Speaker 1so when i'm you're 54 years old when i'm 54 years old i want to be as young and energetic and articulate and cognitively astute as you are so what should i be doing now to make sure that i don't decline decay in all those areas i described well what'd you have for breakfast today yeah um i have not eaten breakfast yet it's okay that's not a bad thing but uh when
Speaker 2you're 54 you should probably put the calories in the morning not at night we know that as you age the cost of a calorie turns into timing if you eat that food one bite of food after six o'clock is worth 10 bites of food before noon so if you're trying to say how do i get the best out of the nourishment but also eating's fun if you only get one bite after six o'clock and 10 before move that food towards morning when you're your age uh what'd you have for what's the last meal you ate yesterday yeah uh for dinner
Speaker 1i had this cod and i had salad i also had pasta okay but i ate pretty late which is yeah what
Speaker 2did you have the rest of the day before that just a salad okay just a big salad was that more towards lunch or noon or probably about four o'clock so waited all the way till four o'clock to eat very common this is a really common pattern of people doing what we would say intermittent or time-restricted eating they put that eating window in this but it's got that balloon at the end of the day yeah and it really does i mean what you're stimulating is an excessive production of insulin and you're gonna wake up the next
Speaker 1morning what time do you wake up this morning today i went to bed fairly relatively early for me i woke up at about 7 30 a.m oh usually it's later and do you have did you have a
Speaker 2solid seven eight hours of sleep or how yeah so during that time uh you finish eating around 10 o'clock then it sounds like yeah okay so then it's a little bit later okay so 11 o'clock and you've got uh seven seven thirty in the mornings when you woke up so that's about eight hours since you've eaten your insulin is still churning especially if the meal was large and there was carbs in it so now you've got these processed foods late at night and you're at the beginning of the disease right you're at the beginning of the chronic inflammatory churn of how do you age faster and faster you don't do that you don't have high insulin throughout the night so can you explain to
Speaker 1me like i'm a 12 year old what insulin is and the role it's playing because you know i guess we're focused here on how to i guess longevity aging yeah for a second but how does insulin play a
Speaker 2role in all of this and what is insulin so insulin insulates okay so think of it as it makes you fluffy it makes you it puts the fat on uh it's got some other roles too but we're going to talk about chronic diseases here where it's not a scarcity problem you you make plenty of it and when it's in excess it will store energy for when you go through a famine it will also cause you to grow now grow means get a little fatter but it also means things like their skin gets a little thicker they have skin tags and what i always think about insulin is that it's a little bit what's going on in their brain and when that insulin is high for years and years and years uh just like yours because if if you didn't eat the rest of today and then you got up tomorrow morning it would be about that long after a late meal last night that's how long it would take you to say okay we're back down to where we started from or where we should be in the morning for
Speaker 1someone that's never heard the word insulin before there's some context to give on in terms of what it's doing so it's coming out like a transporter and helping put away the sugar we'll deal with
Speaker 2it excess sugar right so it is what lifts yeah it lifts glucose or sugar from the circulation into a cell that's its first primary job but if all the cells are full their storage is full it's going to start to pack it into the liver i mean let's say all those stores are full too this job of the of insulin this hormone oozes into every part of your body to say make sure it's got full fuel make sure it's got that sugar but most people are like what i would guess you are most of the time you don't you aren't a shortage of sugar and so it fill it tops things off and then it will turn things into fat it's too much sugar they can't store it all the storage is full so you can send the signal out make me some more cells i need some more storage units this guy's eating more than he thinks he is and we're going to be prepared to live through the famine but in the meantime turn it into fat make him a little fluffier is that the only consequence
Speaker 1of high insulin is that i'm gonna i might be a bit more fat
Speaker 2no that's just the one people hear about the most when you look at chronic disease management it is the growth of of the diseases of the inflammation it's the making of the trash so i keep saying you know you need to take the trash out routinely which means that insulin which has been smoldering higher than you think it is because you live in today's world because you eat processed food because you eat super late at night you don't go two to three days without eating you've you've got storage filled in your body the high insulin levels in a healthy person hides that the debris is being made and you don't know it it hides it yeah it's going to put it in between two cells in your brain it's going to put it in between the skin cells the trash doesn't get taken out until the insulin gets lower and unfortunately most people have been
Speaker 1making buckets of insulin without knowing it why what are they doing to create buckets of insulin
Speaker 2all the things you said about carbs um foods that comes from boxes and barcodes and uh bags instead of whole foods instead of a fat forward diet which would then push that body into making ketones so you can't you cannot make a ketone if your insulin's
Speaker 1high are there any signs that i might have high levels of insulin or insulin resistance
Speaker 2abdominal girth is the first thing that is the first place that the fat goes so you do this really great part where you don't eat until later in the day
Speaker 1how does that feel during the day during the day i feel really focused i actually don't even know
