The Fasting Doctor: “Fasting Cures Obesity!”, This Controversial New Drug Melts Fat, Fasting Fixes Hormones! Skip Breakfast!

26:19So say you start with 2000 calories in, 2000 calories out. You're not gaining weight, you're not losing weight, right? Now you decide, okay, I'm going to go on a diet. So you go down to 1500 calories, thinking that you're going to burn 2000 and the body fat's going to provide 500, right? That's how you balance that equation. However, if you eat the wrong foods and you're eating all the time, so you're eating 10 times a day, 8 times a day, like people say you should, you're eating low fats or you're eating tons of carbs, you're spiking your insulin. Insulin prevents you from burning body fat. Okay, so we've again, we've known about this for 80 years.

26:56So now you eat 1500 calories, but you're keeping your insulin levels really high. So fewer calories, but lots of high -carb foods, eating all the time, insulin stays high. You're taking in 1500, your body is now burning 2000, but you can't burn any body fat. So the calories that are stored in your body fat cannot be, cannot be sort of taken out. It's like it's in the bank and the bank is closed. You can't take it out. So what's going to happen? Well, you don't have a balanced equation. So that cannot, cannot happen. So what happens is that in order to balance that equation, because your insulin levels are high, you're eating 1500 calories coming in, your body can only burn 1500 calories.

27:38Your metabolic rate has just now gone down by 500 calories. And guess what? You're not losing any body fat. So that's an example of how the whole, the calories idea is completely wrong. Because if you continue to do that, what's going to happen over time is that you get tired because you're burning fewer calories. You don't have enough energy to generate body heat. So you're cold, you're tired, you're hungry. So you say, okay, I'm going to go to 1800 calories. So now you're eating 1800 calories, but you're only burning 1500 calories. Guess what? You gain weight. And you say, but how can I gain weight?

28:15I'm eating less than I did. Yes, you are eating less than the 2000 calories you used to eat. You're eating 1800, but you're eating the wrong foods. It's very high insulin foods. So therefore you're going to gain weight. In fact, everybody says that. And all the nutritionists, all the doctors just, they just don't believe them. They say, you're lying, you're cheating. You're eating more than you think. So this explains something that happened with one of my friends, which always puzzled me. He swears by the calories and calorie out. I've spoken about him a few times. He posts about it online as well.

28:48And he actually managed to get a pretty much like six pack abs, pretty much. And at the time, it appears that he was eating a lot of dominos pizzas, a lot of pizzas. And I was thinking, how is this guy in all these pizzas, but he's using his calories and calorie out thing. And then when the pizzas stopped, there was this yo -yo effect. Where he managed to get to basically what I'd described as a six pack, where they're about. And then I'm stopped eating, all stopped the diet, to per se. And then there was this big yo -yo effect, which I imagine is what you've said there. What he's done is he's lowered his metabolism.

29:24Then when he goes up just a little bit, it all comes back. It all comes back. And then some. And then some. Yeah, absolutely. So this form of dieting is actually over the long term, probably, going to make you gain weight. Oh, it's very detrimental. And that's what yo -yo dieting, we all know it's very detrimental. But think about it differently. So let's take a different example with the same calories, which is why I keep saying you have to think about more than the calories. You have to think about what the hormones are because that's the instructions to your body. Food contains calories, energy, but it contains instructions as to what to do.

29:58So let's take an example. You're eating 2 ,000 calories in 2 ,000 calories out. Now you go on a diet. You want to, you take in 1 ,500. But what you do is you do some intermittent fasting. When you fast, insulin is going to fall. That's the whole point. insulin is a hormone that goes up when you eat. It goes down when you don't eat. Right? So when you eat insulin goes up, your body wants to store energy. When you don't eat, insulin goes down. Your body says, I have no energy. I have no food coming in. Please take it out of storage. So now you take 1 ,500 calories, but you do intermittent fasting.

30:30So you're allowing your insulin levels to fall. Now 1 ,500 calories are coming in. Insulin levels are low. Your body wants to burn 2 ,000 calories. It says, well, insulin levels are low. Let me take 500 calories from my body fat. Guess what? You have 500 coming from your body fat. You have 1 ,500 coming from your foods. You burn 2 ,000. It's a balanced equation. So instead of the opposite situation, and you see that the calories are the same. You went from 2 ,000 in to 1 ,500 in. But what the difference was, you allowed insulin to fall, which allowed you to burn body fat. Right? It's the hormonal signal that says, please take energy out.

31:10Open up the doors so that body fat can come out. And this is the piece that's missing. Because people are all like, well, I'm this, I'm that. And it's like, well, why can't you burn the fat that's on your body? Because there's 200, 300 ,000 calories of body fat. Why can't you access it? It's because you haven't activated the right hormones so that you can access it. So now if you do intermittent fasting, you eat 1 ,500 calories. You take 500 calories out. Your body's burning 2 ,000. Now all of sudden, if you go off your diet and you go back to 2 ,000 calories, guess what? You don't gain weight.

31:46You don't lose weight. Same as before. Whereas before you go even to 1 ,800 calories, you lost weight. But the difference was not the calories. It was always 2 ,500. The difference was you paid attention to the hormones that you're telling your body. And the insulin is sort of the primary hormone. There's actually a lot more. There's cortisol is a very important hormone. There's other hormones. You mentioned burning calories there. One of the thoughts around the calories outmodel is that you can just exercise. And if you burn 1 ,000 calories exercising, then that gives you a little bit of a reserve there to eat more, for example.

