this calories in calories out model doesn't work at all if you're trying to lose weight what you need to do is Dr Jason H the founder of intermittent fasting whose influential work could be the key to a healthier and even longer life every continent is seeing this increase in obesity but we put the blame on the individual the problem is there's something wrong with the message we're giving people and I can go over a few examples first of all exercise is really good in a number of ways but in terms of weight loss it's actually
a very very small effect the whole idea that you need to eat as soon as you get up is just false we know from twin studies that 70% of your risk of becoming obese is due to genetics but it doesn't explain why the population became much more obese and we know that you can't cure obesity by saying eat fewer calories it's about fixing the hormones that are behind the calories if you want to lose body fat you actually need to extend the period of time that you're not eating eating so you do some intermittent fasting
there's all this data showing that fasting activates the body it increases your energy your concentration a Treatment available to everybody for free and it will be healthier for us so I need some advice then what does your fast look like what food should I be giving my body and in what proportions the first thing you got to do is I've got to talk to you about these new injections people are getting to lose weight I think quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that
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gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a [Music] deal Dr Jason Hey Stephen how are you I'm really really good this book here the Obesity code unlocking the secrets of weight loss why did you write this book what was the sort of driving motivation behind committing what must have been a very long part of your life to this subject matter uh it's it was actually a very interesting sort of Journey of Discovery for me
so I did my training in Nephrology which is kidney disease so I'm a kidney disease specialist and I thought about weight loss sort of very conventionally sort of calories in calories out just watch what you eat sort of thing and that's what's taught to all doctors is that it's extremely unhelpful for people it doesn't work at all it doesn't work for patients and it doesn't work for for for doctors even right so doctors who want to lose weight they don't they don't use calories and calories out because it doesn't really work and we all know
this um every person has sort of counted their calories and almost all of them failed to succeed so the whole point was how to get people to lose weight and so I started to look into the literature and I started to read about it and so on I got very very interested in it and again I I started to become very unhappy with the discussion about calories and calories out because the whole point was that people had this idea that it was energy balance right and there's this sort of energy balance equation which is uh
calories in minus calories out equals body fat right because body fat is a way to store calories but that's not a very helpful sort of description of how to approach the problem right the problem is not that people didn't realize that they had to eat fewer calories or increase their calorie expenditure the problem was why were they eating more calories than they could expend right and it's because the body is is being told to store energy right that's the way it is that's why you're taking in more calories or you're storing more calories because your
body body has hormones that tell you to store calories so there's a hormone called insulin for example and if you give people insulin so inject them with insulin which is a drug for type two diabetes almost everybody gains weight so if you give somebody insulin they gain weight if I gave you insulin you would gain weight it has nothing to do with the you know your willpower for example if I gave you insulin you would gain weight why because I'm giving your body the instructions to store energy so you're saying that weight gain and obesity
in particular isn't a function of calories in calories out it is a function of hormones it's a function of hormones and it's sort of you have to think about it in sort of levels right so calories in calories out is true so body fat is a storage is it's a way to store energy which is calories equals calories in calories out but that's not the real question the question is why are you storing more calories then you're expending and it's because you're telling your body to do so so for example if if you take another
equal I'll give you an analogy say alcoholism is alcohol in minus alcohol out right same same idea or if you have a room it's the number of people how how full it is is how many people enter the room or exit the room right so same same idea right it's absolutely true so alcohol in minus alcohol out equals how drunk you equals how drunk you are so alcoholism so can you simply cure alcoholism by telling an alcoholic oh just drink less alcohol than you expend it's like yes you can say that and it's absolutely true
but it's not useful in any way because you've never gotten to the really the deeper understanding of why that person is taking in more alcohol right you have to get to that next level and say what you know it's like going one level deeper why why are they drinking more alcohol maybe they're depressed maybe they're addicted deal with the addiction that is the way to deal with alcoholism you can't cure it just by saying drink less alcohol the same way you can't cure the obesities by saying eat fewer calories because you're not understanding why the
body is is storing more energy with the amount of information we now have the amount of science we have one would expect that obesity levels would be coming down yeah unfortunately if you think about the way most people think about it it's mostly still in calories even in the academic centers they all think about sort of calories how to get calories down how to reduce calories and I always and I always say well it's not about the calories right it's about fixing the hormones that are behind the calories like because you can choose to eat
fewer calories yes that's true but you can't but you have to ask yourself why are people eating um so many calories right well it's because they're hungry you can't choose to be less hungry and therefore you have to really talk about controlling the hunger and controlling the hormones which are behind the calories that you eat and that's going to be much more successful to you if you take two different foods equal number of calories and you eat them the hormonal response to those calories are completely different so you eat two slices of white bread and
jam all that energy that so insulin spikes up because it's very high and refined carbohydrates all that energy goes straight into your body fat and you've left none of it for for for energy for your day by 10:30 now you're ravenous and you go get yourself a lowfat muffin again pure carbs insulin spikes up all of that goes straight into your your fat stores why because you told it to remember that when you eat white bread or muffins or refined carbohydrates you're going to have this insulin Spike which is going to tell your body to
store energy if you eat an egg you don't get that Spike and Insulin so that that energy that you've taken those calories are there you can use it and so what happens well that keeps you full during the day if you're telling your body to immediately store those calories as body fat well guess what over time you're going to gain body fat because you told your body to do that if you eat the egg and insulin's not spiking up well you haven't told your body to store that energy so it's going to be around for
you to use all day long and you won't be hungry and you're not going to be hungry because your body's like why do I need to eat again because you know you you basically have taken the energy that you need I've got it available right it's sort of like if you go to the the the grocery store right you can store food in the refrigerator suppose you go to the grocery store put all your food away lock it away in the in the refrigerator now you have nothing to eat right you're going to say oh
I need to go out and get some more food right same thing with your body right so if you take food but you've also spiked up your insulin you're going to lock away all those that energy immediately into into your fat stores it's not going to be available for you to use well you're going to say I'm going to go out and get more so you haven't controlled the hunger that's going to lead to the caloric intake which is going to lead to the weight gain people look at this through an evolutionary lens and say
you know we just didn't have this much food so it's the abundance and um ease of access to food it's the fridges that we now have if it's the you know we never had fridges in our home so people point at it and go well that's why people are getting gaining weight and you know we're suffering with obesity at epidemic levels it's just because there's more Supply and the brain is taking advantage of it because once upon a time if we didn't eat that jam and toast then we would have you know maybe not have
been able to find food for another two weeks or something yeah I don't think that's the whole story because if you think about it uh and people again uh um make that assumption that we don't have any control over uh our body fatness right so they say well it's availables you're going to take it right in fact that's not true because we actually have a number of different uh hormones that tell us to stop eating okay so if you eat you cannot simply keep eating and eating and eating right if you go to an all
