Ep 94 - Dr Jason Fung | Dr Jason Fung: The FASTEST Way To Lose Weight & Prevent Disease (Not Ozempic)

You simply cannot lose body fat when your insulin levels are high and you're eating. You can't because your body is getting the instructions to store calories, not burn calories. One thing that really stops the top of the jacket is protein. Dr. Jason Fung, the founder of intermittent fasting, and the best-selling author of the obesity code. He's on a mission to fix the obesity epidemic and save your life before it's too late. So if you think the calories comes first, then you simply say cut 500 calories from your diet every day, and you will lose a pound a week. That's the standard advice that we've given for 30 years. Does it help? Not at all. The obesity epidemic has gone way out. So it's not calories. It's really the insulin. And if you think about weight gain obesity as a excess of insulin, think and say, well, how do you lower insulin? Now you use something like a terrific fasting, for example, where you allow insulin levels to fall. As you allow insulin levels to fall, you take away this block to fat burning and sugar burning. What do you think about breakfast? The whole thing about breakfast, you know, on the one hand, if you eat your calories for a year, it is better for you than eating later. Every day you should have about 12 to 14 hours. That's just regular. Then if you want to lose weight, then you can push it up. What's better, fasting or ozemic? I think they're different. Over the last five years, I'll tell you that it's far from a panacea. People think it's great. It's going to cure everything. But the truth is that a lot of people just don't stay on it. When it comes to weight loss and preventing chronic health conditions, there are so many different protocols, supplements and diets. But it's important to understand what works for somebody else might not work for you. And that's why in this episode, I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Jason Fung will explain the three main principles to help your body burn body fat and also prevent chronic disease through what you eat. But most importantly, when you eat, and it's not about lowering calories. And if you're learning from and enjoying these episodes, please hit the subscribe button. That is an excellent zero cost way to support this free health podcast because this information is not what you'll hear from big food or big farmer. And by subscribing, you can help share this message to millions more people that need to hear it. Thank you. Dr. Fung, welcome. Thanks for having me. When we think about people around us, it could be our family, it could be our friends. We probably know somebody that is overweight, severely overweight, or has a metabolic disease, like diabetes, cancer, dementia, even heart disease. And we're told there's nothing that we can do about it. But Dr. Fung, you say otherwise. You say the reason why we're sick and fat is because we've been focusing on the wrong thing. So today, Dr. Fung is going to share his decades of experience and talk about a very simple way that you can make your body burn fat and reverse metabolic disease. And why this is better than any medication that you can take, including ozemic. So Dr. Fung, my first question. Let's talk about losing weight, fixing obesity. What is the biggest cause of obesity? Essentially, I think that the problem is hyperinsulinemia, which is really a hormonal issue. And this comes down to a lot of people will say, well, it's a two-and-a-calorie, or something like that. However, I think that doesn't really address the actual underlying problem because the thing is that our bodies respond to hormones. So if we're gaining body fat, then it's because the hormones have signaled us to gain body fat. Really, every single system in our body works the same way. Nothing happens by accident. And it's because in order for us to regulate this very highly complex system, which has lots of interconnections, everybody has to know what's happening with everything else. So insulin is a hormone that essentially tells us to store body fat. That's sort of its jaw. So when you eat the hormone insulin is going to rise. And therefore, that's a signal for us to store some of it as body fat, which is essentially a store of calories. So it doesn't happen by accident. Everybody has this this taken notion that we have a certain amount that we put in, a certain amount that we put in, that we burn, and any excess goes into fat. And that part that goes into fat is completely unregulated, but it's simply not true. It's actually completely inconceivable that the body works that way. And the reason is that most of us, for most of us, the body weight stays stable. For example, if you think about week gain, the average over the last 34 years, really, even with this entire DCD epidemic is about pound a year, a pound of body fat, about 3500 calories. You know, which is about two days worth of eating, which means that our bodies have, like we have to match the amount of calories we eat with calories we burn, to within like a 99 percent, you know, failure rate, right? Like there can be essentially no errors. Yeah, we don't know how many calories we eat and how many calories you burn. So how can you maintain it within a 99 percent sort of accuracy without that? So this idea that it's simply some unregulated dump of calories is not true. So if if you think about it that way, then what happens is people just say, oh, you eat less calories, which is just not useful advice. I don't know why people think it's useful. Like that's the same advice that we've been giving for 25, 35 years. And it really hasn't helped anybody. You know, you look at the number of people who have had struggles with it. And essentially all of them have done calorie counting and it doesn't work. So it's not understanding that it's not calories because our bodies respond to hormones. There is certain calories are going to stimulate insulin more than other calories. So if you eat cookies, you're going to stimulate insulin more, which means you're going to store more for that as body fat, which simply means, and then you compare that to an egg, for example, then you don't stimulate as much insulin, which means you don't store as much of those calories as fat. And you burn more of those calories, right? That's that's all that happens. And the whole idea, which is simply that we're just saying that some foods are more fattening than other foods. Right? So cookies are more fattening than broccoli or eggs, which isn't really that far a stretch. Like how many people do you really have said, well, you know, I got fat because I eat too much broccoli. Right? Like come on, never. Right? But if you say, oh, I eat too much cookies, sure. That could totally gain to make it take too many chips. I made too many, you know, too much junk food, too much fast food. Sure. Candy. Any of that. But oh, I ate too much salmon. It's like, I don't know. I don't know that that's actually a reason. Right? Because that sets you on the right track. And that means to say that, well, you want to eat foods that don't stimulate us by insulin as in eat more food that's less fattening for you. Which again, if you simply go back, you know, to the 60s and 70s, you could find all this advice and all the popular media, right? Like don't eat cookies if you want to eat weight, cut out the starchy foods, cut out the sugary foods, cut out the desserts, you know, cut out the snacks, right? And it's very simple. But see, the thing about hyperinsulinemia, so if you think about insulin is a horrible and that makes tells your body gain weight, does it's job? The problem is that you have too much of it. The reason you have too much of it is because you're hitting foods that stimulate it more than it should. But you can also see that a lot of the diseases that follow along are also diseases of too much insulin. So like two diabetes is also a disease where it's very easy to measure. You measure it. So levels are sky high. The diseases that you have too much insulin. So therefore you have to lower it. And if you, you know, obesity and type 2 diabetes then lead to all those other diseases like heart attacks and strokes and all those other things. And again, you can follow the medical literature and you can see hyperinsulinemia is a huge risk factor for all kinds of diseases including cancers including heart disease and all that. So a lot of these diseases are diseases of sort of hyperinsulinemia which come back down to not so clearly eating too many calories. That's not the issue. Like you eat a lot of broccoli. Like you can eat excessive amounts of broccoli like calories like broccoli. And you simply walk in weight, right? Because other things will happen. Your body is going to adjust because if you're not stimulating the insulin, you're eating all those calories. Well, your body is going to burn it, right? It's not going to