Health Doctor REVEALS Why You CAN'T LOSE WEIGHT! | Jason Fung & Lewis Howes

the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery it's less it's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome welcome everyone to the school of greatness podcast very excited about our guest today his name is jason fung dr jason fung is a as a physician author researcher and he's got groundbreaking science with a number of his books about diabetes obesity uh and fasting he's got a book called the diabetes code the obesity code and the complete guide to fasting sold for millions millions of copies sold and you've got a new book out called the cancer code which i'm very excited to talk about the cancer code and i wanted to start with a question to ask you what are the main causes of cancer as it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or um the early stages of cancer what are the main causes of cancer yeah that's a great question and that's something that we've always been trying to deal with and sometimes some people say well we don't know what causes cancer that's sort of a cop out because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer and these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens and the world health organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens but if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people you can look at the sort of a couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer and the the biggest one of course is tobacco smoke so that's sort of by far and away the the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35 and these estimates were from 2015. so it's it was higher before when more people are smoking but as a contributor to a cancer it's the biggest interestingly the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet so it's a huge huge part of what contributes to cancer in general and far outstrips so those two are way above any other causes of cancer so when you worry about things such as radiation or you know chemicals sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that they do cause cancer but the contribu contribution in a whole population is very small so what's interesting about diet is that we we know this from our studies but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer and that's where things sort of bog down a lot so initially in the 70s people talked about fiber so people thought about oh hey well you know maybe if you eat a lot of fiber what you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer turns out that wasn't true then the next thought was hey maybe it's dietary fat so if you remember the 80s and 90s there's this huge movement against fat that you know all fat is bad for you it caused the heart disease and all this sort of stuff much of which is sort of um been you know overturned at this point but there's this thought maybe it causes cancer too turns out that wasn't true either then people talked about vitamins so maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency so we did many many studies millions of dollars decades of research where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer so we tested vitamin a didn't work vitamin d b didn't work folic acid didn't work vitamin c didn't work vitamin d didn't work vitamin e didn't work selenium didn't work omega-3 fatty acids didn't work so all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer and the the so we were sort of stuck at that point in the mid 2000s saying oh no it's the diet but what part of the diet and that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity related disease so what happened of course is that in the 70s 80s and 90s people didn't really think about it but then we had this obesity epidemic so it became a bigger and bigger problem so uh obesity in in 2003 when they started to look at the studies that was the first really definitive studies that said hey you know obesity is actually a huge risk factor as well as type 2 diabetes and and both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer long so it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking like if you're talking lung cancer obesity plays almost no role in it right that's smoking or if you have asbestos which causes mesothelioma which is a cancer of the lining of the lung again obesity plays no role but things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer which are sort of really important cancers they actually are obesity related cancers so that was the sort of big link and uh to this you know at this point the world health organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancers which is huge because from 2003 we didn't even know like when i went to medical school nobody thought obesity caused cancer really it's almost as big as smoking it's a huge huge thing so therefore if you know that that's super powerful because if you can maintain a normal weight you're going to reduce just like stopping smoking right you're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer but aren't there a lot of healthy people out there or non-obese people that also get cancer oh absolutely because there's a lot of different things that go on and that's what i spend the first half of the book talking about is how the sort of cancers develop so it's not just about obesity just like you can smoke forever and not get lung cancer but it raises your risk so same as what are the other factors if you're say you're there's people out there they're super healthy they're working out they're eating well but then they get cancer they're yeah under 15 body fat 12 body fat what are those other factors of people getting cancer yeah the rest of it we actually know very little about so we need to know more about those because uh certain things so smoking and diet are probably your biggest factors and then there's a whole there's like a hundred different other risk factors for cancer these are the other carcinogens that we talked about but also things such as you know background radiation and sun exposure you know like if you get too much sun for example so there's all sorts of other things and genetics plays a role but one of the big mistakes i think we made is that we focus so much on the genetics part of it thinking that well this is sort of a random mutation that causes cancer not sort of which puts the puts the onus on sort of this random luck uh sort of uh idea that it's just bad luck my parents had this my grandparents had this gene so i have this i'm gonna get cancer yeah exactly and some people think that that's sort of a death sentence like if you take brca which is a certain type of gene for example so this is the gene that angelina jolie for example got diagnosed with her her mom had cancer i think her you know an ant had cancer so she got tested and she had the gene and people think well for sure you're going to get you know cancer but it turns out that if you look at the incidence of cancer if you have brca if you have that gene in like you know in the 30s and 40s and 50s at risk of breast cancer was like 30 compared to sort of like 80 in modern day america so what's the difference even though you have the same genes what's the difference between those two situations and it comes down to the lifestyle so the point about cancer is that cancer is like a seed so if you have the genetics you have the propensity to develop cancer and this seed of cancer actually exists in all of our cells and actually not just all our cells but in all multicellular animals have that sort of seed of cancer so what's important then is you can't do anything about the seed but what you can do something about is the soil which is that if you provide a fertile sort of soil for that seed to germinate then you're going to increase your risk of developing this cancer and cancer is not a rare disease i mean it affects like one in 10 of us one in eight of us something like that so it's something that we really have to think about as we live longer because it is one of these really important things it sounds like you know in the next 30 to 60 years if we don't figure out how to reverse this or solve this or i guess create bad soil for the seed of cancer um by creating healthy uh habits in other ways it seems like this is going to accelerate where it was 30 percent i guess 20 30 years ago or 50 years ago now and now it's 80 i guess it's going to be even more in 20 to 30 years right oh absolutely and the the trend is very clear because if you look at the uh you know the biggest killers of americans it's always been heart disease and cancer so if you go back sort of to 70 so 50 years ago you look at heart disease number one killer of americans that's heart attacks strokes that kind of thing cancer was a fairly distant second but the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very very quickly and the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very very very slowly why is that it's it's because cancer is a very complex disease and the way we think about cancer we just don't know what it is so for such a common disease it's a total mystery why we get this cancer because if you think about it it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us that is if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer for example that cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells so what why would it want to do this that that is if you get cancer then the cancer grows and then it kills you and it kills itself in the in in it yeah why would this sort of thing ever develop it doesn't make any sense from a sort of uh that that looking at it that way but most diseases want to spread but they want to stay alive exactly exactly like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily it wants to be able to spread to affect in fact other people exactly and in the in you know if you're sort of bystander it just kills you uh you know along the way but that's not its primary purpose so the point about cancer is that we have never sort of understood what this is as a disease that is if you look at heart disease heart disease is caused by blockages and arteries so we develop all kinds of things so we develop drugs we develop blood thinners we develop you know you go in and you use a balloon to open up the artery you develop new technologies such as imaging technologies you develop ways to monitor patients so because you know what causes it because if you don't know what causes something it's really hard to fix like if you have a car and all you hear is a random plank and you don't know what the clanking is from it's really hard to fix it same thing with diseases if you have a disease like covid for example you know it's a virus well now at least you have somewhere that you can start that is okay it's a virus let's develop a vaccine or let's develop some antiviral drugs but if you have no idea what this disease actually is then you have nowhere to go so that's what i talk about is how how we how we think about cancer the paradigm of cancer as a disease what causes it you have to first understand what it is and that's been the real mystery the medical mystery is what is cancer and the the way we look at cancer has changed significantly over the last 10 years right and most people don't even understand that so it's a very interesting story from that standard yeah it's interesting you mentioned you know the the heart disease uh i saw dr steven gundry who endorsed the back of your cancer code book and he's been on my show a few times and he's a guy who did 10 000 heart surgeries and realize that like the things that he was doing on the surface level to create temporary relief people were coming back in because they weren't solving the root problem which was a lot of it around diet and lifestyle and that's what i'm hearing you say is that diet is a massive contributor to cultivating the seed of cancer to grow and flourish with the wrong side what is it is it possible is it possible in your mind to reverse cancer by the right diet and by fasting which is something you talk about a lot oh yeah because the thing is that if you like once you have the cancer it's really hard because that's sort of like you know if you if you don't change the oil in your car then your car breaks down then you say oh i'm going to start changing you oh my god well yeah that's good but you need you know a lot more than that it's the same thing once you actually develop the cancer then it's really hard to fix from a diet standpoint you really need the drugs that we've spent you know millions and billions of dollars developing over these last 30 years but in terms of preventing cancer there's actually no reason why you couldn't because you can look at sort of people who live in a traditional society for example so you can take a look at say the inui or the american indian sort of before before sort of they became westernized and or you can look at the african people before they're sort of assimilated into a western culture and interestingly those those uh peoples were actually considered some of them were considered immune to cancer there was so little cancer that they thought that the inui for example or what used to be called the eskimos actually could not get cancer so the university queen's university in kingston ontario they used to send an expedition up to the arctic circle every year to study why these these inuit couldn't get cancer of course as they became westernized and started eating you know sugar and white flour then they started getting all the same cancers that we did in africa for example this this fellow by the name of denis burkitt who is a sort of a missionary and doctor when he got down there he's like wow in my he he was like look at these the difference the the people who live traditionally in africa get no cancer no colon cancer but the minute they transition to a western style civilization with their foods with their that you know the whole thing they actually start to get cancer you don't find cancer when when that so it's it was called actually a disease of civilization so all of these diseases obesity diabetes and cancer were not found in people living traditionally so the point is not that you know one is that they didn't live as long but the point is that if you can find and understand what makes it you know protective from them why this soil is sort of soil like we all have to seed that the soil was different what it is about that if we can understand that then you can you can you can reduce your risk substantially to the point where your you know your risk is very low again as an example if you take a japanese or chinese woman from japan or from shanghai and you move them to san francisco within a couple of generations the risk of breast cancer approximately tripled crazy so it's crazy exactly but that's great hope because because you know the root of it that you can go back to a different way of living exactly because if you can and remember shanghai and japan and so on they're they're you know modern societies so if you can understand what it is about the the diet about the lifestyle that's so important you could actually take that woman in san francisco and reduce her risk of breast cancer by a third so that's very very powerful knowledge so what would you say are the the five foods we must eliminate to support us in preventing cancer what are those five key things that you like and if you can get rid of as much of this as possible it's going to really support your chances yeah i think that's a good question and it's um sort of sugar is probably one of the very very important things that we really need to lower because that really supports it and it gets to how cancer develops a lot of the refined