Change Your Body's Fat Loss Thermostat & Crack the Hunger Code - With Dr. Jason Fung

20:28Dr. Jason Fung:After puberty, girls have about 50 % more fat. Is it willpower? Is it laziness? Absolutely not. The women gain breast fat and hip fat because they're preparing for childbirth. The boys, the teenage boys gain muscle because that's what the testosterone was telling them to do. Is it because they're counting their calories? No. Have you seen what teenage boys eat? It's a lot and it's mostly crap, right it's not good stuff but they're gaining muscle why because that's what the hormones were telling their body to do so again we got to get out of this mindset that it's their fault it's people's fault it's like this is a hormonal balance not a caloric balance because it's the hormones that tell your body what are you supposed to do with these calories right so the testosterone for example, takes the calories and turns it into muscle.

21:22Dr. Jason Fung:And then boys gain muscle. They also do all kinds of stupid things, right? But the point is that it's all that. So if you're looking at weight gain, then you got to think about, hey, what are these other hormones at play, right? So estrogen, testosterone, insulin, cortisol, they're all important and they could be different in different people, right? So for one person, it could be insulin. For another person, it could would be cortisol, right? So somebody who doesn't get enough sleep, they're sleep deprived, they're under stress, their cortisol is going up, cortisol is telling your body, hey, gain some weight, you're pushing that thermostat up.

21:57Dr. Jason Fung:So now you say, oh, eat fewer calories. Well, let me see. So the problem was you didn't get enough sleep and your best advice is to eat less calories? Like that's insane. You should get more sleep, right? Or if your problem is stress, you need to meditate. You need to talk to friends, reconnect with family. The advice is not eat fewer calories, right? But this sort of narrow-minded sort of advice, it's sort of like to the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail, right? So whether your problem is perimenopause or sleep deprivation or stress or emotional trauma, it's all the same solution, eat fewer calories, right?

22:43Dr. Jason Fung:You'll never succeed that way, right? And guess what? We haven't. So we do need to get sort of like, hey, we need to know more about the science of why you're gaining, why you're losing weight. And that's what the hunger code, that's what the obesity code was, right? So the hunger code is sort of a follow-up to the obesity code, which really talked about the hormones. And this explores the topics in much more detail, both in terms of the hormones, but also in terms of emotional hunger and social hunger too, which are actually huge. There are actually huge facets of behavior in general, right? But how do you completely ignore the emotional side, right?

23:21Dr. Jason Fung:This whole calories thing, it completely ignores the importance of social influence and the importance of emotions. It's like, why? No behavior, no human behavior is devoid of that, you know, emotional input, right? Or social input.

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26:50Shawn Stevenson:According to the BMJ a few years ago, the average American adult's diet is around 60 % ultra processed food. And JAMA published in 2018, the average American child's diet is getting close to 70 % ultra processed foods. And so this is a newly invented category of foods. And what makes a food ultra-processed is that, again, this is the phenomenon where we have a field of corn, which I'm from the Midwest. I haven't seen a few cornfields, but that corn, it's not like becoming a creamed corn, which that's processing, right? Ultra-processing means that that cornfield somehow, some way becomes lucky charms, right?

27:34Shawn Stevenson:Something that is so far removed from anything relating to the plant that it apparently came from. And plus all these different additives and known obesogens as well. So obesity causing agents. So these are compounds that can increase the risk of gaining belly fat and body fat overall, independent of the calories. Like this is known again. And so what is the connection here with ultra processed foods and the hunger code?

28:05Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah, so ultra processed foods, and you really hit the nail on the head there because it's like we're moving past this whole discussion about calories, right? The calories was maybe sort of like kindergarten level discussion, right? Very shallow, very superficial. This is getting into the real heart of the matter. How does the processing change the foods so that it becomes so much more obesogenic, right? Because it's clear that it does, right? And there's so many ways. One of the ways is through, so there's really several types of hunger. There's this homeostatic hunger, which is driven by all these hormones, but there's also a sort of emotional hunger called hedonic hunger.

28:45Dr. Jason Fung:And this is because eating is a pleasurable thing. Like we all enjoy eating and the ultra processed foods takes that and sort of turns it up to 11 sort of thing, right? So when you take a natural food, it can only contain a certain amount of, you know, carbohydrates, sugar, whatever it is, right? But once you process it, you can put whatever you feel like, right? You could put these artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial sweeteners, artificial fats. You can change the texture with texturizers. You can change the creaminess with emulsifiers. You can put flavor enhancers like maltodextrin and, you know, MSG.

