Jason Fung: The Complete Guide to Fasting (& how to burn fat)

hey everyone this is guy Lawrence the cause of 180 nutrition and welcome to another stellar episode of the health sessions where we connected leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest science of thinking and power and everyone to turn their health and lives around and this week our awesome guest is dr. Jason Fung and we are getting into the topic of fasting now fasting is a topic that we haven't really covered on the podcast before I do you small I do personally implement little bits of fasting in my life so is great together you know a guy that's been studying it for the last four years and applying it to hundreds and hundreds of patients in his medical practice in the US and we cover things from fasting as an application to obesity to diabetes especially type 2 to then obviously just just weight loss and then health maintenance and even in athleticism as well so you know what are the precautions around it what should we look for it's fasting hard can we eat whatever we do outside of fasting and so forth and why should we do it should we be scared of it are we going to lose muscle mass you know all sorts of stuff so it's all in there and it was fantastic so we had Jason on and basically grilled him for 55 minutes to to unleash as much knowledge as we could so as no doubt you can enjoy guys and if you are enjoying the shows please leave us a review on iTunes if you can only if you enjoy them of course but if you subscribe to its five-star it and leave a review for us it just really helps other people find this podcast as well and can get the information just like yourself are right now if you're a regular listener so that's one thing I'd ask for guys and I really appreciate it if you do I read all the reviews and now would be happy to repeat read them out on the podcast as well anyway let's go over to Jason the fun enjoy hi this is Garland I'm Jon with Stewart cook hi stew good morning hello guys and our awesome guest today is mr. Jason for me Jason welcome to the show hey how are you nice every year Thank You Man did I pronounce you turn him right I did I should have asked you before we saw ya yeah beautiful so I made that look the first question ask everyone on the show is if a complete stranger stopped you on the street now see what you did for living what would you say well I'm a kidney specialist by trade so I'm a physician I trained very conventionally through internal medicine and then I did a couple of years in Los Angeles for my nephrologist a ten years ago now eight years ago now I became very interested in the question of nutrition obesity because that's really the core problem of what faces us in the medical world like a lot of the problems that we face or not what we used to face which is infections and so on they're all metabolic problems that is type 2 diabetes and all the problems that go along with obesity such as sleep apnea high blood pressure high cholesterol and all those sorts of problems so they really take up probably about 40 50 % of the healthcare budgets of their you know modern West Nations is a huge problem and worse than that is a growing problem right so you've all seen the statistics on obesity and type 2 diabetes kind of Rises right along with that so that's where I really got interested in trying to see where we kind of went wrong means obviously what we're doing was not working right we told everybody you know cut calories eat less more well you know we've been saying the same thing for 30 years we've been singing the same song and nothing has worked so I don't know why we would keep using it right because we knew it didn't work so that's really where it came from that I really started looking into first the problems with obesity and the very much related problems of type 2 diabetes and how our treatments are really quite incorrect and really how to properly treat them all right yeah well what them just for a bit of a back story is all Jason what led you into the world of fasting because I know we're going to be talking about fasting today so so there's like this being a doctor you know the first thing you started looking at with your DBC problems and then where did fasting start playmat journey well from from the obesity side of things really I recognized that the problem was too much insulin right and everybody says I demonize it when I don't it's a normal hormone but obviously any hormone if you get it too much of it can be a problem right whether it's by wari hormone or insulin so obesity type 2 diabetes are really problems of too much insulin so the natural solution then is to look for dietary solutions that reduce insulin right and that was the big problem with type 2 diabetes we had two drugs that would reduce insulin so we just kind of kept getting worse and worse so low carbohydrate high fat diets ketogenic diets they're very good at lowering insulin but the problem I had is that my patients didn't really get any better and it wasn't because the diet was good is because it was complicated to these people these aren't like people who go on the internet every day and look for nutrition sort of things there are people who are 65 70 years old some of them don't speak English and they really didn't know how to follow a proper low carbohydrate diet so it was kind of discouraging because here I knew that I had kind of zoomed in on the problem and I knew what needed to be done yet the patients really didn't know how to do it because this whole low-fat kind of craze of the last 40 years most of them are still in that sort of kind of paradigm of cut your fat so to go to all of a sudden to a low carbohydrate high fat diet they really couldn't wrap their heads around so I needed something kind of completely different so one day I was talking to a friend and she's talking about a cleanse that she did as a seven-day cleanse and you drink the stuff right you don't eat anything he drink all this stuff that's really explicit so I felt great and so on I thought oh just like fasting right that's what I was thinking I thought well that's a terrible idea yeah so that does the dumbest thing I ever heard and then she's like telling me how good it was and I'm like huh you know my advantage is that I might think it's stupid but then I talked for a second okay exactly is so stupid about it because I knew kind of peripherally that people did used too fast routinely so every Sunday every Sunday around Easter time you'd go to church and they talk about fasting like for three or four weeks straight you'd hear all about fasting nothing nobody actually did it right yeah and it was very funny