foods and people taught and the most that we eat like the one thing we eat more than anything else tends to be refined carbohydrates um so you know white bread and that kind of thing that's probably the most important thing uh is the sugar and refined uh grains refined anything is probably bad for you so you know even if you're not talking about carbohydrates but refined say oils you should eat natural oils like eat eat foods that are sort of in the natural state and refined uh meats like um you know it's you know eating bologna for example people talk about meat all the time that's like there's a big difference between bologna and you know grass-finished beef sort of thing it's there's a huge difference because one is jam packed full of chemicals and other crap uh and one is just beef right and people have been eating beef for thousands of years so those are fine foods to refine carbs but also refined fats and refined proteins probably those play a decent role although the evidence is lower and then the other thing that is really important the fifth thing that's probably very important is likely uh the frequency that we eat that is eating all the time provides that sort of fertile soil so to understand why this is you have to get back to sort of how cancer develops so you have to understand that cancer almost develops evolves almost as a separate species from us so when you have a breast cancer cell for example it originated from a normal breast cell but after it evolves it it grows or doesn't grow depending on growth factors and it's almost a separate species from us that is it will grow and it won't the normal breast cell or a normal lung cell they will do everything to you know play on the team right so they're always supporting the body you're part you're a team player those cancer cells are not team players basically they're out for themselves and the enemy coming to attack you that's right it's it's like the guy who's just trying to pad his stats you know right it's like you should have passed it's like [Laughter] but that's the point that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival that is it will grow and it will grow at the expense of its neighbors so it will keep growing and it will destroy everything around it so it will move around for example so a breast cancer cell will move around the body and that's not for the good of the whole body right it's for the good of itself it's trying to spread itself around so you've got to realize that the the the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism and it sounds very strange to say okay we have this foreign organism almost like an infection in us but that's actually how our body sees that cancer that is our immune system actually detects is a very powerful um you know it kills stuff but it's very powerful so it has to be rained in because you don't want it destroying you know normal parts of the body so it recognizes certain cells as foreign and certain cells itself and cancers are actually innately uh seen as foreign cells so it is a foreign invader almost that has evolved from us but during the development of this cancer it will grow or not grow depending on growth signals so our body has certain nutrient sensors so nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available so when you eat certain certain hormones like insulin and mtor will go up and that tells our body that food is available we should grow right because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food right it's just natural if there's no food you've got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells so if you have if you're eating all the time and you're always you're always activating these nutrient sensors you're actually telling your body grow grow grow grow so if you eat six eight times a day you're telling your body your cells in your body grow grow grow grow if you eat fewer times like three times a day or you do intermittent fasting if you don't eat at all what you're going to do is shut down those growth signals and this cancer will have a diff more difficult time to grow so if you grow breast cancer cells in the lab for example you can't do it without insulin it will actually wither up and die so therefore if you know that then you can say well if i and that's one of the secrets insulin insulin comes from eating any food or is this only sugar mostly it's carbohydrates and protein so you know but the nutrient sensors come from different foods so different foods will activate different nutrient sensors but the point is that if you don't eat like fasting for example one is you're going to lower your insulin levels which will you know lower the growth overall growth signaling in our body which is a good thing for adults and adults growth is not good generally you you stay the same size you don't want to be growing too much because the you know growth high growth environment of course lets the cancer sort of grow out of control and that was the secret to why vitamins for example was not a good thing because it's basically growth it's it's it supports growth of cells and what they found in a lot of studies was when they gave people these vitamin supplements they actually got more cancer they didn't get less cancer they got more cancer so in fact it's just like if you spray spread fertilizer on an empty field you want the grass to grow but what grows are a bunch of weeds because you've put down all this growth signaling uh stuff so therefore all you get is the weeds of the body are so are supplements and vitamins bad for us then there's no there's no evidence that it's really bad for you when you give high doses in these studies you do get certain ones so folic acid for example and beta-carotene which is a precursor to vitamin a and those two studies there is actually a suggestion that you actually get more cancer from them because in our current situation in north america most of us are not vitamin deficient most of us actually have too much you actually want to slow down the growth really and this is why obesity and type 2 diabetes are so intimately linked with cancer is because both conditions are conditions where we have too much insulin in our body so we want to lower insulin overall because insulin is one of the main causes of the fertilizer for cancer to potentially grow exactly and and there's several ways to do that one is to change either the foods that you eat and that is the sugar for example the refined carbohydrates that make up the bulk of our diet and the other thing is to change the frequency with which you eat because you can affect both things so just like if you're for example to pay you know ten dollars and you pay it every day adds up quickly right if you have a coffee every day and it's like you know five or seven bucks at starbucks every day every day every day it adds up so just like that it's not just the amount that you're paying which is not much but it's the frequency right same thing with the foods it's not just the amount that you eat or what it is that you eat it's how often you eat it so if you're eating now six eight times a day well that's a lot worse if you eat once a day right that's just basic math like you can't get around that and the problem is of course that if you look at how people eat today compared to sort of 1970 it's very different so in 1970 people ate three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner no snacks nobody ate snacks back then it's a snack culture like smacking all day exactly and people say it's good for you people say oh you should eat multiple times in the day six times a day it's good for you but nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do right it's not like your great-grandparents you know working in the factory they're taking off every two hours to make themselves a little you know ham sandwich or something right it was like there's work to do you eat when you have time so you know in the 70s it's funny because i always say you have breakfast lunch and dinner and that was it if you wanted an after school snack your mom said no you're going to ruin your dinner and if you wanted a bedtime snack she would have said no you should ate more at dinner right right you should have finished your meal finished exactly and that was the point and nobody ate not a lot of desserts and all that nowadays of course when you look at the studies people are eating five six times a day you even look at schools it's like you know uh oh you know they're gonna have breakfast then they're gonna have a mid-morning snack then they're gonna have lunch then they're gonna have an after-school snack then they're gonna eat dinner and then if they play soccer in between the half of soccer parents think that you need to feed them like cookies it's like okay well you know i played soccer growing up and nobody chased me around with a bunch of cookies we had a great time gradually we didn't need it right and but but that's six times a day every single day and it's ingrained into us um you know a few years ago when my son was you know going on a trip or something the school said well you should pack him two snacks like why why would you want to give them a bunch of snacks like they're not good for you but there's this idea now that it is good for you but it's it's it's tough because it's what is what does snacking do to our body or brain uh our digestion system when we're every couple hours putting something in our mouth what even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar like what is that doing to our brain and our digestive system yeah and this is the big thing that i've had and uh you know i talk about this in the obesity code is because our body really um exists in sort of one of two states you're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state okay so when you're in the fed state you're eating insulin is going up and as insulin goes up its job like its normal job is to tell your body to store those calories okay so you can store it as glycogen which is sugar or it can store it as body fat but that's the point so you lunch or dinner there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point so you want to store that so when you don't eat which is any time you don't eat is called fasting so when you fast that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage right and that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage so in the fed state insulin goes up you're storing calories or body fat in the fasted state you're not eating your insulins dropping and you're using calories so you're in one or the other you can't do both at the same time so if now you say okay what i'm eating i'm storing i'm not using calories is that right every time i store i'm not burning body fat you're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar for example uh and that sugar is going to signal that hey sugar's coming in use the sugar that's coming in don't burn anything off my body yeah exactly keep on all that stored fat keep it just keep piling it on right exactly so the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat so if you are now eating constantly so the minute you get up somebody tells you oh you have to eat you can't skip breakfast and then you have to snack all day long so now if you look at studies the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes that's the average so if you start eating at 8am you don't stop till 10 45 pm that's on average that's the average 14 hours you mean a 14 hour span of eating from the start to finish right you may not be eating every moment but you're eating every few hours within a 14-hour window it takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state so the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast lunch dinner and by six o'clock you're done you know boom you're you know now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say oh you need time to digest right that's what she sort of said but the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times and that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim now if you're eating constantly then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories the problem of course is that insulin stays high which tends to keep your body storing calories your body so the high insulin for example blocks fat burning you can't burn your fat stores because your body is like the instructions that i'm getting is to store energy not use energy i want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food the problem of course is that there's never a time there's no food right every day is the same same thing right 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating and that's the point so now if you understand the problem you can say well how am i going to change this well it's simple increase the amount of time that you're not eating and that's all intermittent fasting is if you eat one meal a day for example or if you within a eight hour window or a four-hour window or whatever what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored which is body fat predominantly but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat like that body fat is not there for looks is there for you to use right and that's the whole point what's so bad about using it if you don't eat you're gonna burn it well so again go back to the 70s and everybody says oh you can't fast you can't fast well you know they're eating breakfast lunch dinner and if you're a naughty boy you got sent to bed without dinner so you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m 20 hours you look good the next day you're like a clean you got a six-pack it's burning fat exactly and nobody died nothing bad happens right there was nothing wrong with that and hopefully you learned your lesson too right and and that's the whole point is that there's nothing wrong it's a natural part of our human physiology if we couldn't survive without eating like we would not be here today because when we were cavemen and cave women they didn't have food every day yeah exactly they couldn't they there might be a stretch of three four five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat which they did and that was the whole point so let's let our body you know use it because that's the most natural thing to do what's the process for you your day-to-day life do you eat one meal a day two meals a day do you fast every month for a day are you always doing intermittent fasting is there a downside to intermittent fasting what's your process yeah i usually do a lot of sort of i rarely eat breakfast and i'll tell you that it didn't come i mean i started this in medical school and that was mostly because i really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like you know i'd wake up literally like five minutes before i left before you know i brushed my teeth put on some clothes and rolled out the door i was you know it's just a it's just that the way i was right and so i i don't eat breakfast now because again people say you have to eat breakfast you have to eat but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast if you don't eat breakfast what's gonna happen well my body which is now burning fat because i've had eight hours of sleep it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar um it's just gonna keep doing it right there's nothing wrong with it so um so a lot of times i try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours and then once in a while when i get very busy i will do a 24 hour fast which is a one meal a day and then every so often i'll do a longer fast and the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially it's it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals so i