you can eat buffet at some point you have to stop because you're full right so there are systems very powerful systems within our body that tell us to stop eating so you eat food there are uh stomach stretch receptors for example so as your stomach stretches out it sends a signal to your brain and says stop eating if you eat a lot of protein uh it activates a hormone called peptide YY which tells you to stop eating if you eat a lot of dietary fat you activate a hormone called chosy ainin which again tells you
to stop eating these are very powerful if you look in the wild there are no obese Antelope there are no obese Lions why because how much body fat your you carry is actually very important if you are obese as an antelope you're going to get eaten if you are an obes lion you're not going to catch any food so therefore it's going to correct itself so if I overeat now my body will basically overcompensate by burning off the extra calories to it absolutely so if you eat a huge meal right you eat you know you
go to a big wedding or something like that you eat a huge meal the next day you're probably not that hungry if you eat a giant steak so you're activating all these satiety hormones peptide y y chosy ainin you're eating all this food well you may not be hungry for the next day so that means that my body has some kind of Baseline weight yeah it will know whether you should eat more or less so there's a this concept called the sort of of body set weight which is a sort of thermometer that is your
body sets a weight that you should be at and if you go above that weight or if you eat too much it will activate hormonal systems to bring it back down if you don't eat enough it will also activate hormonal systems to bring it up so it's like a thermostat that you set you have in your room for example you set the the room temperature if it's too hot you're the the room activates the air conditioning if it's too cold it activates the heat your body actually acts the same way if you gain too much
body fat your fat cells for example will produce leptin which is another hormone the leptin tells your body to stop eating that's really interesting so in the case of OB Beast people their set point must just be really high yes and that's the Crux of the matter why is that set point being overridden just like if you have a room that's too hot and you look and you say the thermometer is set for room temperature why is it so hot in here then you can say okay well what's the problem and the problem is not
you know heat in versus Heat out right that's that's a very simplistic way same thing if your body has too much body fat you got to then think about why are you overcoming the normal compensatory mechanisms that are happening that are stopping you from eating a lot of it relates to processing of foods of course so if you take out so remember I talked about stretch re receptors in the stomach right so you eat natural natural foods there's a natural break it stretches the stomach you stop eating well what's one way pull out all the
fiber process the foods turn it into say a very fine dust that means it's absorbed extremely quickly into the blood stream so that means that pure you've got Pure carbohydrate basically mainlining it into your I like like an IV your glucose spikes way up your insulin spikes way up completely unnatural right if you eat pure carbohydrate instead of eating it with you know proteins and fats it's going to go it's going to shoot way high that's unnatural and that's going to overcome the natural tendencies for you to stop eating so you know you you've basically
overcome that that that that protective mechanism because you've ultr processed the the carbohydrates if you don't eat any protein if you don't eat any fat you're not activating peptide WI Y which is the satiety hormone you're not activated chinin all of a sudden you're eating you know 500 calories of white bread but you have zero satiety or if you drink a Coca-Cola or a soda for example I've always you know thought about this it's like how can you take a th000 calories for example in one of those giant sodas you get at the ball game
or something and don't feel full at all whereas if you took a steak that's 1,000 calories you'd be like I'm pretty full I don't really feel like eating you drink the soda you're like I really feel like eating some chips or popcorn or something why because it has zero satiety interesting so if I'm if I've got a baseball stadium what I want to do is I want to make sure people get a soda because then they'll also buy the chips but if they just eat the chips you know maybe they won't buy anything else but
the soda is going to um increase my Revenue because it'll basically just pass right through them it'll pass right through them they're going to store all that energy as calories but they're going to want more because you haven't made them full right so the the whole point is that you have to think more than about the calories there's more there than just the calorie story there's this whole hormonal balance you're saying that overeating isn't just a choice it's a hormon driven Behavior it's a hormon driven Behavior I mean the whole thing about obesity is is
quite interesting to me because if you think about obesity if you think about uh in the United States which is where I get a lot of my data from um you know you have maybe 70% of people overweight or obese and it's going up every year it's been going up every year since 1977 and if you think about that it tells you that the problem is not willpower the problem is not the people the problem is the environment that they find themselves in the food environment that they find themselves in because you can take an
analogy say you have a hundred children one of them fails well that might be the child they didn't study what if 70 of them fail would you say it's it's each and every one of them's fault or would you say it's more likely that it's the teacher's fault I think it's more likely that it's the teacher's fault so if we have a 100 Americans and 70 of them are obese the problem is likely not an individual willpower problem the problem is likely that there's something wrong with the message we're giving people the information we're giving
people and the food environment that we're finding our eles in which is dominated by this sort of calories in calories out thinking and what's really unfair of course is that we put the blame on the Obesity or overweight on the individual and we say well they let themselves go and they didn't watch themselves they weren't careful it's their fault and that's the stigma that comes with this whole calories in calories out thinking because we say it's their fault because they could choose what they eat it's like yes they could choose what they eat but they
didn't choose the food environment that is telling them to eat all this ultr processed food that is making all this Ultra processed food available to them that is telling them that all this Ultra processed food is good for you so leptin is this hormone that essentially brings down my Hunger makes me less hungry is it therefore possible that people are becoming lepin resistant there is leapin resistance the question again is why and the way to think about it is it's sort of this sort of balance right so insulin if you give people insulin like if
you think about causes of obesity what causes people to gain weight well if I give you insulin you'll gain weight if I give me insulin I'll gain weight so insulin causes weight gain whereas leptin will cause the opposite so it's sort of the Seesaw body fat is nothing more or less than uh a store of energy right and you only store energy when your body tells you our entire body runs on hormones right nothing happens without the hormonal system being activated so insulin is pushing us to gain weight lefting us is pushing us to lose
weight and what's happening is that one is sort of overcoming the other insulin is overcoming the leptin if obesity isn't about a lack of will power and it isn't just a case of people being lazy or all those things that sometimes some people stereotypically assert I've also heard the counterargument that obesity is a function of our genetic makeup and our we inherit obesity from our parents you know is there any truth in Merit in that um it's it's yes yes and no so yes there is a very strong sort of genetic predisposition to obesity so
if you take you know somebody with a family history then look at the genetics about 70% of your risk of becoming obese is due to genetics and we know that from twin studies for example what do we know from twin studies if you take twins um and raise them sort of in different environments you know they actually turn out very similarly so we know that there's a there's a genetic component to obesity so when they they sort of do the uh calculations they say about 70% of obesity is sort of genetically related so if you
take a a twin that comes from originally a family that were obese and you put them with a family that are not obese yeah the child will still likely become obese even with the family that are not obese yeah so this was done in obviously they they had uh twins that were sort of separated at Birth compare them after they've grown up and say what's the sort of correlation between the weight of the two and it's about 70% so you have somebody who's very overweight and you know twin a goes into one family twin B
goes into a second family you know twin B uh is going to be more prone to gaining weight even if they're with a thin family right so the environment has some role but it's it it's the genetics have a very large role too 17% of 70% is is is genetic so there is however the part that's important is that that doesn't explain why we have obesity in the last 40 to 50 years because the genetics of the world population has not changed so if we're seeing more obesity now and remember this is not a a