to me now that it's something that has been part of human history yet for the last say 40 years has been completely forgotten in fact the mere mention of it gets the same reaction that I used to give which is just a big rolling of the eyes right so then my advantage again is that I know the physiology I could go into the medical literature and start looking and say okay well I think it's really stupid but what exactly is so stupid about it and that's when I recognize that there's actually nothing stupid about it in fact all the changes which is mostly based on lowering insulin are highly beneficial so in people who are overweight or who have very high blood sugars and type 2 diabetes hey just what if you don't eat your blood sugar comes down if you don't eat you lose weight and there's nothing wrong with it this is the way the human body is designed that's what fat is it's stored food energy right that's what it's there for for you to use when you have nothing to eat it's not there for looks right so if that's the case then why don't you simply fasts in a controlled manner and let your body mobilize this stored food energy there's that's the completely 100% natural way to do things so that's what I did I just started people on fasting I monitored them obviously again my advantage is that I could monitor them closely watch their blood Sugar's adjust their medications and what I quickly realized was that it was incredibly powerful that is we had people who are on 200 units of insulin a day who three weeks later were on zero right we had people with 30 years of type 2 diabetes and within a month and a half they're off everything right with normal blood sugar yeah like a Batson in fact it's practically if you're to ask most doctors impossible they would have told you it's impossible yeah I was here I was day after day after day so what we did was we got we just started doing it on everybody because we realized that hey this is very powerful and what we need to do is not a little people and say oh you can't do it because it's so hard we didn't know it's hard but it makes them better so we're going to give them the support they need to get better that's what we did we start a program we actually have people all over the world who you know connect remotely to get coaching and dietary counseling but really based on helping them through the intermittent fasting you know what problems can come up how to deal with them support because it does take support right and that's the that's the whole idea of what we what we did fantastic huh quick question Jason before I know you gonna shoot this - how long have you been applying that protocol for just hopefully four years or four yes you know you know a lot of that and that time right yeah hundreds and hundreds oh I think I mean I don't think that there's anybody in the world who has done this in the you know use fastening in a therapeutic manner yes there are people who say okay come to my clinic come for a week and fast and then that's it but nobody who says you're sick and this is what I'm going to use to treat you for your disease for your obesity for type two diabetes will monitor you will check your blood work will check your you know blood pressures and do it like you know as if it's just part of regular medicine which it really should be right but the thing is that it is so far out of the mainstream that it you know it takes people a little bit of time to kind of understand what's doing it the interesting thing is that we've had a lot of people be able to maintain their weight loss as well because I actually think that is far easier to maintain your weight loss using some kind of intermittent fasting protocols than standard diets going in and when we're talking about duration here for the fasting what what does that look like because I've heard something we'll say well you can do a 12-hour fast if you eat your dinner at 7:00 p.m. and you eat your breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and you sleep you have essentially fasted for 12 hours do we need more than that yeah I think so the the duration is actually flexible so it can be any duration the fasting is just the flip side of eating that is anytime you're not eating you're fasting you know the word breakfast is very interesting because what it implies is that fasting is actually a part of everyday life so what we should keep our feeding and are fasting in balance there right so you go back to the 1950s and people are eating three meals a day and they're getting about 12 to 13 14 hours of fasting in every single day right now that's just normal right finished dinner at 7:00 eat breakfast at seven twelve hours fasting 12 hours feeding great because your body really only exists in one of two states right you're either storing food energy or you're burning food energy right there's no in-between so what what happens when you eat of course is that insulin goes up it tells your body store that food energy so that when you fast when you're asleep insulin goes down your body pulls that energy back oh and burns it that's why you don't die in your sleep every single night right so what happens of course is that if you now eat like from the minute that you get up to the minute you go to bed now you're feeding all the time you're giving your body instructions to keep storing food energy remember you can't store food energy and burn it at the same time right you can't go both ways it's not it's not logical so if you're always storing food energy guess what you're going to be fine so all you do is you extend that period of fasting let your body burn some of the stored food energy and your body knows how to do that so you can do there's several popular regimen so there's 16 hour fast so you can press your eating window for example to eight hours like between say 12 and 8 or 11 and 7 so I'm like that and you can go to 24 hours of fasting which is kind of a one meal a day sort of an idea so if you go kind of 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. that's dinner to dinner you can go even longer if you skip the full day 36 hours and you can go really up to as long as you want so we have people go up to 21 30 days mind you for those longer fasts as with everything right it's more powerful the longer you go but the more problems might face down the line so we are careful to monitor them very closely but again there's nothing wrong with you going 30 days even it's not easy but it's not as hard as most people to leave one of the things would be extended fast which is important is that you do have to be a little bit more careful when you break the fast if you do it gently and