32:26Yeah. And it's probably a very, very small effect for a couple of reasons. So we know that if you exercise, and I say this, exercise is really good for you in a number of ways. Flexibility, strength, core, all kinds of things. So very, very important. But in terms of weight loss, it's actually very, very small effect. Why? Because one, the amount of calories you burn during exercise are simply not that high. So if you look at, you know, if you do walking, I mean, if you did 8 hours of high intensity exercise, yeah, you're going to burn a lot of calories. But most people I deal with, which are sort of middle -aged and higher, you're talking about sort of a quick walk or, you know, 45, half an hour, three times a week sort of thing.

33:15And if you ever go on the treadmill and you ever watch that calorie counter on the treadmill, you know, it goes up very, very slowly, right? You'll do half an hour. And I'll be up to like 120 calories or something like that, right? So that exercise really didn't burn off very many calories. It's the amount that you'd get in a couple of cookies, for example, right? So it's just numerically, it's just very small. So if you're taking in, if your body is normally using 2000 calories with your brain generating body heat, your heart, your lungs, your liver, they're using 2000 calories. And now you go up to 2100 calories.

33:53Well, percentage -wise, it's not a huge deal, right? The other problem with exercise is that it tends to actually cause you to eat more. So again, we've had decades of study for this. If you exercise, during the exercise, you have reduced appetite. So you have exercise, it's called exercise in duestandorexia. So in the middle of a basketball game, you don't suddenly go, oh, wow, I'm really hungry, right? Because your blood is flowing in your, you know, in your muscles and so on. You're not thinking about the hunger. So hunger actually goes down during exercise. But after exercise, we see this rebound.

34:32So we see that people are actually more hungry after exercise. And if you're hungry after exercise, it's going to cause you to tend to gain more weight. In fact, there's this very interesting study that was done a few years ago in Harvard, where they measured the sort of calorie difference that you get for children in certain activities. So they said, okay, what if a child is watching TV? What's the average caloric difference? And it was like plus 100 calories per hour. So for every hour of TV, they're sort of positive 100 calories over time, right? And that makes sense. You're just sitting there.

35:09When you look at mild exercise, it's about the same. It's about positive 100 calories. So the only way that happens is that if that exercise is causing you to eat more, right? And you say, well, why are you eating more? It's like, well, because you're hungry. Like the exercise is inducing you to eat more. And that's going to make it difficult to lose weight. You say in the book in chapter four, that 95 % of weight loss is diet. Yeah. And that's the reason why exercise is very hard to exercise enough to lose weight. And that's not to say that you shouldn't exercise. You really should exercise. Everybody should exercise.

35:48But if you're trying to lose weight, you still got to focus on the main topic, which is the foods that you eat, which is not just the calories. It's about the types of food that you eat, which is going to affect the hormonal balance, and also how often you eat. If you're eating all the time versus if you're eating only eating very infrequently, then you're going to have a different hormonal balance that is going to affect your weight as well. An American survey of more than 60 ,000 adults and children revealed that in 1977, most people ate three times a day. By 2003, most people were eating five to six times a day.

36:28Yeah. Yeah, this is the whole idea of sort of eating all the time. And this, I find fascinating because it was this sort of inadvertent change in our diet that we never talked about. Right? So in 1977, we told people eat lots of carbs. Okay? So we know that. That's in print. For sure, the American government said, 55 to 60 % carbs eat less 5. What happened is that, you know, in 1977, people ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No snacks. If you wanted an after -school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. If you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom would say, no, you should eat more at dinner.

37:10Right? No problem. But what happened is that as we started to eat sort of a lot of carbs, what happened is exactly is what we discussed before, you eat two slices of bread in the morning with jam. You have no satiety, insulin spikes way up, glucose spikes way up, but then it crashes. So you get hungry again. Then you get hungry at 10 .30. So you go around looking for a low fat muffin. And it was because, you know, you know, your sugars are going down, your insulin is going down. So now you're eating mid -morning snack. Then you eat a big plate of pasta. Then you get ravenous at like three o 'clock.

37:49So you go find yourself some crackers or something like that. And then, you're now having a mid -morning snack, you're having mid -after -student snack, then you're having a bedtime snack. And that's the average American by 2003, eating six, five, six times a day. But they're saying, hey, I'm eating so low fat, this must be the right way to eat. This must be good for me. So now the snacking becomes institutionalized. Whereas pre -1977 snacks are an indulgence, right? It's not something good for you. It's something bad for you, but hey, once in a while, you indulge. Then it becomes institutionalized as something that every single one of us should be doing.

38:27And we should never be without food for more than an hour and a half. Let's think about this very simply. Okay? So if you eat, your insulin's going to go up, your body's going to store calories because you told it to. If you don't eat or if you fast, your body is, your insulin's going to go down, you're going to bring those calories back out of storage. Right? So you're going to burn calories. You eat, you store calories, you don't eat, you burn calories. Very simple. So why would you want to eat all the time? That makes no sense at all. If you want to lose body fat, you actually need to extend the period of time that you're not eating.

39:04In other words, extend your fasting period and get rid of all the snacks. In order for you to have enough time that your insulin is low, when insulin is low, it's going to allow fat burning, which is going to allow you to pull those calories back out. You're cited as being really the founder of modern intermittent fasting. And I've heard people talk about intermittent fasting on this show over and over and over and over again now. But the internet says that it really came from you. I know that insulin fasting has been happening in thousands of years, but the idea of it as a tool for weight loss, they say it came from you.