often have dinner with my family for example and doing those longer fast is really really disruptive to that sort of thing which is why when you look at traditional societies like if you look at say you know during uh major religions for example there will be a period of fasting that's sort of universal so you know everyone's doing it so no one's feeling exactly stressed when they smell the food exactly so if you're if it's like good friday or during lent or during ramadan for muslims or you know during yom kippur for jews or whatever everybody's fasting so it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there whereas nowadays if you fast and i've done this it's just really hard to do it's not physically it's not hard but it's hard and i do it mostly um you know when i when i've gained a bit of weight usually after the holidays and after a vacation i will sort of schedule a uh longer fast right after because i know that i can lose that weight very quickly but that means i can enjoy myself like a couple years ago i went on a cruise and really ate too much just a lot i had a lot and i knew it then i could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff so i did sort of a three or four day fast and i'll tell you by the next week i was back to my normal weight well that's great because a week and but i got to enjoy the whole week prior where i really didn't look at what i was eating or how often i was eating or anything i was like this is my vacation i'm doing this but at the same time i know hey i've got this next you know after this week the week after you know very little to eat and and and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it right yeah it's almost like either every day don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time whether it be four six eight hours which i'm hearing is kind of the uh which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time is that right yeah yeah i mean if you want to lose weight you can do very well of course with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8 a.m to 6 p.m which in a 14-hour fast every single night remember they're doing for 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it like that's a secret because they don't even think about that that's just a period of time that they're not eating right but now of course the the the traditions are different you can eat anywhere you want you can eat in the theater you can eat at your desk in a car like in the 70s stuff like that didn't exist you didn't eat in a meeting in a board room for example now you go to a meeting in a board room when there's food everywhere donuts there's donuts and cookies right somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that right it's like well why we're having a meeting here right so that's the uh that's the thing so you could do very well with that kind of you know eight hour eating window for 10 hour eating window you can do very well with it but if you're not doing well then you can extend it and that's the beauty of it you could extend it as much as you want right so if you think about fasting you could go three days you could go five days you could go 30 days people do that all the time but no food no food yeah so if you look if you think about um fasting so uh the ad what the amount of energy that you need so a pound of fat has 3 500 calories roughly if you need about 1800 calories so that's for like a regular person not like an athlete or somebody's working out a lot it takes about half a pound of fat per day so if you're dealing with a lot of obese people like a hundred pounds overweight you could go 200 days you know if you want to lose 100 pounds you could go 200 days without eating before you go and survive and survive exactly and be okay exactly be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories right it's very efficient that's why we developed this it's to keep you alive when there's no food around exactly so use it does it affect your digestive system does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time yeah and what happens when you start eating again does that affect your again your stomach your intestines your choline your metabolism what's affected there and this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do when you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint assuming of course you're not malnourished right i mean i'm assuming if you're the average american who's you know 10 20 30 pounds overweight um then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits so there's a lot of sort of myths around it one is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle and the truth is that you don't i mean when you you know if your body your body stores energy as body fat so people say oh you're going to burn muscle it's like well you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat but the minute you need it it starts burning muscle right like why would our body be so stupid and if it were so stupid how did we survive right and it's like you know if you save firewood all wint for the winter and then as soon as it gets cold you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire like why would you be so stupid right our body's just the same it's not that so you know and i know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise right so if you have uh you know lift heavy weights then your muscles become stronger it doesn't become stronger because you eat right that snake does nothing for building muscle like otherwise we'd be you know the strongest nation on earth right but we're not we're the fattest nation on earth so that's the whole problem right i mean you're confusing two completely different things um there is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say well you're burning muscle but you're not protein is not the same as muscle so our body has all kinds of protein including all the connective tissue like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place and some of that is often burned off so for example when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds they get all this flappy skin that's not excess fat that's excess protein so that's you know it's functional tissue that you've never used up so we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using um so another big myth so muscle burning is one thing the other big big myth is people talk about as uh starvation mode or metabolic rate so metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day the number of calories you burn in a day and this is what we see if you simply cut calories so this is a standard medical advice cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week what happens of course is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories so now you're actually not losing any weight that's what happens all the time because why does it stop why does it stop burning those calories well it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate so the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say generate body heat your liver your kidney your heart and so on we've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar what happens is that your body is going to start using less so because it doesn't like running a deficit right it's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year now you make fifty thousand you don't keep spending a hundred right it's it's you're gonna you're gonna get thrown into jail but so you reduce your expenditure same as a body so it's getting less so it's gonna use less and that's the natural reaction it's it's it's important because it's a survival response it cannot do anything different the difference like so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use yeah in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you but if you just do a little bit i'm gonna eat a little bit less today it's not gonna do that much it doesn't work and and people assume that if you go to zero which is fasting say you fast for a full day you have zero calories you don't die right because what happens is completely different now you've lowered your insulin so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body and as you do that you're now switching fuel sources so instead of using food as your fuel you're switching it into body fat just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric right so it's using food and then boom it goes okay i have no food coming in i need to switch over now into body fat and then it goes whoa i have like 500 000 calories of body fat here so why do i need to cut cut it down and the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat of course it's a problem but for people who have adequate stores of body fat which is most of us and truthfully most people do it for weight loss too much body fat then what happens is that there's so much there why wouldn't you use it because it's a fuel source that's all it is that's the way you have to look at the body fat if you're eating all the time you can never use your body fat because your your insulin's here your insulin's high you're using food then you get hungry so you eat some more right you have a snack you have a low-fat muffin you stay here there's you can only burn food all that stuff over there those 500 000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body so if you simply dial it down like this and say okay instead of 2 000 calories i'm going to eat 1 500 but i'm going to eat 10 times a day keeping myself here now you only have 1500 coming in you can only burn 1500 you can't access that if you go to zero you go boom and then your body burns the full 2000. so they did a study for example where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using they also measure their vo2 which as you know is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero then they measured it at four days of zero food and they were burning ten percent more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating the vo2 was 10 higher you're doing more work your body is actually not shutting down it's revving itself up and again there's a good physiologic reason for that and we know that when insulin goes down when you switch yourself into this sort of uh you know mode that you're burning fat other hormones go up including your sympathetic nervous system which is your noradrenaline so you're actually pumping your body up the reason for that is sort of again it's a survival response so imagine again where cave been and it's winter and there's no food so if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker you're never gone again you're gonna die because every day is gonna be harder you're gonna circle the drain so our body's just not that stupid right so what they do is that your body says okay there's no food coming in boom i'm going to switch you over to body fat and then i'm going to pump you up so that you have energy you go out there you go kill that woolly mammoth you're focused you're clear in the zone everything exactly and that's that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up and the constant the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say well i i have to eat because i have to concentrate it's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat think about when you had a huge thanksgiving meal well were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football right you don't have any sort of focus but if you think about animals it's the same thing lions they just eat they're just like lounging around but if you're the hungry wolf that is not that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused he's ready to kill you same thing for us our level of concentration our mental ability mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry like if you think oh you're hungry for this hungry for that that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic it means you're focused so it's interesting because there was this book a few years ago called unbroken which is a biography of this fellow who got who went to the prisoner of war camp in world war ii japan and he was talking about starvation and he they were literally starving like there's they'd eat like almost nothing for the full day and he's talking about how his his uh his uh other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats so one guy was reading a book entirely from memory another guy learned all of norwegian in a week and he so the guy says this is simply the mental clarity of starvation so it was incredible it's like it was so widespread everybody was starving and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree and then you know in the ancient greece the ancient mathematician pythagoras he would require his students to fast in order to to come to his class because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility to learn this stuff and it's like wow this is incredible completely different than what we were taught but again same thing our body's actually ramping up ramping up because again our major advantage over the lions and tigers and bears is really the uh is really that uh mental uh ability but isn't there a isn't there like a period of time in the day for most people where they feel man i'm really hungry like i can't focus i can't concentrate because i'm starving like i want food now and it's actually hurting them and focusing it's almost like a window of time where you have to just deal with that period and then it switches on into okay i'm not hungry anymore i haven't eaten in a day but i'm not hungry anymore and i'm focused isn't there this kind of window of time there absolutely is so this is why it's important to get you know to understand what happens during fasting so you can prepare for it so if you look at hunger during fasting so they've done again studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called gorelin which is the hunger hormone the higher it is the hungrier you are turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner so you get hungry at you know 12 o'clock it's lunch time you get hungry so it's a learned response the question is what happens if you don't eat does hunger keep going up and up and up it doesn't in fact the gorilla actually peaks and then it just falls if you don't eat it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline which means that your level of hunger so at 12 30 1 o'clock you're hungry no question about it if you don't eat by three four o'clock that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat what happened well your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat you took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down so that's really interesting so if you know that it's a wave right you just have to let the sort of wave pass over you yeah well i often tell people you will get hungry okay don't don't pretend that you're not because you will what you got to do is prepare for it and say okay well if you get hungry then you either there's several things one stay busy you know keep doing stuff don't just think about how hungry you are so we all have had this where we're you know working on some kind of you know doing work at work or if you're doing some kind of you know home renovation or something i get this all the time where i'm like painting you know the house or something like that right and i'll just power right through because i just want to get it done and i'm not hungry at all because i'm so busy i'm so focused on doing the work that i just forgot about it right you see this all the time you know people who go to the casino and people play video games they just get so engrossed so that's one strategy the other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink by the time you finish you know a big cup of green tea the hunger will have passed but you know that it's going to pass and that's the point you know it's not going to get worse and worse and worse and and that's how you do it what's even more interesting actually is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three four five days the gorilla peaks and then after about two days it starts going down so by you know day two day three as you get to day four day five the hunger almost completely disappears it's actually fascinating if you've never done it because i've done a few of these four or five day fast and it's interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger there's a whole lot of hey that slice of pizza looks really good i really want to eat it right but there's no actual physical hunger so if i hadn't seen it which is hard now of course with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff i would actually you know gone right by and done it but the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with but it's not impossible because again one of the big uh objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it like it'll work sure if you don't eat you'll lose weight but nobody do it well you know that literally millions of people throughout history have done this look at ramadan you look at yom kippur you look at lent like when people say okay we're gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness right you know it's good friday we're not going to eat for this amount of time well that's that's how people did it right they supported each other there was no food around somebody's not frying up you know his steak while you're trying to afford making cookies yeah yeah exactly so that's how you do it right you get yourself a supportive community you know you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time and and that's how you get through it right and and and while you do that of course your body uses up the body fats you're going to lose weight it's going to use up the blood sugar which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic and its insulin is going to fall which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term as well as those other conditions obesity and type 2 diabetes which puts you at such high risk of cancer in the first place you're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body and it's completely free right you have to spend money on it yes and this is the parent that's crazy it's because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better heart attacks strokes cancer diabetes which is the leading cause of blindness of kidney disease of amputations the the the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery it's less it's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth you can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better it's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it the people you tell you oh you can't do it you can't do it it's like that's not true we all used to do it right if you think about you know you know a community of like you know on yom kippur like millions of jews around the world are doing or ramadan millions of muslims are doing it or you know millions of catholics are fasting during good friday like my my priest used to tell me all the time during lent you know fasting fat like that's all he talked about practically um so it's it's it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of these diseases and we don't have to charge anybody anything we're not trying to sell anybody anything we're just trying to tell you yes you can do it because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer then let your body burn off that sugar let your body burn off that fat a couple months ago i did a four day fast where i just had water and a black coffee a day and it felt incredible first couple days was challenging but by day three i was like i'm in the zone and i felt good i looked younger i felt healthier um i was doing it more of like seeing what i could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my you know kind of cleaning out my system i just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds it was burning a lot of excess fat um but i just felt better i felt more confident i felt like oh i could do something challenging which gave me more strength in my mind it was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways and i'm curious what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that that you've debunked i mean uh the the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you it's actually one of the healthiest things you can do as long as you're again not underweight and you're doing it safely right you're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing but there's this whole uh recent um scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy which has been you know very very topical people have been going crazy on it because in 2016 one of the nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers and what it showed is that when you fast and you turn down these nutrient sensors then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy an autophagy is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them right it breaks it down and recycles them and everybody thinks well if you're breaking down stuff that's bad for you right you're breaking down protein is bad for you it's good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you want to renovate for example say you want to renovate your bathroom the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there right that avocado green tub has to go otherwise you can't put in a new top right that's just the way it is that's just uh so your body works the same way the first thing you have to do is get rid of the old junky old protein you gotta break it down you gotta kill off those cells yeah you gotta just rip them off the body and let them whatever they flush out your skin or whatever they do right exactly the skin proteins the connective tissue all of that goes and it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need what happens is that everything starts to go and then the stuff you need like if you're still exercising your body's like hey i still need those muscles i'm going to rebuild that so that's the key that one of the things that activates during uh fasting is actually growth hormone so if you'll fast for 24 hours your growth hormone level is like four times what it is really when you're eating yeah and it sounds very strange why would growth hormone goes up well it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff as soon as you start to eat it you want to rebuild all of it so the nobel prize in medicine which is dr osuni said this is the body's intracellular recycling system so it's not let's flush out all our old stuff it's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff but if you think about it that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation right get rid of the old stuff bring in new stuff it's like renovating your body right so all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time so this is this whole you know in in people who are very interested in wellness a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on and and you get this this point where you're doing you know so you've done these longer fast it's like wow this is you just feel really good about yourself you know you're you're full of energy right and and this is the thing that i thought very strange when i did my first sort of three or four day fast it's like i have a ton of energy like i could feel like i could do anything my friend who used to work he said he's a doctor and he worked a lot of nights and stuff he said it felt like my brain was like on fire like i thought i could do anything and everything faster than i could and better than i could ever do it before interestingly another friend of mine who's a cardiologist so he's a heart specialist he says you know i used to he played piano for his whole life he says there's always this piece that i couldn't play and then as soon as i started fasting i noticed that i could start to do it wow that's incredible right and and the doctors when i talk to the doctors they actually instantly see the logic of what i'm talking about because they know the physiology what happens in the human body because what i'm talking about which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting which is oh you can't do it and it's dangerous and it's really bad for you whereas the opposite is true right it's actually part of a natural cycle right it's feeding and fasting feeding and fasting right you don't feed all the time you don't fast all the time but we've gone so far into that one thing so yeah i mean this this whole point of autophagy is very very interesting very topical if you look at studies of longevity for example in in animals the only thing that really makes people makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction and so even almost 100 years ago people were talking about it and saying well you can try and restrict your calories but if you do that day after day after day it's really hard so fasting may be a better way to go which is something they figured out sort of ages ago because if you look back that's how people thought of fasting that people called it a cleanse uh detoxification uh you know reawakening spiritual you know purification that kind of thing right there's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you right it's strange how how things work but without any sort of scientific evidence and as we become as a nation more overweight it becomes even more important and and that's just one of these sort of fascinating things so you know it's not like something i just made up it's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books right i'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people hey there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our health care and you can do something like you don't need your doctor you don't need your dietitian you can do something about it right now for no money right and there's the science is all there right imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem and it's like oh my god like th it's mind-blowing well i think that's part of the issue is uh the reason it's not popular i guess is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine businesses make a lot of money on selling more food not selling less food and therefore people want to make more money and so they have to market their products they have to market their medicines they have to market their foods to try to sell more of it not to say oh just have a few of these just have a couple cookies a day no they want to sell boxes of cookies right it's not like they got to make money uh as in their mind this is a business to be run and we need to sell more more means more people need to eat sugar refined sugar breads all these things uh refined oils refined meats for fine fats all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat the company's making them in order for them to survive financially they need to sell more of these things to us which is a challenge it's it's a real problem because if you look at say you know the doctors and the dietitians you go to conferences they're sponsored by catalogs and you know the breakfast makers and so on and it's crazy i was watching this show the other day one of these uh you know tlc shows with like these very heavy women anyway they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes i'm thinking and they couldn't drink it it was horrible stuff they tasted really bad so they spit it out i'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day except that somebody wants to sell it to you right you're being played here you're drinking this horrible horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out they couldn't take it it's like oh this the whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money it's it's a sad sad sort of state of affairs that we get into what would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then if we had to recap that part of it what would you say the the top five i'm hearing it's it's free that's one of them yeah so it's free that's a huge thing it's it you really you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating it only tells you what the period of time that you're not eating so whether you're vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be even if you want to eat fast food all day it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food it tells you that during this period of time don't eat so you can add it to any diet which is incredible because now we're pulling on a completely different lever that is if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general there's two levers right we always think of the what you're eating right eat more vegetables that's great but what if you don't like vegetables right well that lever doesn't work right so here's a completely different lever you're talking about well there's this other thing i can do to lose weight or get healthier right so you can add it to any diet it's it's completely flexible that is to say you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want if it's christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days then you don't have to if you decide to fast longer after christmas then sure you can do that that's completely up to you it's not like you're locked in you know the fourth thing is that it's very simple so if you look at a lot of diets that is to say uh say you're on a paleo diet it's a great diet right but it's like this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo right it's complex or keto or whatever you want to be so it's very difficult for some people to understand and i've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused and you always get the is this keto or is this paleo or whatever whereas fasting is very simple it's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea say that's it everything else you can't eat right so it's very simple to explain to somebody it makes it very easy for them to follow because it's very black and white if you ate a peanut that's not fasting right yes it's not a big deal but at the same time that's not fasting and then the other thing is that it's powerful right because if you if you follow any type of a diet there's always a natural limit so say here you want to lose weight and so you say i'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet so you do a vegetarian diet and you lose you know a few pounds but not as much as you want well you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian already exactly so what else are you going to do there's nowhere else you or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting and it's powerful because you're eating zero which means that it is by definition for weight loss the most powerful diet there is like absolutely you cannot lose more than if you put any calories in your body no matter what diet you're on you're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories exactly so that's the whole thing it is the most powerful diet it's the the the most powerful should die but it's it's it's like okay well why would you not want it right if you have a lot of work to do you want the best tool that's it right this is the best tool and somehow we said don't ever use this right it's like why if you use it you'll actually get all these other benefits so it's just free it's available it's simple you know you can do it with any diet and it's powerful and you actually