29:28Dr. Jason Fung:there's so much stuff you can do. And what it does is it sort of brings that pleasure, sort of the dopamine reward systems, and basically boosts it right up into very unnatural state. And at the same time, it turns down the satiety, right? So anything that makes you want to stop eating, because there are these natural breaks to eating, right? So when you eat a steak, you're going to activate certain hormones like peptide YY, cholecystokinin, GLP-1. So you can eat a steak. Can you eat 10 steaks? No, because you're activating all those hormones. Well, with ultra-processed foods and natural foods all have this, right?

30:06Dr. Jason Fung:So even with natural carbohydrates, there are natural satiety signals that will turn off, right? You can't just keep eating beans, like pound after pound of beans. You can't because there are those natural signals, but you can get rid of all those, right? With ultra-processed foods. That's why, like, if you go and imagine you went to this, you know, buffet, you've really stuffed and somebody said, here, have this pork chopper. We're going to get charged. You'll be like, yeah, charge me, right? What if now somebody puts down a cookie? You'd be like, oh, I can do that, right? Why? It could be the same calories.

30:41Dr. Jason Fung:The difference is the hormones. And it's so ultra processed that it's turned down all those satiety signals that you can still eat it, right? So now you get into a very dangerous situation where you've got sort of, you're stimulating a lot of hedonic hunger. At the same time, you're not, you know, you're not satisfying the homeostatic hunger. So you can just keep eating it and eating and eating it. And in fact, it can turn into a food addiction. And the research on food addiction is exploding in the last five years, say. They have these scores now, like the Yale Food Addiction Score, so that you can study that scientifically.

31:19Dr. Jason Fung:And what's very clear is that a huge proportion of the people who struggle with weight are actually suffering from food addiction. That is, they cannot stop eating even though they know it's bad for them, right? And if you've ever watched those shows, you know, those 800-pound person shows, right? It's clearly, they're clearly addicted, right? So the thing is that if it's an addiction, again, you need to understand this is an addiction. So there's a whole different toolkit that you have to use. If somebody is an addict, then you don't say everything in moderation, right? If you're addicted to alcohol, the last thing I should say to you is like, have a beer, everything in moderation, right?

32:00Dr. Jason Fung:It'd be like the worst advice ever, right? Because you haven't treated it like an addiction. If you're addicted to cocaine, I don't say just have a little sniff. It's okay, right? But people get addicted to these ultra processed foods because of this, you know, pleasure sort of enhancement, right? And the problem is somebody says, well, just have a little bit. It's fine, right? Everything in moderation. But you can't. You have to actually treat it with abstinence because if you eat that one, you can't stop. And the funny part is that people will tell you. They're like, I'm a bread addict. I'm a pizza addict.

32:36Dr. Jason Fung:I'm a chocolate addict. I'm a candy addict. They're telling you they're addicted and nobody takes them seriously. If you're addicted, stop completely. You can't take any. Now you have to treat them completely different because now we're talking about addiction medicine. How do you treat it? Well, you know, like Alcoholics Anonymous, right? They have 12 steps, right? You have like forgiveness and, you know, you have a sponsor, right? Friends to talk to. You have, you know, finding a purpose and all this stuff, all this great stuff that you give an alcoholic that you don't give a food addict. All the food addict gets is eat fewer calories, eat in moderation, nothing is off the limits, and if you can't lose weight, it's your fault, right?

33:23Dr. Jason Fung:How heartless is that, really? Like, honestly, how heartless is that? So that's where these books come in because they're really trying to get into the heart of what's causing the problem. And therefore, once you know better, then you can bring in, you know, the treatments for it, right? So conditioned hunger, which is the third type of hunger, there's a whole research in behavioral psychology that tells you how to treat conditioned hunger because there's counter conditioning and there's extinction, which are two techniques used in behavioral psychology. And so it's like the more you know, the better you can do because you can dial in the right things.

34:07Dr. Jason Fung:So conditioned hunger is actually quite interesting because I actually think it's a huge problem. Like other than the ultra processed foods, ultra processed foods are a problem too, but conditioning is a term where you compare two things, right? So the classic example is Pavlov's dogs. So if you give dogs food, they'll salivate, they'll get hungry. If you ring a bell and then give them food, they'll quickly pair the bell and the food. So now when you ring a bell, they'll get hungry and salivate, but they don't get food, right? So now you've changed the bell from a neutral stimulus, because it was neutral, to something that's going to provoke hunger, right?