39:41Because in 2013, 2014, really nobody was talking about it from a medical standpoint. Like what's happening in the body? Why is it good? Why is it bad? And really, I was for years sort of this one voice in the wilderness that was saying, like, hey, this is a tool for us. If you want to lose weight because it's important, then you can just set aside a period of time that you don't eat. At the time, people thought it was extremely bad for you. And I looked through all the literature and I said, well, why is it bad for you? And they had all these reasons. There's all these myths about intermittent fasting and how it's going to cause you to gain weight and be tired and hungry and all these sorts of things.

40:21I said, well, no, there's actually a lot of data here over the last 2000 years that we've used intermittent fasting. And they're simply not true. And I can go over a few of those. But that's why there was nobody talking about it at the time. And that's where I started to sort of bring it into the sort of public consciousness that this is a tool. That's all it is. You didn't need it to happen time? Oh, absolutely. Like, I got attacked from all sides. I got, you know, doctors were coming after me, dietitians were coming after me. Everybody thought I was going to do so much harm. And the funny part was that, you know, as I think back as I spoke to a lot of colleagues, a lot of colleagues would say to me, you know what, I used to do that when I was in training.

41:03We did that all the time. We'd go 24 hours without eating because we're in the OR, or we're in the ER, or we're busy. So we did that constantly and nothing bad happened. And I remember thinking, you know what, as a doctor, I actually tell people to fast all the time. If you have to go for surgery, you need to fast. If you're after surgery, you need to fast. If you do fasting blood work, you need to fast. So why is it that I'm actually telling people to fast all the time, and yet for weight loss, you shouldn't fast. That doesn't make any sense. And physiologically, from a body standpoint, it doesn't make any sense.

41:38One of the things people talked about was, you know, it's going to make you eat more later. It's going to make you more hungry. Your basal metabolic rate is going to go down. This was one of the big myths of intermittent fasting. That's going to cause the so -called starvation mode, right? And this is the idea that your basal metabolic rate will fall so low that when you do start to eat, you're going to gain weight again. So I said, well, let's think about this. You can do a study where you take somebody, say you, for example, and you could fast them for four days. And measure how many calories they're burning, their basal metabolic rate on day zero before the fast, and measure them four days into the fast, and see how many calories you're burning.

42:17So on day zero, they say your burning say 2000 calories a day. On day four of zero food, you don't eat any food for four days. They measure how much calories you're burning. Your body is burning 2200 calories. Your basal metabolic rate didn't go down. It went up. Your body's activating itself during fasting, which is fascinating because if you're trying to lose weight, dropping that basal metabolic rate is death. Like, if you drop that metabolic rate, it's so hard to lose weight. That's what the calorie restricted diets did. That's what the low fat diets did. The eating all the time did. But when you actually fast, your metabolic rate went up.

42:59And we see this in study after study. And the reason is actually basic physiology. It's actually medical physiology like first of your medical school stuff. When you don't eat, what happens in your body from a hormone standpoint is that your insulin's going to fall. You're going to allow your body to start using the calories that are in the body. At the same time, other hormones go up. So the sympathetic tone goes up, which is your fight or flight response. Your cortisol levels go up because again, it's an activation and your growth hormone goes up. Because those hormones are going to start telling your body to start pulling calories out.

43:37So you're actually activating yourself. Think about it the wild. If you see a hungry wolf, is that wolf just sort of, you know, all like lethargic? No, he's activated. He's actually more dangerous than any other wolf as opposed to say a lion who just ate. Because when you just eat, you just want to lie there. You know, you want to digest your food. You have no energy. So people say, well, your metabolic rate's going to go down if you fast. No, the truth is actually the opposite. It goes up. You've got me thinking about food as an instruction. I'm giving my body. Because if I eat this food, it's going to have this impact on my hormones, which is going to have this impact on my body.

44:15So if we view food as an instruction to the body, we talked a little bit about the timings of eating a little bit about fasting. I want to get into that a little bit more. But breakfast, I read that you didn't think most people need breakfast. Yeah, the whole idea that you need to eat as soon as you get up is just false. So there's this whole thing about breakfast. Now you will always break your fast. Think of the actual word, right? Break fast. It's the meal that breaks your fast, which tells you that in the English language, we accept that your body should have a fasting period every day. Why?

44:54There's a period of time that you're supposed to feed. You eat, insulin goes up, you store calories. Then there's supposed to be a period of time that you fast. That's after dinner, until the next day's meal, which is breakfast. Right? So you say you stop eating at 6 p .m., you eat at 8 a .m., that's a 14 -hour period, where your body is not eating, it's fasting, and therefore it's going to use calories. But the word breakfast tells us that that's actually a normal pattern. This normal cyclical pattern. You feed, then you fast. If you eat all the time, your body's just going to store energy and never have a period to burn energy.

45:34So, okay, well, what's going to happen? You're going to gain weight. I read as well that breakfast eaters averaged 539 extra calories per day. Compared to those that skipped breakfast, and that's a finding that's consistent with other trials. That was on page 132 of the obesity code. Yeah, so the more often you eat in general, the more calories you take in. So if you eat three times a day, you're six times a day, then if you eat three times a day compared to two times a day, for example, you'll, in general, eat less because it's harder to eat that big meal. So say you eat once a day versus three times a day.

