"Hello, Health Champions! Today, we're going to
talk about some common mistakes that people make with intermittent fasting that could actually
make you gain weight instead of losing it. So, let's make sure that you don't make any of
these. One common mistake that people make is that they overeat after the fast, and that
is because they feel deprived in some form, and then after the fast, they overcompensate and
they overeat. Usually, this comes down to some very common factors, and if they don't really
change what they're eating, they're just eating the same types of food but they're restricting
the window, and a lot of those foods are going to be low quality and processed foods. Now,
the body isn't getting the proper nutrition, so it's going to be screaming for food during
the fast, and then you overcompensate after, and then there are three things that go hand in
hand. So we're going to cover those together. One is that you eat too high of a carb diet; you
keep eating high carb even when you're fasting. One is that you change too quickly from what you
were doing, and the third is that you go directly from a low-fat, high-carb diet—a standard
diet—straight into intermittent fasting. So, we need to understand how those three factors
affect blood sugar and energy production. So, when you eat a high carbohydrate diet, your blood
sugar will rise very quickly, and then the body releases insulin to bring it down because the
body doesn't like high blood sugar. Really high and really low blood sugar is very dangerous,
so it's going to produce a lot of insulin that brings the blood sugar down, and then when it's
low, now you get cravings and you eat again, and so forth. So you keep getting this blood
sugar roller coaster, and this is very much related to processed foods, to high sugar foods,
and to high carb foods. And what happens then is that you train your body to depend on these
blood sugars spikes, because when they're low, you feel bad. So now, you eat more, but then as
soon as the blood sugar is high, your body has to use up that energy and bring that blood sugar
down, so you get stuck in this dependency on high carbohydrate foods and cravings. And then
if you go straight into intermittent fasting, your body doesn't know where to get the energy,
and then you have high energy when the blood sugar is high, you have low energy and low mood when
it's low, and that's not sustainable. Whereas, if you instead eat a low-carb diet with your
intermittent fasting plans, now as you also eat real food with protein and fat, nuts and seeds,
meat, vegetables, now your blood sugar swings are going to be almost non-existent. You have a very,
very stable energy production, and now it's very easy to go eight hours, 16 hours without food,
and you're not going to lose energy, and you've trained your body into using fat for energy, and
that's what your body uses when you fast. So it's not necessary for everyone to go low carb when you
do intermittent fasting. Some people pull it off even though they eat relatively high carb, but for
a lot of people, they're not going to manage it; they're not going to succeed eating high carb
because it's going to be too difficult for them, and for most people, it's going to be much, much
easier to do intermittent fasting and continue and have long-term success if you keep your blood
sugar much more level with low-carb foods. Another problem can be Bulletproof Coffee, and don't get
me wrong, I am a fan of Bulletproof Coffee, but we can't let it get out of hand, and we have to
understand that it's a tool; it's not a benefit, meaning that if you compare Bulletproof Coffee
to fasting completely, then it's not better; it doesn't do anything additionally that fasting
alone couldn't do. And the most common question I get is, does it break a fast? And does it raise
insulin? And does it break a fast? Absolutely, it breaks a fast because a fast is when
you're not eating anything, but the benefit, the good thing about it is that it raises insulin
just a tiny, tiny bit; it raises it so little, so it's almost like you didn't eat. And I am a fan
of Bulletproof Coffee if it helps you go longer. So if you were getting tired, and you got listless
or nauseous, or whatever, or you just felt like you really had to have something, and then the
question was, am I going to eat or can I get another four, six, or eight hours of fasting until
dinner? Will it help me do OMAD, one meal a day, if I have some Bulletproof Coffee? Because then,
it's a good thing. It just gets a little blip on your insulin, and then you're back to fasting.
The problem is when it becomes a fad and a trend, and people don't understand where it fits
in to fasting. So now, we have thousands of people putting up recipes online about all these
great things, and people are having one, and two, and three Bulletproof coffees because they think
more is better; that if Bulletproof Coffee is okay or if it's good, then more must be better.
They put butter in there, they put MCT oil, and heavy cream, and I've even seen recipes with
egg and collagen, and none of those are horrible, but they're not really necessary either, so you
just do enough to get you by. And if you have two tablespoons of butter, for example, now that adds
a couple of hundred calories. A tablespoon of MCT oil is 120 calories. Two tablespoons of cream is
another 100 calories. One egg is 80 calories, and a scoop of collagen powder would be probably about
50 calories. So I think it's okay if Bulletproof Coffee has 200, 250 calories; that's great.