store it because you didn't tell it to store it. And because of that, then you're going to want to stop eating it because your body has an acrylce and tidy mechanisms. Whereas if you store it, and this is the thing, I don't really understand how these calorie people don't understand it. Suppose you eat a food that is very stimulating for insulin. So you eat white bread and jam, right? Lots of sugar, lots of refined carbohydrates. So, we know that the minute you eat that food, that you can eat 100 calories of that compared to 100 calories of an egg, the difference is that the white bread and jam is going to spike your insulin through the roof, whereas the egg is not. So, you have to pretend that the hormones simply don't matter for our body, which is obviously a very difficult thing to reconcile. However, if you say, "Okay, you take 100 calories, insulin spikes way high," with the white bread and jam. That's going to tell your body to store all of those calories. So now those 100 calories goes directly into fat stores, because that's how your body stores calories. Well, if all of that went into your stores, you have nothing left to use for energy. So you eat that white bread and jam. If a few hours later, your body is like, "I have no energy," because everything's stored away. I can't use it. So therefore, it's going to make you want to go eat, which is exactly what happens, of course. So you eat that white bread and jam, which is all fried carbs. Then by 10, 30, you're just ravenous. You're looking for another, something else to eat, right? Whereas you eat that egg, your body didn't store that much of it as calories. So therefore, it's burning it and you're not going to need to eat at 10, 30. So it's like, you know, all these people say it's all about calories and all about calories. Like, what are you talking about? What happens to those calories, the minute you put them in your mouth, is completely different depending on what the hormones tell it to do. So why do you pretend that it's completely irrelevant? And by ignoring that sort of physiology of what happens to food and hormones in our body, they sort of set up this entire thing where everybody's just sort of counting calories. So they're eating these foods, but they're not watching what's happening after that. Lawnbick gets stored away. So therefore, at the same time that they're storing all this excess body fat, because it's the star of calories, they're ravenously hungry and wondering, you know, why am I so hungry? It's like, well, because you didn't sort of fix that whole problem where you need to use, you know, instead of storing energy, you want to use the energy. So the whole thing is sort of misguided and it's always a little bit, you know, I always get a little discouraged that people don't, there's no effort to make people have, have people understand this, right? All these sort of, you talk to any so-called experts or, you know, dietitians and doctors and stuff and solve all of these calories, calories, calories, calories, calories, calories. Well, why don't you pay attention to what type of calories you're eating? Because it's really important. Like it's not irrelevant, right? Which people say it is because they're like, oh, you know, 100 calories of cookies as fattening is 100 calories at broccoli. No, they're not because the way you store it is different depending on what happens to your hormones when to eat it. Absolutely. I think, you know, the work that you do, it does touch a lot of people and it helps so many people. I posted on X or Twitter that I'm speaking to you today and so many people said, doctor Jason Fung has changed my life. So the work that you do, the work that a lot of the doctors that I have in my podcast channel do changes the people's lives. We're going to touch more about hormones versus calories so that people have a deep understanding of the difference and insulin. But Dr. Fung, you are a nephrologist, a kidney doctor and you wrote a New York Times bestselling book, The Obesity Code. Why did you write that book? If it was because I was very interested in the question of how to reverse type 2 diabetes. So a lot of kidney diseases caused by type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes is essentially quite simple to understand. It's your basically your body has too much sugar. Remember that glucose. When we talk about sugar, you don't talk about a table sugar. But that's glucose and fructose, which is sucrose. But sugar is a generic term that includes glucose. If you need carbohydrates like bread, starchy foods basically. Starches are long-chain to the glucose, which is a sugar. So in your body has too much glucose that it can store some of it. But then eventually it spills out blood glucose, which is your blood sugar goes up. And you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which is really the biggest cause of kidney disease in the United States and Canada. Then of course, we've had this big epidemic, we see then the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, which is leading to more kidney disease. So a few years ago, probably about 10 years ago, I was very, you know, I started to really question what had been taught, which is that type 2 diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease. And I realized that it wasn't. It was actually just a lie. And it was funny because at the same time that every diabetes association in the world, what doctors were being taught, what dieticians were being taught, what the American Diabetes Association had there on the website was it's a chronic and progressive disease. Everybody knew it was a lie because if you lost weight, your diabetes would either get better or go away. So to me, it was this horrifying sort of divide between what the sort of authorities were saying, which was a complete fabrication. And very harmful to people, right? You tell them that they can't do anything about it. They won't do anything about it, right? You should be telling them they can do something about it and telling them how. So as this horrifying divide between what the medical authorities were saying, and what was the truth? And the truth is that it was a reversible disease. We had to focus on weight loss. So I got very interested in that question of weight loss, which is how I started really thinking about that entire problem of calories because I had to leave those all about calories, all about calories for so long as well. But it simply wasn't true. It didn't hold up to any rigorous thinking about the problem. And this whole problem of weight gain was more of a hormonal issue. And if you fix that, in their various ways, you can fix that of changing the diet is probably the best way. But also using things like intermittent fasting as a tool could be very effective. Then you can reverse the tectodibides. And as I started to implement it in my clinic, I actually saw the most sort of amazing results. It was like, for example, one fellow. I used to have been treating him for like 10 years. And he had type 2 diabetes and he was very rigorous. He wanted to get better, but I had given him sort of a standard, but wrong advice. Then I told him, okay, well, what you need to do is restrict your carbohydrates. You know, if you have, if your body has too much glucose, why are you eating glucose? Right? That doesn't make any sense. So if you think about type 2 diabetes, blood glucose or blood sugar is high, we know that certain foods will raise your blood glucose. If you eat bread, you're eating glucose because it's a starch, so it's glucose. And therefore your blood glucose goes up. If you eat an equivalent amount of calories, say, of an egg, which is proteins at fast, you're not eating glucose or eating amino acids and triglycerides. So certain foods will raise your blood glucose. Certain foods don't raise your blood glucose. So why were you eating for this at raise your blood glucose? It didn't make any sense, but that was a standard advice. So I told them to do that. I told them that you could use it into a fast thing because if you don't eat your body, you will simply burn off that glucose and your blood glucose will get better. And he was on like 100 units plus of insulin and I simply made a few changes to his diet and within a month, I swear his entire came off all of the diabetic medications and his A1C went down to like 5.9, which actually classified him as a non-diabetic, which is sort of insane. Like to me, it was sort of eye opening that eye had treated this fellow so incredibly incorrectly. And it was a standard way that everybody's treating him like he had other specialists, other doctors who are treating him the exact same way. But nevertheless, it was patient that eye treated that really had been done at very big disservice not having known that information. So that's where I started to write about it. And then it's like, "Wow, this is like sort of insane." So I wrote about it in the diabetes