Megan Ramos | Fasting For Beginners | How to Break a Weight Loss Plateau

[Music] meagan Ramos welcome to the Quito camp podcast thanks for having me on band it's really great to be here this is a huge fan likewise I love what you're doing I love what your whole team is doing with the fasting method and we'll talk about all of that we'll talk all things fasting on this episode but before we get into that you have a very powerful story and I'd love for you to go into your story and how you got on this journey towards healing yourself and now healing the world well I come from like this horrendous gene pool and well your genes definitely aren't your destiny have with no proper lifestyle intervention I did not have a proper lifestyle so things hit me early on I was 12 years old when I was diagnosed with fatty liver disease in 14 and I diagnosed with PCOS and my doctors can figure it out because my BMI was really low it's classified it's underweight but in hindsight I was just a skinny little sack of fat like I was a little tophi I had no energy so explain tophi what's tophi so I was thin on the outside but fat on the inside - lots of visceral fat oregon fat you know meaning to inevitably type 2 diabetes in my case amongst many other health conditions so so my doctor's attitude was like well you're skinny like why do you have diseases of obesity does it make sense you'll grow out of it like don't worry about it like it doesn't make sense it can't be you you don't fit the criteria here so I tried not to stress about it but like the whole PCOS and fertility thing really bummed me out at 14 I always wanted to be a mom so it weighed really heavily on my mind you know going through my teenage years and then to my early 20s my mom's medical history is horrendous and I grew up sleeping on emergency room floors and doctors are only ever treating her symptoms no one is ever trying to figure out why she was so sick and it took a very special doctor to actually spend a lot of time with her and figure out what the root cause or causes in her can in her instances her conditions were and it made all the world a difference so when I was really young I want to get into preventative medicine I had a keen interest in kidneys my dad had a good friend he was director of this massive nephrology which is the study of kidney disease so massive nephrology program his kids wanted to shadow my dad for a summer job so my dad said well trade to kids you know my my daughter is really interested in preventive medicine and you have a big research department so I started at this nephrology group when I was 15 and I got lumped in with this goofy guy named dr. Jason Fong he was fresh out of his nephrology fellowship and he had to do some research projects to prove himself to the nephrology group and I was the student assigned to help him with those projects I started working with Jason when I was 15 and really just this keen interest in preventive medicine by the time I was 25 I still hadn't had been in the nephrology department for ten years I snuck through there with all my education and I thought gosh this is depressing you know we have all this ayat but at kidney disease it's killing everybody and as kidney specialist we can't help them so from the time I was 15 to 25 we just saw this massive boom and diabetic kidney disease that didn't exist when I first started there and I said to myself okay Megan like you really need to get your help together grab the copy of the Canadian Food Guide found the fanciest most accredited dietician in the country paid her an arm and a leg conned my parents into getting me a fancy personal trainer and started doing everything by the books and within a year I gave Nomos eighty pounds and I had developed type-2 diabetes so that didn't work I you know professionally I was becoming really disheartened too because I knew all my patients in my research projects were trying to live life right and their diabetes is just getting worse they were just gaining more and more weight they were needing more and more insulin and I felt so frustrated for these people because I now living it - I was doing everything right I was getting worse my doctors are rolling their eyes at me I had to diet the dietician accused me of eating Oreos in my closet and lying to her and wasting her time and I may be beaten like two Oreos in 35 years so I was really really ticked off and Jason really had started getting into low carb but didn't think it was the complete answer and I was just having really poor compliance with a handful of patients he was trying and he was inspired by a friend of his who is fasting for religious reasons spiritual reasons and got some health benefits and then we went through Ramadan and you know he noticed the trend we have to take people off their medications because of my fast throughout Ramadan so Ramadan a holy month of Ramadan people fast from sunrise to sunset and it's a dry fast for about you roughly 8 to 14 hours depending on the time of year but he would see all of his patients get better and have to come off of medication and then after Ramadan have to go back on all of the medication so so he became really fascinated with fasting and to him it was the missing piece of the puzzle so I started fasting after chatting with Jason it made so much sense you know as the scientist I went through all of the stages like anger hostility at my education mad at my parents they're brilliant people like why weren't they asking these questions or you know why wasn't I asking these questions I went through all the emotional swings because it just made so much sense it made so much sense so I started fasting I started transitioning my diet to low carb and then the ketogenic and within six months I'd lost over 60 pounds I brought my m1c down to 4.6 I had no more fatty liver and I had no more symptoms associated with PCOS no signs of PCOS and that was about a decade ago so flash forward a decade I fought him down 86 pounds I've stood by body confidence for the better feeling good I still have some some adrenal issues but I'm able to you know sort of manage that requiring steroid therapy which is really helpful wow that's quite the journey and it's even with dr. Fung since you were 15 so you you know journey is amazing