46:12If you eat once a day, it's not always easy to eat three meals worth of calories all in one sitting because you get full. You fast. Oh, I do that regularly. And what does your fast look like? Because I've had all these different types of fasting. 36 hours, 72 hours, 14 hours. There's no rules for fasting. You could do, you know, it could be 16 hours. So 14 hours, remember, is sort of a baseline. 12 to 14 hours, right? That just means you're not eating after dinner. That's it. And so if you want to lose weight, that's probably not strong enough to make you lose weight because 12 to 14 hours is sort of just this baseline that people had in the 70s.

46:53So you can go to 16 hours, for example, and you shrink that by either eating breakfast a little later or eating dinner a little earlier. But you can do more than that. You can do, say, a 24 hour fast. You could eat two meals a day, say, eat between 12 and six. That's a six hour eating window, or you could eat once a day, which is like a 24 hour fast. Or you could even go multiple days without eating. Because again, your body is smart. Like, your body knows what to do. If you have all those calories sitting on your body, right, 100 ,000 calories sitting in body fat, and you don't eat for three days, well, you need 6 ,000 calories.

47:29Well, you have 100 ,000, 200 ,000. So what's the problem? Take it out of your body fat. Let your body eat your body fat. That's what fasting is doing for you. And it's totally natural. Because that's what it's there for. That body fat is not there for looks. It's there for you as a source, as a store of calories. So fasting just lets you use that. There's nothing wrong with it. People talk about hunger, for example. But again, hunger is very interesting because people think it's the amount of time that you haven't eaten. But it's not true. It's actually harmoniously mediated. So if you think about hunger, I actually found this really fascinating.

48:08So if you look at studies of when people are the most hungry and the least hungry, on average, people are the most hungry at 8 p .m. and the least hungry at 8 a .m. So in the morning time, you're actually the least hungry that you will be all day. That's just an average. And at 8 p .m. in the evening time, you are the most hungry. So 8 a .m. is the period of time that you've gone the longest without food. So why are you the least hungry? It's because it's hormonally mediated. When you wake up at 5 a .m., your body actually has this surge of hormones, growth hormone, cortisol, and sympathetic tone, which is already getting you prepared for the day.

48:52It's starting to release some of the stored glucose from your body fat from your sugar stores at 5 a .m. So your body has already prepared you for the day ahead without you even doing anything. That's why people in general are not hungry at 8 a .m. I've got to talk to you about these new injections people are getting to lose weight. And the role that they must be playing in our hormone balances. What are those bloody things called? The GLP ones? GLP ones. There's another name for it, isn't that? Yeah. Well, there's the drug name, which is ozemic as the American name. And these are all in a class called GLP ones.

49:30And essentially, again, very interesting because they essentially really reduce the appetite, which goes to show you that and people lose weight, like a lot of weight, and they keep it off. So it's very small people that are using them. And like a billionaire friend of mine that's very big in a certain industry uses azempick, kind of Elon Musk came out and said he used it. Yeah, that's an azempick as well. I don't have any problem with the ozemic, because again, if you think about it, what it's telling you, the lesson it's teaching you about weight loss, is that it's not about controlling the calories, because the ozemic doesn't burn in calories.

50:14It's about controlling your hunger. It's about that one level deeper. Why are you taking so many calories? So if you simply reduce the hunger, you're going to naturally eat fewer calories, which is going to cause weight loss. And that's what the ozemic does. It really reduces your appetite to very low levels. How? It's this hormone called GLP1, which is a natural sort of hormone. It's released mostly in the intestines, and distal intestine, and the small intestine. And in response to certain foods, it goes up. Right? So when you eat, the body has a homeostatic mechanism. So again, remember, people think that we're just eating machines.

50:57We eat until we explode sort of thing, but that's not true. When you eat, you actually activate the GLP1, along with other hormones, there's multiple hormonal systems. The GLP1 is the one we're interested in. You activate GLP1, which then sets into motion, the instructions for you to stop eating. Right? So the active eating sort of sets in motion that whole feedback loop to stop. So this is homeostasis, which is trying to keep things at a proper level. Does that mean if you eat slower? There will be less, you'll eat less. There's probably not. Yeah, probably it's true. Although it's probably mostly true that if you eat really, really fast, that you don't have enough time for this sort of homeostatic mechanisms to kick in, so you don't have enough time to stop eating.

51:48But the GLP1s then go to the brain. They do certain things. They help with digestion. So they increase insulin response. Then they go to the brain. It crosses the blood -brain barrier. So the GLP1s gets released by the active eating. Goes into the brain, crosses and is active in the mid -brain area that tells your body to stop eating. What these GLP1s do, of course, is that it gives you the hormone that tells you to stop eating, even though you have an eaten. It's sort of, that's the way the drug works. So then what people tell you is that they're just not hungry. And if they're not hungry, then they don't eat.

52:29And when they don't eat, of course, insulin falls. And you start to burn calories and lose weight. But it wasn't about controlling the calories. It was about controlling the hunger. That was the important part of it. It's the hormones. Every successful drug to gain or lose weight is a hormone. It's a hormone -based because that's instructions to the body. Food is energy and food is instructions. You change the instructions and you change the hormone. This whole history of fibre thing has been so interesting to me. In the last six months, so many of the nutritionists I've spoken to have really impressed upon me that we are fibre deficient.