code, which was about how you could actually reverse two diabetes. And back up, I published in 2018, it wasn't until 2021 that the American Diabetes Association finally said that it's a disease that can be reversed. There's criteria for remission. It's a reversible disease. It's like goodness. It took all this time and me calling it the biggest lie in type 2 diabetes for them to finally admit what was pretty obvious to anybody who would think about it. Like, I don't think anybody really thought about it for a long time. Or if they did, they simply went with a consensus, which is again slightly horrifying to me. As Dr. Feng mentions, an excellent zero-cost way to help your body burn body fat and also prevent chronic health conditions is to incorporate two strategies, intermittent fasting or a fasting schedule, and also lowering your carbohydrates. And later in the episode, Dr. Feng will talk more about how to incorporate these two strategies. But as you do this, you might experience some side effects. like nausea, fatigue, and headaches. And this is quite normal because your body is shifting towards using key tones for energy as opposed to glucose. So an excellent zero cost way to help is to use some high quality salt. You can salt your meals and you can also salt your water. But over time, if this doesn't help, I would highly recommend that you use a high quality electrolyte supplement. And the one that I recommend is element. Because LMA contains the right amount of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. The great thing about element is that it doesn't contain any nasties, any preservatives, and nothing artificial. And I like to use the raw, unflavored option in my morning coffee. My husband loves the chocolate salt and the watermelon salt in his coffee and his other drinks. And element has also launched their new sparkling water range. And right now, element is offering this free sample pack on any purchase. So you're going to get eight single servings of element to try for free. So if you want this, just head to drink element dot com forward slash five minute body. That's DRI NK LMNT dot com forward slash five minute body to get this free sample pack. Let's talk about hormonal theory versus calorie theory. Let's talk about the hormone source because that's the answer. And then if people can understand that they'll understand how to burn body fat. They'll understand how to reverse metabolic disease. Now you alluded to this earlier. It's about insulin. So when your insulin is elevated, that is telling your body to store fat. Let's talk about in terms of when somebody eats some food. So it could be like even a pizza butter sandwich with whole grain bread. Sounds pretty healthy. It could be a low fat muffin in terms of the food energy. When you eat that food, what's actually physiologically happening in the body? So if you eat, say that food, the insulin is going to go up and insulin is a hormone. It's a natural hormone. I always says I'm trying to demonize it. I'm not. But the issue is that if it's too high, it's bad. If it's too low, it's bad. Now that's no different than any other thyroid hormone. If it's too high, it's bad. I'm not saying that thyroid hormone is bad for you. But you want to have it in the normal range. So insulin's job. It has many jobs. One of its jobs is just tell you to store energy. This is a survival mechanism, obviously. So if you're a caveman or a cave woman and it's food is scarce and stuff, so when you eat, you want to be able to store some of that. So your body will store that in the form of body fat. It's a store of calories, no more and no less. But it's regulated. That is the hormones tell you when to put it in and when to take it out. So when insulin goes up, you simply tell your body that you want to take the calories that you're eating right now. You want to store some of it away for future use, which is smart, right? And it turns off fat burning and it turns off sugar burning. So your body has two sources of energy. Glue ghost, which is sugar and fat. So you can store sugar in the form of glycogen in the liver and you can store fat in the form of body fat. When insulin goes up, what happens is that you stop burning glucose and you stop burning fat. So insulin inhibits like paulisis, which is the breakdown of fat and inhibits. It's inhibits glycolysis, which is the glycogenlicis, sorry, which is the breaking down of glycogen. So you basically stop burning sugar, you stop burning fat and you store it, right? So that's sensible. If you're eating it, then you don't want to use your stores. You want to hear it because you're putting it in, not taking it out. So essentially, when you're eating, you're storing calories. That's what insulin is telling you to do. If the food that you eat shoots your insulin way up high, you're going to store more of it. If your insulin goes down, only then can you actually burn those sugar and fat, which are those stores of calories. Because when insulin goes down, your body senses, okay, so I'm not getting food any worse. I have no source of energy coming in. I need to use my own stores of energy and burn it, right? So not difficult when you eat insulin goes up, you store energy when insulin is down, which happens when you don't eat. Then that's when you burn calories in the form of sugar or fat. So therefore, if you really want to burn fat, you simply cannot have insulin way high. Like because you're fighting yourself all the time. So even if you cut your calories, but you keep your insulin levels very high, you can't burn those calories. So what happens? So say you eat 2,000 calories. Normally you burn 2,000 calories. Now you drop into 1,500 calories going in. But you keep insulin levels very high because you're eating very high carbohydrate foods, you're stacking all the time, you're eating all the time. Well, if you're only taking in 1,500, but you can't burn sugar, you can't burn your stores of fat. What's going to happen? Well, the only way you can balance this equation, 1,500 going in and 2,000 going out is for you to drop how much you burn for 2,500. So people talk about this because it's this metabolic rate, which is how much energy you're burning now has gone down and happens with dieting because you haven't watched what's happening with your calories with your hormones because you've kept the insulin too high. Now you use something like intermittent fasting, for example, where you allow insulin levels to fall. So now suppose you eat 1,500 calories because you dropped 1 meal. However, because you allow your insulin levels to fall, you can take 500 calories out of your fat stores. So you've got 1,500 food, you've got 500 from your body fat stores, so you don't have to drop the energy expense, the 2,000 calories. So therefore that's exactly what you want to happen. So keeping your insulin levels high is really bad from a numb pre-issues. So the thing is that some people have taken that as well as all about carbohydrates cutting carbs. It's not necessarily because there's a lot of things that contribute between the carbohydrate and the insulin response. So the lots of things will influence it. You know, things such as what else you eat your carbohydrates with sort of vinegars and acids will influence it if you eat the carbohydrates. First versus last, that makes a difference to how much insulin response you have. How processed those carbohydrates are. So you can take 2 foods. Like oatmeal, for example, you have, you can compare steel cut oats to instant oats and you'll find that one has a much higher glycemic index, which measures how higher glucose and insulin goes up. So when you process a food like with instant oatmeal, you get much higher glycemic index, which is going to drive your insulin levels much higher, which is going to drive the insulin much more. So the whole idea is that it's not simply about calories. Calories is not the sort of end, you know, be all an end doll when you lower your calories, you put a little bit of weight. No, you don't have to. If you lower your calories, you simply burn less. If you eat less and you burn less, you don't lose weight. That also balances the equation. So people talk about, oh, you know, it's the first law of thermodynamics. People who say that clearly don't understand what I'm talking about because, you know, if you think about it, it's thorough dynamics is about where energy goes. That's exactly what I'm talking about, right? What's going in? What's going out and what's being stored? There are three variables, right? That have to balance. You change one of them, which is the amount of calories you put in. You can balance that with either the calories that you store, which is body fat or the calories you burn. So if you eat less, but burn less, your body fat stays the same. So, you know, it's about tracking that energy and where it goes. That is, if you gain too much, you know, you're eating excess calories. It