USA problem it's a it's a worldwide problem we see it in Asia we see it in Europe we see it in America we see it in South America we see it everywhere uh we see it in Africa so every continent is seeing this increase in obesity therefore it's not due this this recent change within the last 50 years is not due to a change in genetics so while yes it's true that there is a strong genetic component that explains my risk of say obesity compared to yours but doesn't explain how the population of the United
States for example all of a sudden became much more obese in general so you're saying this is really about a predisposition which basically means your genetics make you more or less likely for some reason um which is a genetic reason to become obese when you make certain lifestyle choices um but that is a predisposition which means that and I guess your work asserts that the predisposition relates to your hormones response to the foods that we eat so really it's really a a gen genc response to foods which is based on your hormone response we all
have a certain genetic sort of predisposition to obesity right so all of us have a certain risk some people obviously they eat whatever they want and they don't gain weight we all know people like that right and some people sort of look at a muffin and they gain weight so you have that genetic predisposition so that explains the difference between two people but it doesn't explain the difference within an entire population like if you take the entire population of the Earth or even of America or whatever the genetics haven't changed sufficiently of that entire population
to say why there's more obesity now than before so we're inheriting our parents hormone response uh yeah but we're we're we're the the hormone response that we have is going to be dependent a lot on genetics but the food choices we're making are different than our our parents so they're eating different things if you think back about what your grandmother ate and stuff it's different than the food environment that we find ourselves in right now and that food environment is creating this sort of uh is sort of increasing the risk uh over over time that's
the sort of uh what what we need to try and figure out and why we need to have a deeper discussion as opposed to calories because we've been having this sort of calories discussion for you know 30 40 years it just hasn't been very helpful you call it a a deception you say in chap part two of your book you say the calorie deception yeah and you say there are five wrong assumptions about obesity and weight loss the calorie Cal calorie in calorie out are independent of each other so won't trigger one another and this
interesting point about the basil metabolic rate being stable yeah is that in essence because people you know people will often say I have a low metabolism it's kind of like a word in culture if someone is um obese often the the diagnosis is they have a low metabolism yeah is there any Merit in that is that true oh absolutely the question so when you think about so body fat you think about the energy balance equation body fat equals calories in minus calories out this often leads people to say well just eat 500 few calories and
you'll lose a pound of fat per week it's it's unquestionably false because every single study that we've done over the last 50 years shows that if you eat 500 fewer calories then over time depending on what foods you're eating if eventually your body will just burn 500 fewer calories so that's your basil metabolic rate the number of calories that your body is expending in one day so we see this in almost every single study we've known about it for like 80 years at least you eat fewer calories your body Burns fewer calories well that's going
to limit how much weight you're going to lose right so this idea that just eat fewer calories will automatically lead to weight loss is completely false because we know that eating fewer calories leads also to burning fewer calories so you eat 500 less your body Burns 500 less and you're not losing any body weight so I go on a diet let's say because I'm trying to lose weight my metabolism lowers to meet the calorific Restriction that I've imposed on myself yeah what then happens when I come off the diet does my metabolism stay generally yes
low yeah so that's that yo-yo dieting effect so say you start with 2,000 calories in 2,000 calories out you're not gaining weight you're not losing weight right now you decide okay I'm going to go on a diet so you go down to, 1500 calories thinking that you're going to burn 2,000 and the body Fat's going to provide 500 right that's how you balance that equation however if you eat the wrong foods and you're eating all the time so you're eating 10 times a day eight times a day like people say you should you're eating low
fats or you're eating tons of carbs you're spiking your insulin insulin prevents you from burning body fat Okay so we've again we've known about this for 80 years so now you eat, 1500 calories but you're keeping your insulin levels really high so few calories but lots of high carb foods eating all the time insulin stays high you're you're taking in 1500 your body is now burning 2,000 but you can't burn any body fat so the calories that are stored in your body fat cannot be cannot be sort of taken out it's like it's in the
bank and the bank is closed it's you can't take it out so what's going to happen well you don't have a balanced equation so that cannot cannot happen so what happens is that in order to balance that equation because your insulin levels are high you're eating 1500 calories coming in your body can only burn 1500 calories your metabolic rate has just now gone down by 500 calories and guess what you're not losing any body fat so that's an example of how the whole the calories idea is completely wrong because if you continue to do that
what's going to happen over time is that you you get tired because you're burning fewer calories you don't have enough energy to generate body heat so you're cold you're tired you're hungry so you say okay I'm going to go to 1,800 calories so now you're eating 1,00 calories but you're only burning 1500 calories guess what you gain weight and you say but how can I gain weight I'm eating less than I did yes you you are eating less than the 2,000 calories you used to eat you're eating 1,800 but you're eating the wrong Foods very
high insulin Foods so therefore you're going to gain weight in fact everybody says that and and all the all the nutritionists all the doctors just they just don't believe them they say you're lying you're cheating you're eating more than you think so this explains something that happened with one of my friends which I always puzzled me he swears by the calories in calorie out thing I've spoken about him a few times he posts about it online as well um and he he actually managed to get a pretty much like six-pack abs pretty much and at
the time it appears that he was eating a lot of Domino's Pizzas a lot of pizzas and I was thinking how's this guy eating all these pizzas but he's using his calories in calorie out thing uh and then when the pizza stopped yeah there was this yo-yo effect yeah where he managed to get to basically what I describe as a six-pack or there thereabouts and then um stopped eating all uh stopped the diet per se and then there was this big yo-yo effect which I imagine is what you said there what he's done is he's
lowered his metabolism then when he goes up just a little bit it all comes back it all comes back and then some and then some yeah absolutely so this form of dieting is actually over the long term probably going to make you gain weight oh it's it's very detrimental and that's what yo-yo dieting we all know it's very detrimental but think about it differently right so let's take a different example with the same calories which is why I keep saying you have to think about more than the calories you have to think about what the
hormones are because that's the instructions to your body food contains calories energy but it contains instructions as to what to do so let's take an example you're eating 2,000 calories in 2,000 calories out now you go on a diet you want to you take in, 1500 but what you do is you do some intermittent fasting when you fast insulin is going to fall that's the whole point insulin is a hormone that goes up when you eat it goes down when you don't eat right so when you eat eat insulin goes up your body wants to
store energy when you don't eat insulin goes down your body says I have no energy I have no food coming in please take it out of storage so now you take 1500 calories but you do intermittent fasting so you're allowing your insulin levels to fall now 1500 calories are coming in insulin levels are low your body wants to burn 2,000 calories it says well insulin levels are low let me take 500 calories from my body fat guess what you have 500 coming from your body fat you have 1,500 coming from your foods you burn 2,000
it's a balanced equation so instead of the opposite situation so and and you see that the calories are the same you went from 2,000 in to 1500 in but what the difference was that you allowed insulin to fall which allowed you to burn body fat right it's the hormonal signal that says please take energy out open up the doors so that body fat can come out and this is the piece that's missing because people are all all like well I'm this I'm that and it's like well why can't you burn the fat that's on your
body cuz there's 200 300,000 calories of body fat why can't you access it it's because you haven't activated the right hormones so that you can access it so now if you do intermittent fasting you eat, 1500 calories you take 500 calories out your body is burning 2,000 now all of a sudden if you go off your diet and you go back to 2,000 calories guess what you don't gain weight you don't lose weight same as before whereas before you go even to 1,800 calories you lost weight but the difference was not the calories it was