and I love that both you and dr. Fong with we're kind of at the forefront of fasting and how powerful it is especially in a clinical setting and now it's worldwide it's very popular now but you were at the forefront and you talked about Ramadan that's very interesting to me because I don't know if you know this but my parents are Muslim my mom and my dad emigrated from Iran so they would teach Ramadan every single year and I did a little bit when I was younger but I I stopped kind of following it but my mom always stuck with it and growing up I say mom you can't do this is so unhealthy what are you doing and now I'm like yes Ramadan is coming up I know it's gonna be so good for health and it's a complete 180 because I know how healthy it is for the body it will talk all about that but I just wanted to put that in there and you said your a1c dropped to 4.6 how high was it it was 6.4 so I was never ages we high but that was type-2 diabetic yeah yeah you know and then sort of growing up in a frolic G we started getting all these patients coming in at the age of 40 not really like obese I liked it liked ofice but and they were having like early kidney disease and we can figure it out and there anyone seems to be like five point six and five point seven so we'd biopsy them and the biopsies always came back diabetic nephropathy diabetic kidney disease with what is considered to be like pre-diabetes or like not even dive diabetic at five point five so I mean by the time you get to an a1c a six point four I think your body's already in a bit of trouble I've seen how much damage healthy a ones these can do to the body at like five point five or five point six how did you what was your suspicion that this patient had kidney disease or some sort of kidney dysfunction what are some things you asked or some symptoms you paid - so these particular patients they're younger and they would come in and their creatinine levels would be high so their overall kidney function their estimated filtration area of their kidneys gone earlier our filtration rate or EGFR was low and it didn't make sense and then another thing was that they were starting to leak a lot of protein into their urine but they didn't have high blood pressure so there are these those major things the protein in the urine was sort of a big thing that okay there's probably some diabetes diabetic thing going on here but then it never really made sense because the a1c and fasting blood sugar level were considered normal by standard range so we would biopsy them since they were young and healthy and sure enough they would come back but the kidneys were quite damaged and that's why they were leaking the protein in the absence of high blood pressure and you said something really key there you said there their levels or a 1c and their glucose fasting glucose was averaged by standard reference ranges but not necessarily by the functional optimal ranges that we look for yeah it's pretty wild now like our current reference ranges were made you know based on a festive in a population who are all living a poor lifestyle and you know are pretty much you know in North America you have insulin resistance until proven otherwise you know a - it's really poor data so actually a friend of mine did lab work recently for something that's not in my particular field of interest or interest that specialty and she sent it to me and I said I only know how to interpret this by standard practice by what I was taught in school so I said you're better off finding someone who specializes in it because even though your lab says normal all the way down I don't know it's like fasting insulin levels we use Pico moles per liter here in North America nada and like normals like 40 to 180 have you got insulin levels of 100 Piko moles per liter like here type-2 diabetic like you got severe metabolic syndrome and we like to get our patients you know 220 or under for their fasting insulin levels and that that would be considered type 1 diabetic by standard reference range which is just mind-blowing so it's really tough even when it comes to assessing like thyroid function and t3 levels there's like that ideal range and then there's a you know if you're an actually healthy person eating a healthy diet and hormonal a balanced this is what it what it is so it's it's such a hard time to be a clinician because there's just like we have we have so many guidelines we need to go back and revisit I was working with diet doctor a couple years ago on creating reference ranges for people at follow a low-carb ketogenic diet based on all in my clinical experience with Jason because you know you'll see someone on a ketogenic diet that has high urea levels but otherwise normal kidney function levels so does that mean that they have kidney disease no it just means for the person on the ketogenic diet it's normal to have higher your real levels throughout human history we probably had higher urea levels we just didn't start documenting it until the last 40 or 50 years to come out with these reference ranges that's a great point I also see that with triglycerides sometimes they go up before they go back down cuz the body is breaking down fat and that's not a bad thing it's actually a good thing so it's so important to understand this but the conventional approach doesn't really they're they're kind of stuck in their their box but we'll continue getting the word out you're doing a good job of getting the word out you had mentioned you were doing standard care of practice you and dr. Fong you were treating the symptoms but it was already so far advanced the kidneys the failure of the kidneys that you weren't able to do much besides maybe a transplant or something like that and then you realize that you could actually be ahead of the curve and teach from what to do to prevent this and be proactive and not reactive I love that and when was that light bulb moment that switched that oh my gosh I got to actually be proactive here and not reactive to to what's going on with the symptom my whole life I wanted to figure out how to help patients be proactive and around the time I turned 25 I realized that our system was terribly broken broken you may be beyond repair like it was going to take something really radical to