could simply be that those calories stimulate excessive. You're storing too much of those calories, right? That's a possibility. Process foods is sort of a classic because, you know, a lot of processed foods drive that insulin spike up. So in terms of absorption, when you eat, you know, a whole grain or, you know, you're very unprocessed. Your body takes a while to digest it. So, so glucose sort of goes up very slowly and insulin goes up very slowly when you eat it, processed version, the insulin, the glucose spikes up, the insulin spikes up. And that's why people talk about ultra-process foods now and why they're so bad for you, but the people who only look at calories or only look at carbs today. So, there's no difference in the number of calories. It's like that you're not thinking about the rest of physiology. There's a whole lot of physiology. What's happened to the hormones? And it's not simply insulin. There are other hormones that are all like, G.O.P.1s, G.I.P. and synthetic tone and cortisol. So there's a whole lot of other hormonal systems that do play a role as well. So you have to think about that. And that's why I'm always, you know, I'm always trying to just tell people about this is how it works because once you understand how it works, you can decide which part of the process that is the problem for you. If it's if it's if it's that you're eating too much ultra-crowded as foods, then you cut that down, right? You might eat. And I remember reading this very interesting study about the Southern diet that he was talking about. And it was people who ate a lot of very highly processed foods in the deep south, where there is a lot of obesity. And the interesting part is that when you actually tell you the number of calories they're eating, it actually wasn't much different than anybody else. So people in Mississippi, for example, were eating this very highly processed diet. We're eating about the same number of calories as everybody else in the nation, like Colorado, where they have very little obesity, for example. It was the quality of those calories. One was very highly processed, and one was not, and that was the difference, not the calories, but the processing, which influenced the hormone response. Absolutely. I'm thinking about people that say, look, I get it. It's about lowering insulin. But Dr. Feng, you need to be in a calorie deficit. You cannot lose weight, even in a, because if you eat in a calorie surplus, as well as address hormones, so lowering the insulin, you're still going to not lose weight. Does that work out that way, or is it something else? No, it always is. It always is a calorie deficit if you lose weight. But it's, remember, it's, there never actually is a calorie deficit, right? It's a balanced equation. Does it, you look at body fat, equals calories and minus calories. So, right? There's no inequality there. It's balanced equation. There are three variables, that have to balance. So if you're going to, say you start to, you know, the problem with that is that if you say it's a calorie deficit, then you say, okay, how are you going to generate that calorie deficit? That's the question, not that is there a calorie deficit. When you have a calorie deficit, it means that, because that's two of the variables, that means body fat is going down. Essentially, you're taking calories out of your storage system, right? That's what you want to do. Well, how are you going to do that? Right? So, that's the question. So it's not that there is a calorie deficit. It's sort of like saying, you know, if you have alcoholism, drunkenness equals alcohol and minus alcohol out. And I say, well, you know, people are drunk because they're suffering from depression or something like that. Right? And it's like, oh, that's not the problem. The problem is alcohol. You need to be in an alcohol deficit. So, like, that's stupid, right? It's about treating the depression, right? It's the alcoholism, right? It's the depression, which drives the alcoholism, which drives you to drink more alcohol and over alcohol out. Right? It's what's driving the alcohol in greater than alcohol out. Same thing. What's driving you to store more is what's driving calories and minus calories out. Right? So it's about what comes first and what comes last. They both happen, but which comes first and what comes last. So if you think the calories comes first, then you simply say, cut 500 calories from your diet every day and you will lose a pound a week. Does it help? Not at all. Like not at all. The obesity epidemic has gone way up. So then what happens, of course, is that people say, well, we gave this advice and people didn't listen to it. Right? It's like, okay, but now you're blaming people as opposed to the advice that you're giving. You think the advice, like, if, you know, you give a certain advice, which has cut your calories, and it doesn't work like objectively, you know, it hasn't worked because obesity has gone up. So either the advice is bad or the people are bad. So you're blaming people. You're saying the advice is good and people are just really bad people. They don't, they're lazy. They don't want to listen. And that's where you get all this stuff with fat, shame, and stuff, right? Because this is the idea that if you're fat is because you're lazy and you have no willpower. I don't actually believe that's true. I think that there's a hormonal balance, which is driving you to, which is driving the sort of weight gain, which is causing the calories in to be excessive calories out. That is, for example, if you take the wrong food, which is you eat a lot of that junk food spikes, your insulin, all those calories goes into storage, right? It goes all into storage. That leaves you ravenous. So you can eat more, right? You go get another bag of chips, right? So yes, your calories in excess. It sees your calories out. That is the only way that you get body fat storage. It's what's driving you to store all this was driving you to eat all that is because you haven't eaten the right food, right? That's where it's like it's one of these things where you sing. You know, if you say body fat equals calories in calories out, what's the primary driving force here? I think it's the body fat. The body fat is saying feed me more, feed me more, feed me more. You're eating more, you're driving all those calories into storage, or she leaves you with nothing left. So you either eat more, or you decrease your metabolic rate, but the primary event was the increase of the body fat, which is driven by the hormones telling you to increase your body fat. So therefore, if you don't pay attention to that, just like if you don't pay attention to the depression, say, you know, then you say, oh, it's all about alcohol. You have no willpower, like you're just drinking alcohol. It's alcohol in minus alcohol out. That's the first law of thermodynamics. You can't create alcohol from nothing. So the whole idea is that it's you're not looking at the bright sort of end of it. You're looking at the result, not the cause. And then trying to make the treatment, like the treatment of alcoholism is just don't drink alcohol. Well, sure. But you haven't addressed the actual cause, which is depression. Same thing, if you have say a food addiction, or if you eat ultra-process foods, which leads you to have very high insulin, which leads you to store a lot of body fat, right? Because insulin tells your body to start body fat, which leads you to have excess calorie intake of these ultra-process foods. Well, the problem is the ultra-process foods, right? So you need to fix that, not say just eat your calories, right? Because if you eating fewer calories of that, you can burn your calories and still gain that weight, right? So it's really the, what is the primary driving event and what is the end result? So they do go together in that you do have calories, but it's not the it's the effect, not the cause. I'm glad that you said that. I had Dr. Ben Bigman on the podcast as well. And it is important to understand. It is both, but the calories is not the driving factor. It's the hormones. So once you fix the hormones by dropping the insulin, we're going to talk about the best strategy to drop your insulin, as well as diet and food and things to eat and not to eat. But if you drop, if you fix the hormones, fix the insulin, you're not hungry. If you're not hungry, you tend to eat less and you eat until you feel satiated and what your body actually needs, rather than forcing lower calories. Let's talk about fixing hormones, lowering your insulin predominantly. So we're going to first talk about fasting because you are, I guess the founder of intermittent fasting, but you kind of say that you're not the founder, you just spoke about it first. Yeah, because I mean, it's been used for thousands of years. But the thing is that fasting is simply a period of time that you allow when you set aside a period of