always 2,000 to 500 the difference was you paid attention to the hormones that you're telling your body and the insulin is sort of the primary hormone there's actually a lot more there's you know there's there's there's cortisol is is a very important hormone there's other hormones you mentioned burning calories there one of the thoughts around the calories in Cal calories out model is that you can just exercise and if you burn a th000 calories exercising then that gives you a little bit of a reserve there to eat more for example yeah and it's probably a
very very small effect for for a couple of reasons so we know that uh if you exercise and and I say this exercise is really good for you in a number of ways flexibility strength core all kinds of things so very very important but in terms of weight loss it's actually a very very small effect why because one the amount of calories you burn during exercise are simply not that high so if you look at you know if you do walking I mean if you did eight hours of high-intensity exercise yeah you're going to burn
a lot of calories but most people I deal with which are sort of middle-aged and higher you're talking about sort of a quick walk or you know 45 half an hour three times a week sort of thing and if you ever go on the treadmill and you ever ever watch that calorie counter on the treadmill you know it goes up very very slowly right you'll do half an hour and it'll be up to like 120 calories or something like that right so that exercise really didn't burn off very many calories it's the amount that you'd
get in a couple of cookies for example right so it's it's just numerically it's just very small so if you're you're taking in if your body is normally using 2,000 calories with your brain generating body heat your heart your lungs your liver they're using 2,000 calories and now you go up to 2100 calories well percentage wise it's not a huge deal right the other problem with exercise is that it tends to actually cause you to eat more so uh again we've had Decades of study for this if you exercise during the exercise you have uh
loss reduced appetite so you have ex it's called exercise induced anorexia so in the middle of a basketball game you don't suddenly go oh wow I'm really hungry right because your your blood is flowing in your you know in your muscles and so on uh you're not thinking about The Hunger So Hunger actually goes down during exercise but after exercise we see this rebound so we see that people are actually more hungry after exercise and if you're hungrier after exercise it's going to cause you to tend to gain more weight in fact there's this very
interesting study that was done a few years ago in Harvard where they measured the sort of calorie difference that you get with uh for for children um in certain activities so they said okay what if a child is watching TV what's the average uh caloric difference and it was like plus 100 calories per hour so for every hour of TV they're sort of positive 100 calories over time right and that makes sense you're just sitting there when you look at mild exercise it's about the same it's about positive 100 calories so the only way that
happens is that if that that exercise is causing you to eat more right and you say well why are you eating more it's like well because you're you're hungry like the exercise is inducing you to eat more and that's going to make it difficult to lose weight you say in the book in chapter 4 that 95% of weight loss is Diet yeah and that's the reason why exercise it's very hard to exercise enough to lose weight and and and that's not to say that you shouldn't exercise it's it you really should exercise everybody should exercise
but if you're trying to lose weight you still got to focus on the main topic which is the foods that you eat which is not just the calories it's about the types of food that you eat which is going to affect the hormonal balance and also how often you eat if you're eating all the time versus if you're eating only eating very infrequently then you're going to have a different hormonal balance that is going to affect your weight as well an American survey of more than 60,000 adults and children revealed that in 1977 most people
ate three times a day by 2003 most people were eating five to six times a day yeah yeah this is the whole idea of sort of eating all the time and this I find fascinating because it was this sort of inadvertent change in our diet that we never talked about right so in 1977 we told people eat lots of carbs okay so we know that that's in print for sure the American government said eat 55 to 60% carbs eat less fat what happened is that you know in 1977 people ate breakfast lunch and dinner no
snacks if you wanted an after school snack your mom said no you're going to ruin your dinner if you wanted a bedtime snack your mom would say no you should have ate more at dinner right no problem but what happened is that as we started to eat sort of a lot of carbs what happened is exactly is what we discussed before you eat two slices of bread in the morning with Jam you have no satiety insulin spikes way up glucose spikes way up but then it crashes because you get hungry again then you get hungry
at 10:30 so you go around looking for a low-fat muffin and it was because you know you know your your your your sugars are going down your insulin's going down so now you're eating midm morning snack then you eat a big plate of pasta then you get ravenous at like 3:00 so you go find yourself some crackers or something like that right and then so now you're having a midm morning snack you're having mid-afternoon snack then you're having a bedtime and that's the average American by 2003 is eating six five six times a day but
they're saying hey I'm eating so low fat this must be the right way to eat this must be good for me so now this snacking becomes institutionalized whereas pre- 1977 snacks are an Indulgence right it's not something good for you you it's something bad for you but hey once in a while you indulge then it becomes institutionalized as something that every single one of us should be doing and we should never be without food for more than an hour and a half let's think about this very simply okay so if you eat your insulin's going
to go up your body is going to store calories because you're told it to if you don't eat or if you fast your body is your your insulin is going to go down you're going to bring those calories back out of storage right so you're going to burn calories you eat you store calories you don't eat you burn calories very simple so why would you want to eat all the time that makes no sense at all if you want to lose body fat you actually need to extend the period of time that you're not eating
in other words extend your fasting period and get rid of all the snacks in order for you to have enough time that your insulin is low when insulin is low it's going to allow fat burning which is going to allow you to pull those calories back out you're cited as being really the founder of modern intermittent fasting and I've heard people talk about intermittent fasting on this show over and over and over and over again now but the internet says that it really came from you I know that inter fasting has been happening for thousands
of years but the idea of it as a tool for weight loss they say it came from you because in 2013 2014 really nobody was talking about it from a medical standpoint like what's happening in the body why is it good why is it bad and really I was for years sort of this one voice in the wilderness that was saying like hey this is a tool for us if you want to lose weight because it's important then you can just set aside a period of time that you don't eat at the time people thought
it was extremely bad for you and I I looked through all the literature and I said well why is it bad for you and they had all these reasons there's all these myths about intermittent fasting and and how it's going to cause you to gain weight and be tired and hungry and all these sorts things I said well no there's actually a lot of data here over the last you know 2,000 years that we've used intermittent fasting and they're simply not true and I can go over a few of those but that's why there was
nobody talking about it at the time and that's where I started to sort of bring it into the uh sort of public Consciousness that this is a tool that's all it is were you attacked for that at the time oh absolutely like I got I got attacked from all sides I you know doctors were coming after me dietitians were coming after me everybody thought I was going to do so much harm and the funny part was that you know as I think back as I spoke to a lot of colleagues a lot of colleagues would
say to me you know what I used to do that when I was in training we did that all the time we'd go 24 hours without eating because we're in the o or we're in the ER or we were busy so we did that constantly and nothing bad happened and I remember thinking you know what as a doctor I actually tell people to fast all the time if you have to go for surgery you need to fast if you after surgery you need to fast if you do fasting blood work you need to fast so
why is it that I'm actually telling people to fast all the time and yet for weight loss you shouldn't fast that doesn't make any sense and physiologically from a body standpoint it doesn't make any sense uh one of the things people talked about was you know it's going to make you eat more later it's going to make you more hungry your basil metabolic rates go down this was one of the big myths of intermittent fasting that's going to cause the so-called starvation mode right and this is the idea that your basil metabolic rate will fall
so low that when you do start to eat you're going to gain weight again so I said well let's think about this you can do a study where you take somebody say you for example and you could fast them for four days and measure how much how many calories they're burning their basil metabolic rate on Day Zero before the fast and measure them four days into the fast and see how many calories you're burning so on Day Zero they say you're you're burning say 2,000 calories a day on day four of zero food you don't