fix it and actually was deferred going back to school for medicine to do my LSAT because it became so depressing just watching people die and being like here's another tablet here's another tablet and especially like with the kidney function because as the diabetes gets worse there's something you can do for the kidneys so I've lost hope like I lost hope in the standard standard care I didn't know what to do I felt really lost as someone who wanted to become a practitioner someone who is a researcher trying to work in preventive medicine it just seemed like there was no such thing and then when I got sick and I was talking with Jason and I started fasting and I started cutting up the junk and then you know trying to regulate my carbohydrates like I felt alive for the first time in my life and I realized that oh my gosh like there's hope for these people and you know I would go into the clinic and I see patients for a research study visit and they say oh my gosh you know you're coming back to life like we watched you like grow up and we watch you start to die in your 20s and now we're watching you come back to life you know in your 30s or late 20s and I said what are you doing we want to do it so Jason and I you know begged our colleagues to say okay let us try fasting with some people look it hasn't slipped me look at how better it's made my life and they all saw how sick and how much I was suffering so we started fasting with the patients and it was just so inspirational we had an initial pilot of eight patients and within one month they were all off of insulin and it was just like oh my gosh like these are people that Ivan I have literally knew some of them since I was 15 and then a virology Department and these are people that I watched and I even told that there was no hope for them and that they were going to need dialysis or they're gonna need transplants because a diabetic kidney disease is gonna get them in the end and here we were reversing their diabetes and we were limiting the progression of their kidney disease and dialysis and transplants maybe weren't in the cards for them and it was just like okay like yeah I didn't know what life just happened so quickly and then you know I had been deferring going back to go to medical school and one day Jason said don't do it like just he's going to take 50 years for the system to get fixed and something radical to happen and he's like let's just do this like I don't want you to go back let's just do this together and you know when the time comes we'll be teaching you know the future generation of doctors you know what healthcare actually should be and I just like I discarded going back to school I said to my husband who is my fiancee at the time like I don't know what the future holds I don't know if we'll be living in my mother's basement but I've got to do this because like every day you go to work and you make like one person's life better and that person goes out and changes the mind of one doctor who then you changes the lives of 10,000 patients that they're gonna see over the course of their career and then those patients are going to infiltrate the population that way and you're going to be able to provide people with hope again so it's just been so wild for Jason and I to watch this unfold because when we first started talking about fasting people thought we were lunatics or said you know we're not inventing the wheel here we're just bringing it back okay and we're just bringing it back and we started just sharing you notes from Elliott P Johnson that we were drowning like father take two diabetic medicine standard of care back in like 1916 was talking about the benefits of intermittent fasting for type 2 diabetics and I think we were saying was revolutionary we were just trying to bring it to the forefront again and people thought we were not and it's just been so a while to see it gained so much acceptance and make such a great change in people's lives it's just been a really really wild decade for us yes it has and it's just getting started I mean there's so many people who need this information fasting is my favorite tool in the health toolbox personally I absolutely love it and it's made a big difference for myself and the keto campers as well and I want to get into all but all about fasting and I have a lot of fasting questions for you but going back to what you were saying about the type-2 diabetes it's unfortunate that a lot of conventional doctors and dietitians and nutritionists are not looking to reverse the disease they're looking to treat it and manage it and that's what it used to say I don't know if it still does but on the American Diabetes Association website it would say we cannot reverse it with it we could we could manage it and we could have you how helped you have a quality of life with this disease and that's not really a genius mindset as I call it because Einstein said it best intellectual assault problems geniuses prevent them so what you're doing what dr. Fong what your whole fasting that the team is doing is you're you're geniuses obviously but you're empowering other people to be geniuses because nobody dies from diabetes they die from the degeneration of it from the kidney disease from the heart disease and I saw it take my dad's life and I didn't understand it back then and I understand it now so this conversation is so important if you are diabetic types diabetic I'm talking about and you or you know somebody who's type 2 diabetic or a family or a friend they have to listen to the episode it could steer them in the right direction that could change their life so I encourage those listening or watching on youtube please share this with somebody you know who has this lifestyle disease that is treated with medication I mean that's a huge mismatch so getting to fasting fasting is a very very powerful tool and I tell people all the time a chainsaw he's a very powerful tool it can get the job done or it could hurt you you got to know what you're doing and you teach people how to do it so let's talk about fasting what are some of the pitfalls you see when somebody does fasting the wrong way how do you do fast in the wrong way what are some negative consequences that could come from fasting I think the most common