don't have to stop you can actually keep going you can you know do a seven day fast and take a little break to another seven day fast and and and you can't go lower than zero there's no way it is possible physiologically to go less than zero so it is the most powerful diet so there's so many benefits and yet for for years i'll tell you when i started using it with with patients in about about seven or eight seven years ago maybe it was like the stuff we saw was just incredible people were like coming off their medications they were reversing their type 2 diabetes or losing weight it's like you know all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book crazy what is the what is the cause of type 2 diabetes how does that develop in humans yeah type 2 diabetes is essentially too much sugar in the body so it's not just in the blood that's in your whole body right so if you think about the body like a sugar bowl so imagine your body is a sugar bowl and over the years you're sort of eating a lot of sugar you're eating a lot more and not using it up so the sugar sort of builds up builds up builds up eventually it gets to the point where it starts to overflow that's basically what type 2 diabetes is you've stored up so much sugar in your body that it overflows into the blood as the blood sugar goes up then you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes now the point is that if you look at standard medications so some of the newer ones are quite good but the older medications like insulin and so on what that what those drugs did was you have this full sugar bowl that's full every time you eat the sugar would go into the bowl flow out and spill out into the blood the blood sugar will go high the solution to these old drugs was to take that sugar that's in the blood and simply cram it back into the body right and you just shove it and shove it in and of course there would be reach a time where shoving it in didn't work and it'd still overflow so then you get a second medication and really shove it in oh man is that what insulin does all right that's what insulin does that's it back into the body yeah so your body has too much insulin so remember insulin's job is to take that sugar that you've eaten and put it into the body and the point is that you have had too much insulin over time because you've put in so much into that bowl that it's overflowed the solution is not to put more in right it's just like if you have a suitcase think about a suitcase you put in a few shirts it's fine then it gets full you can't close it right so the solution is not to put more and more force to push it in the solution is to get rid of all that stuff same as the sugar bowl the solution is to get rid of all that sugar so how do you do that there's only two things you need to know right don't put it in and two let your body burn it off and that's it so that's how you do that one you can use a low carbohydrate diet and two you can use intermittent fasting because when you don't eat nothing's going in and you're going to start burning off the sugar i mean you can think about an analogy for example suppose you have a car and you go to the gas station three times a day and fill up on gas now your gas tank is full and every time you go to pump the gas it overflows and spills into your back seat and is now making you sick so what should you do well i'll tell you what you wouldn't do you wouldn't go back to that gas station three times a day what you would do of course is drive that car around drive and drive and drive it until the gas tank starts to go down same as the body every time you're just putting more sugar and putting more sugar into what should you do well run that body without sugar for a while and that's what intermittent fasting does and that's why we were able to reverse we wrote a case series about three patients who we did this and we just reversed diabetes like they had 20 years of diabetes and we still reversed it in them it was insane how quickly they got better what does type 2 diabetes do to someone how does it affect them yeah the type 2 diabetes is one of the worst diseases we have unfortunately type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes is about 50 percent of the american population wow population has type two diabetes or pre-diabetes or pre-diabetes is the majority so about ten percent ten fifteen percent is type two diabetes about thirty thirty five percent as is pre-diabetes um so the point is that if you put all that sugar into your body what happens is that you can cram it in cram it in but then all that sugar sort of goes all over the body and every single organ just starts to rot away and this is the problem this is the reason you get like gangrene you know the foot goes black the toe goes back that's the reason why you get all kinds of infections that you don't normally get because there's sugar everywhere the bacteria love that right so you get infections that you don't see in any other diseases you you get you know too much sugar it rots away your kidneys you get kidney disease you get blindness because all the sugar damage to the eye so it's the leading cause of non-traumatic blindness you know kidney disease is what i deal with a lot because the kidneys just start to sort of rot away so you go on to dialysis for example you get heart attacks you get strokes so the whole gamut and then you get cancer of course because of the too much insulin insulin is not only a nutrient sensor it's a growth factor so it tells your body to grow so all of those things that are important in terms of killing people which is heart disease heart attack strokes and cancer is going to be made much worse with type 2 diabetes and that's why it's so important to really take care of yourself if someone is listening here how would they know if they have type 2 diabetes or if they're pre-diabetic yeah generally you have to get a blood test to do that you test something called the a1c most people who are overweight are at risk of that and the the point is a lot of people will say that type 2 diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive it's actually a total lie type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease it's simply too much sugar you need to empty that sugar bowl that's the whole idea and that's how you reverse it taking medications is not going to reverse your disease because you're simply cramming more stuff into the body so you can get a simple test it's a routine test and you can you can see if you have are at risk of this and the point is that if you do find out that you're either diabetic or type 2 or pre-diabetic then you got to understand this is a reversible disease but it's largely a dietary disease so therefore the treatment must be dietary you've got to get to it exactly you've got to get to that root cause and it's not it doesn't mean you have to buy expensive food right you could simply fast which is free and you could still reverse and gets so much healthier so what i'm hearing you say is it's 100 possible to reverse type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes through fasting and through eliminating sugar from the body yeah so sugar refined sugars especially so sugar which is fructose and high fructose corn syrup and that kind of thing and then a lot of the refined carbohydrates are carbohydrates are actually chains of sugar they're actually chains of glucose in the body so they're they tend to raise that like is that like breads and bagels bread bagels uh rice potatoes yeah all of those things so potatoes and rice are not good for you if you have type 2 diabetes if you have type 2 diabetes it tends to so we we do this thing called the glycemic index which is of certain foods which one raises the blood glucose the most and carbohydrates like rice and potatoes and bread tend to be the highest i think sugar is probably much worse for you than any of those so um but the so so sugar sort of is number one enemy for me number two is eating all the time is probably the really the other thing that's really bad i mean you get this advice sometimes i think it's so dumb uh eat six times a day it's like one nobody's ever done that before two what happens when you eat six times a day well if you eat a small portion of food and then deliberately stop which is what they're telling you to do so eat a small portion and not until you're full but just a little bit and then stop what happens well we know what happens because that's what an appetizer is a small tasty portion of food that makes you more more hungry i want to put more in my stomach so why would you want to do this six times a day you're gonna you know eat a little bit of food then before you're full actually stop while you're hungry and wanting more and do this six times a day you're going to use your willpower you're going to use all your willpower just to do this when that was completely you know it's totally against it because everybody you know there's this inertia right it's like my son right you can't get them into the bath one's easy and you can't get them out of the bath right because once you're in you're comfortable right same thing when you eat you should eat until you're full hopefully of good food that's the way that we are designed to eat when you're not eating you don't eat right you just let the con the existing conditions sort of run you don't eat a little bit make yourself hungry then stop and do it over and over and over again that's a that's a recipe for failure right and then when people fail what happens is people say well you know these people have no willpower it's like it has nothing to do with willpower it all has to do with the habits that you put in if your habit is to eat breakfast lunch dinner and nothing in between like virtually everybody in the 70s well hey it's easy to stay slim they were eating white bread like nobody ate whole wheat bread back then right i ate a sandwich for lunch at school every single day as did everybody else in my class right peanut butter and jam classic right so it was it's not it's not the the willpower it's putting in those healthy habits not eating all the time of not snacking all the time of you know hopefully avoiding those those foods and there's so many things we do to sort of sabotage ourselves right i mean if you're a um you know if i was a business owner with a lot of people the first thing i do i mean and this probably applies pre-covered is you know to say there is no food in the office right because there's no reason that you need to eat if you're working right if you were and say there's no food in the office there's no food in the conference rooms when we have meetings we won't have food there might be coffee but there's no cookies right and these are the ways we sabotage ourselves right like why do we need to do this like i always think if i'm in a meeting right and it's in the middle of the afternoon and i was hungry in 1970s would i really get up leave the meeting go find myself a donut and come back people be like what the hell is this guy doing right but if i'm bored out of my mind in this meeting and there's a donut sitting in front of me guess what there it goes right or or in the movie theaters or in front of the tv or whatever right it or in the car or whatever it's it's simply the habits that you put in it's not a matter of willpower it's identifying these behaviorable changes that can sort of lead you to success and finding a community of people that is going to say yes we agree with you there's no bowls of candy on on the desk this is a place of work i don't want to sabotage weight loss efforts by putting out a bowl of candy that's not acceptable because if somebody's losing weight i don't think this person should be doing that right you're tempting people every single time like it may have been a good gesture in 1975 but it's not a good gesture now like this is not this is where we work this is not what we do right and these are the sort of things that you can now i start once you understand obesity you can search identify okay these are behaviors these are little things you never thought about that really are very simple like you know very simple to do that could lead to a big change and that we have a website that we have a program that does that called thefastingmethod.com and that's what we try to help people with establish these patterns find themselves a community where you can say hey i'm having problems with headaches during fasting has anybody else had this and then people will chime in and say yeah this is there's this right and that's what your mom used to do for you like but now of course nobody fast so nobody's able to help you so you need to find this supportive community and that's what we've tried to build and also the tools uh to ask questions get the education that kind of thing yeah especially if you're the only one in your local community trying to fast it's gonna be very hard when everyone else is eating around you and they don't get it they're not in on the game of what you're trying to do so finding that support and accountability is gonna be crucial i'm curious your take on fruits i've had many different doctors and scientists and researchers on dr rhonda patrick dr stephen gundry just recently dr peter atiyah who all kind of mention that fruit may not be the best thing for us in abundance uh and being very specific on when we eat fruit how much with fruit we eat because of the sugar intake that it has what's your research show about fruit in terms of in our diet is it more beneficial or is it more harmful in general uh i'm sort of i i agree with them because the fruit contains fructose which is chemically sort of what you get in sugar as well so when you eat carbohydrates like bread it's mostly glucose when you eat fruit it's mostly fructose sugar table sugar is sort of half and half that's where you get high fructose corn syrup as well um and the fructose is fructose no matter where you get it from so in in whether it's from an organic apple or banana it's still fructose it's still fructose so if you drink a coke and it has high fructose corn syrup it's still fructose and some glucose right which is no different than you'd get if you were to eat an apple with you know some rice or something it'd be like glucose and fructose it's the same thing on the other hand the there's there's all kinds of other things that happens with whole fruit that may mitigate some of that badness right and this is the whole point that i try to make is that there's a difference between added sugars and natural sugars so if you eat an orange or an apple yes the fructose is the fructose but there's a natural limit that you have you can't just keep eating that right because you can't eat like 10 apples at a time you'll just feel full and you'll just not want to right that's just life whereas if you put sugar in like you know a coca-cola like a big gulp or something you can keep drinking that thing like the whole thing like lots of people do those giant things at the movie theaters people do they'd sign sort of mindlessly sip the sweet sweet stuff and the amount of sugar is probably equal to like 10 apples but the apple had all this fiber it had all this you know the pulp and all this other stuff that naturally put a break on how much you can get so yes on the one hand fructose is fructose so i sort of agree with that on the other hand i sort of disagree in that i don't think that whole fruit is nearly as bad as added sugars because there's no limit on the amount of sugar you can add to something like you can always make it sweeter you can always make it sweeter and you won't even you won't ever get that sort of break so on on on stopping so i think it's a real different