time, not eating, you're going to allow your insulin levels to fall, right? And that's the whole problem when you eat all the time is that you're not allowed your insulin levels to fall. So only when you allow those insulin levels to fall, that you now signal to your body to start pulling those calories back out of storage, right? That's really the only way you can do that, which I always thought was funny because people are saying you should eat 10 times a day. That was the prevailing wisdom when I started talking about it. And it's like, then you should eat 10 times a day to lose weight. I'm like, how do you expect that to happen? Like physiologically, you simply cannot lose body fat when your insulin levels are high and you're eating. So essentially, if the only time that you can actually pull those calories out of storage is to let insulin fall to and fasting is probably the most efficient way to get there, then why don't you simply extend the period of time to spend fasting? It totally makes sense, right? Physiology standpoint, it makes sense. There's no reason why you didn't do it. People have done it for thousands of years. You need about it and the Bible, you need about it in every major religious text and Buddhism and Hinduism and every other major religion is Islam. Whatever you want to do, there's fasting built into it. So therefore, it's not some crazy thing that I just sort of made up. It's been used for thousands of years. So if there's a problem, we wouldn't know about it ages ago. So now that we actually have a problem with excess obesity, why can't you use it then as a tool to improve your metabolic health because you're allowing your body to normalize those insulin levels that are too high. That is, your insulin levels are too high. So the fasting allows you to bring it down. Is it fun? No, not really. I didn't say it was fun. Why is it not fun? It's actually really easy. My God, it's like, for me, it was a life saver, even doing a 16/8. And the best thing about fasting or intermittent fasting, it's so flexible. So you don't have to have these pre-prescribed must-do 8 hours, must-do 6 hours or omad, it's very flexible during the week, during the month, during your life. Yeah, exactly. That's how people have always used it. Like, so certain times, certain periods of the year, for example, you're supposed to fast, right? I remember, you know, I go to church, Catholic church, and every year around Easter time, they talk about length and fasting and all that. Like, every single year, like, and it's like, okay, well, even as they were talking about it, the doctors are saying nobody should fast. You should need 10 times a day. It's like, oh, that's strange. Why is there this, I can't have this strange dichotomy between what people had accepted as a healthy, sort of longevity, well, this practice, right? Because it was always couched in those terms, right? It's a curification, it's a detoxification, right? That's what fasting has been called. And this idea that fasting was extremely hard and bad on the body, right? And it's like, it was a very strange sort of thing. So it's simply one way for people to achieve. And I thought it was funny too, because I was a cell of the first studies went through. I remember thinking, okay, fasting, you know, if you think about the diet in the 60s and 70s, snowy eight dinner around six o'clock, seven o'clock, perhaps the year breakfast around seven, eight o'clock in the morning, perhaps, then you went to school, right? And it's like, okay, so that's like 13 to 14 hours a day. Without even thinking about it, that wasn't, that wasn't fasting. That was just normal eating, right? There's a period of time to eat and a period of time to fast, the 13, 14 hours. And then they do these studies where they go, okay, we did a 16 hour fast for people and then elect people, whatever they wanted. Like that's not, that's not going to be nearly enough for most people, because, you know, for some people it's going to be okay. But, you know, so then a lot of the early studies were like, oh, we didn't show any benefits. It's like, yeah, on the one hand, you extended the fasting period by a little bit. On the other hand, you told people to eat whatever they want it, right? So it's like, okay, well, that's not good. Like they're not supposed to do that. What kind of what clinic has I've never been in a clinic where I told people you can eat whatever you want, right? It's like, but that's how they did the studies, right? And or they tell people to fast for a period of time and then make sure they ate extra on their other days. I'm like, okay, why would you do that? That's the advice I would ever get, right? So that's why some of the early studies were quite, you know, bad. But now we have actually a number of studies looking at it, you know, for reversing type 2 diabetes, there's, you know, a number of studies now that have shown that it's, it's possible. In fact, it makes perfect sense from, you know, from physiologic standpoint, makes perfect sense from, you know, from a personal standpoint, like it's flexible, there's, there's, there's, you know, there's this, there's this history, there's this, you know, history of humanity at fasting that has been there for a long, long time that we sort of ignored as is sort of just being brought back. So it's, it's, that, that was one of the things that is, is really, you know, one of the things I always said was it's just a tool, right? It's want to use a great, if you don't want to use it, that's fine. You don't have to. But if you're feeling that is something that you can add. Absolutely. I think breakfast is, you know, the thing is that you can eat breakfast. But remember, the meal that breaks your fast is the meal that breaks your fast, whether it's in the morning or not, it doesn't matter. Like you can eat, you can break your fast that noon, you can break your fast in the evening. It's still when you break your fast. So you can skip it. So, you know, it's, it's some people they, they skip breakfast. And other people will say, oh, that's really really bad for you. But they say it's not at that, at some point, you have to break your fast, right? I mean, if you wake up at seven and break your fast, seven, it's fine. If you wake up at 11 and break your fast at 11, it's fine. Doesn't mean you need to set your alarm wake up four hours early to eat and then go back to sleep. Like that doesn't make any sense. The whole thing about breakfast, you know, on the one hand, if you eat your calories earlier, it is better for you than eating later, right? So if you eat earlier, it's not, then you have the rest of the day to work it off and so on. If you eat very late, then of course, then you have nothing to do with storage, right? So you can eat at like 11 p.m. A big meal. Well, what, what, what are your body going to do with that, right? Well, you're going to go to sleep, then your body is just going to store it. There's really nothing you can do. Whereas with, if you eat early, you're going to be able to, you know, use it through the day and eat less through the rest of the, like the lunch at dinner. So, seeing breakfast is not bad thing, but it's not, you know, it's, it's not necessarily good thing if you're pushing all your meals super late either, right? So you just have to find a balance. That's how I said that, you know, it's, it's not really the most important meal of the day. It's just a meal and it has to fall within where you, you know, take it. There's lots of different things you could do. So some of people eating breakfast is great because then they feel full. They eat less throughout the rest of the day. And they don't eat as much late at night, which is worse for you. So if you, if on the other hand, you're not hungry at breakfast, then it's decent. A reasonable strategy is to not eat breakfast. I then just eat, you know, a healthier meal at a lunch night, the problem with breakfast is not that, you know, it's not that it's early or whatever the problem is that everybody's in a rush. Everybody's looking for something which is fast with no cleanup, which will usually some kind of pre-packaged ultra-processed food, right? So you're eating not like eggs and, you know, sausage, which was sort of this traditional breakfast because nobody wants to cook it, eat it, clean it up, and then go. So you're going to wake up like what? An hour earlier, it tends for that. So what do they eat? Like breakfast cereal, right? Lots of sugar, lots of refined ultra-processed for sure. Are they slice of bread with, you know, with jam, which is all processed and sugary, right? So that's the problem where you eat a hot tire, which is all processed and sugar refined food and train. So the problem with breakfast is not that it's early. Like if you eat a good breakfast, that's fine. But nobody wants to spend the time. So then it's a very highly processed meal, which is bad for you, right? So you're better off