34:44Dr. Jason Fung:Now you think about what happens in modern day society. You eat as soon as you get up. People say, you can't skip a meal. You must eat breakfast. You have a mid-morning snack. You have lunch. You eat in the car. You eat at the desk. You eat when you're walking. You eat when you're watching a movie. You eat when you're going to the mall. You eat when you're getting a coffee. You eat when you're, you know, watching a sports event, right? Now you've paired every single one of these things with food. You walk outside and it's like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's like, you're creating all this conditioned hunger.

35:17Dr. Jason Fung:We are Pavlov's dogs, right? And that's the food noise that people talk about, right? You go outside. It's like, why am I hungry all the time? Because there's billboards with food. You're walking in the hospital lobby and hey, there's a a coffee shop and they're baking donuts. And the subway here is baking bread. There's smells, you know, you get in the car and you've paired the car with food and then you watch a movie and you're used to eating something. So it's like everything, you can't stop it, right? And the thing is that once you identify it then you can do something about it. If you didn't know what the problem, you couldn't deal with it.

35:54Dr. Jason Fung:But now if you recognize, hey, what kind of hunger is it? Like what's driving the food behavior? Well, it's the hunger, right? We eat when we're hungry. Is it the hormone, the hormonal physical hunger? Is it the emotional hunger, the hedonic hunger, which is the ultra processed foods and food addiction? Or is it the conditioned hunger? Now you can say, oh, I see. It's addiction. Let me reach into this bag of addiction medicine, figure out what are the appropriate things to do and do it, right? And that's what these books are about.

36:27Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. So there's three types of hunger. and again we think hunger is just one thing there's just one note on a piano like this is hunger yeah and it's far more complex now you mentioned social yeah aspect of hunger as well and this ties in as well with these kind of conditions the conditioned hunger piece of it which is again we have these certain social structures and especially with humans like everything revolves around food i can't think of an event that food isn't involved you know whether it's a birthday or a funeral, whether it's, you know, a graduation or, you know, obviously a big part of, you know, dating and whether it's after the game with our kids, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

37:15Shawn Stevenson:You mentioned, you know, watching a sporting event, for example, Super Bowl Sunday was recent. You know, it's just a huge food day. Our holidays, huge food days. But what we've created is a 365 huge food day with all of these social hunger cues. And then we're blaming ourselves when it's so difficult for us to manage our appetite, our hunger in these conditions. Exactly.

37:41Dr. Jason Fung:So you look at countries around the world, for example. So you could look at Japan, which is a very first world developed nation, just like the United States. But the obesity rate is very low, right? Why? Because the social structures really prevent a lot of this sort of extraneous eating behavior, right? So you take a Japanese person in Japan, the risk of obesity is extremely low. Now they move to the United States and guess what? Their obesity rate goes up like fivefold. By the second generation, it's gone up like 10 fold. And you think about these situations, Like think about it this way. So in the 1970s, say, and you're working, you're in an office, whatever, there's no food anywhere, right?

38:28Dr. Jason Fung:Now you go to the office and you have a meeting. Guess what? There's a plate of bagels. There's a plate of cookies. So you're not actually hungry, but you're super bored. So what do you do? You go eat that cookie, right? It's because of the situation. In the 1970s, would you have really left that meeting, gone outside, gone and found a store to sell you a cookie and then come back while your boss is like, should I fire you? It's not. It's the situation. It's not the person. But now, look, in the 1970s, that person, it took a huge amount of willpower to get that cookie. In modern day, when somebody's just ordered a plate of cookies, it takes a huge amount of willpower to not eat that cookie because it's staring you in the face and you're just bored out of your mind.

39:15Dr. Jason Fung:The situation is all about the environment. And so we blamed the individual, but it's not their fault. Just like the Japanese person, you can't blame it on the individual because it's the environment. So then you have to say, how do you change that? Well, there are lots of ways, right? You say, okay, you know, one small example is in the nurse's station. So I work in the hospital. And so 20 years ago in the nurse's station, there'd be like cookies and donuts all the time, like 24 hours a day. Because there's a lot of patients and stuff, families would bring in food and stuff, and they'd bring cookies and baked goods.