eat any food for 4 days they measure how much calories you're burning your body is burning 2200 calories your basil metabolic rate didn't go down it went up your body's activating itself during fasting which is fascinating because if you're trying to lose weight dropping that matal metabolic rate is death like if you drop that metabolic rate it's so hard to lose weight that's what the calorie restricted diets did that's what the lowfat diets did the eating all the time did but when you actually fast your metabolic rate went up and we see this in study
after study and the reason is actually basic physiology it's actually medical physiology like first year medical school stuff when you don't eat what happens in your body from a hormone standpoint is that your insulin is going to fall you're going to allow your body to start using the calories that are in the body at the same time other hormones go up so the sympathetic tone goes up which is your fight ORF flight response your cortisol levels go up because again it's an activation and your growth hormone goes up because those hormones are going to start
telling your body to start pulling calories out so you're actually activating yourself think about of the wild if you see a Hungry Wolf is that wolf just sort of you know all like lethargic no he's activated he's actually more dangerous than any other wolf as opposed to say a lion who just ate because when you just eat you just want to lie there you know you you want to digest your food you have no energy so people say wow your your your metabolic rate is going to go down if you fast no the the truth
is actually the opposite it goes up you've got me thinking about food as an instruction I'm giving my body because if I eat this food it's going to have this impact on my hormones which is going to have this impact on my body so if we View food as an instruction to the body we talked a little bit about the timings of eating and a little bit about fasting I want to get into that a little bit more but breakfast I read that you didn't think most people need breakfast yeah the the whole idea that
you need to eat as soon as you get up is just false so there's this whole um thing about breakfast now you will always break your fast think about the actual word right break fast it's the meal that breaks your fast which tells you that in the English language we accept that your body should have a fasting period every day why there's a period of time that you're supposed to feed you eat instant goes up you store calories then there's supposed to be a period of time that you fast that's after dinner until the next
day's Meal which is breakfast right so say you stop eating at 6 p.m. you eat at 8:00 a.m. that's a 14-hour period where your body is not eating eating it's fasting and therefore it's going to use calories right but the word breakfast tells us that that's actually a normal pattern this normal cyclical pattern you feed then you fast right if you eat all the time your body's just going to store energy and never have a period to burn energy so okay well what's going to happen you're going to gain weight I read as well that
breakfast eaters averaged 539 extra calories per day compared to those that skipped breakfast and that's a finding that's consistent with other trials that was on page 132 of the Obesity code yeah so the more often you eat in general the more calories you take in so if you eat three times a day you or six times a day then you know if you eat three times a day compared to two times a day for example you'll in general eat less because it's harder to eat that you know big meal so say you eat once a
day versus three times a day if you eat once a day it's not always easy to eat three meals worth of calories all in one sitting because you get full do you fast oh I do that regularly yeah and what does your fast look like cuz I've heard of all these different types of fasting 36 hours 72 hours oh yeah 14 hours there's no rules for fasting you could do you know it could be 16 hours so 14 hours remember is sort of a baseline 12 to 14 hours right that just means you're not eating
after dinner that's it um and so if you want to lose weight that's probably not strong enough to make you lose weight because 12 to 14 hours is sort of just this Baseline that people had in the 70s um so you can go to 16 hours for example and you shrink that by either eating breakfast a little later or eating dinner a little earlier but you can do more than that you can do say a 24-hour fast you could eat two meals a day say eat between 12 and six that's a six-h hour eating window
or you could eat once a day which is like a 24-hour fast or you could even go multiple days uh without eating because again your body is smart like our your body knows what to do if you have all those calories sitting on your body right 100,000 calories sitting in body fat and you don't eat for three days well you need 6,000 calories well you have 100,000 200,000 so what's the problem take it out of your body fat let your body eat your body fat that's what fasting is doing for you and it's totally natural
because that's what it's there for that body fat is not there for books is there for you as a source as a store of calories so fasting just lets you use that there's nothing wrong with it people talk about Hunger for example but again hunger is very interesting because people think it's the amount of time that you haven't eaten but it's not true it's actually hormonally mediated so if you think about Hunger I actually found this really fascinating so if you look at studies of when people are the most hungry and the least hungry on
average people are the most hungry at 8:00 p.m. and the least hungry at 8:00 a.m. so in the morning time you actually the least hungry that you will be all day that's just an average and at 8 8:00 p.m. in the evening time you are the most hungry so 8:00 a.m. is the period of time that you've gone the longest without food so why are you the least hungry it's because it's hormonally mediated when you wake up at 500 a.m. your body actually has this surge of hormones growth hormone cortisol and uh sympathetic tone which
is already getting you prepared for the day it's starting to release some of the stored glucose from your body fat from your sugar stores at 5:00 a.m. so your body has already prepared you for the day ahead without you even doing anything that's why people in general are not hungry at 8: a.m. I've got to talk to you about these um these new injections people are getting to lose weight yeah and the role that they must be playing in our hormone balances what are those bloody things called the gp1s gp1s there's another name for it
isn't there yeah uh well it's there's the drug name which is uh OIC is the is the American name and these are all in a class called gp1s and essentially again very interesting because they essentially really reduce the appetite which goes to show you that and people lose weight like a lot of weight and they keep it off so using them like a billionaire friend of mine that's very big in a certain industry uses a z kind of Elon Musk came out and said he he used it yeah as mic as well um I don't
I'm not I I I don't have any problem with the OIC because again if you think about it what it's telling you the the lesson it's teaching you about weight loss is that it's not about controlling the calories because the OIC doesn't burn any calories it's about controll controlling your hunger it's about that one level deeper why are you taking so many calories so if you simply reduce the hunger you're going to naturally eat fewer calories which is going to cause weight loss and that's what this OIC doeses it really reduces your appetite to very
low levels how it it's it's it's this this hormone called gp1 uh which is a natural sort of hormone it's it's released mostly in the intestines in the distal intestine and the small intestine and and in response to certain foods it it goes up right so when you eat the body has a homeostatic mechanism so again remember you know people think that we're just eating machines we eat until you know we explode sort of thing but that's not true when you eat you actually activate the gp1 along with other hormones there's multiple hormonal systems the
gp1 is the one we're interested in you activate gp1 which then sets into motion the the the instructions for you to stop stop eating right so the act of eating sort of sets in motion that whole feedback loop to stop right so this is homeostasis which is trying to keep things at a proper level does that mean if you eat slower uh you'll be less you'll eat less there's probably not yeah probably it's true um you know although it's probably mostly true that if you eat really really fast that you don't have enough time for
this sort of homeostatic mechanisms to kick in so you don't have enough time to stop eating um but the GP 1es then go to the brain so they do certain things they help with digestion so they increase insulin response and then they go to the brain it crosses um the the the bloodb brain barrier so the glp 1's gets released by the act of eating goes into the brain crosses and is active um in the sort of midbrain area that tells your body to stop eating what these gp1s do of course is that it's a
uh it it gives you the hormone that tells you to stop eating even though you haven't eaten it's sort of that's that's the way the drug works so then what people tell you is that you know they're just not hungry and if they're not hungry then they don't eat and when they don't eat of course insulin Falls and you start to burn calories and lose weight but it wasn't about controlling the calories it was about controlling the hunger that was the important part of it it's the hormones right every successful drug to gain or lose