53:10And I'm wondering how that happened. Well, I think it was part of the processing thing. So taking out fibre is a great way to make foods more appealing, if you will. So what happens is that if you take flour, for example, and you have a lot of fibre in it, then the digestion is slowed. So what you get is a slower rise. So you take flour and you put a lot of fibre in it. Well, instead of having this huge spike in insulin, which you're going to get, it's a much slower spike in insulin. When you have the huge spike in insulin, it basically overloads your system. And it makes you feel, you know, it gives you this big hit.

53:54Sort of like if you have cocaine, for example. You know, it's turned into a very fine powder, then you snort it, so you get this massive sort of spike. Same thing with carbohydrates. If you don't have any fibre, you pull all the fibre out by processing. You get this massive sort of unnatural spike in your body. It says, oh, that's great. It tastes great. I really love it. And you get people who are sort of addicted to it, because that big spike is going, then going to release dopamine. Dopamine is a pleasure hormone. So you eat, you know, cookies or whatever, highly processed foods, you get this sort of pleasurable response.

54:33And that makes you crave it. If you have a lot of fibre, it acts almost sort of like an antidote to that carbohydrate, because you're slowing down that release. What fruits are high in fibre? Well, mostly unprocessed foods, so the things like beans, and if you're eating whole grains, for example, compared to others, then it's going to have a reduction in the speed of absorption. So it's, again, not about the calories necessary, or even necessarily about the carbohydrates, because you're still eating the same amount of carbohydrate, but you're slowing down the speed at which is absorbed, which is going to change the instructions that you give your body.

55:12If you have a massive spike in glucose, you get this massive dopamine surge, right? And your body's like, you love it. Then the next time you're like, okay, give me that refined carbohydrate. What about protein? Because we tend to think of protein as something that, you know, super great for weight loss. Yeah, protein is probably sort of inter, it's not bad. I mean, the main thing is cutting down the carbohydrates, but you know, in the obesity code, I really talk about cutting the processing down, because proteins usually don't come as pure protein, right? In nature, you never find like, you know, how you have like, way powder protein or whatever.

55:56Yeah. The only way you can do that is by processing the heck out of food to get some kind of pure protein. It doesn't exist in nature. Like, it almost doesn't exist in it. Maybe there's a few examples. But when you eat meat, you think, okay, there's a lot of protein, but that's actually a lot of fat in there too, right? If you eat anything else that has protein, it's rarely all protein. You know, very lean meats like chicken, brass, and stuff are going to be higher in protein, but there's still a lot of other stuff in there. And it's very rare that somebody will eat just all pure 100 % protein.

56:32It tends to be hard to eat, like the fat brings a lot of flavor and so on. So it's a bit of an unnatural way to eat. Sure, if you're to eat a lot of protein, it does spike insulin, so it does have some effect to gain weight, but it's actually a very inefficient macronutrient. That is, there's three not macronutrients. There's carbohydrates, there's fat, and there's protein. Your body stores energy or calories in two ways. There's glucose, which is carbohydrate, and stores it as body fat, which is fat, right? It doesn't, protein is not a way for the body to store energy. So when you're eating a lot of protein, it's very difficult for it to turn it into a storage mechanism, like, you know, so you eat glucose, you can eat fat, you can store glucose, and you can store fat, but you eat protein, but you don't really store it as a source of energy.

57:25So if all foods then increase our insulin levels, I guess the best solution is to fast. Fasting is certainly one way, but just changing the foods to other ones, because if you look at the insulin release in processed foods versus unprocessed foods, there's a huge difference. So if you eat sort of highly refined foods, like white bread, for example, then you're going to have a very different response in insulin compared to sort of a whole whole food. So unprocessed foods in general, your body knows how to handle. Like we've been eating them for thousands of years, but certainly anytime you eat, your insulin's going to go up, you're giving your body instructions to store energy.

58:13So the solution is to eat less often. What if you do a juice fast? Juice fast, of course, is not a real fast, because you're taking a lot of sugars. Which I think is juice fasting. I'm generally, I think it's less effective than regular fasting, and it really depends on how much juice you take. If you take a lot of juice, you could easily get thousands of calories plus a lot of sugar. If you do it cucumber juice and stuff that's very low in sugar and kale juice, then it could be very, very healthy for you, because there's vitamins and stuff there. So it all depends on how it's done. However, the fast thing is a way for you to sort of clean out the body.

58:49You can clean out the glucose. If you have excess body fat, you're going to use it. So again, way to clean it out. Then there's this whole process called autophagy, which is just fascinating. An autophagy is this, so it's been very topical, because in 2016, one of the key researchers was given the Nobel Prize in Medicine. So it's a very important process that's been relatively recently discovered. What they discovered is that when you don't eat protein particularly, but when you fast, your body activates this thing called autophagy, and it breaks down some of the subcellular organs, which sounds really bad.

59:26Subcellular organs. Yeah, so these are sort of like the organs within the cell. So it's not like the liver, but there's something called organelles within a cell, and some of that is broken down. So basically, these proteins and so on within the cell, your body gets rid of that, and you think, oh, well, that sounds really bad. But it's not. It turns out that it's very, very good for you, because it's an opportunity for your body to get rid of all this old protein, old junky protein. And at the same time, remember that you're fasting, your growth hormone levels are shooting up through the roof.

1:00:00So like a two, three day fast, your growth hormone levels might go up five times. So you're getting rid of all the old stuff. Then when you eat again, you're actually got growth hormone to produce new proteins. So in essence, you're getting rid of the old, you're bringing in the new. It's basically the process of rejuvenation. Could this be a very important way to get rid of some of the chronic illnesses of aging? And there's lots of data, you know, talking about, you know, Alzheimer's disease. There's talk people talking about cancers. There's people talking about just general aging, you know, Dr.