39:52Dr. Jason Fung:It's very nice because they're showing their appreciation. But the problem was the same thing. It's staring you in the face all the time. You cannot stop it because it's right there, right? So when you're a little bored, you're a little this or a little that, boom, that donut goes in your mouth, right? It's changed a bit, right? Because of the mindset that around these ultra processed foods have changed. So you don't see that nearly as much. I see much less chocolates and cookies and stuff in the nurse's station, but it's so much healthier, right? And so you can take that and you can say, well, what if I ran a company?

40:27Dr. Jason Fung:What would I do? Well, you can say there's no more of this, we're celebrating somebody's birthday, so there's cake, right? Because now you can't, the problem is that all those other people, they can't not eat cake and look like an ass, right? Like, oh, why aren't you eating cake? It's like, well, you know, you're going to eat cake because it's their birthday, right? But you never should have and you never would have except that of that, right? So if you're a boss, you say no more eating in the boardrooms. Meetings have no food because that's not a place for eating. No more candy bowls because, you know, hey, it's really unfair to people trying to lose weight.

41:00Dr. Jason Fung:Like we're trying to be nice, but in fact, we're not actually doing good. You know, so there's so many little things. Let's bring back the water cooler. You want to have somewhere to hang out and talk, go and get some water, right? It's right there for you. It's set up for you, right? So why don't we do that, right? Because the whole narrative is about redesigning your social and your physical environment so that you can succeed. And we saw this during COVID. COVID was a tricky time. Everybody's at home. Guess what? Everybody ate a lot. Why? Because you're sitting on the kitchen table and there's food just all around.

41:39Dr. Jason Fung:And all those cues, right? The pantry's there, right? Oh, you're a little bored. Oh, hey, look, there's cookies in the pantry, right?

41:46Shawn Stevenson:You're watching Lion King or Tiger King during that time as well. Yeah, that's right. You know, got to grab some snacks.

41:53Dr. Jason Fung:Exactly. So it was a tough time. But again, it's not the individual. It's the environment that they've put themselves in, right? So therefore, one of the key things you have to do is redesign that environment, create that social environment, the people who are going to help you succeed, the environment that are going to help you succeed. Amazing.

42:11Shawn Stevenson:So obviously, you know, one of the things, well, maybe not so obvious that you articulate in the book is just this kind of evolution of weight gain in our modern society, you know, in particular here in the United States, going from 1960s, around 13 % obesity rate to currently somewhere around 42%, close to, you know, getting close to 45%. in just the span of a few decades. But in particular, it's been the last few decades where, and this is what I want to ask you about, is it true that we're not necessarily, especially since the 1990s, 1980s, we're not necessarily eating that many more calories to account for all of the weight that we're gaining?

42:59Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah, because calories are not the end thing. So everybody thinks it's calories equals weight gain, but it's actually completely not true. If you eat 100 calories, your body has a decision to make. Do you store those calories or do you burn those calories, right? So how many calories you eat is not the most important thing. The most important thing is what you do with those calories, right? So you eat lunch and you eat a certain number of calories. What do you do? Do you store it or do you burn it? Because obviously, if you store it, you're going to get fat. If you burn it, you're going to have lots of energy, feel good, and not get fat, right?

43:32Dr. Jason Fung:But you don't get to choose, right? It's not like, oh, I'd like to do this, right? It's their hormones that decide for you which goes where, and insulin is a big thing. So this idea that it's all about calories is patently false, right? Because it doesn't account for the differences, the quality of the foods, because food contains not just the calories, which is the energy, the food energy, but it contains the instructions, right, of what you're supposed to do. So therefore, if you're eating foods with the instructions to, hey, don't store it, let's burn it, right? Or you can choose foods like very ultra processed foods that have a lot of instructions, store all this as fat, right?

44:16Dr. Jason Fung:So therefore, those are very different. And that's why the number of calories has a very, very loose association with obesity rates. And that's what I mean about let's move past this idea. Even if you think about human physiology, you know, I described in the book how, you know, we think that it goes from calories to weight, but it's not. It's a food, but it has to be then digested, which then goes into the stomach. Then it must be absorbed, which affects your hormones, which then affects your weight. And each of these steps has like 10 different ways it can be changed. So therefore, they're not the same.

44:53Dr. Jason Fung:Just like the 200 calories of cookies is not the same as 200 calories of broccoli. Like who gets fat eating broccoli? Like not that many people, right? But there's plenty of people who will eat cookies and get fat. Why? Because of the hormonal change, right? So the whole calories thing is sort of, just it's so, it really doesn't make a huge difference. if you look at the correlation between calories and obesity amongst countries, for example, I take that in the book, it's a very loose correlation. You can calculate something called the correlation coefficient, which is like 0.6, which is sort of a moderately weak association, right?