not eating it and eating something nice for lunch, which you cook and is relatively unprocessed and all that sort of thing. We're going to talk about specifics, fasting lengths and foods to eat. But before that, I wanted to get your thoughts about a study from the American Heart Association. It showed a 91% increase risk of death from cardiovascular events with intermittent fasting a few months ago. People might have heard that study. Can you just share your thoughts about that? Yeah, that study was basically garbage. What they did was they took people and they asked them how long do you eat for what's your fasting duration and so on. And they took it from I think 2000 to 2017 or something like that. And what they said was that people who ate within a eight hour eating window, like a 16-8 had higher, was associated with higher risk of heart disease. The problem with association is that it doesn't show causation, right? So just because something associated doesn't mean that something caused it. So in this case, first of all, nobody was using fasting for weight loss. So it wasn't weight loss diet, right? From 2002 to 2016 when I published the obesity code, basically nobody was using fasting. It wasn't even nobody mentioned it. Like you can look on Google Trends, you can look at whatever there is like zero mention of it. So the people who were not eating, were not eating not because they wanted to lose weight, they were not eating for other reasons. And you say, okay, what are those other reasons? Well, maybe they have other illnesses. Maybe they have cancer. Maybe they have alcoholism. Maybe they're on drugs. Like a lot of other reasons why people are not eating properly, but they weren't doing it to lose weight at that period of time. So therefore, if you're a tough group of people where there's a lot more sick people, cancer patients, you know, drug patients, you know, people on drugs, people on alcohol, while you're going to have higher risk. The study, you know, they always forget to mention that if you look at people who ate over a 10 hours a day, so suppose you ate, you know, you ate breakfast at 8 a.m. and ate dinner at 6 p.m. So not bad, pretty reasonable sort of eating schedule. But that was associated, I think, with a 30 percent, you know, 61 percent increased risk of heart disease. So are you telling me that in order, like, that doesn't even make any sense. If you're eating a normal eating schedule, that's worse for you than virtually any other risk factor in medicine. Like, like, you know, if you're not exercising, you know, it's worse than for heart disease than anything else. So that whole association study was just garbage because it's sort of like saying that, you know, I took a whole bunch of people who had gray hair. And I found that their risk of dying was 3 times more than people without gray hair. It's like, well, duh, people with gray hair are older. Like, that's the reason, right? Why are you doing this stupid study? Same thing with the fasting. Like, you took a group of people we're not eating for many. many different reasons, right? Many of them puts them at higher risk of heart disease. And then you say, well, it's because they're not eating. That's what caused it. No, it's not what caused it. It's just an association. There's a million associations just like if you say, well, if you look at, you know, eating ice cream, you'll find that when you eat ice cream, your risk of drowning is like, you know, five times. Why? Because people eat ice cream in the summer, people swim in the summer. That's why if you're eating ice cream, your risk of drowning is higher, not because ice cream causes drowning, but because both happen at around roughly in the same time, same, same, right? Yeah, he taking group people. We're not eating for some other reason. And then you try and blame that for the higher risk of heart disease. So it's a complete garbage study. It's like the worst study that ever done, but it's super clickbaiting. That's why I asked because I think that if we have this conversation about fasting and lowering the insulin, you know, these things that make headlines, they scare people. And that's what they're trying to do. It's the same thing as breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Why? Because Kellogg's wants to sell you a cereal. But if you eat these foods that we're going to talk about and do a fasting window or a fasting length, you can naturally burn fat and you can also prevent metabolic disease. It is simple, but we have to take out the clickbaity, the garbage information in the background. Let's look at fasting windows. If somebody wants to start fasting to drop their insulin, to burn fat, to prevent metabolic disease, is there a best fasting length? There isn't really. They can all work. Some people like different ones. Some people like long fast and some people like truck fast. So every day you're supposed to have a fasting period, right? That's where the more breakfast comes from, right? Break your fast, right? You need to have to fast to break your fast, right? You're not supposed to be eating all the time. Fasting is when you burn your calories. Eating is when you store your calories, right? So you have to have a period where you're not eating, right? And that's what the word itself means. So every day you should have about 12 to 14 hours. That's just regular, right? Me, it's don't eat anything after dinner until breakfast time, right? And that's essentially a 12 hour plus 12 to 14 hour fast. You can do 16. Generally, if you do, you know, a shorter fast, then you have to do it more frequently. If you do a longer fast, you don't have to do it as frequently. And you can do any of them. So 16 hours, you go 18, you can do 24, you could do two days, three days, four days, five days, whatever you really feel like. So there's a lot of people who, you know, like one versus the up. And I have a lot of people I'll tell you, you'd like to do the long fast and not so much the shorter fast. So they'll still maintain that sort of 12 hour fast, but they don't do the 16 every day, right? Because it's less, they don't like it. Like everybody's different, right? Some people like one thing, you know, a some people like the other thing. And so it's not right or wrong. So we have to adjust it to whatever works for you, right? So that's the thing. So you have to sort of experiment and see what works for you. Because obviously if you're one of these people that really likes the three day fast every so often, then you should do that. Because if that maintains you at your goal, then you're done. Then there's a reason, no reason why you shouldn't do that. As opposed to the other people who say, oh, I can't do that. I can't go more than, you know, 18 hours. So they do 16 hours or 18 hours. And they does well for that. Well, they should do that. And you should do that. So there's no right or wrong answer, but you do have to sort of experiment a little bit to find out what's what's, you know, best. Okay. I want to talk about extended fasting because people generally want to do the extended fast to get the therapeutic benefits in terms of perhaps cancer to get into ketosis, perhaps using water fasting. Can you talk about why eating too much protein might affect your results from extended fasting or trying to get into a toffee. Yeah. Predating is mostly for toffee. So this is sort of an ongoing, you know, discussion because if you look at a toffee, this is a process where your body sort of breaks down some of the subcellular polients. And it sounds really bad, but it's actually not. It's actually really good for you. So one of the things is that there's a toffee and there's my toffee, which is a toffee for mitochondria, which is the sort of energy generating parts of the cell. And the reason it's good to break down these sort of subcellular components is because after you break them down, then you can build new ones. And same thing with the mitochondria, once you break them down, then you can generate new ones. And you know, when you think about that process of breaking down old stuff and building new stuff, it's really a process of rejuvenation. So really when you're talking about a toffee, it's very popular in terms of longevity and all these people who we like to discuss it. And one thing that really stops the toffee is protein. So amino acids, when you eat amino acids, that really stops the toffee in this track. And you can see how that might be one of these sort of not so good things for from a, you know, longevity standpoint, because it's just like if you keep, you know, you know, the same house without renovating for a long time, everything just starts to get old as opposed to if you're breaking down, you know, tearing out the old bathroom, putting in new bathroom, tearing out the old kitchen, putting a new kitchen, everything starts, you know, looks good and works better. Same thing with the toffee, you really want to