1:00:39Chris Palmer talking about mental disorders. We're all talking about insulin and overeating and diet as a really important component of not just diabetes and weight, but all of these diseases, mental illnesses, you know, chronic illnesses like Alzheimer's disease and your logic illnesses. And there's all this data that suggests that autophagy and fasting is a way to activate autophagy could be actually extremely beneficial for you, which is fine when we used to do it. And you know, what's so interesting is that people seem to have already known about it. Like you see it in almost every major religion.

1:01:23There's periods of fasting, right? It's like, why did they do that? Because it was good for them. Through trial and error, whatever they realize that, hey, periodically abstaining from food makes us stronger. If you eat all the time constantly, day and day out, week and week out, month and month out, that's not that good for you. There are periods that you should feast and there are periods you should fast. So religions set days or weeks or months even where you should fast. So it's like, whoa, why did they do that? And are they just way ahead of us in terms of understanding the human body? Like we get so enamored of our own intelligence and science and so on that we think that they didn't know what they're talking about.

1:02:14Maybe they knew more about what they're talking about. And science is just catching up and saying, oh, this process of autophagy that you activate with fasting, this could be really important for longevity, for other things. I'm not saying you should do it like every month or whatever. If you look at the way that people do it, they don't do it like, you know, they don't do like five days a month or something. They do it once a year or once every few months. How long does a autophagy take to kick in? Is it 72 hours? Did you say? Nobody knows, but probably it's, and it depends on probably how much protein you eat.

1:02:47Protein is the key sort of when you eat protein, autophagy just stops. So low protein, you can activate it and it's probably somewhere around 20 to 30 hours. So you'll see a lot of religions, for example, they'll have like a 24 -hour fast, right? One day that you're not supposed to eat or something like that. And maybe that's the way to cleanse your body, not just of the glucose and the fat, but also the excess proteins that are old, they're junky. I mean, you think about renovating your bathroom or something like that, right? The first thing you got to do, you got to throw out the, you know, 1970s tub and the avocado green toilet.

1:03:24That's the first thing you got to do. You got to get rid of it. You got to break down before you can rebuild better. Well, autophagy might be that way to break down some of the stuff that you actually can't break down any other way. If your body's full of all this junky protein, you can't get rid of it. Is there an evolutionary explanation for the role of autophagy, do you think? I think there is actually. I think there's a huge number of reasons why people do it. One of it, this whole idea that fasting actually activates the body, for example, is very interesting because I think it's like if you're a caveman, for example, or cavewoman, there's winter and there's nothing to eat.

1:04:05If your body starts to shut down, then evolutionarily, you're going to die, right? Because you have less energy, you can't go out and hunt. So our body's just not that stupid. So what it does is says, okay, well, I'm going to give you more energy. So I'm going to activate the body, but then I'm going to change where you're getting your energy from. You're not going to get the energy from the food. You're going to get it from your body fat stores, which is your stored food, right? You stored food for a reason. So that's why I think some of the fasting has a lot of evolutionary benefits because it increases your energy.

1:04:40It lowers the glucose. So if you look at the blood glucose, the blood glucose goes down. So in times of stress and so on, your body actually naturally fast. If you get sick, you get a flu or something. You stop eating. First thing you do, right? You just want to drink some water and stuff. Why? Because your body wants to lock down the glucose, because the bacteria love glucose. Your body can run on fat, but the bacteria want the glucose. So you fast to lock down the glucose. So there's a lot of evolutionary reasons why the fasting might be good for, you know, bacterial infections, taking care of things, increasing your energy, increasing your concentration at a time that you're not like when you're not eating, you're actually getting more mental capacity and more energy because you need it in order to go hunt.

1:05:27Interesting. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learned just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio.

1:05:58As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. What is the most interesting thing, or the most, you know, use the word interesting, a little fascinating? What is the most fascinating thing that we haven't talked about?

1:06:36I think to me, the most fascinating thing is other than for intermittent fasting, because a lot of the stuff we thought about it was wrong. In fact, the opposite. But the most interesting thing I think is in the field of type 2 diabetes because it's such an important disease. If you look at the number of people being affected with type 2 diabetes, it's skyrocketing. So we had since the 1970s an increase in obesity, then we had an increase in type 2 diabetes. And I think the most fascinating thing, the most promising thing I've heard in a long time is that you can actually start to reverse this disease by changing the diet.

1:07:19And I think what's interesting is that you have to understand that type 2 diabetes is largely a dietary disease. And so we treated it with drugs for a long time. And if you give drugs to a dietary disease, well, you're never going to fix it because you haven't identified the core problem and fix it. You need to change the diet to fix that dietary problem, then the disease goes away. And now we have data on intermittent fasting, for example, and also low carbohydrate diets. Dr. David Unwin published his data in the UK on reversing type 2 diabetes with reducing carbohydrates, which is showing that you can reduce about 50 % of the people and put them into a completely drug -free remission state, like basically cure 50 % of those type 2 diabetics, who are at risk of cancer, at risk of heart disease, at risk of strokes, at risk of blindness, at risk of kidney disease, nerve damage, infections.