45:39Dr. Jason Fung:So the quality of the calories, like what are those calories telling you, that's also very important. And that's where the ultra processed foods just throws us sort of completely out of whack.

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49:04Shawn Stevenson:Again, independent of even lifting weights, which when we think about gaining muscle, we think about the input, the signals that we need to give our muscles to do that. But now we know that if you eat a certain amount of protein, in particular, like leucine, we can stimulate the creation of muscle tissue. So again, our body's deciding what to do based on the inputs, in particular from our food.

49:30Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah. Because so protein is quite interesting because it affects this different hormonal mediator called mTOR. And mTOR is a growth hormone as well, right? So insulin is also a growth hormone. But that's why when you eat a lot of protein, you're going to stimulate the mTOR, which is going to stimulate growth, which in a lot of cases, if you let it, it's muscle growth, right especially if you pair that right with exercise because it's really most important for that eating protein by itself without doing exercise you can get a bit but very very minimal yeah you're not going to get a lot i wish you could but nobody nobody just eats and gains a lot of muscle right so the whole point is that there's there's such complexity of this you know system that our body is, why do we dumb it down to something that's so basic when we've actually spent decades learning how our body works and then ignoring everything that we've discovered and just saying, well, it's all about calories, right?

50:36Dr. Jason Fung:So we're just going to ignore insulin and GLP-1 and all this good stuff, right? Like GLP-1 is interesting because that's the hormonal system of Ozempic. And Ozempic really turns down the hunger, right? But the key is that you're not restricting calories, right? If you're restricting calories, it's very unsuccessful. And we've done that. So you could wire somebody's jaw shot. They did that in the 60s. They wired people's jaw shot because they wanted to make them lose weight, but they didn't. Why? Because they got hungry, right? They wired the jaw shot, they couldn't eat calories, then they got really hungry, and then they figured out a way around it, right?

51:17Dr. Jason Fung:You'd take milkshakes and all this other stuff, right? Then in the 2010s, they're like, oh, I know, we're gonna cut out somebody's stomach. That was the sleeve gastrectomy, the bariatric surgery. And it was also mostly a failure, right? We actually had high hopes for that as a medical community. But the problem was that if you look at what they're doing, it's completely wrong. Because again, you're pushing down the calories because you're surgically restricting calories, but then the hunger just goes up and up and up. because you never dealt with the hunger issue and they find ways around it. Again, they take milkshakes and they take sweets and all this stuff.

51:52Dr. Jason Fung:And then they regain all that weight, right? So the number of surgeries, the Roux-en-Y surgeries that is done in the United States peaked in 2010. So while the obesity rate went up, this so-called miracle cure for obesity just kept going down. The only reason is because it doesn't work, right? Now you get a drug that suppresses hunger, but not calories. And it works, right? The problem is when you go off of it, if you haven't learned what's driving the hunger, then of course the weight goes back up, right? But it's the hunger that's most important. And that's the sort of theme of the hunger code, right?

52:29Dr. Jason Fung:The hunger is what's driving your eating behavior. So until you think about the sort of deeper reason for the eating behavior, you can't get it, right? So if you're thinking that the problem is overeating, then it's really a problem of over hunger because why are you eating? Because you're hungry. So if you don't think about the hunger, you'll actually never get ahead of the problem because you never understood the problem. Wow.

52:58Shawn Stevenson:Obviously there is so much rich information in the book to understand this inside and out, but just practically for everybody listening today, just to have some things to walk away with. What would you say are the three most important things for people to target when thinking about things in terms of this body fat thermostat, cracking the hunger code and proactively addressing weight loss, sustainable weight loss through addressing hunger? What would those three most important things be?

53:34Dr. Jason Fung:So in the book, I have this three golden rules of weight loss. and there's sort of, there's 50 weight loss tips, but there's three golden rules, which are sort of the most important things. So the first is ultra processed foods, like don't eat ultra processed foods because they actually cut across all the different types of hunger. They're basically deliberately engineered to give you a lot of, you know, it's easy to eat. You're getting a lot of, you know, spiking insulin. So you're getting a lot of this homeostatic hunger, the physical hunger. It's turned up the pleasure to like, you know, the reward system to 11.