yet make sure if you don't feel well of course not to push yourself kind of get yourself the trouble so the first thing a popped in there with the you know the different periodization the fasting that you can do is that should we all be considering that or should it be more for people that have chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes or whatever obesity or whatever might be in sort of implement protocol into like a weekly or monthly basis and then you got the other spectrum you know where people are healthy and maybe just looking to optimize health and maintain good health so where would yes so where would that fit in with with both spectrums or something does that make sense yeah so yeah absolutely and this is what I tell people all the time is keep in mind what your goals of treatment are right yeah so if your goal of treatment for example is just to kind of maintain your weight you can do it fairly well with a daily kind of 12 14 hour fast right that's just normal you don't with a game we don't lose weight again that's kind of the 1950s America sort of model they're eating white bread they're eating cookies they're eating ice cream right but there's very little obesity piece not eating all the time if you look at national surveys of how often they ate it was three meals a day in 1977 it goes up to six a day by 2005 so it's an uncertainty and I think that's played a huge role now if you want to there's there's different reasons why people do it so for weight loss for example type-2 diabetes it's tests on your severity but typically we will go to a longer fast not 16 hours for example which does pretty well for weight loss but to at least a 24 36 hour fast for type 2 diabetes for severe diabetes we often consider doing about a 7 to 14 day fast and then there's different reasons again so for people who are into kind of athletics for example you might do some different fast so there's something called training in the fasted state which is becoming very popular which is again about a 20 24 hour fast then you exercise then you and that sounds very strange but physiologically there's a huge number of benefits because what happens when you fast is that you're noradrenaline goes up and your growth hormone goes up now those two hormones are considered part of the counter regulatory hormones that is they run counter to insulin so insulin tends to lower blood glucose noradrenaline or adrenaline and growth hormone tend to raise blood glucose so as your insulin Falls you have higher levels of our adrenaline and growth hormone now you exercise and you can exercise harder than you've done before because you're kind of pumped up from all the adrenaline then as you eat your growth hormone levels are high so you recover faster so train harder recover faster now that's a huge advantage if you're talking about any athletics right so it's an advantage you almost cannot afford to you know skip and that's nearly from adjusting your timing right so another advantage of fasting for example some people find that they have much higher mental clarity so again people think oh I don't eat I'm going to not be able to concentrate it's actually the exact opposite if you think about a time you've eaten a huge meal like that Thanksgiving or something you had a huge meal you're not really sharp right all you can do is kind of sit on the couch and watch football that's about it whereas on the other hand when you think about somebody and you say oh that guy is really hungry you know hungry for success he's hungry for power does that mean he's just sitting on the couch watching TV no it means he's energized and out they're getting stuff that's what it means when you're hungry you don't have all that blood kind of digesting food so your brain is sharp and some people really feel that so there's a whole group of people out in in Silicon Valley who do this as a sort of a bio hack so that is they're trying to hack themselves like into a higher level of mental performance now not just athletic performance of a mental performance and what they do is they fast and guess what you're saving time because you don't have to eat you don't have to shop you don't have to clean up you get more work done but the work that you do is on a higher level than you used to do and that's fantastic because that's free right so it's like okay if you're in a competition in Silicon Valley like a higher level of mental farms means a lot of money it's the difference between success and failure right so for these guys they're like okay there's going to hack themselves into a love higher level of performance oh that's terrific there's a story that Pythagoras the ancient Greek mathematician required his students to fast before thewhat they would cut they could come to class so all these ancient Greek thinkers actually did a lot of fasting Socrates judo and all those people and they didn't not because they're fat they did it because they they knew that it gave them kind of more mental clarity and we still talk about the classic Greek philosophers right the great Greek mathematicians are like holy that's amazing all right and then you can talk about things like cancer prevention I know we touched on that briefly but there's people who feel and the research is more shady here that you can actually prevent cancers from developing because cancers need glucose and what happens when you fast is that you kind of lock down all that glucose and you kind of starve them out so there are people who suggest that you can actually do this in combination if a ketogenic diet can actually help prevent cancers yeah do you think as well that there's when it comes to fasting if you haven't fasted before let's say your diet this slowly process doo-doo-doo you find there's an adjustment period to actually getting into fasting oh absolutely yeah yeah so it's probably about a two-week period so generally what we tell people is that the first couple of times you fast the first two weeks say it's going to suck yes your body's not used to it and it's not going to go very well but you can't give up because it's just like exercise if you start exercising and you got sore muscles you know go oh man that died he told me to exercise as the worst thing right I don't I'm not and you don't do that right yes yeah okay well I'm not in shape I got to give myself a couple of weeks get in shape and I'll see how it is you know you can't say oh my joints hurt after that first run that I did after 30 years right so it's the same thing the fast thing if you haven't done it it's easier to do from a ketogenic or low carb diet for sure because your body is kind of used to burning