Science-Backed Strategies for Lasting Weight Loss

29:38What's phytonutrient? What does that mean? Phytonutrient is a chemical that's in plant foods. Phyto means plant. And it's not a vitamin or mineral. It's not a protein, fat, or carb, or fiber. It's something else. So for example, like broccoli has glucosinolates, which upregulates detoxification. Catechins are in green tea, which are powerful detoxifiers of metal, powerful antioxidants. Tomatoes have lycopene, which is a powerful cancer preventer for prostate cancer. So anthocyanidins, you can have black rice, which has anthocyanidins, which are powerful antioxidants that are in black rice. It's emperor's rice.

30:19Love that. It's also very low glycemic. So I think the things that they disagree on are basically beans, grains, and meat, like where you get your protein from. Everything else is the same. Paleo and vegan is the same except for meat, beans. Yeah, and protein. I mean, beans, grains, and protein. Beans, grains, and protein. Right. I mean, like meat. Right. And so what I realized is that I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're a diabetic, which affects a lot of people, I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is there's a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant.

31:08That means that they eat a lot of starch, that they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans, it can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains and non-gluten grains in particular because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think meat is the big issue, right? To me, it's the big issue. So should we beat meat? We just had dinner the other night. Right. We both had meat, right? We had fish.

31:36We had fish, yeah. We had black cod. Yes, that's great. Which was awesome. I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod? Is that what it was? Yeah, I had the black cod. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had the black cod. The guy next to me had meatballs. Yeah. The guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so the issues around meat also, I think, are everybody agrees, and fish, everybody agrees, that if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised, it should be sustainably raised, it should be grass-fed, it should be not harming the environment. The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and they're real.

32:07And I have many Buddhist patients. I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's, you know, is a diabetic, and he's never going to eat an animal. You know, so I need to help him understand how to, he never needs an egg, how to eat a high, higher fat protein diet, which is low glycemic. So we can do that. Okay. Right. So more nuts and seeds, you know, less rice, more beans, you know, just there's, there's strategies for, for doing that. Sure. And he did great. He lost 35 pounds, reverses diabetes. And I have like tons of bun people, you know, praying for me. That's great. Yeah, and then the meat thing is tricky because it's also an environmental risk.

32:46If you're eating factory-formed animals, there's antibiotics in that. And there's runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers that damages our water supply in rivers and lakes. There's climate change that happens from the methane produced. It's more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. And there's high energy use. One-fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption. You know, our water is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals. There's basically, I think, 70 % of all water use, and there's basically only 5 % of the world's surface is fresh water.

33:24It's usable. It's fresh water. Right? 1 % is in Russia. Wow. And at least 4 % of the rest of us. And 70 % of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. Sure. So I think, you know, a factory farming just should be not supported in any way. And we need to change that. And that means we need to change our patterns of consumption around meat. We need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having condo meat. Condo meat. Condo meat. As opposed to like a condiment. Like condo meat. You know, it should be a side dish or a dressing if you're going to eat it.

33:59Sure, sure. And I think. Not a full plate of steak, you mean? You know, I think there's three issues with meat, right? There's environmental issues. there's moral issues and there's health issues so we kind of talked about the moral i think that's yeah people are entitled their beliefs and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy the environmental issues are real i think everybody would agree whether they're paleo vegan that we need to stop harming the environment and i think even if you're not paleo vegan everybody really releases believes that in fact the dietary advisory committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact, right?

34:36Now, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably-based meat, you can't, it's not as abundant. You can't produce as much. And so we all have to eat less of it. Right. And it's more expensive. But that's okay. And I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in Eat Fat Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was, I'm like, well, I don't know. You want to know for yourself, too. Yeah, I'm like, I'm recommending to my patients. I'm, you know, a human, too. and I want to live a long time and I don't want to be doing something stupid.