But if you have four, 500 calories and you have a couple of those a day, now that's a meal; that's
two meals, and you're not really fasting anymore, and the fat is there to carry you over, not to
have you eat so much fat that your body has no reason to burn it off, the body. So that's where
Bulletproof Coffee can be a problem when it gets out of hand, when it becomes a meal. Now, there
are two kinds of mistakes that could make you gain weight with intermittent fasting, and the
first two things we talked about are things like overeating and too much Bulletproof Coffee, that
could actually make you gain weight directly. But then, the other way is if you make it
so hard that you're going to quit. If you don't understand to turn this into a lifestyle
that is sustainable, now, if you quit fasting, intermittent fasting, now you gain the weight back
because you're not doing the right things anymore, and intermittent fasting is not supposed
to be hard. But we have this mentality that of no pain, no gain. We go to the gym, and
if it's not hurting, it can't be good, right? But then, that mentality sometimes carries over, and
now we think that it's the hunger that's going to give us the results, and we feel absolutely
terrible, and we say, 'Oh my God, I'm both hungry and I feel deprived, and then I must be doing
it right.' And we got to get past that kind of thinking. All right, it's not supposed to be hard;
if it's too difficult, if we feel miserable, then we're not going to turn it into a lifestyle, and
then we fail. Another thing that can make us feel really bad is dehydration, and the two parts to
that: one is that we're not drinking enough water, but the second part is that we're not taking
enough electrolytes because electrolytes are charged little particles, little molecules that
bind water, that hold the water, so the body uses electrolytes to regulate fluid balance in the
body. And if we're not taking any, then we can be losing water even though we're drinking a lot of
water. And the most important electrolyte to take is just salt, plain salt, called sodium chloride.
I do recommend typically that you get sea salt or pink Himalayan salt; those are my favorites.
But then, it's also a really good idea that if you supplement also with some potassium, some
magnesium, and some calcium, as well as some trace minerals, especially if you end up doing a little
bit more intermittent fasting on a regular basis, or maybe you go a little bit longer once in a
while, like more than 24 hours. And because this is such a common problem, I developed a product to
support fasting called euLyte, and I'll put a link down below if you want to check that out. Another
thing that can actually make you gain weight is poor sleep, and hand in hand with that is high
stress because anytime you wake up after poor sleep or insufficient sleep, now your cortisol is
going to be elevated, and the same thing with any type of stress, anytime that your body perceives
that you are in danger, then you're going to be activating the fight-flight response. And anytime
that your body perceives danger, it thinks, 'Well, I might have to run if there's a bear or a tiger
around the corner, then I might have to run.' So I might need a little extra blood sugar,
and that's what the cortisol is for. Cortisol raises that blood sugar, and historically, that
was a great thing because we are in danger, we raise the blood sugar, and now the muscles
will absorb that blood sugar, and then we move, we run, we fight, and we use up that blood sugar.
That's the purpose, that's the balance that resets everything. But modern people, we don't get
that movement. We are feeling stressed, sitting in a car; we're feeling stressed, sitting at a
desk; there's no additional energy expenditure, and now that cortisol raises blood sugar, and
now, with that extra blood sugar and no movement, the body also raises insulin, and now we're
promoting metabolic imbalances with that extra stress and that extra cortisol. And of course,
when you don't move, and you handle that elevated glucose with insulin, now that glucose is going to
turn into fat, and whenever insulin is elevated, and we store it as fat, now we can't retrieve it,
and we get hungry. So now we end up eating more, we get more cravings, and that's what happens with
excess cortisol. And two really powerful ways to deal with this stress to help the body reset is
to do some breathing exercises and to do some meditation. And it doesn't take very long if you
get your body used to doing this, and you notice that you're feeling a little stressed, you could
take 30 seconds of breathing exercises and reset the body. Another problem is if we exercise wrong.