fat so if it's burning body fat or if it's burning dietary fat it makes no difference it's much easier and that's what we find anecdotally if you come from a fairly process kind of high carb sort of a meal then yeah there's an adjustment and there's there's a lot of problems that do come up things like hunger things like headaches and so on and they're manageable but you have to kind of understand that you can get through it and there's kind of two ways to do it one is to kind of jump right in and force your body to adapt like start with kind of a longer fast five days seven days and then force your body to make that adjustment or just build it up slowly so and there's no right or wrong answers so for example if you jump in the pool you can either jump in or you can kind of you know slowly go in down the stairs all right or wrong answer people do it both ways but if you find that it's getting really difficult what we tell people is actually just do the long one and force your body to make that that that adaptation so that it makes it easier gonna go sit and you're going well yeah I'm just going to think from an athletic perspective as well there would be concerns about things like muscle wastage how would we address that yeah so there's actually this question that comes up quite a bit so for muscle loss it happens at around 24 hours and that's one of the reasons most people who do fit for an athletic standpoint don't go beyond that what happens is that your body actually burns up to 24 hours it burns the stored glucose which is glycogen in the liver but it takes about 36 hours roughly to go into fat burning so between 24 and 36 hours that's actually a period where you're actually burning some protein so 24 to 36 hours and that's where people think that you lose a lot of muscle so you do burn protein but that's not actually always a bad thing so let's leave athletics for a second if you just talked about the regular person people might say well you're going to lose a lot of lean muscle if you keep doing 36 hours all the time because you're good just for muscle that's not actually what happens in real life because you're forgetting that after that period of fasting you're going to rebuild muscle that's what the growth hormone is therefore what you do in fact is you actually tear down all these kind of broken-down kind of junky old proteins and then you replace them with new proteins so when you look at studies of people who do alternate daily fasting if you compare it to daily caloric restriction the weight the lean body mass of a percentage in daily caloric restriction so if you look at percentage lean mass yeah caloric restriction it goes up by about 0.5% with the alternate daily fasting goes up by about 2.2 percent in other words fasting is about four times better at preserving lean muscle so it's much better because you can't just look at the period where you're breaking you down you have to look at the period where you're building it up and again the other interesting thing is that in four years we've never sent a patient to the surgeon to get a flabby skin off why because all that excess protein that's the excess skin excess connective tissue right blood vessels all that stuff that feeds that fat yeah if you don't break down that protein it's going to hang off as loose skin so what we what we find is that we actually just about never have that problem because the intermittent fasting takes care of that problem for you the body is much smarter than we are if it sees excess protein that's hanging around with nothing to be used for it's going to break it down so again thinking about pictures that you seemed of say Holocaust victim yeah they're very skinny they're very thin because they could starve in a real sense but there's no loose skin right the body has used them for fuel so your body can do the same thing and it's actually interesting because there's a process called at otha G where you break down these proteins and it the 2016 Nobel Prize in medicine was just awarded to one of the early researchers in this process of esophageal so it's actually considered a very healthy process because you're taking kind of old protein and replacing it with new protein but if you're talking athletics now what you have to do is kind of limit yourself to the shorter periods lasting 16 hours 20 hours 24 hours because you may or may not want to get into that period of earning if you are lean compared to if you're obese you're going to burn more protein why because if you have more fat your body's going to use more fat right so it depends on the context so yes if you're lean to begin with and you probably don't want to be going into a lot of these 36 hours fast because you're going to burn more protein that you don't actually have that much of right or you're interested in keeping it up and you're going to skew yourself more towards the shorter end of the spectrum so for example there's a story of Hugh Jackman who when he was training for the role of Wolverine did a lot of these 16 ate like 16 our fasting 8 our eating window sort of thing right and he was able to kind of tone himself up incredibly well because he was using this sort of this sort of interment fasting to his advantage yeah but just to just to put that into context and I'm going to use myself as an example so I am 44 years old I see myself as relatively healthy I've got good blood 70 kgs almost 6 foot tall low body fat how would I use fasting to optimize my health well again it you probably could go with a short sign of 12 daily 1214 hours and do just fine right so you know people say you need to specify well it's part of everyday life but you could do kind of 3 meals breakfast lunch dinner and be completely fine yeah because you don't need to lose weight there's no need for you to kind of expand that if you want to try and use it to your advantage then what you could do is go with the 16a training in the fasted State right so when you're doing your workouts you may be able to do better workouts and build up better I slightly adjusting that not huge amount but do a 16-8 the other thing that some people recommend is kind of a yearly longer fast like a couple of days kind of yeah and that's more for kind of stimulate this kind of breaking down of cancer preventing cancer that kind of thing and if you think about it that's not far off of what many religions have always recommended right don't lift all the time but also you know around Easter or around you and on and religion exactly Lent well there's periods of fasting some of them fairly long right and and we're not saying oh go 40 days and 40 nights right we're just saying that