54:06Dr. Jason Fung:So you got to stimulate a lot of hedonic hunger. And then the social conditioned hunger, because it's so easy, it's so convenient, you can always pair it, right? So you can always go and when you go to the car, you can open a bag of Cheetos or whatever, right? Like who's going to fry a little piece of salmon and go into their car, right? Obviously not, right? But the convenience and availability of that makes that social hunger, that sort of conditioned hunger, good. So because it cuts across all three, it's actually one of the most important things you need to do, which is why we need to move past this sort of idea.

54:43Dr. Jason Fung:It's just calories, right? There's the three types of hunger, and this cuts across all three. So number one is avoid ultra processed foods. Number two is make sure you have an adequate fasting period. So again, fasting is a very ancient strategy, right? So it's in the Bible. So it's been around at least for 2 ,026 years. and the thing is that when you don't eat, insulin's gonna fall, which is the signal for your body to release calories, right? And body fat is just a store of calories. So if you think about it, you're just using the calories that you've stored for what it was meant to do. So what's wrong with that, right?

55:23Dr. Jason Fung:Think about it. If you have 50 pounds of body fat, you have like 375 ,000 calories. What's the big deal if you don't eat for a day and you take 2 ,000 of those 375 ,000 calories. Is there anything wrong with that? No, not really, right? So you have to make sure that, hey, you got to understand, it's very simple. When you eat, your body's going to store calories, right? When you don't eat fasting, that's when your body's going to release calories, right? That's why you don't die in your sleep every single night because your body can hold it and release it. The key is it's the hormones that determines which way it goes, especially insulin.

56:01Dr. Jason Fung:is the hormones going into storage or is it coming out of storage? You got to make sure it comes out of storage. And that's when it comes out of storage, that's when you're going to turn off all those types of hunger. And it also breaks a lot of the conditioned hunger. Because if you have a rule, for example, that I'm going to fast for 16 hours, I won't eat sort of after 6 p.m. Well, all of a sudden, if you go watch TV, that runs smack into your rule of, hey, I'm not eating after 6. Now you've set this guardrail for yourself to make sure that you're following good practices, right? It's this sort of like, oh, okay, this is just gonna give me that little nudge.

56:36Dr. Jason Fung:So the third thing is to sort of redesign that social and environmental piece because it's actually super, super important. For example, the people that you hang out with have a huge influence on what you do, right? If all your friends are playing basketball, you're playing basketball. If all your friends are watching basketball and eating potato chips, you're watching basketball and eating potato chips. That's life, right? So you got to find that environment that's going to allow you to succeed. You got to find the people that are going to allow you to succeed because they influence us. We all know that social influence is a huge, you know, it's highly important, right?

57:19Dr. Jason Fung:To what we do. Like what we do reflects what our friends do, our family does and so on. So if you have a chance and you can influence them, of course, on the other side to be good as well, but it's important, just like the Japanese person in Japan and the Japanese person in America, it makes a difference. So those are the most important things. Avoid ultra processed foods fast, regularly, and redesign your environment, your social and physical environment to succeed. And the funny part about these golden rules is that they're literally the oldest rules in the book, right? They're not something newfangled.

57:56Dr. Jason Fung:Oh, do this and this and this, right? It's never been thought of before. No. If you ask your grandmother, she would have told you the same thing. Don't eat junk food and don't eat all the time, right? Don't fall in with the bad crowd. Okay. Well, her grandmother would have told her the same thing, right? And this sort of wisdom has sort of distilled itself and proven itself over the years. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. I'm just trying to point out that these are the most important things you should do. Not, oh, we should get this new drink with the peptides and the this and the that.

58:33Dr. Jason Fung:I mean, there's nothing wrong with them. But, you know, is it like advice that has withstood like the thousand years of human history, right? It's like, I don't think so, right? They might be fine. But here's the things that have worked for a lot of people. They're principles, right? And you have to follow those three sort of principles. Don't eat like bad food. Don't eat junk food. Don't eat all the time. And surround yourself with the right people in the right environment.

59:04Shawn Stevenson:I love that. That third one is so powerful because the third one also influences the other two tremendously. You know, if you really think about it, that social piece, you gave a great example. Like if this is what the people that you're around are doing, you're doing it yeah and it takes an inc when we talk about willpower that's where that comes into play like yeah your willpower to do a certain thing in the environment that is doing something completely different and there's a place for that but what if you stack conditions in your favor to where it makes the choices more automatic but one thing since i have you here that i would love to get some more insight about would be the fasting piece yeah because when somebody hears that it's just like, so what, how do I do it?