things that I see are issues with electrolyte imbalances most people are just petrified of salt and they don't realize throughout most of human history we were taking four thousand to six milligrams of sodium a day for optimal health and civilizations went to war over salt because it was so critical to our survival and well-being so there's this big paranoia about it everyone thinks it's gonna drive up their blood pressures which it does for some people but it's a very small percentage of the population so so for newbies for people who are new to fasting their insulin levels are so high they start to fast they start to burn through glycogen and they start transitioning into state of ketosis and then burn body fat and their insulin levels just tanked they bottomed out it forces them to urinate out all kinds of excess water it might cause diarrhea and they're not rehydrating properly so you know for someone who is not a newbie faster do you need to be as diligent or as concerned or if you didn't take any salt that day is it really that critical and the answers like no not if you're not a newbie faster but if you're a newbie faster and your insulin levels are high you need to be more mindful of electrolytes and I still do consultations online and 99% of the time it's someone coming to me and their issues literally remedy the salt or maybe magnesium Wow that's pretty high percentage it's really wild so I feel like an idiot you know because I'm there and I'm like oh you need to take salt you know like I I know I guess specific advice for women at different stages in life definitely if you're menopausal or postmenopausal or perimenopausal then you actually need a lot more sodium if you're not sensitive to it so there's timing of it and how much you should have and different methods for taking it but I'm sitting there like this talking to them BAM and they look at me like is this woman for real like can we just sign up for this and then so then I feel terrible but then two weeks later I get an email saying like oh my gosh like that made a huge difference and they said we just wanted to do it to email you and say it didn't work because like how could it be that simple and but it's it's really important especially found for women more so than men and especially sort of you know when you're you're going through the change of life you need to be a lot more diligent with it too so people when they start they are not really compliant with it and it doesn't have to be salt water it could be pickle juice could be bone broth I know with bone broth it's going to limit a tapa G but you're learning fast things a big change for a lot of people you don't learn how to ride a two-wheeler bike you start off with the tricycle you have training wheels and then when you get the hang of it and you take off the training wheels and you move into the the big kid bike and that's the same thing with fasting it's like lifting weights to you know I would very much like to deadlift 300 pounds but I had to start off at like 30 pounds to make sure I had good form and that I wasn't gonna hurt myself and then you know I did hurt my hip and then it was figuring it out and now I can so late now that I know what I'm doing work my way up to my desire goal so being diligent with the sodium I think is the most important thing for newbie passers for more advanced fasters to that like to do longer fast they tend to ignore electrolytes at the start of their fast and think that it's more important towards the end of their fast so like if someone is reading a 5 day fast or a 7 day fast they're like oh I'll think about you know pickle juice or I'll think about salt water like on day 4 where it's actually the first few days where your insulin levels are going to drop the most you're at the most risk for having depleted electrolytes and that's what you need to hydrate the most most much more important than on day four day five and then another thing too is like people really carb up sometimes because life happens I get it [Music] Prentis they carve up before the fast is that what you're saying yeah so they'll they'll like go out on staff Sunday night and then they'll end up eating pizza and then they have to feel fatter than they'd a bunch of carbs and then they think okay tomorrow I'm gonna fast like they're punishing themselves by introducing a fast after eating all this junk food but what they've done is they've retained a lot of water through eating my junk food so then when they go too fast they lose all that water they get depleted of electrolytes they feel nauseous and they start to form this negative relationship with fasting the fasting becomes the punishment not this amazing lifestyle tool so that's the second thing is you know if you do carb up the best thing to do is something like a fat-ass or like a really like low carb you know keto day or maybe a carnivore day if you like mixing in carnivore once in a while and so you keep the cards really low lose that water weight by replenishing your electrolytes through food that day and through salt on food and then the day after a couple days later then do your fast but like don't carb up and then punish yourself with a fast physiologically it wrecks habit and then mentally it wrecks habit too I've seen so many people again so this negative my like fasting them becomes a punishment and then they could ever bring themselves to do it and fasting should be something that gives you time back gives you energy you know it's passing is supposed to provide you with so many wonderful things it should never be a punishment so don't put yourself in a state where you're gonna fast and put yourself at a high risk for experiencing all these like keto flu-like symptoms you know eat keto for a day or two you're still gonna feel maybe a little bit woozy depending on where you are in your journey of recovering from insulin resistance but it's better than trying to just jump in and say I'm gonna do a three day three day fast after a weekend of eating like garbage totally yeah you wouldn't be a couch potato for ten years and say oh I'm gonna do a CrossFit workout tomorrow right like you said fasting is a muscle you develop it sometimes you got to use these crutches these training wheels like a fat fast I agree Cecil I