hey maybe like a couple of days is okay and everybody always just bet time shape about putting like a five-day class right now but I'm not saying it's great fun right it's never nobody ever said that Wow yeah but I'm talking healthy here if you think about it again look at the numbers we eat three meals a day in a year that's roughly a thousand meal okay well if you do a five-day khasim is fifteen fifteen of those vows and meal okay and everybody always gets on my case oh my god you know you're gonna kill people like really are you serious if you're 60 years old you have 60,000 meals and I'm telling you to miss teen of those 60,000 meals right that's ridiculous that this is going to be a problem our body is obvious going to be able to handle it right and there may be a lot of benefits to it and that's all we're saying you gotta understand how to use it you got to understand what your goals are yeah right and this is where I get a lot of flack from people who are relatively healthy relatively mean and I go you shouldn't do these fasts I'm like yeah because your your goal was completely different than my 350 pound patient with 200 units of insulin it's completely different I'm going to use completely different regimens but you have to understand that of course people don't they just kind of hear working in this way oh okay another thing I want to raise is all Jason like if someone's listening to this and they using fasting as a way to maintain their weight right which is fair enough but does they not give them a license to eat whatever they want outside of that window because then they use in fast and to bring their weight loss back into that state you can although obviously it's not optimal yeah it's hard because it's not exactly the same thing right so if you eat a lot of sugar you'll be better off fasting than not fasting that's for sure but it's not like it's going to make you healthy right yeah you can't do something bad and then something good and pretend that it's okay you still you know had all that processed kind of sugar and stuff so it's not quite that but it is better than doing kind of nothing at all the whole the whole idea is that for people it's actually a lot easier to do it kind of on an intermittent basis and for people who haven't done it before it may be actually much easier for them like a lot of everybody's tried these kind of caloric restriction diets right they don't work right period everybody's done it it never worked we've been telling people to do these caloric restriction diets for 50 years right we've been singing the same song and nothing's been happening right and the thing is sometimes it's just easier to not eat at all right it's like my son right you can't get them into the bath but once he's in the bath you can't get them out of the bath right so there's this whole inertia that goes along with it so once you start eating it's actually a lot harder and takes a lot more willpower to say okay wow this is delicious I'm not nearly full I've only had three bites but I'm going to force myself to stop even though there's all this food here and I really could just eat the whole plate right and look why would you do that right why wouldn't you just say okay I'm not going to eat don't even look at it go do something else watch TV read a book do something interesting and then by that time everything's passed and then you haven't eaten anything guess what your body will simply eat the equivalent number of calories from your body fat that's it right so again people think that it's really hard and like I said it's not fun sometimes it's just easier than doing the office and you can because it's so flexible you can mix and match you can use it a lot this week and not at all next week it's Christmas I'm not going to fast right so for a week and a half I didn't fast at all and it's okay because I'm going to make up for that later on or you make up for it before right so you can use it to kind of make those adjustments because life is like that right that's life life is not this life is full of ups and downs both in you know stress and personal life but also on eating and that's that's the secret the cycle of life is feast and fat right it's not constant deprivation right yeah when it's something birthday a be straight when it's wedding not eating solid right I mean cake right and it's not good for you and so on but it's a treat right the point and you can't have treats every day and when you have treats you have to make up for periods of fasting right and that's what we've always done right feast and fast that's the cycle and we for some reason think that that's not a really bad cycle but that's just life yeah yeah Jason you look like a very fit and healthy guy how often do you far well how do you bring it into you I do it I do it the easiest thing for me I do it probably 24 hours of fasting is my typical so I rarely eat breakfast because I find it easiest meal for me to skip yeah and again that's probably five or six days out of seven Monday to Friday when I'm work I almost I rarely eat breakfast because I find it easy but now it's like nothing at all I get my coffee like instead of waking up you know making some eggs washing up eating a less 45 minutes right 30 minutes it's like now I get my coffee I walk out the door so much easier right and then I skip lunch sometimes and then that's a 24 hour five and you do that two or three times a week and truthfully again and this is you know to my point of the multiple benefits it all depends when I'm really busy and have a lot of work to do I fast a lot more why because I want that extra 30 45 minutes of time to do work right so when I was writing my book for example I was fasting like all the time and it wasn't because I was trying to lose weight my weight which stays relatively stable it's because I wanted the the 30 45 minutes every day so it's like four times a week and you know what that that adds up right 45 minutes a day four days a week all of a sudden I've got an extra three hours like a hours of extra time every single week right people always complain about you know how busy our lives are how complex our lives are well guess what fasting is actually a way that simplifies everything right because it's not something that costs you money it saves you money right that's not something that cost you time it saves you time it's not something that makes your life more complex right oh can I eat this grass-fed butter or is this organic regular butter okay right it's like it's not complex just don't eat anything right you know I'll have water and that's it it simplifies your life because it's almost the exact opposite