35:06Yeah. So I wanted to find out what does the science tell us about meat? So you did all the research. So I looked at all the research and I wrote 8 ,000 words in the book on meat. Wow. That's a lot of research in there. And I addressed all these issues, you know, environmental, moral. And the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right? Right. So you want the paleo people like, meat's healthy, here's all the research. And the vegan people like, meat's going to kill you, here's all the research. So it's like, and then you're at the average Joe, you're totally confused and your average doctor you're totally confused because we had no training in nutrition they haven't done the research themselves no they're going off of their opinion or their theory yeah they're they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science they don't know because it's not what we learn right i mean i i just am at cleveland clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school they had this integrated in which is so great and that's awesome i i helped team ryan who's a congressman from Ohio, introduced Tim.

36:00He's great. Has he been on your show? He's been on here. Introduce a bill called the Enrich Act, which was a bill that is funding $15 million to fund nutrition in medical schools. Nutrition education for doctors. Interesting. That's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like it could heal a lot of their patients through food. Oh my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food. And they just medicaid a lot of the time i mean listen it's so bad i mean i use food as medicine that's what i food is the most powerful drug on the planet i mean that's why last week i was in cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class like that's what doctors should be doing because that's how i'm going to get that's real medicine that's real medicine now just just a quick side note what is your involvement with what is functional medicine and what is your involvement at the cleveland clinic can i can i finish my meat yes go ahead i was still i was still rolling on the meat i'm going to talk about functional medicine and then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic.

36:55Perfect, perfect. Because people want to know. They're like, well, what about meat? They're probably listening. Yeah, let's do it. So the science - 8 ,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8 ,000 words, but I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating. So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, followed them, and then they asked questions of them. What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last month? And they basically do these food frequency questionnaires.

37:24And then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And they try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death. But what else was... They were smoking. They were drinking. Yeah, exactly. They went sleepy. Exactly. Stressed out. So if you look at the data, they ate 800 more calories a day. They almost ate no fruits and vegetables. Tons of sugar. They had tons of sugar in processed food. Lots of fried foods. Drank more. Smoked more. Didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals.

37:52Well, guess what? You're getting it. as healthy as the other people. So most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few studies that were interesting I found. One was a study of 11 ,000 people who shopped at health food stores. And they found there were a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. So who are the people who are healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat? Because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on factory-farm meat, right? So again, how do you generalize that? But then there were these 11 ,000 people, and they followed them for many years, and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes.

38:26Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference in health outcomes. And you have a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference. What is the main cause in your mind to why it's so hard for people to get rid of that extra 20 or 30 pounds of belly back fat? So when you think about fat burning, there's two different phenomenon at play. One is thermodynamics, so there's more calories in than calories out, and then the other is lipolysis. So if you're going to restructure or recomp a building or your body, you have to remove blocks in some places and then put blocks in other places.

39:11So a lot of fat burners help with lipolysis. So they break fat molecules down and they increase, For example, mitochondrial beta oxidation, which is basically just you're metabolizing fats and then using them in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. The details don't really matter, but that's essentially the powerhouse of your cell. And you can do that all you want. But if you're still, you know, at caloric maintenance or even excess surplus, then you're just going to take all those blocks and then put them right back into fat cells. Gotcha. So you need a caloric deficit, it sounds like, somewhere.

39:48at some point in order to remove, you need to be exercising more than you're consuming and burning more calories than you're consuming or consuming less than you normally would. There's many tools and ways to achieve this, of course. Sure. What ways? So the OG way is just counting calories. Right. And even if you look at doctors and dieticians, we usually underestimate the amount of calories that we consume, I believe by at least 10%. Wow. And we overestimate the amount of calories that we burn by about 10%. We think we're burning more. Correct. We're not. Even doctors and dieticians. Really? Yeah.

40:28And we think we're eating less, but there's always hidden calories in something, right? Or you maybe didn't weigh it perfectly or it was a bigger size or something, right? Okay. So that's the original ways to count calories. Do you recommend that strategy? For some individuals, it's particularly helpful. Most of the time that I see a patient in my clinic, and a lot of what I do is obesity medicine. I am board certified in obesity medicine. They have already done that. And many of the time they say, it doesn't work, and I eat like a bird, and there is nothing quite as powerful to destroy a physician-patient relationship than to just tell the patient that they're lying or that they don't know what they're talking about.