put in my coffee I'm taking magnesium and potassium and also another thing is if they do carb up and then decide to do a fast the next day they're not going to get a toffee as fast as if they went into it in a low carb ketogenic state because they would deplete those but those sugar reserves much faster and then enter a top G much faster body fat for the majority of the day that you're fasting you're just gonna be burning six core glycogen so it's better just to do it through a ketogenic diet then you know they are too late or jump in do a fast and then reap all those wonderful benefits so you'll spend most of the time to you know actually burning body fat which is what so many people are trying to do it passing how many so you're first pilot group was eight people and you said all of them or most of them got off their insulin which is amazing since then if you could give me like a estimation you dr. Fung the whole entire fasting method how many people would you estimate that you've put on a fasting protocol oh my gosh 14,000 people so I think Megan knows a thing or two when it comes to fasting what are there any other what's been the most surprising benefit you've seen out of the 14,000 people what's fasting so there has been a whole whole whack load of interesting things I love it when the older ladies get their libido back and they like share one another but the most surprising thing is as anti-aging and women we have women coming in where they like on gray but they're like roots are coming in their natural hair color and it's just like the most wild thing to see like I've had women near hyperventilating because they don't understand what's going on and they'll come in and they'll have like brunette roots like the hear and the rest will be like white and they're like what is going on or like a woman that in there like 76 year old woman getting a regular menstrual period for like two years and just feeling on top of the world again there's nothing more interesting than talking to a 76 year old or 78 year old about what's the latest in like birth control but these things happen so that that has sort of been like the wildest thing you know these women would come in and they would say that they had had a period in this week okay there's all kinds of hormonal shifts going on when you're fasting and reading fat and your body is releasing estrogen so got it you know things are gonna quite a change but I thought it only ever would be short lives and we're going on like three four years in some cases where women are having like every 28 days no medication no bioidentical hormones nothing and they're having regular periods every 28 days in their seventies and that is a pretty wild thing so you really are seeing the anti-aging benefits which is just totally wild that's super cool yeah one of the members Deborah shout out to Deborah if she's watching or listening in my Quito camp Academy she just posted actually I think today or yesterday that her hair some of her gray hair is going away and she heard she was so shocked by it I'm like wow that's a great testimony testimony so I love that you shared that should women practice fasting differently than men you have to be more diligent with sodium it's really important not quite sure why they shouldn't I have a few theories I'm writing a book that will be published next year called woman and passing so I'm gonna run through mine in mine and dayson series still doing some research but salt seems to be super critical particularly a middle-aged woman poor not necessarily feeling good but for making sure that weight loss is happening and an efficient rate rather than just being slow so so that's one I think that is a really really important thing women do need to fast more than men that's pretty much the bottom line to get sort of the same results I really find 24-hour fast and like a postmenopausal diabetic woman who's done a letter has a long-standing history of calorie restriction diets you know 4 10 20 30 years get tremendous results doing fast shorter than 36 hours make sure they'll start off at 24 will drop water weight they'll lose seven body fat but eventually we had a wall before they've reached their goals so I always just like to speak to them in consultation saying that okay you know we might we're aiming to do a 36 that's our target fasts and will listen to your body we'll go at your body's rate you know of course if a woman or a man yet has a history of doubts or acid reflux we have the fasting journeys always slower to start just to avoid issues with reflux and then I get flare-up what I found with women though there's a lot of the time they prefer to fast for three days straight rather than do intermittent fasting and if you look at some of the data Jason wrote a blog post about this it's up on our website but is I think it's called big lemon in hunger but around the 36 hour mark women's belen levels like tanked and they bottom out by 72 hours whereas with men you still see more of like a cyclical cycle of ghrelin for over the course of three days so we find that women it's they're more compliant doing a three-day fasts for that reason because once they get through the first day and they wake up the next day you know there's 36 hours and that really is no hunger and it just gets easier and easier for them whereas they're constantly like every other day trying to do it they say it's really tough mentally for them to bounce back and forth like that when they can just stay in a fast and know that it will be easier so I tell a lot of women missed you when I see them in clinic prayer and consultation you know like let's try the intermittent fast because it's generally a little bit more easy to fit into one's lifestyle especially if you've got kids or spouse at home or a partner that you have have regular meals with they might be caught off guard at first if you're not eating with them for three days straight but I let them know that most women generally like to go into a sort of a three day fast so they're intermittent fasting is like three days on four days off three days on four days off rather than every other day so that is a strategy that I found works really really well for a woman so when you say four days off they are not even doing intermittent