Speaker 2that i'm not eating so that's really good so what i would love to know is show me what your blood sugars are doing during the day and show me if you make ketones that'll be the answer is you when you have excess insulin which is this chronic disease maker it is what makes cancer it is what makes high blood pressure it is what makes debris in the brain where call it depression or brain fog or parkinson's it's the aging of the brain it's linked to all of those things all of those things and that excess insulin nobody tells you about but the symptoms are dang i feel like i gotta eat every two to three hours uh their debris or their fuel keeps running out when you say boy i can eat uh once at the end of the day and i'm pretty good my focus stays really good what i want you to prove is what are your ketones during the day so when when you've got a patient who has done that their ketones will be 0.7 1.0 and they're taking out the trash all day long so there's these two energy sources one of them's
Speaker 1the glucose one of them's which is from like you know eating pasta which i ate last night um so that probably put a lot of glucose in my bed i probably had a high glucose spike and then insulin came out to deal with that and then there's ketones which start to appear when i'm fasting or when i haven't been eating carbs for a while and my body's looking for an energy source right
Speaker 2yeah so think of it as your short-term easy to access sugar has to decrease and that means your insulin has decreased that hormone for insulate they both run in tangents you decrease your mt and glycogen
Speaker 1your insulin's going down so how do i know if i have insulin resistance what are the key signs
Speaker 2you mentioned skin tags i've never had that term before yeah skin tags are not moles so moles you can feel this bump on your on your skin right but a skin tag has a neck and like a little mushroom and it's the most annoying thing when patients come and say well i just tried to cut them all off but they kept bleeding i'm like do not cut them off they'll fall off when your insulin's lower so that's the first place it'll be found in their armpits or places where their skin rubs so armpits and their groin and once insulin starts to grow them it's like a crop a crop a little baby
Speaker 1cauliflower hanging out in their armpits you talked about velvety skin yes as well being an
Speaker 2indicator velvety skin is this latin word acanthosis nigricans which is fancy word that means the skin is darker and thicker so the the places that usually happens is the back of the neck and you'll hear you know stories of i tried to wash my neck it's it's dirty all the time it's not dirt it is the way the skin is under the the curse of high insulin and you see it in teenagers all the time now they put on weight and their growth hormones are already doing that teenage thing now you put high insulin in there and they have this dirty neck syndrome or on the creases of their elbow it's just darker here uh that is pathology that's not normal from high
Speaker 1insulin you talked about weight changes as well what's this thing about hairy toes that i was
Speaker 2reading about right so as my patients age so most of my 55 year olds that have had high insulin i will tell them look at your toes they're supposed to have hair on them and when your body has had that high insulin you're supposed to have hair on them and when your body has had that high insulin you're supposed to have hair on them and when your body has had that high insulin you're supposed to have high insulin state for a couple decades now it will start to say we don't send resources to a couple parts of the body anymore and the follicles in their toe are one of them like you just stop growing hair on your toes and there's an ascending problem with this where the toe starts then it's the ankles then it's up to the knees and they don't have hair anywhere on their lower extremities it is a process
Speaker 1that started from high insulin so you have this idea of this keto continuum what is the ketone continuum i read about it i mean it's a it's a book here i have which you published in 2020 called the ketone continuum consistently keto for life right so the keto continuum is this 12-step process right to get into a consistent consistently keto yeah that
Speaker 2you're constantly taking out the trash the first part is the beginner okay so the first part the
Speaker 1beginner section has four stages to it right what are those four stages well i like to tell
Speaker 2patients that you never fall all the way off of the continuum so the first part the first step is really not keto but it is that they're eating every two to three hours and if they fall off the wagon that's usually where they land so that's what most people start at they're eating every two to three hours they are not keeping their carbs less than 20. step two is cut your carbs to 20. that's the only thing i need you to measure and you're going to be able to use a piton strip you know measure ketones in your urine uh and that will ride you'll ride a wave and that ketone production is happening the fat-based hormones in your body are starting to resurrect they're starting to do the things that they need to do and there will be this magical moment in the not
Speaker 1too near future where you skip a meal and this that beginning stage how long does that last i'll put this on the screen so everybody can see sure the continuum um how long does that initial
Speaker 2beginning stage last for people if they've been severely insulin resistant this is the ones where i've said they took their carbs to 20 for for two weeks before they pete a ketone so i use some other steps if that's how severe that is but let's just take the average person that's like not they're not 100 pounds overweight they're hitting menopause and they've put on 25 pounds when they drop their carbs to 20 they're peeing a ketone by the end of the week and they are missing their first meal by day 10 okay so day 10 is the first meal of the week and they're missing their first meal by day 10
Speaker 1okay so day 10 is the first meal of the week and they're missing their first meal by day 10 and they're missing their first meal of the week and they're missing their first meal by day 10 and then it says when we get to stage five in the keto continuum it says 1680 168 is that yeah so let me start to