41:11So it's not helpful to push that angle of vector. That's just a tool. And there's many tools in the toolbox. For some people, whether it's genetic or epigenetic or just their situation that they're in in life or their mental health or their hormone health, it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight. Almost like it's more difficult for someone in quicksand to get out. So you can teach a person how to dig. That's your lifestyle interventions. but you should also give them a shovel to help out. It doesn't necessarily mean that you throw a shovel at them, but that's where medications and supplements come in to address whether it's insulin resistance or whether it's their mental health or their hormone health to help give them the tool to do it themselves.

41:58Okay. So the counting the calories works for some, doesn't work for everyone. What else would you suggest they do then? Or what have you seen has been really effective consistently for people you've worked with? When I write a prescription for this, I have several different areas or boxes that I can circle. And one of them is number of meals per day. One of them is macronutrients, for example, carbohydrates. One of them is timing of meals. One of them is eating speed. So there's a lot of strategies to develop good eating speed habits. For example, split your meal into three different portions.

42:38Consume one, wait 10 minutes. Consume the next one if you would like, wait 10 minutes, and then consume the last one if you would like. So don't just put it all in your mouth in 10 seconds is what I'm hearing you say, which is kind of my whole childhood. Just like eat as fast as you can, not know that you're full, and just keep eating more, right? These are extremely powerful for pediatric patients for childhood obesity. I believe in the New England Journal of Medicine did a study, and it was called the turtle bite study, where every five or 10 bites at some interval, the kids took one bite that was extremely slow.

43:12And it was helpful for recomposition of those kids. Really? You mean recomposition of their bodies? When you're in the field of pediatric obesity medicine, you're not really going, your end target's not weight loss. Sure. It's usually weight gain, but a body recomposition. Huh, so less fat weight gain, but more like you're growing as a child either way, but it's diversifying the weight gain, I guess, right? Correct. Directing it in another place. Interesting. Okay, so we have meals per day, timing of meals, eating speed, I think you said one or two others. Timing of meals, that would kind of incorporate intermittent fasting, which is not, it's more of a health tool rather than a weight loss tool.

43:59Meals per day, eating speed, timing. I'm sure there are other tools. Sure. ones that I remember off the top of my head. If you were just saying, hey, listen, I don't want to count calories. I'm probably not going to do the intermittent fasting thing. I'm not going to eat slower or split it up in three things. That seems like too much work for me. But I will eat one less meal a day. Or I'll only eat a certain amount of meals and then I'll essentially be intermittent fasting in that process. But if I looked at it as, okay, what would my meals per day look like? If I wanted to consume a little less calories, obviously I'm going to feel hungry, but when can I do it where I'm not going to want to munch on extra calories?

44:38What would that be? Skip dinner? What does that look like? I would say skip eating after dinner and don't even worry about taking away a meal. No eating after 7 p.m. That being said, if you do remove one meal, whether it's breakfast or lunch or dinner, it is not helpful at all for weight loss or body composition. To remove one meal, it's not helpful. Correct. So in isolation, removing one meal is not helpful at all for weight loss. Really? It's truly an intervention for health reasons. If you would benefit from that, less mTOR signaling, less like growth signaling in cells in general, or more of a reprieve where your body's immune system has a chance to go throughout the rest to your cells and see if there is abnormal ones.

45:23For most individuals, unless they like doing that for mental clarity, whatever benefit, some people really like skipping breakfast. But many people, especially those that struggle with metabolic syndrome, have other pathologies. There's several new ones. There is sleep eating syndrome where you eat, you're sleeping, you wake up, and then you eat and you don't even realize it. You see that there's a bag of chips and you literally don't even remember it, almost like sleepwalking. Wow. And there's also night eating where you consume almost all of your calories between dinner and bedtime. Often these individuals also stay up late at night.