of every single diet it's not something that you do it's something that you don't do right and you can add it to whatever diet you feel you want to do so you want to do a vegan diet you can still fast right you want to do you know one of these low carb high fat diets ketogenic with a lot of me you can still fast right if you wanted you don't eat nuts or you don't eat wheat or you want to do a low fat diet you can still do it right so there's so many different advantages because it's actually cook the complete opposite of everything of thing every other diet that's out there it's like the anti diet right yeah that's the advantage so I use it a lot more for time-saving and especially like when I went on a cruise and stuff right like seriously gained a lot of weight and it was like okay time for a little fasting that was about the only time I really said okay this is that right my drink oh right like I get that was bad but I had a great time right I didn't really you know watch what I did and yes what in a couple of weeks I was back too and I'm like okay that's good but the key is that I was able to enjoy myself on that because those wraps other people who weren't really you know very strict and you go out and you don't want to be that guy who doesn't eat this and doesn't eat that and you know big party pooper right so you do it and then it's like but I'm okay because I know I have a tool that I can use to bring myself right back down and then all have forgotten about it two weeks later right all but I'll have a remember that I had a great time right that's the best the whole ideas is flexible you know and powerful no I like it I like it it's perfect advice and you mentioned the book as well you're writing the book and I would just wanted to touch on that as well because what's the book with Jimmy Moore we've had Jimmy on this show before I just wanted to find out a little bit more yeah so the first book I wrote was called the obesity code and that's really a book about what causes weight gain so everybody thinks it's about calorie but it has nothing to do with calories so it goes over why the whole idea of calories is so incorrect and the reason that it's interact us because our body really just doesn't have any way to measure calories right so if you eat say 100 calories of cookies or a high calorie broccoli people then you're the same thing because it's all about the calories well the body responds entirely differently the minute that food goes in your mouth the cookies insulin goes off your body starts to store fat right the broccoli it doesn't and it has lot of nutrients and all this other stuff but the point is that the body just doesn't care about because it has no way to measure it and so the reason that we've fallen so far off the track is because we've completely misunderstood the cause of weight gain so if you think that too many calories causes weight gain and you're going to say okay then I'm going to lower my calorie so we all did that it didn't work okay you have the entire wrong idea so what actually causes weight gain is really insulin insulin is a hormone that tells our body to store fat right so when you're storing fat you're going to gain weight so the whole idea is if your infant is high how are you going to lower your insulin right that's the whole key to weight loss so that's really what it goes over in detail it's more it's not a real diet book it's kind of a science and then I touch about a touch on low carbohydrate diets ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting but you know intermittent fasting was like one eighth one chapter a lot of that book so then all these people had a lot of question about regimens and practicalities and you know how to do it whether problems that come up and that's what we covered so I met Jimmy in Cape Town and we're talking about fasting and he's like oh okay well what's a good resource for this like what's a good book I can just go and buy like there is nothing okay I think that's nothing it was like one of our websites is there anybody that talks about it I'm like I talked about it that's about it right nobody really talks about fasting at all it's a really under covered area so then he's like okay well if there's no book let's write a book I'm like hey that sounds like a great idea and that's how that book came about which is going to complete I too thought yeah I'm Jimmy I Jimmy got some great results so from where I hear as well from since you've been bringing in fasting in yeah he's done some longer fasts and he's really kind of showing how it's doable for people he did a 30-day fast a 21-day fast right and he you know how he is he's out there showing people and so he did a daily kind of update on his FAFSA you know he you can watch him and he's like yeah I feel great you know it's like yeah yeah they think you're going to be curled up on the couch in the fetal position right for 21 days it's not he's out there he's doing everything he normally does and why not you're powering your body on the food that you store it away but you've carried on your body so what's the difference between powering yourself on food you're eating now empowering yourself on food you ate you know from a month ago that's carried around on your body as body fat yeah it takes a lot it takes a lot more fasting than you would actually most people believe if you look at the how much fasting causes weight loss a pound of fat is roughly 3500 calories and most people eat somewhere around 1820 2,000 calories a day so it takes almost two full days a fasting to lose one pound of fat though that's shredded also a 20 day fast everybody thinks wow that's really long and it is is you can only you might only expect to lose 10 pounds of fat now you'll probably lose a bit more than that right you'll probably lose another 20 pounds but a lot of that will be water weight which will come back right that's why people say oh I've failed because you lost 20 and gained 10 back no because you should have only expected 10 to begin with so that's the key is that ya understand that then you know so if somebody is doing a 21 20 days fast for 21 days fast would you alter the way you go about your daily life during that time like would you still be exercising regular like you normally would and the other would use that would you lose muscle mass a bit on 21 days and I we spoke about short windows and what we'd done how would you approach it yeah you should do everything you normally do on fasting days that you do on a regular day because really the way you have to think about it is that you're feeding your body with body fat right you're eating breakfast lunch dinner