fasting they are having breakfast lunch and dinner type of thing so with them it's usually 16 I don't Jason and I don't consider 16 hour fast to really be a fast like that should be standard heating day got it okay makes sense so what would you do if somebody comes to you I'm sure you get it all the time and they have been stuck at a certain weight they lost you know 20 pounds and they have another 20 to go and I've been doing it and fast and they've been doing a ketogenic type of diet I've been doing let's say 18 6 scheduled fasting what advice would you give this person's just stuck at this certain weight oh of course we always take a look at the diet to making sure that there's no problem foods that there's no snacking going on - a lot of people find on keto they'll eat a lot of nuts so need a lot of cheese outside of eating windows so we try to go back to their eating days and say ok what do they look like are you eating from noon to 8 p.m. or are you eating lunch and are you eating dinner and if you are eating in between you how can we add that fat and that protein to your other meals to make them more satiating so you don't have to snap between meals and sometimes just that alone is enough to break a person through a plateau that's because that's because if they're snacking in between their meals they'll spike insulin and be in a fat storage state it's calm yeah it's constant stimulus so in order to develop insulin resistance you need a constant stimulus you need high levels of insulin so a lot of people say well I'm not eating the carbs anymore so I'm not secreting these high volumes of insulin but regardless of what you're eating you're still going to secrete some insulin and then if you're eating all day long and you're constantly spiking at so the power of eliminating snacking is huge because by a carreer default I end up working with a lot of dialysis patients and your dialysis patients have severe fluid restrictions they've got all kinds of electrolyte issues up the kazoo like we really you just to be careful we don't want to be fasting them much more than 24 hours so what do we do and we have to be diligent with their eating windows and it might take a little bit longer but if we can get them eating and eating windows and not snacking between meals you know they can get the same results as people who are regularly doing 36 or 42 hours of intermittent fasting because they're keeping their eating windows really tidy most of the people that come to the fasting method for help they're doing amazing ketogenic diets like all real food no fake food no processed garbage like a lot of them you know have come to the point where they've given up sweeteners like they're eating beef and salmon and eggs and hard cheeses and you know broccoli like they're eating real food macadamia nuts and raw organic almond butter but they're not they're eating all day long or for that you know eight hour eating window they're eating for the whole eight hours and they already have some degree of insulin resistance and insulin resistance itself will drive the insulin levels up and then your eating habit of grazing for that eight hours will provide the constant stimulus so you are getting high levels of insulin still through that insulin resistance even though you're not eating the bagel or the cereal or the pasta or the potatoes so those eating windows are really important to limit the stimulus that alone is huge like I think if we just all stop snacking like we would immediately see this massive reduction in obesity and metabolic syndrome and it's terrifying one in five adolescents in the United States has pre-diabetes and just cut out the snacks like when my grandmother went to school there was some snacking but my dad went to school there is no snacking you know there is no obesity for these people until much later on in life but you've got kids nowadays Jason's talking about how his kids are essentially force fed at breaks in between classes and some of my colleagues like Nadia petiguana her daughter's in school too like theirs soon as they show up they give them bread and juice in the morning like and this is after they've already had breakfast and before school starts it's just a while but they're doing to children nowadays so so it's just it's a really very crazy thing so getting rid of the snacks is critical and then if someone is doing a 16 hour fast and they're feeling good I would encourage them to try to increase it to 18 and then 24 hours and then add the 24-hour mark rip off the band-aid and try to do maybe one or two 36-hour fast a week for a period of time maybe two or three months see what the results are and then you can sort of predict how long from there it's going to take you to reach some of your target goals yeah what you shared about the one in five adolescents it's ridiculous Scot enough is enough right I mean I believe in the next five to ten years we're gonna see a trend in the right direction with the work that we're doing and the internet and the work that's available to so many people so I think that it's a disgusting trend and stat but I don't see it going continuing that direction I I see it going in the right direction within the next five or ten years I really do okay fasting what is your favorite benefit of fasting for me I think it's the energy that I get well i'm fasting i I travel a lot for work I have so privileged to go around and train doctors and other health care providers and speak at medical conferences so regardless of how I try to do my best when it comes to eating on the road you know even the other day I was recently when I was traveling I was actually in Florida and I ordered a lovely steak but I just watched some squeezed vegetable oil all over the girl so I find that one I eat out when I travel it's tough and I always come home and I feel inflamed and I feel really groggy so I will come home from a trip and I'll do like a fatass for a couple of days and then I'll jump into a fast and I love how it just gives me that sort of energy reboot and that mental clarity that I need and I start to feel human again so for me personally I really love the energy when I was diabetic and obese I sure love my lab test results and my weight loss but for something that was really