45:57Those are chips, snacks, and other like kind of emptier calories, right? Correct. But they don't eat breakfast. Really? Ice cream, cookies, or whatever it might be, yeah. Yeah. So that's the time where you could really, if you just stop eating after dinner, you'll eat less calories. and that sounds like you're still at kind of like the even maintenance you're not a caloric deficit correct unless you eat less than each meal correct and obviously it's possible to be in a deficit and do that as well but that's your biggest bang for the buck is not eating anything after dinner because society values family dinners and also social dinners with colleagues and whatnot it would be very difficult to tell everybody to stop eating dinner.

46:43But if you wanted to design the perfect, like in a lab, Truman Show style, whatever you want to call it, not eating after about 3 p.m. would be even more beneficial. For weight loss? For health reasons. Well, not weight loss. I don't think it would have any effect with weight loss. Maybe it would, but that I know of it has not been studied. Gotcha. So it's truly because you could still consume all your calories in the morning and in the afternoon before three o 'clock for the day. You could still consume a lot of calories is what you're saying. So you'd still have to cut the amount of calories in that timing window.

47:21And then you'd just be intermittent fasting longer, right? Which would help for health benefits. And maybe it would, I guess, help cleanse some of the dead cells and kind of like regenerate new cells, that type of thing, but not necessarily for weight loss. Is that what I'm hearing you say? But at the end of the day, it sounds like it's a caloric deficit. Yeah. And it's just a matter of helping provide individuals with the tools that will work best for them. So for some, they might need a shovel and for some, they might want and or need a backhoe. Sure, sure. It doesn't seem like you've ever been out of shape.

47:56Have you ever been overweight? When I had my first child, I was about 40 pounds overweight. Really? Yeah. And I could I hardly tell because I'm so tall and skinny. You're tall. Yeah, it's hard to see. So it's kind of like the fat, just a little bit everywhere, right? Yeah. So how did you burn that 40 pounds? What did you do? I eliminated all liquid calories. Yeah. I ate foods of low caloric density but high nutrient density. Like what? These five types of food groups are, yeah. A lot of salmon. I love spinach. I ate a lot of spinach that would kind of go under the fiber category. I love carrots, although carrots don't have a lot of dietary fiber.

48:34They're just kind of empty, insoluble fiber, if you will. Not totally, of course. It's not many calories. Yeah. Yeah. And a few months later, I was kind of back at my baseline. Really? Yeah. 40 pounds, just like that in a few months, just by changing the way you ate. My biggest intervention was I eliminated all liquid calories, and I did not have any more than two caloric beverages, whether it was like a coffee with a bunch of cream in it. I did learn to like black coffee during that time and I still do, but no more than two beverages with calories in them per month. Interesting, because something like a Bulletproof coffee, which is a lot of people talk about intermittent fasting with a Bulletproof, that still has a lot of calories, doesn't it?

49:19I don't know the macronutrient profile on Bulletproof offhand, but I believe it's mostly protein. So the one exception to that for some individuals could be a protein shake. And you would probably want to consume this in the morning rather than the evening. That way you can have the benefit of some degree of appetite suppression. Some protein shakes like casein, which is an interesting one to talk about because it can also affect prolactin. And some people negatively, if their prolactin is too high, Casein can increase it. But casein is also digested very slowly, and it has a lot of amino acids in it that will activate mTOR.

49:58So during your eating window through the day, if you consume your casein at the beginning of the eating window, then it could be helpful to provide satiety and also help with anabolism. But if you consume it at the end of your day, then it's going to essentially cut short your fasting period. So if you have a protein shake after 8 o 'clock, right? Say someone's working out consistently and they're doing a workout in the morning or in the afternoon. They eat their dinner, but then they're still hungry and they say, well, let me just do a protein shake, right? It's 150, 200 calories, but it's 20 to 40 grams of protein.

50:32Are you saying having that because it's got the calories, it's extending the eating window? So it's not allowing you to burn off those calories more? What are you saying there? That would be more for health reasons. For example, let's take an intermittent faster that right before bed every night, they have a shake of 50 grams of casein. So that's essentially making their intermittent fasting for health reasons worthless because their mTOR is still very active for many hours at night. However, if you are looking at the satiety benefit of specifically protein, if your shake has just protein in it, then that's going to help provide some degree of satiety.