there's a there's a big difference but i'm not a huge fan if you're trying to lose weight yeah i think you do need to limit your fruit it's still fructose it's not the best it's not the worst thing but it's not the best thing for you either but as a as a sort of treat or whatever it's probably a whole lot better than a cookie for example which doesn't have those natural satiety hormones curious you're uh i've asked this with a few different people in this space if you're on a uh a five food only diet for the rest of your life to help the quality of your life your the the health of your body your minds and to help lengthen your life to the best of your ability obviously um if you could only eat five foods what would those be based on your scientific research and based on what those foods would do for the body well i think that's uh um i mean meat is probably one of the most nutritious foods there is and i know that there's a lot of sort of debate sort of environmental debate there's ethical debates about ethical raising of meat and so on but the you know if you're just set all that aside and just say from a nutrition standpoint one is delicious and you know that because when you watch shows like naked and afraid like you never see how excited they get when they get a fish or something that's insane right they're like oh my god fish or they'll be like a rat or something and they'll be like oh all right it's like you don't go like whoa cauliflower right right even though cauli i love cauliflower right it's a great food but you can see that it's it's a natural food for humans like we really get that's part of the natural thing so meat is is you know meat and fish and chicken for sure would be up there and and you know scientifically of course they're much more complete sources of protein for us than natural because we're animals so therefore we use animal proteins much better than we can use plant proteins um so that'd probably be a base uh if you you know if uh you know so you could actually survive just on meat so people like the inui for example subsisted largely on meat however if you set aside the ethical you know costs and so on uh then you might want to you know eat some other foods so there are some carbohydrate-containing foods which can be very good too something like beans for example people have eaten beans for a year like you know millennia like subsisted on beans and so on so that'd be a very again a vegetarian source of very good protein and can actually be quite delicious like you know people eat it in all different kinds of ways um you know for me it's it's one of these things that is uh you know one of these things that you can put on a plate that that that takes that sort of carbohydrate but there's lots of fiber and all that kind of thing you know some other vegetables and fruits that i really enjoy like something like avocado it's like i love i think everybody loves avocado honestly so and there's so many vitamins in there and so on so um you know that's that's something those are probably the main things i could think of like other other vegetables that would be well up there so any of the above ground vegetables like to me i love cauliflower and broccoli i mean those are just foods that i could eat sort of uh easily it's one of these things if you're trying to replace a carbohydrate side dish like if you're thinking about okay i have a bit of meat and then you know in the past you might say oh i have a lot of potato or rice you could easily put cauliflower or or broccoli or something in there that just totally takes the place of one of those yeah so those are some of the foods that i think are you know i'd probably i could probably do pretty well with those things i mean beans i would include tofu as well because i eat a lot of tofu being being chinese okay i like those those are good what about athletes and fasting i'm an athlete uh i'll i'll mix it up from being like a a power sprinter type of athlete doing different basketball uh weightlifting training things like that to right now i'm also in marathon training because i'm committed to do my first marathon in the next six months so i'm doing longer runs how does fasting work with someone who is working out often it can you do both do you need to limit your ability to exercise and again going back to would you lose muscle as an athlete if you're doing intermittent fasting or three to four day fastings yeah so that's a great question uh you have to sort of differentiate between sort of the weekend athlete the one who really isn't at that super high level of competition for those people you could probably do whatever fasting you want because remember the point is that you can leave it up to your body to find those sources of calories so if you're one of these guys works out two or three times a week and so on plays a little bit of ball in the weekend sort of thing and that's most people you could do whatever you could fast and then do workouts so that's perfectly acceptable because if you don't eat your body will simply take those calories that it needs from from from your body fat there is a period of adaptation from when your body so remember there's two sources of fuel in the body there's there's sugar glucose and there's fat so your body your muscles so your legs and so on can use either glucose or it can use fat in order to efficiently use fat you have to train it to use fat and that often takes weeks like three four five weeks in order to get that and you can do actually muscle biopsies of people who are undergoing this transition and you can see that they start to gain the machinery that it needs to efficiently metabolize fat so if you are eating a high carb diet as most of us did for most of the 90s and 2000s and so on and then all of a sudden you say i'm going to fast well you have no more glucose your muscles are going to be highly inefficient because they haven't been used to using fat so some of the top-end athletes have actually started to train themselves to use fat so chris froome for example the tour de france ultra low carb there's zach bittner who's one of these ultra marathoners 100 mile races and stuff he uses a very low fat sorry low carb diet training his muscles a lot of fat so he's training his muscles to metabolize fat so a lot of these dave scott's a very uh sort of legendary triathlete who really talks about low low carb high fat nutrition uh tim knox who writes a lot about that and these are all exercise physiologists so you could really do well with that and fasting is really just the same the problem with fasting of course in elite sort of high level athletes is that you actually need all those calories right so you really can't get by without eating because you you you're you're using it you need it right and most people don't have enough body fat to sustain those sort of things right because they're in that sort of less than 10 percent body fat not the sort of 25 percent that you see in the general population so what we do here and we've worked with a number of elite athletes is that you have to separate what you're trying to do so in the on season you really can't fast it's not gonna do it it's it's hard to do you need too much energy and your body you know to perform at a high level the carbohydrates often are slightly better than fat unless you're in one of these ultra marathon sort of endurance events and which because that will be a perfect because they give you the carbohydrates give you the sugar that your body needs for the energy in that moment like it probably gives you extra boost so if you're like sprinting the you know metabolizing glucose is probably slightly better than fat even if you train yourself to use fat when you get to triathlon and ultramarathon and stuff you probably don't see that that difference as much which is why you have somebody like chris froome who's a you know he won the tour de france a number of times and dave scott who was a you know did all these triathlons who talk about eating high-fat meals and so on so you know peter bruckner who's with the australian cricket national team and you know tim knox who did all this research and then but in the off season you certainly could do this and this is something that's uh it's called training in the fasted state which is something that they're doing a lot of research on and this is sort of the off season so we work with baseball players and soccer players and rugby players and stuff on this and the point of this is that when you fast what you do is you fast for 24 hours then you do your training and then you eat so when you fast your insulin goes down but your growth hormone goes up and your noradrenaline goes up so as you train you actually can work harder than you have before and your growth hormone goes up so when you eat and preferably a high protein diet then you're going to rebuild so this is especially important in the off season because you're what you're trying to do is sort of rebuild all that sort of stuff the wear and tear on your body you're trying to clean out the the autophagy you're trying to get rid of that stuff and then build muscle or build or get rid of inflammation you know heal your joints all that stuff exactly and this is something that we'll do with people in sort of the off season um and then process it like a 24 hour fast and then train or eat first after that no you train and then you eat because if you train and then eat your body will start to use some of that protein to rebuild your growth hormone is up you've got the protein and that pro that period of time where you you eat afterwards does not have to be like you know you stop running and start showing like you have like about 12 hours in that window where your body's actually going to more efficiently use the protein so this is something that you know will do with people in the off season to try and prevent injury and all this kind of stuff the one other interesting thing is we worked with uh george san pierre who was this mixed martial artist and he actually was very fascinating because he loved the fasting so he'd do these long fasts and he shredded a machine and he said that boy when he used to fast he every he said that when he used to go and fight because he did this during competitions too he'd say when i went to fight or when i was training in the fighting like everything looked like he was in slow motion as hitting and you know as you know he felt unstoppable so he would actually use it during his uh you know which we don't often do but you're you know again understanding the physiology of what's happening with that higher level of noradrenaline you know that increased concentration everything kind of gets like that hungry wolf you get tunneled in you get focused in to a higher degree he said that you know oh boy he you know that was his sort of like secret you know weapon he could he could you know he he could move and and do other stuff and it was crazy but he that was an example of it depends on your sport something like baseball for example we've done it for people in the season because if you're a starting pitcher you have like four days where you're doing nothing so you could actually use that in your sport because even during the season if you're a starting pitcher well you've got two or three days in the middle where you actually try and try to get this sort of rebuilding regenerating and then sort of break it in time for your for your start or whatever so it depends a little bit on the sport and the situation yeah i'm curious about fasting and eating unhealthy while you fast like intermittent fasting are you able to do a 14 16 hour window of fasting or 18 hour window fasting and then eat any junk food fast food candies sugars you want and still get the same benefits or is it really the quality of foods also that you're eating in that four-hour window while you're doing fasting yeah it's both so if you eat just junk and fast you're gonna get it's better than if you ate junk all the time but it's not better than eating healthy and not fasting and that's what one of the recent studies said so one of the recent studies that was completed on fasting they said well if you do this sort of eight hour window uh you don't lose any weight and maybe it might be bad but the one of the things and the way they did the study is they said that you eat whatever you want during that period of time so it's like you we don't know what they ate but if you eat you know chocolate doughnuts and stuff and french fries all day you know in that eight hour window that's not good for you so they're two sort of different levers so one is the foods that you eat and one is the fasting and so if you're you know if if you're doing both you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck if you do one but not the other it'll be okay but you know doing neither of course is the worst right if you're eating whatever you want and you're getting old and whenever you're lasting you're screwed yeah exactly for cancer yeah yeah for a lot of diseases and and you know cancer is sort of one of those ultimate diseases that winds up being very very um you know once you get it it's really hard to turn that back and that's why it's so important to really stop it before it gets to that point and and and that's the the thing that we have to really look at is you know let's really talk about what it is that you have to do because it's not this sort of you know predetermined event right it's not like oh i'm predetermined to have cancer when i am 65 or whatever it is like the genes are the same you know the lifestyle to some extent is you know determined by where you are born and where you live but there's so many things that we can do to raise or lower like even to the extent that it's almost as powerful as stopping smoking right it's just such a powerful determinant of cancer and dwarfs every other thing in there right if you talk about pesticides and you know stuff it's like one percent we use this term called uh paf or population attribution factor which is like 35 of cancer can be attributed to smoking and 30 is diet and pesticide might be one percent and radiation might be two percent right it's it's it's negligible compared to the diet why because we're exposing ourselves to this diet day in day out day and day out as opposed to pesticide which were or or uh you know some you know sunscreen or something which is not like every day day after day right are there toxins stored in our fat and if so is that dangerous to fast if there's toxins in the fat not really i mean some people talk about that and uh if there is it's it's a very minor point i mean so i know there's this whole theory that we get fat because you know our fat is trying to lock away these toxins and stuff but there's really very little data to suggest that's true if that's true then of course being fat is better than not being fat that is the skinny people should also be being exposed to these sort of toxins as well but it's not true you can clearly see that the people who are fatter have more risk of all kinds of diseases predominantly type 2 diabetes and cancer and heart disease what's you you mentioned paleo and ketogenic diet what's the biggest myth about ketogenic diet right now is it seems like everyone's trying to do this or talking about it yeah i think the ketogenic diet is a perfectly reasonable diet from a scientific standpoint that is if you look at what it is it's really high in fat but not just fats if you you know as with anything and i was sort of in on the beginning of this is that we talked a lot about natural fats like not eating a lot of corn oil and refined vegetable oil and margarine right it's eating natural fats like animal fats and coconut fat