So one thing could be if we just exercise too much, period, but very commonly, we just exercise
at too high a level for too long, and that matters because we use the wrong type of fuel. And we
really want to understand that it's not about calories. Everywhere you look, there's such stupid
advice that if you eat a cookie with 100 calories, then you have to walk so many minutes, or you
have to run so many minutes; that is just not how it works at all, get that out of your head
forever. What you try to do is to burn fat, and you burn fat during aerobic exercise. Whenever
you switch to anaerobic exercise, now you're shifting from fat-burning to carbohydrates because
anytime that you get into anaerobic exercise, you're going to be shifting to a fuel source
called glycolysis. And here's how that works. So let's say that you're in pretty good shape,
and you have a resting heart rate of about 60, and let's say that at rest, you're using up that
much energy, and then as you start exercising, your body needs more energy. And this energy comes
primarily from burning fat and using oxygen. So the blood provides that oxygen, you're oxidizing
the fat, and you're making energy, and then as you make more, more, more energy, your heart
rate goes up so you can provide more oxygen. So once you get to about 120, you're close to maxing
out how much oxygen the blood can carry. So here, you have doubled your heart rate, but you've
also increased how much blood is pumped for every heartbeat because the heart stretches
a little bit. So now, you're pumping about three to four times as much blood, and here,
there's still enough oxygen to completely cover the need to make energy. So far, you are
in what we're calling aerobic, with air, that all the energy is covered by oxygen supplied
in real-time. But now, if you start going faster, now your heart rate is going to increase further,
and that's a sign that once you start huffing and puffing, now you're not taking in the blood
cannot deliver enough air, enough oxygen. So anything above here is going to be anaerobic,
and now you're not burning primarily fat anymore, now you're still burning the same amount of fat
at the bottom as the base, but anything extra, you're going to be using carbohydrate, and
you're switching to another energy pathway called glycolysis. And the way you can tell is that
you're huffing and puffing, your muscles start burning because this glycolysis, you're breaking
down glucose, and you turn that into lactic acid, that burn in the muscle, that's the lactic acid
from anaerobic metabolism. And now the problem is that fat burning with oxygen is very, very
efficient because you're going to be producing 38 ATP per unit of energy that you're using up per
unit of fat, but when you switch to glycolysis to carbohydrate, now you're only getting two ATP. So
to get this extra energy, you're going to be using up a lot of carbohydrate fairly quickly, and if
you're using up carbohydrate quickly, what is the body have to do? It has to look for more. So now,
you're making cortisol at a very high level. So anytime that you get into this zone, you're going
to automatically kick in the cortisol at a pretty high level. Now, even though you're making massive
amounts of cortisol, this can be beneficial if this anaerobic is very, very brief; that's called
high-intensity interval training. So if you do that all out, like a maximum effort for about
30 seconds, and you keep the total of intervals down to just a few minutes, now you're getting
tremendous benefits, and the drawback is not so much because even though you're in this anaerobic
zone, it's such a short time that the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. However, if you go to a
spin class, or if you go huffing and puffing, or you do something for 30, 40 minutes, or an hour,
now you spend so much time in that anaerobic zone, you're making so much cortisol that you're also
going to drive up your insulin. And when you do a lot of this, you also will get increased cravings
to replenish all of that carbohydrate that you used up. So we have to understand that if we do
things the hard way, that if we struggle and make it complicated and difficult, then we all end up
quitting, whereas if we learn how to do it right, now you can set yourself up for long-term success
for a lifestyle change. Another problem can be hypoglycemia, and for the most part, it's not
the hypoglycemia itself that's kind of rare that it becomes a problem, but it is the fear; it's
an inappropriate fear sometimes. Like someone asked me, how do I do this? Every time I try to do
one meal a day, my blood glucose drops below 70, and I have to eat something because we've
heard, we've been warned, we've been scared of hypoglycemia like that's a terrible thing. But
when you're fasting, you're burning mostly fat, and when you're mostly in fat burning, especially
if you're low carb, now you make ketones, that's an alternate fuel. So your body doesn't need
as much blood glucose, and it's not a problem. When I do a longer fast, I sometimes get down into
the 50s. I know a lot of people get into the 40s, and as long as you feel good, it's not a problem.
But I want to tell you about a study that they did one time, where they took a group of young,
healthy men, and they fasted them for three, four, five days, and their blood glucose levels were
at in the 40s and 50s, and then they injected them with insulin to force the blood glucose
dramatically low, just to see what happened. And they got one guy got the glucose down to nine, and
most of them were between 15 and 20, and nothing happened. None of them displayed symptoms of
hypoglycemia; they still felt good because their bodies, their brains, were running on ketones.
So your body doesn't need as much glucose when you're fat-adapted, and when you're fasting. But
the people who really need to be careful about hypoglycemia are type 2 diabetics on insulin
and type 1 diabetics who are also, obviously, on insulin. If you're not on insulin, then all
you have to do is to pay attention to how you feel because if you're a type two diabetic, if you're
taking insulin, and you stop eating, now that insulin will be just like the study I mentioned,
it will force the blood sugar super, super low, and that can be dangerous if you're not used to
fasting. But if you're not on insulin, then you just have to pay attention to how you feel. Are
you feeling good? Are you clearheaded? You have energy, or are you dizzy? Are you lightheaded?
And if you start feeling off in any way, then the first thing that you do is you drink some
water, and you have some salt or some electrolytes with it, and if it doesn't pick up almost
immediately where you're feeling better, then you go eat something. And then, next time that you
try intermittent fasting again, you go a little bit slower at it, or you make sure that you're a
little better fat-adapted, and you follow all the other rules that we talked about. But the biggest
reason people fail to develop a lifestyle of intermittent fasting is probably that they don't
understand enough about it; if they have a lack of knowledge, if they don't understand how the
body works, then you just need to study a little bit more because more understanding of these
things will create a better expectation, a more realistic expectation. And the best way to gain
a better understanding is, of course, to watch a lot more of my videos, and if you enjoyed this
video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how
the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications,
so you never miss a life-saving video."