weight right is a hormone it's a hormone based because that's instructions to the body food is energy and food is instructions you change the instructions and you you change the hormone this whole history of fiber thing has been so interesting to me because in the last six months so many of the nutritionists I've spoken to have really impressed upon me that we are fiber deficient and I'm wondering how that happened um well I think it was part of the processing uh thing so taking out fiber is a great way to make foods more appealing if
you will um so what happens is that if you take um flour for example and you have a lot of fiber in it then the digestion is slowed so what you get is a slower rise so you take flour and you put a lot of fiber in it well instead of uh having this huge spike in insulin which you're going to get is a much slower spike in insulin when you have the huge spike in insulin it basically overloads your system and it makes you feel you know gives you this big hit sort of like
if you have like cocaine for example you know it's it's turned into a very fine powder then you snort it so you got this massive sort of Spike same thing with um you know carbohydrates if you don't have any uh fiber you you pull all the fiber out by processing you get this massive sort of unnatural Spike and your body says oh that's great great it tastes great I really love it and you get people who are sort of addicted to it because that big spike is going then going to release dopamine and dopamine is
a pleasure hormone so you eat you know cookies or whatever highly processed foods you get this sort of pleasurable response and that makes you crave it if you have a lot of fiber it acts almost sort of like an antidote to that carbohydrate because you're slowing down that release what food are high in fiber well mostly unprocessed Foods so the the things like beans and if you're having if you're eating uh whole grains for example compared to others then it's going to have a reduction in the speed of absorption so it's again not about the
calories necessary or even necessarily about the carbohydrates because you're still eating the same amount of carbohydrate but you're slowing down the speed at which is absorbed which is going to change the instructions that you give your body if you have a massive spike in glut glucose you get this massive dopamine surge right and your body's like yo love it the next time you're like okay give me that refined carbohydrate what about protein because we we tend to think a protein is something that you know is super great for weight loss yeah protein is probably uh
sort of inter it's not bad I mean the main thing is cutting down the carbohydrates but you know in the OBD code I really talk about cutting the processing down because uh proteins usually don't come as pure protein right in nature you never find like you know how you have like whey powder protein or whatever you get the only way you can do that is by processing the heck out of food to get some kind of pure protein it doesn't exist in nature like it almost doesn't exist in maybe there's a few examples but when
you eat meat you think okay there's a lot of protein but that's actually a lot of fat in there too right um if you eat anything else that has protein it's it's rarely uh all protein you know very lean meats like chicken breast and stuff are going to be higher in protein but there's still a lot of other stuff in there and it's very rare that somebody will eat just all pure 100% protein it tends to be hard to eat like the fat brings a lot of flavor and so on so it's a bit of
an unnatural way to eat sure if you if you're to eat a lot of protein it does Spike insulin so it does have some effect to gain weight but it's actually a very um inefficient uh macronutrient that is your there's three macronutrients there's carbohydrates there's um fat and there's protein your body stores energy or calories in two ways there's car glucose which is carbohydrate and it stores it as body fat which is fat right it doesn't protein is not a way for the body to store energy so when you're eating a lot of protein it's
very difficult for it to turn it into a storage mechanism like you know so you eat glucose and you eat fat you can store glucose and you can store fat but you eat protein but you don't really store it as a source of energy so if all foods then increase our insulin levels I guess the best solution is to fast uh fasting is certainly one way but just changing the foods to uh other ones because if you look at the insulin uh release in processed foods versus unprocessed Foods there's a huge difference so if you
eat eat sort of uh highly refined foods like white bread for example then you're going to have a very different response in insulin compared to sort of um a whole a whole food so unprocessed Foods in general your body knows how to handle like we've been eating them for thousands of years um but certainly anytime you eat your insulin is going to go up you're giving your body instructions to store energy so the solution is to eat less often what if you do a juice fast juice fast of course is not a real fast because
you're you're taking a lot of sugars what you think of juice fasting um I'm generally I I I think it's less effective than regular fasting and it really depends on how much juice you take if you take a lot of juice you could easily get you know thousands of calories plus a lot of sugar if you do it you know cucumber juice and stuff that's very low in sugar and kale juice then it could be very very healthy for you because there's vitamins and stuff there so it all depends on how it's done however the
um the fasting is a way for you to sort of clean out the body so you can clean out the glucose if you have excess body fat you're you're going to use it right so again way to clean it out and then there's this whole process called autophagy which is just fascinating and autophagy is this um so it's been very topical because in 2016 one of the key researchers was given the Nobel Prize in medicine so it's it's a very important process that's been relatively recently discovered what they discovered is that when you don't eat
protein particularly but when you fast your body activates this thing called autophagy and it breaks down some of the subcellular organs which sounds really bad subcellular or organs yeah so uh you know these are sort of like the organs within the cell so it's not like the liver but there's something called organel within a cell and some of that is broken down so basically these proteins and so on within the cell your body gets rid of that and you think oh well that sounds really bad but it's not it turns out that it's very very
good for you because it's an opportunity for your body to get rid of all this old protein old junky protein and at the same time remember that you're fasting your growth hormone levels are shooting up through the roof so like a you know two three day fast your growth hormone levels might go up five times so you're getting rid of all the old stuff and then when you eat again you're actually got growth hormone to produce new proteins so Essence you're getting rid of the old you're bringing in the new it's basically the process of
Rejuvenation could this be a very important way to get rid of some of the chronic illnesses of aging and there's lots of data uh you know talking about uh you know Alzheimer's disease there's talk people talking about cancers there's people talking about just general aging you know Dr Chris Palmer talking about mental disorders we're all talking about insulin and overeating and diet as a really important component of not just diabetes and weight but all of these diseases mental illnesses uh you know chronic uh illnesses like Alzheimer's disease neurologic illnesses and there's all this data that
suggests that autophagy and fasting as a way to activate autophagy could be actually extremely beneficial for you which is fine when we used to do it and and you know what's so interesting is that people seem to have already known about it like you see it in almost every major religion there's periods of fasting right it's like why did they do that because it was good for them through trial and error or whatever they realize that hey periodically abstaining from food makes us stronger if you eat all the time constantly day in day out week
and week out month in month out that's not that good for you there are periods that you should feast and there are periods you should fast so religion set days or weeks or months even where you should fast so it's like whoa why did they do that and are they just way ahead of us in terms of understanding the human body like we get so you know enamored of our own you know intelligence and Science and so on that we think they're you know that they didn't know what they're talking about maybe maybe they knew
more about what they were talking about and science is just catching up and saying oh this process of autophagy that you activate with fasting this could be really important for longevity uh for other things I'm not saying you should do it like every month or whatever if you look at the way that people do it they don't do it like you know they don't do like five days a month or something it's they do it once a year or once every few months how long does a toughage you take to kick in is it 72
hours did you say um nobody knows but probably it's and it depends on probably how much protein you eat protein is the key um sort of when you eat protein autophagy just stops so low protein you can activate it it's probably somewhere around 20 to 30 hours so you'll see a lot of religions for example they'll have like a 24-hour fast right one day that you're not supposed to eat or something like that and maybe that's the way to cleanse your body not just of the glucose and the fat but also the excess proteins that