and that kind of thing so natural fats not going crazy on protein and then really really going very low on carbohydrates and i think that that makes a lot of sense for weight loss and that's why it's become such a popular diet i think there's all these there's this reaction to it that oh it's really really unhealthy for you i don't think there's anything inherently unhealthy for you about the keto diet it's also not a super easy diet to follow um anything that's really different from what you're used to is not easy to follow that's not to say that you couldn't follow it but it it does it does tend to get a little difficult over time because yeah people enjoy carbohydrates so um this is the thing is is that it's it's there's a you know when you're only talking about the foods then you have to be very very strict on the foods as opposed to when you can say okay i can be leaning on the foods if i'm gonna up the fasting like well i'll dial this down but i'll dial this up so that i can sort of balance it right it gives you more flexibility to do it but i think one of the big myths is that it's a super unhealthy diet but it doesn't necessarily have to be as as it gets bigger then you wind up attracting all these people that are trying to sell you keto bars and keto shakes and it's like you know that was sort of like the remember the paleo movement which was all about the caveman diet then you get these paleo bars like yes the caveman did not full of hearts right it's like that's not a thing so the movement winds up getting a little bit diluted as opposed to the original sort of movement which was a lot of natural fats a lot of intermittent fasting was sort of built right in because there's talking about well you're gonna eat until you're full and don't eat unless you're not you know unless you're really hungry so there's a lot of intermittent fasting baked into keto originally and like i said some of it gets moved out you you wind up attracting all these other people who try and put their sort of specialize in yeah yeah yeah yeah commercialize it what about what's your thought then on the bulletproof or the coffee with ghee method uh you know where you fast intermittent fast but then you have coffee with a little bit of ghee or something like that is that something you feel like is useful while intermittent fasting or is it better to just do water only and black coffee or no coffee yeah i think that the classic is water only uh coffee like black coffee and tea like green tea herbal tea make very little difference so even though they're not part of a classic fast black coffee makes no difference there's no calories there's very little anything else right when you get to bulletproof coffee it's actually very interesting because again the main point of intermittent fasting is you're trying to reduce your insulin so you're getting into the sort of fat burning when you take pure fat so coffee with ghee or whatever like that you're taking almost pure fat which is interesting because it's actually not going to affect your insulin at all so some people do very well on that because what you're trying to do of course is you take that bulletproof coffee um and then you don't eat like that's the point you're not taking it and then eating you know muffin right that's not the point of that exercise you're not dipping the donut in the coffee exactly so you're just trying to take it and then not eat and if it allows you to not eat for a long enough period of time because some people say oh yeah i get this so full then you're going to be net better so remember when you're taking almost pure fat you're not having any insulin effect that fat actually goes almost straight into your fat stores but it keeps you in that fat burning mode so it's adding some fat storage but it's burning as well exactly so it depends on your net balance that is if the fat that you put in allows you to fast for a long enough period that you're going to balance it out then your net better if you're going to take a bulletproof coffee at nine o'clock and then eat something at 10 o'clock well you you didn't take and you didn't buy yourself enough time with that bulletproof coffee to offset that it's the way that the body metabolizes fat and it's it's it's strange because it's not usual for our body like we don't usually just eat a stick of butter like that's not a meal right so therefore that's why this is sort of like a hack because it's sort of this thing that people do but it has to give you enough time to come up benefit right it's like investing right you have to put in money to make money and you hope that you don't just throw it away right same thing you're taking in calories to try and fast for long enough to burn net more calories what it would be the ultimate way to do intermittent fasting in your mind and is this something that we should do every day intermittent fasting or periods of time seasons of life yeah i that's a great question i think that fasting is actually a part of natural life so if you think about fasting people think it's some you know strange thing that you do but it's really not that's where the word breakfast comes in right so the meal that breaks your fast you have to fast to break your fast so even baked into the english language and it's actually not just the english language in french it's petite de genere jenae is the word to fast so it's to break your fast so the point is that you're supposed to feed and fast so you're supposed to be at 12 to 14 hours every single day yeah maybe once in a while you'll have a midnight meal or whatever but that's for in general you should be fasting every single day then i think then there's occasional longer fast and i think this is the point is to you know every once in a while just to sort of cleanse the system keep things kind of going and that's the way we did it right if you look at any of the major religions you know some did it more than others greek orthodox at all kinds of fasting periods and but you know and people would do it differently mormons would do it differently from catholics would do it differently from buddhists for example but they all had this idea of fasting buddhists for example won't eat after 12 noon so they'll just fast until the next day so sort of a four hour eating window every single day sort of thing so that's that's the way they do it but this occasional longer fast is i think beneficial to sort of activate this autophagy and get the benefits of a longer fast because you're getting different things happening at different stages if you're getting 12 to 14 hours every day you're getting a lot of the benefits and then every once in a while you try and get the benefits of that longer fast and you do it at pre-specified times of the year and religion is what used to tie people into this whole cycle or they'd do it because it was winter right you'd have a big meal at thanksgiving after that you know there's not a lot of food coming in so then you know you'd have longer periods of very little to eat yeah i mean i've had both dr david sinclair on and also uh dr peter atiyah who talked about if you want to live a longer life you you almost need to have fasting in your life you you need it to help with autophagy to help with getting rid of these pre-cancerous cells to help with eliminating diseases all these different things the body needs less food or windows of time where it's eating a lot less food to help cultivate a longer living life now obviously there's certain things that might happen that aren't going to guarantee the length of our life but what have you found in your research on this process to extend life yeah i totally agree with those guys those are smart guys and i think that the point is that our body has sort of two ways that it can go you can either go into sort of growth mode or it can go into cell repair and maintenance mode and the point is that you you really in order to maximize sort of longevity you want to go more towards sort of maintenance mode and the way you do that of course is by eating less and fasting plays a big role in that because again if you eat then you're going to activate the nutrient sensors the nutrient sensors are going to tell your body you must grow because you grow when food is available right so you put yourself into growth mode when insulin is up when m tours up you're going to go into growth mode and it's great if you're young you know you're you're your kid you want to grow that's fine but think of it like a like a race car right you have that engine you're going to go really fast but you keep revving that engine it's not going to last for very long right so you need to put that engine into sort of storage for a little while if you want to maximize the length of it so they're diametrically opposed that is growth versus longevity so you need to push yourself into longevity if that's your goal then you need to eat less right and whether you do it by sort of chronic calorie restriction which you could but it's difficult um because that's not the way we're sort of built we're not built that way i'm convinced that that's a very artificial way to do it not that you couldn't do it but when we're you know we're designed to eat until we're full and then stop and if we don't get food then the hunger just dissipates so naturally i think we're more built towards the intermittent fasting model as opposed to every day eat a little bit less which i think could work but i think it just takes sort of willpower every single day which is a lot of energy it's a lot of energy just to think about it um as opposed to saying well i'm only going to eat twice a day because that way i have time to do this and i don't have to buy you know myself a lunch which will save me money and it's going to give me an extra hour of the day that kind of thing so i think that that's the point is that in the end you've got this sort of sort of seesaw between growth versus longevity sort of just like that you know race car engine you can either go fast or you can use it for a long time you really can't do both it's really hard to do both so as you get older you want to push yourself into that longevity stage which means eating less which means doing more fasting ultimately can you build muscle while you're doing a lot of this fasting or is it oh yeah yeah i mean you got to understand that most of what we use for energy is not muscle that's only one organ system that's skeletal muscle so if you're riding your bicycle that's your you know that's your muscles there's all these other organ systems that we have no control over so there's the liver the kidney the heart the lungs the brain you know generating body heat and all these sort of automatic systems that also require energy so when you don't eat then your body starts to reduce energy it will reduce you know all of those things if you exercise you will still keep building muscle and so on that's totally different but if you start to you know use less energy then you'll feel a bit colder and your you know your your liver may slow down a bit your heart may slow down a bit but again people think it's a bad thing but it's probably a better thing you don't want to be you don't want to be revving that engine all that time you actually want to go down a little bit as you get older it's interesting you mentioned briefly the uh different societies that we found probably had very little or no cancer i think you mentioned the the eskimos that you said before before they became westernized i guess or before um things started to shift it's interesting i just did i've i've done a lot of training with wim hof i'm not sure if you've heard the name wim hof because he's a guy who focuses on breathing on mindset and on cold therapy exposure uh extreme amounts of cold therapy exposure and he has done a test i don't know if you've heard about this where they injected i believe it was e coli into his body and he rejected the disease from breathing and cold therapy where it actually didn't harm him um and he didn't contract the disease i guess uh and he did this with a a group of other subjects of just people who he did the method with where it was cold therapy breathing uh where they're able to reject the infection i'm curious in your mind about cold exposure knowing that the eskimos are in cold and they didn't have uh maybe it was only all they did was eat meat and then cold how much do you think cold therapy cold exposure supports with eliminating cancer i don't know i haven't really looked into that i have to say i don't think it's just the cold because they have anywhere of course when they started to eat like they're still in the cold but when they started to eat all kinds of processed foods like sugar and bread and stuff they wind up getting cancer they also see it in africans who live a traditional african diet again they really have very little cancer so it was um that was where they described these sort of diseases of civilization so it didn't have to do just with the cold on the other hand i actually think there's a lot of interesting stuff both with extreme cold and extreme heat where people you know talk about the benefits of like saunas and all this sort of stuff which i think is very interesting i actually haven't looked into it a lot myself i actually think that the extreme cold to me seems like it there may be something there um you know there's actually a few things that people talk about like the browning of white fat and all this kind of stuff which makes a lot of sense to me but i you know seems it you know and there's a lot of people who do it like in in scandinavia and russian and stuff there's all these people who do this sort of cold therapy and they swear by it then it's like i think that there probably is something there i don't know how much it has to do with what i talk about which is mostly like insulin and foods and fasting and so on but i think that there's actually going i think somebody should look into that but again with them because nobody makes money on figure out jumping in the ice is not a money-making day yeah yeah and it's not doesn't seem so comfortable to me but you know on the other hand i actually think that there probably is something there that is highly beneficial maybe that's your uh the next book down the line the cold code the cold therapy code to see what that does with cancer um this has been fascinating i feel like i have so many more questions when i ask you but i also want to be respectful of your time with this interview this for me i could ask more and more about this stuff because i feel like the body uh is you know it's our temple it's the thing we need to take care of the most and if we want to have a high quality of life we need to take care of our body and if we want to have a longer life and be around for more memories with our friends and family then we've got to also take care of these things a few final questions for you before i ask these final questions is there anything else that we should be aware of when it comes to the mindset around cancer have you found any research on healing the mind in order to heal the body physically or is it more been around nutrition mostly uh most of the data is around nutrition i think that the way it interacts is that i think that there's actually like a lot of those things are super important so when people talk about positive attitudes and gratitude and community and staying connected and all that sort of stuff it sounds hokey but it actually has a huge impact on life and quality of life and even longevity but it's hard to study because how do you quantify if somebody is grateful for example or if they have a positive attitude it's very hard to quantify that so it tends not to get studied but i