important for me back then was the mental clarity and if you read my report card stare at school Meaghan is the most attentive student Meaghan is always participates in class so on and so forth all throughout school and then I got into University and I started to feel like I was handicapped or mentally impaired and I couldn't focus I was the doodle queen my notebooks professors used to get mad at me because I'd sit in the front and I was clearly not paying attention but the nights were really high on my tests like I once got over a hundred percent on an exam that the entire class totally bombed the class average is in the high 30s and my professor was really irritated because she said you come you sit front and center you do doodle you pay no attention to me and she's like how did you do this like you did like I know you didn't even cheat off of anybody cuz no one in the class even got closer and she said you have ADHD and I said I went through the whole rigmarole of getting diagnosed and then you know getting put on the admiral and then finding that I needed a dural to actually be able to focus like I could in high school in elementary school and I felt like I had become this like drug dependent person and I didn't like it and then adderall and then bio mance I tried to switch to that because I had less side effects but still it wasn't great you know you're up all night it's it mellowed out my personality my friends didn't enjoy spending time with me my boyfriend the time-bar was being weird and didn't like me on it but then I felt like I couldn't function in life and I felt like I was on the fast track to dementia which I probably was has a my diet but I'll never forget I I was it was the end of the work year I hadn't gone back to my psychiatrist to get my new dosage are not new doses for a new prescription of I Avance and I realized I was in the clinic and I thought gosh like I haven't been on it for three months and then I started to think about all of the work I've done that's very much all of the literature reviews that I stayed up all night doing all of the personal adult stuff you know that I don't like doing less paperwork I did it all and without any drugs and that was the first time that I had ever like I had been able to do that in about five or six years and I think it was really the mental clarity from passing and I had realized it was looking at my calendar and I was like I always wrote in fasting on my busiest days because I'm not just because it was easier to fast if you're busy but because I'd be more mentally sharp and focused and it took that whole realize they should not Day for me to realize that I have been doing this a bit chewy you had a presentation you need to fast that day so you'll be sharp and focus and I hadn't put two and two together I hadn't really connected it in my mind I'd just become a habit to do that so that's been really cool for me I love that that's also my favorite benefit and when I'm talking when I'm giving a lecture I'm making sure I'm fast cuz I'm just going to be on top of my game and and the physiological reason for that is the counter regulatory hormones our body thinks oh there's no food in our environment it's been 16 hours 24 hours let's pump this body full of energy right raise these the sympathetic tone and raise these council regulatory hormones and give the human body all this energy all this focus to go out there and hunt right and go kill our next meal but we're gonna use it to crush our day and I think it's one of the best hacks you can have especially if you're an entrepreneur or you're somebody who has a high demand or high workload and you want to function in a high level any human being could use that benefit but especially if you're an entrepreneur so I'm with you Megan I love that amendment okay so I have a couple more questions for you we have a little less than 10 minutes to go I want to make sure I ask these questions how important is it to feast when you are eating and when I say feast healthy food but how important is it's actually eat and feast and remind the body that it's not starving it's really important to like when you're eating eat and eat until you feel satiated and try to eat a Friday foods I see a lot of people Morse over the last few years that are - creatures of habit with their diet and then don't eat enough they're mostly women who have a long-standing history of calorie restriction diet so in the past if they didn't if they ate too satiation they'd always gain weight but the reading breadth association or our pasta the satiation foods that would make them gain weight you know when you're eating an amazing steak or when you're eating fish or you eat four eggs like and you feel full your that that kind of satiation is actually going to be quite helpful in you achieving weight loss but a lot of people are terrified to eat until they feel full so you know we want all of the people that I work with everybody whose will say today don't feel guilty for feeling full you know if you have to undo your button on your pants and take off your belt then maybe you pushed it a little bit too far at the meal but enjoy leave your meal feeling full so you can feel like you can fast until your next meal or the next day when you intend to eat again that's really important and then I find that people still when they're transitioning into this lifestyle so maybe not people in the Kido camp Academy maybe their keto diets a little bit better than some of the ones that I see but there's still not a whole lot of nutrients going on in the diet there's still real foods missing still some process who's lingering and a lot of people come in to our program we started doing some pretty intensive mineral and vitamin testing and found that a lot of people are really depleted I think we have all these patients that are over nourished yeah malnourished at the same same time so it's really important to make sure that you are reading eating real food and so that's something that we really encourage people to do until you feel full don't feel guilty it will help you actually lose weight in the long run especially if you're eating a diet that's high in healthy fats that will actually raise your metabolic rates which will make you then burn more when you're