1:08:17All these people you can fix, just by changing their diet, either cutting down the carbohydrates or using intermittent fasting. And it's free, and anybody can do it. I'm not talking about a drug that costs thousands of dollars. I'm not talking about a surgery which is only available to the 1%. I'm talking about a treatment, which is intermittent fasting, which is available to everybody in the entire world for free, and yet has the power to completely reverse their disease and make them so much healthier. So the question is, why don't we do it? I can't answer that question for you. I try to do my parts that's alvevil, but you know.

1:09:09Did you know I was going to ask you that question? No. I was going to ask you, why don't we do it? I think it is. I think it's. You know, the real reason is I think that people are slow to catch new ideas. Like when people hear about new ideas, and I'm talking about academic doctors and so on, there's an intrinsic resistance to change. So I started talking about intermittent fasting, say 2016, when the obesity code was published, I talked about it about reversing type 2 diabetes around the same time. And it's just they're just very slow to say, hey, this makes a lot of sense because for them, they've invested so much in this calories and calories outmodel.

1:09:59They've built an entire career on saying that it's your fault that you're fat, right? It's the foods that you ate. It's the calories that you ate instead of trying to get to a deeper understanding. So people are very reluctant to change. In fact, I mean, it's been 10 years and you see the public, the interest in intermittent fasting has skyrocketed. And yet most doctors still won't prescribe it. They won't talk about it. They know nothing about it. There's how much teaching do doctors get about intermittent fasting and why it might be helpful, probably zero. Like why? We have this amazing tool.

1:10:35And people, doctors call it a fad, right? It's a fad diet. Well, it's been around for 2000 plus years. That's a long, long, long fad, right? It's proven effective. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. What's simpler than that? If you don't eat, you're going to use up your blood glucose, your diabetes will get better. What's wrong with that? It's not hard to understand. The diabetes code, I've got the diabetes journal here in front of me and put simply, it talks about step one being to pull their sugar in and step two being burned the sugar off. Yeah. And step one, which relates to putting more sugar in, is all about low carbohydrate diets, right?

1:11:16Cutting down the carbohydrates. Yeah, that's one effective way of cutting down the diabetes. In fact, the American Diabetes Association and their sort of nutritional journals, they talk about it having the most scientific evidence of any diet. There's no diet with more evidence for reversing type two diabetes than cutting down the carbohydrates. And then step two about burning the sugar off and that's where fasting comes into the picture. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, it's not that hard to understand. Everybody can understand it. You don't eat, you're going to lose weight, right? I mean, it's such a simple, powerful tool, but it threatens the whole apple cart.

1:11:59All these doctors, all these professors, which have built their entire reputations, all these systems that are in place for people. Personal trainers work on a different level because they talk about more exercise. We're at some calories out. I think when we talk about calories on this show sometimes, I think the people that get quite offended tend to be personal trainers because I think they would say they've got case studies of telling one of their clients to monitor their calories and they saw a reduction in weight. So for them, that means it works. There's calories in calories outmodel. It, again, it is that, but it's a simplistic understanding.

1:12:45That's my whole point. It's sort of like, if I were to say to you, why did the Titanic crash? And most people would say, well, I hit an iceberg. Well, that's very simplistic. That's not the right answer. The right answer is it was going too fast. If you think the right answer to why did the Titanic crash is because it hit an iceberg, you'd say the solution is to hit less icebergs, which is the same as eat less calories or drink less alcohol. That's a very superficial understanding. You have to get to the deeper level, which is say, why did the Titanic hit that iceberg? It was going too fast. And there was all these icebergs and it was going too fast for where it was.

1:13:26So then you say, it needs to slow down. Now you've identified that deeper understanding, same as with calories. You can say eat less calories and for some people will work. But for some people, it's like, why are you eating so many calories? Is it because you're hungry? Why are you hungry? Is it because all those calories that you're eating are going immediately into storage. You're eating white bread and jam and sugar and all of it's going directly into storage, which is leaving you hungry, which is making you eat too many calories. So in the end, yes, you are eating more calories. But that's the sort of first order thinking and not the second order thinking that we need to be doing.

1:14:01And that's what the ozempake and so on starts to address is the hunger issue. And this is really what all your work addresses. And it's really the first time I've heard someone talk to me about obesity and weight gain through the lens of hormones. Never really, I've never heard that before. And reading through your work was really illuminating because it allowed me to change my frame. And it's as you say, when we're just focusing on the surface, it's very easy to fail because we need to understand the first principles of what's going on underneath the surface for that long term success, test standard chance of occurring.

1:14:35And I think everyone listening to this who's struggled with weight or obesity or whatever else can relate to this idea that something's not working. In, you know, if there was any diet that worked, there wouldn't be a thousand of them. Yeah. And I think the other thing is to understand that it's not the personal failing that we make it out to be, which is, I think, extremely unfair. Because obviously there's something within the system within the food environment within the system of how we're framing it, which is making a lot of people overweight. But it's not because they don't have willpower or because they're weak.

1:15:16Or these other number of reasons that we stigmatize obesity because we look at it from that calories and calories out framework, right? We say, you're eating too many calories. You must be weak. As opposed to you're eating too many calories, what, why is it that you're eating too many calories? Why are you hungry all the time? In a word, then, if you had to describe what you think about this idea of calories in calories out, what is that word? I would say that it's shallow. It's correct if you don't think about it too hard. Anybody who focuses in on thermodynamics and calories hasn't really thought about the problem enough.

