The SIMPLE Way To Make Your Body KILL BELLY FAT! | Dr Jason Fung

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 over again now but

the internet says that it really came from you I know the 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 it 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 how it's going to cause you to gain weight and be tired and hungry and all these sorts of 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 got 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 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 are 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're 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 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 ratees going to 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 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 masal 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 metabol 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's 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 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 in 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 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 do you fast oh I do that regularly yeah and what does your fast look like because I've heard of all these different types of fasting 36 hours 72 hours 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 6 that's a 6-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 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 because that's what it's there

for that body fat is not there for looks it's there for you as a source as a store of calories so fasting just lets you use that there's nothing wrong with it leptin is this hormone that essentially brings down my Hunger makes me less hungry is it therefore possible that people are becoming leapin resistant there is leap in 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 Le 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 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 flow 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 it's 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 P for example you know it's it's turned into a very fine powder then you snort it so you get 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 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 foods 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 necessarily 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 glucose you get this massive dopamine surge right and your body's like yo love it then the next time you're like okay give me that fine carbohydrate what about protein cuz 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 BCD 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 whe powder protein or whatever 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 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 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 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 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 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 institutionalized 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 2 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 hubris but you know I I can only try right because I I see in my own 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 understand this 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 change 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 intim and 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 disas 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 a 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 great if you love the dver CEO brand and you watch this Channel please do me a huge favor become part of the 15

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