are are are old they're junky I mean you think about renovating your bathroom or something like that right the first thing you got to do you got to throw out the you know 1970s tub and the avocado green toilet that's the first thing you got to do you got to get rid of it you got to break down before you can rebuild better well autophagy might be that way to break down some of the stuff that you actually can't break down any other way if your body's full of all this junky protein you can't get
rid of it is there an evolutionary explanation for the role of autophagy do you think I think there is actually I think there's a huge uh number of reasons why people uh do it one of it um this whole idea that fasting actually activates the body for example um is is very interesting because I think it's like if you're a caveman for example or cave woman and it's winter and there's nothing to eat if your body starts to shut down then evolutionarily you're going to die right because you have less energy you can't go out
and Hunt so our body is just not that stupid so what it does it says okay well I'm going to give you more energy so I'm going to activate the body but then I'm going to uh change where you're getting your energy from you're not going to get the energy from the food you're going to get it from your body fat stores which is your stored food right you stored food for a reason so that's why I think some of the the fasting has a lot of evolutionary benefits because it increases your energy it it
it lowers the glucose so if if you look at the blood glucose the blood glucose goes down so in times of stress and so on your your body actually naturally fasts if you get sick you get a flu or something you stop eating first thing you do right you just want to drink some water and stuff why because your body wants to lock down the glucose because the bacteria love glucose your body can run on fat but the bacteria want the glucose so you fast to lock down the glucose so there's a lot of evolutionary
reasons why the fasting might be good for you know bacterial infections taking care of things increasing your energy increasing your concentration at a time that you're not like when you're not eating you're actually getting more mental capacity and more energy because you need it in order to go hunt interesting as you'll know if you've listened to this podcast before I'm an investor in a company called hu I'm on their board and they sponsor this podcast and I have a very exciting announcement to make this product called Daily Greens is one of the most highly requested
products at hu but it's never been sold in the UK before until now it's often difficult to get all of the greens into our diet that we need to have a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy body and with Hues Daily Greens product with one scoop every morning a very very delicious scoop you can get 91 vitamins minerals and Whole Food sourced nutrients into your diet the most important Point here is I genuinely believe it tastes delicious it's May my favorite heu product ever for all the reasons I've described so if you want access to
this product the link is in the description below it launches in the UK in January because of the demand I'm pretty sure it's going to sell out what is what is the most interesting thing or the most you know use the word interesting a lot or fascinating what is the most fascinating thing that we haven't talked about I think to me the most fascinating thing is uh other than for intermittent fasting because a lot of the stuff we thought about it was wrong uh in fact the opposite but the the most interesting thing I think
is in the field of type 2 diabetes because it's such an important disease um if you look at the number of people being affected with type two diabetes it's skyrocketing so we had since the 1970s an increase in obesity then we had an increase in type two diabetes and I think the most fascinating thing the most promising thing I've heard in a long time is that you can actually start to reverse this disease by changing the diet and and I think what's interesting is that you have to understand that type 2 diabetes is largely a
dietary disease and so we treated it with drugs for a long time and if you give drugs to a dietary disease well you're never going to fix it because you haven't identified the core problem and fixed it you need to change the diet to fix that dietary problem then the disease goes away and now we have data on intermittent fasting for example and also uh low carbohydrate diets Dr David win published his data in the in the UK on reversing type 2 diabetes with uh reducing carbohydrates which is showing that you can reduce about 50%
of the people and put them into a completely drug-free remission State like basically cure 50% of those type two diabetics who are at risk of cancer at risk of heart disease at risk of Strokes at risk of blindness at risk of kidney disease nerve damage infections all these people you can fix just by changing their diet either cutting down the carbohydrates or using intermittent fasting and it's free and anybody can do it I'm not talking about a drug that costs thousands of dollars I'm not talking about a surgery which is only available to the the
the 1% I'm talking about a treatment which is intermittent fasting which is available to everybody in the entire world for free and yet has the power to completely reverse their disease and make them so much healthier so the question is why don't we do it I couldn't answer that question for you I try to do my part to tell people but you know did you know I was going to ask you that question h no I was gonna ask you why don't we do it no what systems incentives money I think it is I think
it's you know the real reason is I think that people are slow to catch new ideas like when people hear about new ideas and I'm talking about academic doctors and so on there's an intrinsic resistance to change so I started talking about intermittent fasting say 2016 when the Obesity code was published I talked about it about reversing type 2 diabetes around the same time um and uh it's just they're just very slow to say hey this makes a lot of sense because for them they've invested so much in this calories in calories out model they've
built their entire careers on saying that it's it's your fault that you're fat right it's it's the foods that you ate it's the calories that you ate instead of trying to get to a deeper understanding so people are very reluctant to change in fact I mean it's been 10 years and you see the public the interest in intermittent fasting has skyrocketed and yet most doctors still won't prescribe it they won't talk about it they know nothing about it there's how much teaching do doctors get about intermittent fasting and why it might be helpful probably zero
like why we have this amazing tool and people you know doctors call it a fad right it's a fad diet well it's been around for 2,000 plus years that's a long long long fad right it's it's proven effective if you don't eat you're going to lose weight what's simpler than that if you don't eat you're going to use up your blood glucose your diabetes will get better what's wrong with that it's not hard to understand the diabetes code I've got the diabetes Journal here in front of me and put simply it talks about step one
being to put less sugar in and step two being burn the sugar off yeah and and step one which relates to putting more sugar in is all about um low carbohydrate diets right cutting down the carbohydrates uh yeah that's that's one effective way of cutting down the type 2 diabetes in fact the American Diabetes Association and their sort of um nutritional journals they talk about it uh having the most scientific evidence of any diet there's no diet with more evidence for reversing type 2 diabetes than cutting down the carbohydrates and then step two about burning
the sugar off and that's where fasting comes into the picture yeah I mean if you think about it there's there's it's it's not that hard to understand everybody can understand it you don't eat you're going to lose weight right I mean it's it's such a simple powerful tool but it it threatens the whole apple cart all these doctors all these professors which have built their entire reputations all these uh systems that are in place person TR yeah personal trainers work on a different level because they talk about more exercise umies calories out I think when
we talk about calories on this show some times I think the people that get quite offended tend to be um personal trainers because I think they would say they've got case studies of telling one of their clients to monitor their calories and they saw a reduction in weight so they for them that means it works there's calories in calories out model um it again it it is that but it's a simplistic understanding that's that's that's my whole point it's sort of like if AR to say to you why did the Titanic crash right and most
people would say hidden Iceberg well that's very simplistic that's not the right answer the right answer is it was going too fast right if you think the right answer to why did the tanic crashes because it HD an iceberg you'd say the solution is to hit less icebergs which is the same as eat less calories or drink less alcohol that's a very superficial understanding you have to get to the deeper level which is say why did the Titanic hit that Iceberg it was going too fast and there was all these icebergs and it was going
too fast for where it was so then you say it needs to slow down now you've identified that deeper understanding same as with calories you can say eat less calories and for some people work but for some people it's like why are you eating so many calories is it because you're hungry why are you hungry is it because all those calories that you're eating are going immediately into storage you're eating white bread and jam and sugar and all of going directly into storage which is leaving you hungry which is making you eat too many calories