Speaker 2use time restricted eating uh where i want when we're gonna your body will adapt people say you can't stay on the keto diet because they go to step four and then they think that that's all they needed to do there are several steps to reversing this problem and you'll know you have the right step if the ketones are still present in your glut in your blood your body will adapt though so we start to say all right we're going to learn something new and we're going to learn some new behaviors we're going to learn what the nothing burger looks like at least for 16 hours out of the day what does that mean you do not eat a thing in those 16 hours now i give them a little hedge because most people come in like you they don't start eating until two o'clock in the afternoon and then they eat until 10 o'clock and i want them fat forward i want lots of fat going in because insulin resistance uh that high insulin state means they've locked or they've insulated their fat
Speaker 1on their body and then we get to stage seven where it says 23 one is that fasting for 23 hours a day
Speaker 2yeah and eating for one hour a day and the there's a little bitty line between 16 8 and 23 and 1 but there's a whole bunch of life there meaning we don't actually have patients go from 16 hours of fasting uh to 23 we have them slide it down by an hour slide it down by an hour and then we do that harder thing which is move it towards sunrise quit eating so late at night and then the last
Speaker 1stage here is the stage where you're going to start eating and you're going to start eating so so step 9 10 11 and 12 is prolonged fasting between 36 and 72 hour fasting right so those
Speaker 2folks that have high insulin for 20 you know 15 20 years they're going to have to do a nothing burger for 36 hours in most of them to really give a good reset of their metabolism and although you you look at other folks saying oh you should never do that if you're a woman you should never do that over the age of 50 i'm saying you have too much insulin in your body you have to do that to get the pancreas to make less insulin over time on that point between men and women are there
Speaker 1metabolic differences that need to be mentioned here because you know when i sometimes when i do ketogenic fasting my girlfriend she takes much longer than me to get into a ketogenic state and i'm wondering if her body is in some way trying to defend the switch have you ever seen the the
Speaker 2reality show alone oh no i'm not a reality show guy oh i'm not either but they drop these people off in the middle of nowhere and they starve them to death and you watch the fat come off of them and the men the fat just melts off of them and the women they do what your girlfriend does it just holds on to them that we are designed to have that fat on them so asking them to do a ketogenic state you'll hear people say oh it's going to ruin your hormones oh it's going to you can't do that and um i would say you can have all those conversations once their insulin is normal but i have lots of women in childbearing years that are excessive producers of insulin and their d is low their estrogen is low they have hair loss on the top of their head they have skin tags throughout their body or maybe the first sign was they had pcos okay all of these are a sign that insulin came in and it's too high in their body so lowering it has rules and if you want to have a baby carry a baby uh have uh the weight come off after you've gestated a baby um have weight not be your enemy during menopause you have to be making ketones at a routine and regular interval and start with the food start with the menus in the kitchen don't run to the gym first i've noticed
Speaker 1uh in women in my life that they've told me that their menstrual cycles become more synced up when
Speaker 2they are in a lower carbohydrate diet right their hormones can hear each other i mean when insulin is high insulin dictates what that sugar does but it also is the dictator for every morsel of fat and estrogen testosterone vitamin d they're all a derivative of fat of cholesterol and they are they're put into the fat cells if you biopsy an obese woman and say can i see is there any vitamin d hidden in there is there any estrogen is there any yes they're all in those fat cells you start to lower their insulin and the fat mobilizes so the hormones that are naturally communicated between women they can actually hear them again i mean that that tribal thing
Speaker 1if a woman were to start to eat a lot of fat she would start to eat a lot of fat she would start to in a ketogenic state permanently would there be any disruption to her metabolic health you mean like me yeah like what you know her menstrual cycles her uh yeah anything no i think
Speaker 2it's you're going to find people that it shouldn't be extreme meaning i've been on this for 15 years the ketogenic phase is at least 20 out of 30 days uh in a month the first few years i was on it now at 55 menopause in the last year um i'm like without a ketone my brain doesn't work right now without a ketone my energy goes to pot and i've been walking women through menopause for 25 years it is not a fun story when they're insulin resistant so prepare uh have the flexibility of that mitochondria to use both ketones and glucose and that's what a ketogenic state is i want to speak to the business
Speaker 1owners listening and watching right now i know what it's like to be part of a ketogenic state personally responsible for every decision i founded my first company at 21 years old and honestly the pressure can be immense it's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface i recently did some tests through our sponsor function which got me thinking about that invisible impact i found that i had low levels of omega-3s i had deficient levels of vitamin d probably because i sit inside this dark room all day and that has totally changed how i construct my day going forward i get up in the morning and the first thing i now do is i go for a walk outside in the sunshine in part to help my vitamin d levels increase but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm with function you can check your brain health your aging your stress and so much more they provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging head to functionhealth.com slash doac to join and use code doac25 for a 25 credit what you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode if you want to listen to that full episode i've linked it down below check the description thank you
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