59:49Shawn Stevenson:What do I do? Because going from like, I'm eating every day, all these different meals to just like cold turkey, I'm not going to eat tomorrow. Like what, what are some best practices when it comes to fasting?

1:00:00Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah. So there's, there's two sort of variables. You have to set the amount of time. So how long are you going to fast for? Right? So there's different strategies. There's a 16 hour fast, which is eight hour eating window. So you might eat, for example, from 10 AM to 6 PM. And then you would fast from 6 PM to 8 AM. You can still eat three meals in that if you want to. You can go up to 24 hours, which is a sort of one meal a day. So you eat sort of early dinner, late lunch sort of thing, and then go to the next day, early dinner, late lunch. You don't have to do it every day, right? So you can pick and choose.

1:00:32Dr. Jason Fung:If you have an event that night, of course, you can always change it. And you can go longer and shorter and you can alternate them. Then you can start going into the longer one. So past 24 hours, sort of 36 hours. Once you go past the 24 hours, interestingly, I think it's, you gain a lot of power in terms of weight loss. And it comes down to the fact that when you sort of go, like, say you fast the whole day and then don't eat till the next day. So you've actually gone more than 24 hours. Cause say you eat at 7 PM dinnertime on Monday, you don't eat Tuesday. You don't eat again until say 7 AM on Wednesday.

1:01:07Dr. Jason Fung:It's more than 24 hours. You're talking about 36 hours, right? Once you get the nighttime, what you're getting is this sort of eight hours of sleep where you're still fasting, but it's completely free because there's no effort involved. There's no hunger involved. And the thing about it is by the time you get the next morning, you get the circadian rhythm works in your favor because you release all these hormones at 5 a.m. This part of the circadian rhythm, which happens every day at 5 a.m. Your brain releases certain chemicals like growth hormone and cortisol, which actually suppress hunger. And that's why a lot of people are not hungry in the morning.

1:01:44Dr. Jason Fung:So even though you didn't eat the whole previous day, you'll wake up on that Wednesday morning and feel completely normal with no extra hunger. So you basically reset even though you didn't eat. And then you can keep going longer, right? So you can add more to it. And what happens also is that you get into this sort of fat burning state because your body has two sources of fuel. one is sugar glycogen and one is fat so you're getting into this fat burning state so really interesting because the hunger is starting to come down when you reset that next morning but you're still getting you're still in that fat burning state you got the whole night time where you didn't even have to think about it and and and and you're still burning fat right so really powerful stuff and then you can start going into the multiple days and the really interesting thing when you start getting into the multiple days is that one you can start putting some calories back You don't have to do a full water only fast.

1:02:38Dr. Jason Fung:You can do things like bone broth. You can do things like a little bit of vegetables, a few calories here and there. Turns out that if you, you know, when you're going longer, it's okay to add a few calories back, like 300, 500 calories. A lot of the data now says that, hey, you're going to get most of the benefits and put less stress on your body because it's not as stringent, right? So that's another option that actually works really, really well and may have additional benefits like anti-inflammation and all this sort of thing. So that's the sort of, you know, the sort of types of fasting that I have, which is the sort of the short ones, the 16s, the 24s, getting into the 36s and then going longer.

1:03:20Dr. Jason Fung:So any of those work. Really, you know, you have to try it and see which one you prefer because some people love the longer ones and other people hate them. They all work. It depends on how often you do it. If it's shorter, generally more often, longer, you might do it like, you know, a little less often.

1:03:40Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. And keep in mind, this isn't just about I'm fasting just to lose weight. This is one of the most effective approaches when you, when you talk about the removal of these ultra processed foods or the things that are causing the problem.

1:03:55Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah.

1:03:55Shawn Stevenson:Right. So we're moving away from that. So we've got abstinence. Yeah. Essentially when you gave that example of like, you know, this whole everything in moderation, like, yeah, we just need to remove the thing. That's the issue, you know, and it's an opportunity to do that. And your chemistry is going to adjust, you know, based on that decision. So it's again, thousands of years of use. And I love that you came in with the softball here of like, you could just do, you know, an intermittent fast, you know, and give that a shot, see how you feel. because what it is, if we're just going to say it bluntly, we've conditioned ourselves to want to eat all the time.

