegetables, like leafy green vegetables, chia seeds are very good as well. What else? Meat? Obviously in the fasting window, you don't want to bone, you're breaking it fast, then any natural foods is probably fine. Okay, and what do you think about a healthy high fat diet to eat, like for example, you eat normal healthy fats in meals like nuts and eat butter, like when you're cooking and coconut oil in some meats and vegetables. Is that kind of healthy? Absolutely. You shouldn't be any natural fat. I wouldn't be afraid to use as much as you want. Okay, final question. If somebody's like Dr. Fung, I have felt it everything. What is your last words of wisdom? for them to take action right now. - Community is the most important thing, because everybody's heard about calories, everybody's heard about diets, it's not about the diet. If you think it's about the food, you've already lost. It's about eating behavior, which reflects your community and your social circle. Again, it's so important, because it influences you day in and day out. So community, community, find yourself that community where you're going to be able to succeed. And for me, it's like eating with my family, not with my high school friends day after day, right? - That's a no-brainer. Where could people find a hunger code? - You can really get it anywhere. And it's on sale in March, 2026. So anywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere. You can also go to my website, DrJasonFung.com, to find links to preorder or order. - Perfect, I'll leave the link in the description. Dr. Fang, thank you so much for your time. - Thank you, thank you. - If you want to know more about insulin and weight loss, watch this episode next with Dr. Jason Fang Part 2. See you next week.