so in the end yes you are eating more calories but that's the sort of first order thinking and not the second order thinking that we need to be doing and that's what the OIC and so on starts to address is the hunger issue and this is really what all your work addresses and it's really the first time I've heard someone talk to me about obesity and weight gain through the lens of hormones never really I've never heard that before and really reading through your work was really Illuminating because it allowed me to change my frame
and it's as you say when we're just focusing on the surface it's very easy to fail because we need to understand the first principles of what's going on underneath the surface for that long-term success to stand a chance of occurring and I think everyone listening to this who's struggled with weight or obesity or whatever else um can relate to this idea that something's not working in you know if there was any diet that work there wouldn't be a thousand of them yeah and I think the other thing is to understand that it's not the personal
failing that we make it out to be which is I think extremely unfair because obviously there's something within the system within the food environment within the system of how we're framing it which is making a lot of people overweight but it's not because they don't have willpower or because they're weak or these other number of reasons that we stigmatize obesity because we look at it from that calories in calories out framework right we say you're eating too many calories you must be weak as opposed to you're eating too many calories what why is it that
you're eating too many calories why are you hungry all the time in a word then if you had to describe what you think about this idea of calories in calories out what is that word I would say that it's shallow it's correct if you don't think about it too hard anybody who focuses in on thermodynamics and calories hasn't really thought about the problem enough that's what I think so in the end it is correct just like alcohol in alcohol out you know hitting the iceberg yes it did hit an iceberg that's why it but it
was going too fast right or alcohol in yes if you drink less alcohol you'll cure your alcoholism but you won't cure the PTSD that caused you you to drink correct but not helpful exactly that's exactly right it's it's it's it is correct but it's sort of not getting to that root deeper cause that we need to in order to help people and that's causing us to blame them so what we're doing which I think is very unfair is blaming the victim like do you think this person who's trying to lose 50 lbs needs you to
tell them that need need to lose 50 lbs absolutely not that's only going to be the 10,000th time they've heard it it's interesting because one of our guests talked about the role of compassion and kindness in weight loss and now through the lens of understanding cortisol now I can understand how kindness and gratitude and being happy yeah you know for lack of a better word can help us lose weight and when we're not happy when we're resentful when we're low in gratitude um when we're bitter yeah we're more likely to gain weight and and and
other things help too because if you think about things like a sense of community it's very important lowest cortisol levels lowest cortisol is a way for you to relieve stress right talking to other people we did that we did of course limit that during covid and of course we saw a lot of problems but one of them was lonel and all these sort of things but again I always think about um you know people you know the way they are so if you look at a lot of religions for example it's like oh they were
so far ahead of us what did they do they brought people together every week oh you're building a sense of community fasting oh they all got together and fasted they all shared they're lowering their cortisol they're lowering their insulin levels they're staying healthy and and we in our big mcmansions right we we we eat the the ice cream for dinner and we live alone in this giant house and we wonder why we're not as as as happy as you know our grandparents or our parents before them because they understood the power of some of these
things that we're trying to get back to like the the weirdest thing is that I'm not trying to tell people something that's weird and unusual and you never thought about this before I'm trying to tell them about something that everybody in human history history has been exposed to which is intermittent fasting that's been a part of our human history whether it's through religion or whether it's through inadvertent whatever or whether it's through his cleansing and purifications and all this sort of stuff people have exposed it even in the English language breakfast break your fast you
need to feed then you need to fast then you need to break your fast so I'm not telling people anything different Jason thank you so much we um feel like we could talk for hours because I'm so there's so many sort of I was thinking about it like spiderwebs but there's so many little branches we could go off on as it relates to hormones and the impact of hormones on the human body you have this other book as well called the PCOS plan um preventing and reversing polycystic ovary syndrome which is a you know a
whole another conversation for another time but these books are so wonderful because they provide a new lens on an old conversation and a conversation that's lacked the depth that's required to make any significant progress on these subjects as we've seen obesity levels and other issues with weight have gone in the wrong direction for the last couple of decades and I think it's a more systemic understanding of these issues that will give us any chance of reversing it and that's exactly what your work does um everyone knows where to find you Dr Jason Fang will link
all of your work in the description below we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what is your greatest gift to the world I think if if if you know I suppose it's sounds very arrogant um but I really hope that my my work helps people sort of reverse the type two diabetes because that is really sort of one of the most close things that I deal with because
I deal with it professionally sort of every day um and helps break the stigma of not just the stigma but the understanding like like you know stimulates more thinking about weight loss how to lose weight more than calories in calories out I mean it's so sort of Pie in the Sky because you know it's there's a whole you know worldwide sort of instit tionalized fossilized almost you know thinking around calories it's all about calories sort of thing so to for me to upset it seems ridiculous but I hope that I can at least start that
conversation to say hey let's think about these things let's think about the hormones let's think about reversing type two diabetes let's think about all getting together and helping each other to become so much healthier not through drugs and not through more surgery and not with you know weird and new things that you've never heard of but with the tried and the true sort of oldest thinking that has been there right it's it's to me it's I I sometimes think about this crazy I like why do I think I can even do that right it's just
ridiculous it's so much huis but you know I I can only try right because I I see in my own practi practice how much good it's done for some people so it drives me to say I need to bring it to more people I need to to to explain it to them if they want to be helped they will be helped but if they don't want to understand it's okay I'm not trying to force myself to do anything but you know that's what I hope my greatest gift will be um but at the same time
I sort of think that's just you know you're crazy if you can think you can do that but well it's The Crazy Ones that change the world Dr Jason um it's the crazy ones that changed the world and even with you know your conversation around intermittent fasting has changed many many lives that you'll never get to meet I imagine many many millions many many millions because it's even brought the conversation to this show before you entered the room many many months and months and months and almost a year ago people started talking on the show
about intermittent fasting and that's in many respects due to the work that you've done to further that conversation and now your work continues to highlight the fact that type 2 diabetes is a reversible disease in many cases and I think again that's going to save you know tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of lives over the coming coming decades and years so thank you for what you do Dr Jason um it's an huge honor to get to sit with you today and I feel wiser and more enlightened and like someone has turned the
lights on in a certain part of my knowledge because of this conversation so I thank you for that tremendously thank you so much it's been [Music] great one we are working with an exciting new sponsor on this podcast Shopify I'm sure you guys have heard of Shopify if you haven't been living under a rock but for those that don't know Shopify is a Commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide it is pretty incredible they provide everything you need to start your business and it's super simple to get started and to get your business out there
here at the Dio we've used Shopify for a variety of our different product drops the latest being the conversation cards and without the help of Shopify that wouldn't have been possible it's mine and my team's goto website for all things Commerce related so I'm giving you guys the chance to trial Shopify for $1 that's right $1 sign up for a $1 trial for a month by searching shopify.com Bartlet all lowercase keep it to yourself and let me know how you get on do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who
liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy [Music] it