1:04:34Shawn Stevenson:And we've conditioned ourselves to not be comfortable with being hungry or just even feeling that feeling or even something remotely like a tickle of hunger.

1:04:44Dr. Jason Fung:So we don't

1:04:45Shawn Stevenson:really know what hunger really feels like. A lot of times it's just entertainment. It's just, boredom you know it's all these other components of hunger not just like a true hunger where your biology is like i'm not going to make it because you have thousands and thousands and thousands of extra calories that your body has you know has to utilize and so you know i love this because you're expanding the conversation and the inputs and giving credibility to the fact that this is a complex system. And to stop treating ourselves like we're just this one vanilla way to go about it. And by the way, when you mentioned the buffet example, and just like you go and get stuffed, there's room for dessert.

1:05:33Shawn Stevenson:You're not going to want to, let me get another slice of pizza or chicken or whatever the case might be. But I remember this as a kid, the best thing would be to go over to the ice cream. I'm stuffed. Okay. I'm done. But going over, and I remember the first time I was at a buffet called Ryan's and I could not believe that they were about to let me do the ice cream machine. Like it's just a handle and I can just do this myself. I don't feel like I got any training for this. Like, you know, and so I did it. I did the whole thing, try to do a little swirl like they do at the restaurants and you get all these toppings and there's room for

1:06:08Dr. Jason Fung:it. Yeah. We used to joke as kids that, uh, you know, our parents would be like, Oh, why would you want dessert? Like, didn't you eat? And we were all like, no, no, no, no, no. There's a second stomach for dessert. We used to tell ourselves that all the time. And I think it was hilarious because there's actually some truth to the whole thing because there's no satiety signaling, right? All those desserts, highly, highly refined carbohydrates, right? Not talking protein shakes here. You're talking about you take out all the protein because it's satiating. You're taking out anything that could, like the bulk, you're taking out anything that would, you know, increase satiety signaling.

1:06:48Dr. Jason Fung:So now you have this ice cream or this cookie or whatever. It's like, oh, because it doesn't make you full, even when you're full, you can take another one down. Right. And that was our whole second stomach thing. Kids, you know, the genius of children. We got to the heart of the matter and like telling you the second stomach, like we knew that as kids. and the top researchers in obesity don't even know about that whole stomach, second stomach phenomenon, right? That's crazy.

1:07:17Shawn Stevenson:Hopefully they're learning and they're getting access to your book and your knowledge. And, you know, just the work that you've been doing in recent years has made huge waves and made a huge impact, not just on individuals who are getting the results, but also on practitioners, you know? And so I appreciate you so much for that. Can you let everybody know where to get a copy of the book? And also where to follow you to get more information.

1:07:40Dr. Jason Fung:Yeah, so you can get it anywhere you buy your books normally. And on social media, you can find me on YouTube under Jason Fung on x.com and Instagram under Dr. Jason Fung. You can also go to my website if you're interested in the other books, which is Dr. Jason Fung. I say that because the other one, Dr. Jason Fung is like some porn site or something like that.

1:08:06Shawn Stevenson:I know. I know. I tried to get that website. I'm like, oh my God, what is this?

1:08:12Dr. Jason Fung:So I had to go with the other one. So just remember that other one is not me. It's D-O-C-T-O-R, Jason Fung. So yeah. And then from there, you know, there's links to all my, all my books and so on.

1:08:24Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. Amazing.

1:08:26Dr. Jason Fung:And do not go there.

1:08:27Shawn Stevenson:All right. Whoever is this, no. Okay. So the book is called The Hunger Code, Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the age of ultra processed food available right now. Go pick up your copy today. Dr. Jason Fung, I appreciate you so much.

1:08:42Dr. Jason Fung:Oh, thank you so much. This was great conversation. Of course, of course.

1:08:46Shawn Stevenson:The one and only Dr. D-O-C-T-O-R, Jason Fung, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. You already know what to do. If this was enlightening and you found it beneficial, Please share the love with somebody that you care about. One of the best ways to share today is where everybody's hanging out, which is social media. All right, take a screenshot of this episode. Tag me, I'm at Sean Model, and tag Dr. Jason Fong as well. I'm sure that he would love to see the love. And let's keep this momentum going, keep this education going, because it really does matter.

1:09:26Shawn Stevenson:We're making a huge difference. so listen again i'm telling you now you ain't seen nothing yet we've got some incredible master classes and world leading experts coming your way very very soon so make sure to stay tuned take care have an amazing day and i'll talk with you soon