on a fasting day it will help itself out so enjoy those fats embrace those fats and and eat real foods and try to get in there bribed you have grilled foods into your diet and if you're you know if you're still like if you're only eating beef there's so many different parts of the beef you know really embrace the nose-to-tail lifestyle to make sure that you are getting a variety of nutrients and I have people that just eat beef that thrive but I have people that just eat beef and flounder because they're not eating very nutrient-dense parts of beef and same with all diets regardless of whether they're an omnivore or their keto terian or anywhere yeah I love it I so agree with you it's it's important because I believe our cells off 70 trillion cells are designed for feast famine cycles and that my coach dr. pombo talks about it all the time feast famine cycle fees so if we're just doing the fasting fasting fasting the famine famine famine we're gonna be too catabolic and we're gonna get too much' Tov G I mean we don't want too much talk we want a proper balance of mTOR and a topsy there's an art to and that's what you guys teach over the fasting methods let's talk about the fasting method it used to be called IDM intensive dietary management you rebranded I love the new name tell us all about the fasting method so we found out that there is a clinic in Cambridge UK called intensive dietary management that is the opposite of what we do so once the got catapulted to the international state or stage it was suggested that we might want to figure that out so we decided to make IDM our parent company and we are fasting program which is the IDM program we would make it the fasting method program and it's sure if you if you're looking for fasting help you're not going to be searching intensive dietary management we're not doing into service to people by using that name anyways so the fasting method what we have is you have this online program it's got three pillars it's got education support and community so the education has fasting and eating courses taught by Jason and myself and in the new year some of our partners that are joining us dr. nadir Olli dr. TRO they're coming in to do some more advanced lessons for us dr. and Lee's can do a whole educational series on on top adji and optimizing it so we have our educational pillar so you get a lesson you get the transcript of the lesson you get action points with every lesson to start implementing the tools that were emphasized since your lifestyle so your your talk the why and then you're explaining the how in every lesson and then you get a quiz just to reinforce the knowledge so that's our educational so we have all these different courses for if you're brand new to passing and just maybe you want to go to the basics and cut out snacking or you've gone through your journey and now you're super well and healthy and want to start you know working out and learning more Tophet ii will have some more educational materials for that end of the spectrum in 2020 and then we have a whole bunch of stuff for the metabolic group so obesity the full spectrum of diabetes and type 1 die these PCOS and fatty liver and then in our support we have lots of live and interactive ways to support so we do have handouts and sort of static stuff that stays there but we have a monthly book or a book club so the book club meets every Friday health tips yeah all health books so we've already done the diabetes code and the obesity code in the new year we've got like the big fat surprise and like Nina is gonna be a guest and dr. Ali is gonna be a guest so every Friday we'll have we'll try to get the author plus some of the some other experts in the area so we've got the big fat surprise going on in the month of January and we'll break down the science behind the books we've got focus groups so you can come together with like-minded peers and get a fasting coach to help you we've got everything from basic intermittent fasting fasting for women to be able to hey girl psychologists on our team dr. Terry Lance and she runs for behavioral modification groups with slightly different themes every week so if there's a certain area you're struggling with like maybe the paradigm shift and you're scared to eat fat she's got a class every week that you can join and learn some tools to help you would adapt psychologically we've got a group fasting challenge going on every week we cycle through four so from beginner to advanced so there's something going on for everybody every month or you could just simply turn them all to keep things mixed up dr. fun does alive meetup where he answers answers questions to our listeners I do one monthly and dr. Ali is going to start doing them once a month - in the new year so pretty much every week we have a lab made up with Jason myself or dr. nadir Ali which is which is pretty cool yeah it sounds like an awesome freakin program where can they learn more about it fasting fasting method calm so all of our impose there and if you wanted some more personal advice you've got some cool coaches who have all had their own incredible transformation that can help you - yeah I interviewed Carolyn McCann last week for the Academy and her story was amazing so we're running out of time I want to acknowledge you Megan and say thank you so much for your knowledge you are the fasting Queen I can't wait your book the women in fasting we'll have you back on the show and you are just I love the work that you're doing and thank you for your time today thank you really appreciate that and thank you for all of your support we love the work you're doing too

Channel: Ben Azadi

Views: 40,810

Keywords: Megan ramos, megan ramos pcos, megan ramos fasting, megan ramos intermittent fasting, fasting for beginners, intermittent fasting for beginners, how to break a weight loss plateau, keto weight loss plateau, stop losing weight on keto, Guide to intermittent fasting, weight loss stall on keto, side effects of intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting for women, dr fung intermittent fasting, dr fung, The fasting method, Idm program, keto and intermittent fasting, keto kamp

Id: s2uBWR8NYEE

Length: 53min 40sec (3220 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020