of body fat that's not a way you have to think about it terms of muscle loss there is a steady muscle turnover on that and again it there there is some protein loss as you go through not all of it is muscle they usually also expect to regain some of that once you start refeeding so again it there's a difference between obese patients and lean patients with people who are lean are going to burn so if you're obese for example when you measure how much of your calories comes from fat during a sauce it's like 90 plus percent if you take a look that same fasting period and put a lean person in it's like 70 percent body fat there's a hell of a lot more protein loss because there's not as if that record again you have to really look at what you're trying to do here because if you are obese and these long ones are not really that big of a deal yeah right now that makes sense that makes sense a lot last questions is just now just trying to clarify things as well and for people that are then doing the intermittent fasting might be you know 12 18 24 hours and might be a few times a week in that other window period of eating what you're saying is just eat when you're hungry and stop when you fall pretty much and not before concern the glands how much food that you eat like you can eat in abundance if you want but yeah I make the key is to eat real foods because the thing about CGR satiety is that if you look at processed foods they don't activate satiety mechanism so you can say e to satiety but you have to be careful because the quality is example if you eat steak you you know you eat and then at some point you really just can't eat anymore right and these are like those eating competitions like you look at them and they're like green right it's like I can't eat anymore even though it looks delicious to the person who doesn't mean but and we've all had this phenomenon and is that if you have a huge meal and then somebody says oh you want another pork chop you're like no way but then somebody says oh how about a slice of that pie you say yeah sure right it's like okay what's the difference right again here's the thing the calories they might be the same number of calories a small pork chop and a slice of apple pie does that apply a lot of calories but the thing is that the apple pie is highly processed you know it's highly refined and it doesn't activate the satiety kinnison so what activates the tidy mechanism protein does that does but when you have just almost pure carbohydrate it does it same as fructose and I used to think this even when I was a child I used to think this is very interesting that you can eat a meal with water and be full or you can eat a meal with coke and be equally full but you took an extra thousand calories with that coke right and it's like why is that yeah it's a lot of calories but no satiety at all and that's the sugar right the sugar really just doesn't fill you up which is why you say well you know if you're if you want to have some snack or something and the worst thing to have is like some sugary snack which is what we all give the kids right yeah it just doesn't fill you up at all but if you have fast get protein well there are natural mechanisms and even carbohydrates but not not processed ones right like beans and so unlucky yeah a lot of just not going to feel it I'm saying even though there's something like potatoes for instance it's a natural seed you got to remember but it's actually fairly filling right so not potato chips but you know natural potato fried they're much different way you know if you're if you're full and somebody says here you want a baked potato you'd be like whoa no way yeah ok so again there's natural satiety mechanisms that are there that are gonna make you stop right so if you as long as you stick to kind of real foods and avoid the kind of process flour sugars and so on yeah you know eat until you're full because your body will tell you to stop and everybody thinks this is the whole thing with the sort of there's this whole notion out there that we're programmed to eat like we're it's like eating robots right you put it in front of us and we're going to eat until we get sighs like there's no truth to that whatsoever in fact there's multiple mechanisms that stop us from eating so in the stomach there are stretch receptors if you eat too much your stomach you'll stretch you'll tell your brain stop eating there's cool assistant cholecystokinin which is activated by fat it once you eat it get enough they'll tell you to stop eating is approaching why why again approach activate it if you get enough it's a satiety magnet and then you know there's so there's multiple overlapping mechanisms to stop us from eating when it's highly processed we bypass all those right so this idea that it's you know you know we're just programmed to eat and it's like okay that's just that's just so untrue there's no truth to it but sounds great on TV right it's like oh because we have food all the time that's why we're all fat because we have food all the time it's like well they had food all time in 1950 as well right there's no starvation yeah people were okay they didn't eat all the time so yeah it's very interesting the entire field of I find it actually fascinating the entire field of obesity and so on because there's so many misconceptions out there about what we should do we should not do really you know getting back to the real basics of you know eat real food yeah you'd cry go a long way with those two simple principles I know it's incredible isn't it yeah that's beautiful it's great on so thank you Jason now I just looking at the time as well we have a couple of questions you asked everyone on the show Jason and the first one is what are your non-negotiables to be the best version of yourself um I don't I mean that's a hard one I mean I think that maintaining a kind of a healthy living so it doesn't necessarily mean a specific weight but obviously the most important thing to all of us is our health right because you could be a billionaire but if you have all kinds of illnesses and cancer well it just ain't worth it right I'd rather be kind of middle class you know have a house and a mortgage and a car that's not too fancy then a you know ku trillionaire with terminal cancer right so to us that's really the most important thing is maintaining good health and that doesn't necessarily mean that you have a six-pack and can bench like 300 pounds right you can do fine just maintaining yourself in a normal way and that's where fasting is very good because and it's not the weight that's the most important is the waist size decimal or in so a very simple