1:15:59That's what I think. So in the end, it is correct. Just like alcohol in alcohol out, hitting the iceberg. Yes, it did have an iceberg. That's why it was going too fast, right? Alcohol in, yes, if you drink less alcohol, you'll cure your alcoholism. But you won't cure the PTSD that caused you to drink. Correct, but not helpful. Exactly. That's exactly right. It is correct, but it's not getting to that root, deeper cause that we need to in order to help people. And that's causing us to blame them. So what we're doing, which I think is very unfair, is blaming the victim. Like, do you think this person who's trying to lose 50 pounds needs you to tell them that need to lose 50 pounds?

1:16:51Absolutely not. That's only going to be the 10 ,000th time they've heard it. It's interesting because one of our guests talked about the role of compassion and kindness in weight loss. And now through the lens of understanding cortisol, now I can understand how kindness and gratitude and being happy, you know, for lack of a better word can help us lose weight. And when we're not happy, when we're resentful, when we're low in gratitude, when we're bitter, we're more likely to gain weight. And other things help too, because if you think about things like a sense of community, it's very important.

1:17:29Lowest cortisol levels. Lowest cortisol is a way for you to relieve stress, right? Talking to other people. We did that. We did of course limit that during COVID. And of course, we saw a lot of problems, but one of them was loneliness and all these sort of things. But again, I always think about people, the way they are. So if you look at a lot of religions, for example, it's like, oh, they were so far ahead of us. What did they do? They brought people together every week. Oh, you're building a sense of community. Fasting. Oh, they all got together and fasted. They all shared. They're lowering their cortisol.

1:18:11They're lowering their insulin levels. They're staying healthy. And we in our big McMansions, right? We eat the ice cream for dinner, and we live alone in this giant house. And we wonder why we're not as happy as our grandparents were, our parents before them, because they understood the power of some of these things that we're trying to get back to. The weirdest thing is that I'm not trying to tell people something that's weird and unusual. And you never thought about this before. I'm trying to tell them about something that everybody in human history has been exposed to, which is intermittent fasting.

1:18:53That's been a part of our human history, whether it's through religion or whether it's through inadvertent, whatever, or whether it's through his cleansing and purifications and all this sort of stuff. People have things supposed to, even in the English language, breakfast, break your fast. You need to feed. Then you need to fast. Then you need to break your fast. So I'm not telling people anything different. Jason, thank you so much. We, feel like we could talk for hours because I'm so, there's so many, sort of, I was thinking about like spider webs, but there's so many little branches we could go off on as it relates to hormones and the impact of hormones on the human body.

1:19:30You have this other book as well called the PCOS plan, preventing and reversing polycystic ovary syndrome, which is a whole other conversation for another time. But these books are so wonderful because they provide a new lens on an old conversation and a conversation that's lacked the depth that's required to make any significant progress on these subjects. As we've seen, obesity levels and other issues with weight have gone in the wrong direction for the last couple of decades. I think it's a more systemic understanding of these issues that will give us any chance of reversing it. That's exactly what your work does.

1:20:03Everyone knows where to find you. Dr. Jason Fang will link all of your work in the description below. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is what is your greatest gift to the world? I think if, if, if, you know, I suppose it sounds very arrogant. But I really hope that my work helps people sort of reverse the type two diabetes because that is really sort of one of the most close things that I deal with because I deal with it professionally sort of every day.

1:20:53And helps break the stigma of not just the stigma, but the understanding that stimulates more thinking about weight loss, how to lose weight more than calories in calories. I mean, it's so sort of pie in the sky because there's a whole worldwide sort of institutionalized, fossilized almost thinking around calories. It's all about calories sort of thing. So for me to upset, it seems ridiculous. But I hope that I can at least start that conversation to say, Hey, let's think about these things. Let's think about the hormones. Let's think about reversing type two diabetes. Let's think about all getting together and helping each other to become so much healthier, not through drugs and not through more surgery and not with, you know, weird and new things that you've never heard of.

1:21:55But with the tried and the true sort of oldest thinking that has been there, right? It's to me, it's I sometimes think about this. Like crazy. I like, why do I think I can even do that? Right? It's just ridiculous. It's so much hubris. But, you know, I can only try, right? Because I see in my own practice how much good it's done for some people. So it drives me to say, I need to bring it to more people. I need to explain it to them. If they want to be healthy, we'll be help. But if they don't want to say, this will, hey, I'm not trying to force myself to do anything. But, you know, that's what I hope my greatest gift will be.

1:22:36But at the same time, I sort of think, that's just, you know, you're crazy if you can think you can do that. But well, it's the crazy ones that change the world. Dr. Jason, it's the crazy ones that change the world. And even with, you know, your conversation around intimate and fasting has changed many, many lives that you'll never get to me. I imagine many, many millions, many, many millions because it's even brought the conversation to this show before you entered the room, many, many months and months and months and almost a year ago, I, people started talking on the show about intimate and fasting.

1:23:08And that's in many respects, due to the work that you've done to further that conversation. And now your work continues to highlight the fact that type two diabetes is a reversible disease in many cases. And I think, again, that's going to save, you know, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of lives over the coming, coming decades and years. So thank you for what you do, Dr. Jason. It's a huge honor to get to sit with you today. And I feel why is there more enlightened? And like someone has turned the lights on in a certain part of my knowledge because of this conversation. So I thank you for that tremendously.

1:23:41Thank you so much. It's been great. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.

1:24:07Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. Net suite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

1:24:42We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with net suite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsweep .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsweep .com slash Bartlett.