think the where it interacts is that it if you are one of these people who has a lot of stress and very unhappy or isolated like a hermit compared to somebody who has tons of friends and goes out and you know has a great supportive church and all this sort of stuff um where i think it makes a big difference is that uh you can measure sort of stress levels like and there are certain things that get activated during chronic stress like cortisol which is certain hormone and i think that impacts the immune system so the immune system which under chronic stress winds up getting degraded right so if you produce if you're under too much stress your immune system really doesn't work as well and the immune system plays a key role in fighting cancer so i think that there probably is some i think there's a lot of truth to that but the data is hard to find because then you get all these sort of you know various by the book sort of doctors who say well there's no proof that having a lot of friends makes you live longer it's like well that's data or if you're grateful or keep the journal or whatever or meditate it's like that's it's it's it's not that there's not a real effect i think and they confuse the fact that it's very hard to study with the fact that it doesn't work like i think it works i think it's super important i think that's actually more important than almost everything else like being you know being grateful being happy you know being connected i think that's actually has a bigger impact on life than most anything else but it's so hard to put it into a scale where you can say okay this is this and this is this so i think it does play a role but yeah yeah the data is going to be so hard to find when i look at it what actually astounds me is how far ahead a lot of the religions were and it doesn't matter what religion you are because the basics are the same right you go to you gather every week so hey that's staying connected you pray so that's like meditation you give thanks like you say grace right you give thanks to god or whatever and it doesn't even matter what god you believe in and they fast it's like oh my god like those are the pillars right there and it's not if you're catholic or if you're jewish or you're muslim it's all of them it's the same thing or buddhism or hinduism or whatever and always astounds when i look at that so holy they are way ahead of us and why because these were things that just worked they didn't care why it worked right so gathering every week to do something right and it doesn't matter if you're gathering to do this or do that but you're gathering as a community connecting you're seeing the people that you're you're living with you're giving thanks for the food that you're eating you're giving thanks for having the friends and being here on this earth uh you know all of this stuff it just worked so they kept it but didn't work of course thought god dropped long ago and what worked stayed and it's a core all of these things the the prayer which is like meditation the the connectiveness which is the gathering together the fasting and the uh you know the gratitude all of these things are sort of a core part of sort of what makes us human and that's why you see it in every single one of these things and it's like wow i always think that is crazy how far ahead they were and then we get to the 20th century we live in our own mcmansion and you know we stopped doing stuff together because we want our own space and and not realizing and not fasting anymore and not praying anymore and we don't realize that hey you know what these people might have known what they were doing they might have developed this over thousands of years and we just think we're just smarter than them when we're actually not we're actually not you know not even smart enough to realize that that was the core of what's what good good quality of life is yeah i'm uh i'm so glad we've connected i've got these couple final questions i want to ask you that i ask everyone at the end of my show before i ask them i want to remind people about all the books you have you've got a new book called the cancer code a revolutionary new understanding of medical mystery that's out um you've got a few other ones the obesity code and also the diabetes code which and also the complete guide to fasting so you've got also the fasting which can help you with fasting if you need a support community if you need tools if you need resources so go check out thefastingmethod.com i believe that is correct and uh check you out on social media your dr jason fung on instagram twitter and fun style fasting on fa uh on facebook and thefastingmethod.com this has been extremely insightful and eye-opening for me and hopefully it's a lot of great tools for so many other people that listen to this and watch this if you're watching uh online feel free to share this feel free to like this up leave a comment below of what's supported you the most over on youtube this question is at the end that i i ask people called the three truths so i'd love for you to imagine for a moment a hypothetical scenario jason where uh it's your last day on earth and it says you get to live as old as you want to live but eventually you got to turn off the lights and you've created and accomplished and lived the exact way you want to live you've written many books and and done so many different things but for whatever reason all the content you've put out in the world has to go with you to the next place wherever that place is and so no one has access to this interview or any of your content anymore but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true from all of your lessons in life kind of these three lessons you share with the world or i call the three truths what would you say are those three things for you i think one of them is of course the importance of um intermittent fasting like it's it's really just a part of the way you're supposed to live that is everything is a cycle right ying and yang it's all a cycle feeding and fasting is that same cycle you can't do all of one or all of the other we've gone so far of course towards feeding that you know you really have to turn back the dial a little bit on that side so that's one of the sort of great things that i'd love to sort of leave with people and i think that's what the obesity code was about was like let's really think about what causes this disease you know the second thing is very similar to to that i i'd love people to really understand that type 2 diabetes and that one is near and dear to me mostly because that's what i deal with a lot in my profession as a kidney specialist i see a lot of type 2 diabetes so i'm always invested in it because my patients are suffering from it and i always think it's a shame like boy i wish that people would have told you that it's reversible like you don't have to suffer this disease you can do something about it if you want if you don't want that's fine too but you know it's a reversible disease and that's one of the things i always think about when you know it's like there's so much suffering in this world that really is not necessary if people had the right understanding and then the third thing i think of course um is to always sort of stay real um which is that you know as you get out there like you know you know i mean because you're in the public eye a lot you get a lot of you know admirers but you get a lot of haters as well right so you always got to stay real and similar to like this whole idea of living a digital life or you know on social media life you know how everybody's happy and smiling that's not real life um and i always think like stay real like like just do real things like you know it's fine to be on social media and stuff but that doesn't mean you don't see your friends and make sure you go out with you know to to to to run or to play some ball or to whatever it is that you enjoy doing you know read there are other things that you can do that you have to sort of stay in the real world right it's like being present you have to be there right because in the end that's what you will always remember right it's not the facebook friends that you had or whatever and and and it goes the other way too right there's lots of facebook friends and stuff and they're great but you also get those haters who are always like ragging on you and stuff oh you're just such a phony and you're just trying to sell out and all this stuff and i always say okay one i wind up just blocking those people because they're a pain to deal with but i always think that you got to stay real like if somebody came up to me and i get this a lot some people say oh he's full of crap that's i can't believe he's a doctor kind of thing and i'm always like uh imagine going up to somebody and saying that to my face right you'd never do it i'd never talk to you again so why would i want you to talk to me i just mute you right away right and that's part of staying real right like so stay doing real things and it's so easy especially now with covid where we're all supposed to be going and doing virtual things but you know it's like you're not gonna remember that like a virtual trip to you know the beach is not the same as going to the beach i mean you know you gotta go to the beach right and i think that that's one thing that i've been thinking about maybe more during this period of time when we're not allowed to do anything but you know when it comes back around to it it's like remember there are friends and you know there are friends and you can you know don't get down on the stuff you see online either from old people ragging on you or the fact that people are always smiling in a beautiful place on instagram right it's like that's not real life either so go out do something real talk to real people it benefits you no matter no matter what right it's it's always better to do that even though it's easier to sit in front of a screen and you know play video games or watch somebody else's life and stuff right love that that's a good three truths uh i would acknowledge you for a second uh jason for you have amazing analogies you turn the complex into something that's understandable and easier to break down which can seem very scary very overwhelming very hard to understand when you're dealing with sickness disease illnesses viruses obesity cancer these are scary subjects and the fact that you're able to communicate effectively the hard data and research so that everyone can understand it is extremely powerful for us so i acknowledge you for the decades of research and work and practice in mastering this and constantly trying to learn new ways to make it better for the rest of us i acknowledge you for that and for uh for being a nice doctor for being a kind-hearted doctor i appreciate that hopefully when you're in la we can do this in person again sometime and get some more content out of this because i think this was really helpful for for myself and i think for everyone listening and watching my final question for you dr jason fung is what is your definition of greatness i think you know that greatness is really about being able to impact people in a positive way right and i see so much of this again online because of course everybody's online nowadays right because that's all you can do but and and and i'm sure you've seen this as well right it's like because i think this is the core of what you want to do is do something good for people but there are people who get famous for putting other people down right and it's like oh god like i get it you want to be famous for putting somebody down whether it's people you think deserve to be or not like oh you know people rag on this guy or that guy and it's like yeah but you're just trying to build yourself up right the greatness is not in tearing somebody down or saying that this guy's stupid or this theory is stupid right it's like you know when i talk about calories and stuff sometimes i get frustrated i say that's really stupid right but that's not what i'm trying to do right what i'm trying to do is not just tear something down because i don't really like to do that i like to sort of say this is a better way to look at it right think about it this way because this is what's going to make you better right and to be able to impact somebody so that you know i won't even have seen them and they'll be able to lose weight or they'll be able to reverse their diabetes or they'll understand cancer better as a disease is a humongous privilege and it makes me feel great i mean that's why i do it right because i like that feeling that i've been able to help somebody that i can impact you know hundreds or thousands of people and they are going to be better and to me that's greatness right to to to be able to make something where people say wow he helped a lot of people like i'm you know or somebody even you know a few people who will say well you know i listen to him and i really turn my life around like that means a lot to me because that's what healing is that's what being a doctor is but you can only do that on a one-on-one basis which is very limited as opposed to being able to write a book where you can impact a lot of people and i think that's what greatness is is to be able to sort of sort of impact people and make the world so much better for you having been there for for me having basically obsessed about these sort of questions you have no idea how much time i spent on this stuff like i i'm sort of obsessed about some stuff and it's like once i dig into it i'm like i'm digging i'm digging i'm digging i'm digging and it just takes a ton of time like uh so you know for me having obsessed about these sort of questions just because i like to i like to understand stuff um you know i want people to say well i'm glad he obsessed about this so much and thought about this in a different way that somebody else did because it doesn't look good to say the same stuff like if everybody tells you you know eat 500 less calories a day what good is it for me to come out and be the millionth and first person to say you should eat 500 less calories per day right completely useless like completely worthless but if i come out and say as i did sort of seven eight years ago consider intermittent fasting i don't think you have to do it but you should consider it which nobody practically nobody said at the time then it's like that's useful because it's a new piece of information and that's what i try to do in the cancer code the obesity code the diabetes code is to say let's take this problem let's look at it differently so that we can understand it and by understanding it we can do something about it because that's great that's really great my man there you go dr jason funk thank you so much for your wisdom and thank you so much for being here if you want to learn more about how to master your mind check out this next video right here we're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations and we are at that point that nexus point in our evolution as a species so then you don't try to fix that that's never going to work what you do

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,118,319

Rating: 4.8765807 out of 5

Keywords: jason fung fasting, jason fung, jason fung diabetes, jason fung interview, jason fung autophagy, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personl development, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, health theory, how to lose weight, weight loss tips, healthy foods, how to stay healthy, intermittent fasting, healthy foods to eat, how to prevent cancer, intermittent fasting weight loss

Id: vWg0oBFRZPI

Length: 130min 34sec (7834 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020