break things down and build them back up, which is what fasting does because it stops the protein, which is activating, you know, you stop protein and activate toffee, which is the breakdown and then fasting increases growth hormones so that when you rebuild, you rebuild new. So that's that, that renovation, rejuvenation process. So the problem is that there, protein is sort of this two-sided thing if you don't get enough protein, well, you don't have building blocks to build new stuff. If you eat too much protein, then perhaps you, they activate this mTOR, which is a nutrient sensor for amino acids and stopatophagycletic cold. So it's sort of this two, like nobody knows where to go with all this. On the one hand, they're people say, "Oh, you should take drugs like rapamycin to stop mTOR." On the other hand, they're saying, "Oh, well, but then you need to eat more protein," which increases out poor. So, you don't know really where this whole process is going to lie out. My guess is that it's, it's going to be one of these cyclical things. So once in a while you should have sort of lower protein, like during fasting, and then the other time, you should have relatively high protein, if you want to rebuild it. So it could be one of these things that needs to cycle between one and the other as opposed to sort of you need this. Everybody thinks that you need this, but the human body never is like this. It's always up and down, up and down. It's always cycles, right? Same as fasting and feeding it. You have to fast, and then you have to feed. You don't just go all the way across. It's actually really bad for you to do that. It's probably the same for a lot of things, same as muscle growth, for example. You want to stress it sometimes. So that's how you build muscle, right? If you lift the same five pound weight all the time, that's not nearly as good for you at once. And why you lift 20 pound weights, right? It's just the way the human body is. It doesn't really like that sort of stable sort of thing, because it doesn't keep it healthy. Exactly. The body is always trying to stay in homostasis. So it's trying to keep balance and then stay the same. So we need to vary our fasting lengths maybe. We need to vary kind of what we eat, maybe vary the protein. Let's talk about foods, because along with the fasting, just not eating all the time. So even if we do like a 12, 14 hour eating window, and then you can do a 16, 8 and then progress it from there. But in that eating window, we need to think about what we're eating. What do you think about foods like oatmeal? So it's a mix, right? So it's not that you need to be super, super low-carp, for example. Really, what you're trying to optimize is the insulin. And different types of oatmeal will have different effects. So if you eat steel cut oats, it has a much different effect than instant oats. If you put a lot of sugar in it, like with the instant oats, then that's going to have further detrimental effects. So the oatmeal wasn't bad, because you have to realize that a lot of cultures are based on, you know, starches and stuff, like we'd eat them up throughout history. So therefore that can't be the sole reason. The way we process them is relatively new, right? So you know, it's one thing to eat corn, for example. Then you have all are sort of genetically codified corn. So therefore it may not be the same, but then you turn it into corn chips, for example. And that's completely different, right? You throw a bunch of artificial seasonings and flavors into them. Well, that's completely different than the original corn that you ate, you know, 30 years ago. So there is a difference. And I think ultimately, and this is what I said at the ECT code is that it's ultimately the processing of foods that is going to probably be the most important thing. So eating sort of making sure you have your proper fasting schedule, but when you're eating, you make sure that you eat unprovened process foods because when you eat unprocessed foods, it's very difficult to sort of go overboard on them. Overboard means that you eat them and you can't stop eating them because they have such say low satiety value. So if you eat an apple, you usually stop after one, but if you drink apple juice, you could drink the juice of five apples, for example. So that extra step of juicing them or processing them has made you sort of over, you know, take too much of a certain component of it, which is the juice part, right? But that's also the part that has the no satiety, right? Because you're not eating the actual pulp, you're not eating a fiber. So all you're getting is the juice of it, which is a lot of the sugar and not a lot of the stuff that's going to make you fall. So the processing, that step of processing, same as you can go from steel cutouts to instant outs, you've taken that step and made it a much less sort of healthy food. That is if you look at the glucose spike, insulin spike is much different. You can do the same with virtually any other foods, right? Like you can, you can take a food and then turn it into an ultra-process food, right? You can take a chicken and then you can turn it into a chicken nugget, right? And it's not the same. Like it's much different and how much you eat is much different because remember when they process foods, they often lower the satiety value of the food so that when you eat it, normally you eat a piece of, you know, a food is going to make you in full. But if they do something to a process that usually like turn it into corn chips or something, they'll put additives and stuff so that you can keep eating them, right? Because they want to sell it to you. They want you to eat more. But therefore that value, if you go back towards the unprocessed foods, that's going to make you healthier for longer because it's going to be that natural food that is going to make you full, right? There are all these mechanisms in our body, our monomechanisms, to stop us from overeating. Those are what most processing tries to circumvent so that you'll eat more, right? It's not, it's deliberate. Well, I was going to ask you about Diet Coke, but that's full on proof because I have a list here because people, they eat these foods. So although it sounds so simple to many other people, but for other people, they're like, well, doesn't have any calories and we spoke about the calorie assumption, but diet so it is also processed. So what you're saying is, first of all, eat whole unprocessed foods. But I wanted to ask about the carbohydrate concept because then you have other people, because it's all about lowering your insulin, so fasting is one way if people can do it. However, when you eat carbohydrates even in the whole unprocessed form, that's going to raise your insulin. So conversely, is it not better to eat perhaps protein and fat and vegetables? For sure. For sure, sometimes it works for some people, but it's not simply the carbohydrate. The total amount of carbohydrate is one component of how much insulin it does. It goes. So if you look at oatmeal, steel cut it versus insinote, for example, same foods, same calories, same carbs, but one has almost doubled the insulin effect of the other because of that processing. They shredded it. It gets absorbed much faster because they got rid of a lot of fiber of it. So same foods, but much different insulin effects. So therefore, one of them, you might be able to tolerate pretty reasonably the other you can't because it's been processed to do that. So cutting the total number of carbs is a large component of the insulin effect, but it's not the only impact of it. So therefore, you certainly, you can cut down all carbs. That's a reasonable strategy, but you don't always have to. Some people will tolerate a certain amount of it. That's the idea. You want to balance those. The whole diet cook thing is interesting because a lot of people tolerate it fine. For some people, it's not a problem, but there are other people who simply, they drink this diet soda and they get really much hungrier than if they didn't. It's the sweetness of it. It's because of whatever chemical compound it is. And therefore, for those people, you can't say, well, it's about, it's no calories. Therefore, it's okay. It's like, no, the problem is that it's activating certain neural pathways with the sweetness that is making you hungry. It is making you hungry. It's going to make you eat more. It's going to be detrimental to you. So it's not simply the calories. It's the if total effect, including the hormones because it does have the effects on the body. Again, this is the main one, but there are others as well. So, gel pee ones is another water for example. And that's obviously a very important hormones system because they use it for osampic and things like that. Let's talk about gel pee ones, a very popular weight loss medication. This is the last thing we're going to talk about because I want to know what's