rule of thumb is keep your waist size measured around to half of your height and if you keep that you can see from study so for example I'm 65 inches is five foot six so 33 inches is the maximum I would want to be from the waist which is the fat that accumulates around your waist is actually far more dangerous to you than all the other five yeah so if you look at the metabolic syndrome it doesn't have a weight category it measures the waist side and that's because that's the most important once you get above a waist to height ratio 0.5 then you see the complications really go high so again it's and it's oh it's it's you know it's it's a way to kind of stay healthy right and it's a lot easier to kind of maintain that so I I like to look at that as a good proxy of you know of good health as in it's a simple way to measure because obviously some people do an exercise less and do do fine and some people exercise a lot and and do fine as well yeah fair enough I'm the last questions annotation what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given ah the best piece of advice I think would really just to you know to think for yourself right I mean there's a lot of people out there that give a lot of advice and not all of it is wrong but you have to see what works for you alright so some people they'll do long fast and love it and some people will do long fast and they hate it well guess what you shouldn't do long fast right just because somebody else does it doesn't mean you should do it right we all like different things some people like you know let's uh put in some people like Britney Spears it doesn't mean somebody's wrong and somebody's right it's a things were different so what you have to do is take the advice and say well is it really worth okay and if you say okay I'm going to follow this reduce my calories low fat advice is it working if it's not working then it doesn't matter that every dietician and every doctor and every association says that you should do it you're not doing well then you got to change it and find something for you so that's probably the most important thing and that's I mean it's important for me because I really had to kind of unlearn a lot of what I was taught in order to kind of understand this whole process so I think that to me it's important to kind of maintain a little bit of independence of thought it's always good to listen to people but you always got to use common sense right and this is where you know we kind of get into this trap of listening to the experts and then throwing out our own common sense that if somebody tells you oh you should eat all the time and you're gonna lose weight I'm like okay that really sounds dumb okay it sounds stupid so but try it and again what people do and they gain a lot of weight because they're eating all the time it's like okay well that was really bad advice it sounds like that advice and it was really bad advice so then it's like okay common sense will tell you that you shouldn't do it what happens is that we get into this kind of brainwashed state where we say go every expert every doctor tells me to eat six times a day I'm doing terribly eating six times a day but I'm going to keep doing it and I'm going to make fun of those people who try to eat once or twice a day right it's like no you shouldn't do that think for yourself use your common sense and you can't believe that like you got to follow your own path because there are people who do terribly on low carb diets and then they say oh I followed a high carb diet it did really well I'm like great I don't care what you eat if you're feeling well and doing well then you can go on doing whatever it is you do right but if you do early and then you come to me I'll say let me give you some advice you should you can try and change it this way or this way or this way and see if you do better right but don't be so dogmatic that you have to say oh I have to do your body will tell you like you always got to come back and say our bodies are like wonderful you know machines because they know a lot more than we do and they can take a lot more and they'll always help us you got to listen to it right you can't just say oh I'm just going to eat even if I'm not hungry I'm like that's it you know and you hear this all the time right if you're not hungry I practice it doesn't matter you still got to stuff your face with a couple of slices of toast right well that's not a winning strategy for weight loss okay if you're not hungry at breakfast don't eat that two slices of toast right and then people do better and then I don't think I guess you're right it's like well it was common sense right so that's yeah make sense so I think that just to think for yourself kind of and recognize that everybody is different so you can't say that just because you guys say it works just because that fungi says that fasting is kind of it doesn't mean it will be good for everybody it doesn't need to work for everybody you got to tweak it and find fine way to make it work for you but it's a tool in our tool belt probably the most powerful tool that we have and to kind of throw that out and not use it at all to me is completely nonsensical mmm absolutely but that's good advice yeah Jason if anyone were to get any more of you where's the best place to send them website wise there's a so I'm on my website is www.seannal.com which is under is infeld's a website I'm on there as well and there's a lot of great stuff on intermittent fasting a lot of great stuff on low carbs and recipes very easy to use both of those websites are excellent beautiful and of course is the book to complete guide to fasting with you and Jimmy Moore which was released last October November if I'm not mistaken Jack yeah yeah late October excellent well we link it all to the show notes this will go out to everyone across our audiences and I've no doubt they're going to get a great deal from today's topic thanks so much for coming on Jason and sharing your wisdom with us it's the first time we've ever thank you first time we've covered fasting on the show and yeah it's fascinating stuff awesome yeah absolutely thank you thank you so much Jason Thank You gentleman probably okay bye-bye all right [Music]

Channel: 180 Nutrition

Views: 1,597,418

Rating: 4.8681865 out of 5

Keywords: Jason, Fung, Kidney, Specialist, Fasting, 180, Nutrition, Guy, Lawrence, Health, Sugar, Diabetes, jason fung interview, intermittent fasting, dr fung interview, expert interview, fasting for weight loss, extended fasting, 16-8 diet, 5-2 diet

Id: n3dwizlGaRI

Length: 56min 3sec (3363 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2017