better, fasting or ozampic? See, the whole idea with ozampic is that by stimulating gel pee ones, and remember, it's also a very super physiologic. So, it's not a normal amount of gel pee one. It's a very high level of gel pee one. That's basically makes you not hungry, which makes you not want to eat. So it really does something very similar to fasting because a lot of people will not eat while they're off this because they're not as dated. So it's not that they're against each other, that one is better than the other. They can actually work together. So it's not a problem. The problem is that if you don't learn good habits while you're taking the ozampic, good dietary habits, then when you stop it, the weight counts right back. So it's a very temporary fix. So because metabolic disease is a process that takes decades, you're like, what are you going to do? Take a few decades? It's possible, but it's not easy. So I've prescribed a lot of it because it's a drug that has good effects for diabetes. For example, I take care of a lot of people with diabetes. So I've prescribed it quite heavily. I saw this study from Blue Cross where they looked at what happens in the real world. And they saw that, and it was like 169,000 Blue Cross patients. I think only about 25% of people were still on it after a year. And that's pretty close to the experience I have for describing. A lot of people don't stay on it. Why? Because you get nauseated because you don't enjoy your foods. The whole idea is that if you're not hungry and you're nauseated, you're not going to eat. But it takes away the pleasure of eating. And the pleasure of eating is one of really one of rice, great pleasures. You think about what every all cultures, everybody's like, oh, you know, let's celebrate. Let's go get something. Go to a nice restaurant. Let's get something delicious. That's how you enjoy yourself. It's one of the sort of universal things that humans, all humans do. And if you take that away, well, it's not so fun anymore. So it's hard. It's, yeah, you can do it for six months. But can you do it for four, five, six, seven years? Let alone like 20 years? 20 years, a long time to never enjoy your food. Right? There are most people are like, you know what, I don't think it's really worth it, right? So the thing about fasting, because it's different. You actually heighten your enjoyment because you're restricting yourself. Therefore you enjoy it all the more when you do take it. Yes, it is a little harder. But on the other hand, you're learning those good habits that you'll be able to sustain. Because people say, oh, fasting is unsustainable. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for thousands of years. Like it is literally something that people have done for their entire life. If there's anything sustainable, it's fasting because that has been our tradition, right? In 60s and 70s, people were fasting 12, 14 hours a day, every single day. So don't tell me that's not sustainable. It is sustainable. It's just a matter of adjusting your expectations. So what's that big is okay. I don't mind it. It's a good drug is all the drug studies have shown. But it does have a huge downside and it's more than the, it's more than the nausea of the vomiting, the diarrhea, that kind of thing that is, it's quite common. It's that sort of taking away the enjoyment of food. Like you will never be able to enjoy a good meal. People tell me, oh, you know, I go out there and I look at it and I just feel sick. It's like, oh, well, that's nice. Say you're going out to your nice birthday dinner that somebody splurged for you and you're like, oh my God, I cannot eat that steak. That is literally going to make me throw up because that's what those people do, right? And that's what it's supposed to do. That's how it gives you the benefits. If you can learn how to do it yourself, then you're actually much better off. I don't mind if people want to do it as a crotch, you know, whatever they want to do. I'm not against an education, but it's. you know, if you expect it to solve all your problems, then I think you're going to be mistaken. It's actually not that. It's not that effective because not all that many people want to stay on it forever. Kind of like a diet. Nobody wants to stay on a diet. But people can just generally do fasting really, really easily. Yeah, it's a difference, right? It's a difference of saying that I'm going to cut out like whatever diet you want to do. Say you want to be vegan. So you're going to cut out all meat products for your whole life or zero carbs, so all carbs for the rest of your life. That's very daunting to think about as opposed to staying okay, well, I'm going to cut out everything. But only for two days or one day or whatever it is. Then tomorrow I'm going to be able to enjoy a little bit of carbs or meat or whatever it is that you choose, right? It's a it's a much different experience. So if you say okay, well, I've gained a bit of weight. So I'm going to do like a lot of fasting for the next two weeks. You know, I'm going to have one meal a day and I'm going to do a three day fast. Now I'm going to do this. Well, it's only two weeks. At the end of two weeks, you can go back to eating something so you enjoy. Well, that's a lot different from a psychological standpoint. Then okay, well, I've decided I'm never going to have X, Y, Z for the rest of my life. Like that's a lot. Same thing with those I'm big. Like you're not going to enjoy anything or it'll be much diminished, right? You know, that that was, you know, it's a reasonable strategy, but it's the same problem as bariatric surgery had, right? It was supposed to cure everything. It didn't. In fact, people we rarely see people that that kind of surgery anymore. It just hasn't hand out in the long term. If it was so good, we'd be doing lots of it, that surgery. The truth is we rarely do that surgery. We rarely see people doing that surgery. If there was one thing that you want people to take away from this conversation, what is that one thing? I think the one thing is to really understand that it's the hormones, the drive, weight gain and a lot of metabolic disease because it's the same hyper-insulvening that drives a lot of disease. It's not the calories, right? So confusing the two makes you make bad choices, right? So you eat things like, you know, low-fat fake foods because they're low in calories. But in fact, they're actually much worse for you. Let's say eating instant oats as opposed to steel cut oats because it's more convenient and hey, it's the same number of calories, but not understanding that hey, it's an ultra-process food. It has different effects on your glucose, different effects on your insulin. So the instant oatmeal is not the same as the steel cut oats, right? So not understanding the heart-onal part of that, which is much more complicated, I'd rather you than calories, right? People try to boil it down to a very, very simplistic model of calories, which leads them to make bad choices. And then they don't understand, why am I getting weight? Like, it's the same calories. I'm cutting my calories. It's like, because that was a the important issue. That's the thing I hope people try to understand from all this. I think they will. I'm going to leave all your books and links and resources in the show notes. You have two best-selling books, the diabetes code and the obesity code. And that has really changed the lives of people. And slowly, slowly people are understanding these new concepts. It takes time for it to evolve and to get into our minds. But Dr. Feng, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. And I'm sure we're going to see you very, very soon. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me on this episode with Dr. Jason Feng. You can find the full show notes, including books, reference articles, and free resources at the five-minute-body labs. There is a link in the description of this video. If you're learning from and enjoying these episodes, please hit the subscribe button. That is an excellent zero-cost way to support this free health podcast. You can also find me on other social media accounts. I'm at five-minute-body on Instagram and on X, formerly known as Twitter. As I generally share different information to what you'll see here on YouTube, I share health tips and advice that I hear from the best experts. If you have a recommendation of a guest speaker or a comment, please leave that in the YouTube comments as I check every single one. And if you love this episode, you would also enjoy another episode I did with Dr. Ben Bigman. Dr. Bigman explains the scientific way to help your body burn belly fat. Dr. Bigman talks about why hormones is more important than counting calories. The difference between brown and white fat and a surprising sugar that might help you burn body fat. Finally, thank you for your interest in root cause healing and I'll see you next week.