51:15Well, you're not hungry. I mean, yeah. And there's obviously a lot of factors to this. One that has received a lot of press recently is called GLP-1. There's all these different drugs like semaglutide that are GLP-1 agonists. And if you look at carbs, carbs spike up GLP-1 very quickly. GLP-1 is produced in a lot of areas, but a lot of it is the gut and also the pancreas. And then fat will increase very, very slowly, but it will increase GLP-1 for a long time and protein is somewhere in between. You had like a formula in there that you said about two minutes ago. You said no snacking, you said a few other things.

51:59Can you share that formula again? Yeah. Yeah. So one, you want to cut down the sugar because sugar is not good. And I think everybody agrees on that, right? Cut down the refined foods. So this actually applies mostly to carbohydrates, but refined other stuff is not good either. So refined fats, for example, are not good for you. So trans fats were pretty clearly bad. Refined meat, like bologna and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either. So you want to eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you want to eat no sugar, you want to eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you want to make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of fasting.

52:40And that really just gets you back to 1970, where people were still eating white bread, right? White bread. I know I grew up in that period. Nobody ate whole wheat bread. Nobody ate whole wheat pasta. It was white bread. It's white pasta, right? But you didn't eat all the time. That was the big difference. Right. And it was the same everywhere you went, you know, and the Irish were eating potatoes, the Chinese were eating rice, the Japanese were eating rice, you know, those are all carbs, refined carbs, right? Bread, rice, potatoes. But they were doing okay because they weren't eating all the time.

53:15They give their bodies a break from eating, right? Where now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat. We've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating. Like, why wouldn't you think that that's important? Like, balance everything else in life, right? Why wouldn't you want to balance eating and not eating, right? Don't you think that's, like, fundamentally important? Like, I think it is. But up until sort of I wrote the obesity code, people just thought fasting was really bad for you, which is sort of odd, you know, because it's It's like up until then, everybody's like, oh, fast is so bad for you, right?

53:56You're going to do so bad. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for a long time. So I'm curious then what effect does fasting have on reducing our chances of getting life threatening diseases and also which diseases are most people at risk if they don't fast and improve their diet? Type 2 diabetes is probably the biggest one. And the reason is that it's a huge one. It's become an epidemic. So lots of people have it. If you look at prediabetes and diabetes, which is sort of, and you do big surveys, it's actually about 50 % of adult Americans, right? So it's very common to have prediabetes and diabetes.

54:42And the problem with it is that it causes all kinds of other problems. It increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancer. It's a leading cause of blindness, leading cause of non-traumatic amputations, leading cause of kidney disease, all of those things. And, you know, in trying to understand type 2 diabetes, you just have to understand that it's basically your body has too much sugar. That's it. So if you have too much sugar, remember, excuse me, your body really has two sources of energy it can use. can use sugar, which is mostly glucose, and it can use fat. And when your body stores energy, it stores it as sugar, or stores it as fat makes sense, right?

55:30So if you have too much fat, then you have obesity. If you have too much sugar, you have type two diabetes. Interesting. But the situation, the solution is the same. So think about it, your body has too much energy, Both situations, obesity, you have too much energy stored away. In type 2 diabetes, you have too much sugar, which is also too much energy stored away because both fat and sugar are sources of energy for the body. So if you think about trying to reverse type 2 diabetes, because again, I wrote about this in the diabetes code, and I said it's a reversible disease because your body doesn't have too little energy.

56:08It has too much energy. So think about this situation. Think about your car. Suppose you go to the gas station three times a day, you fill up. Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas in, right? So it's spilling out, it's spilling out, it's spilling into your back seat and it's now making you sick. But what are you going to do? Well, here's what you wouldn't do is keep going to that gas station three times a day, right? It's ridiculous. You have to do two things. One, stop putting gas in. And two, drive that car around so that you use the gas that's there. That's what you would do. Now think about your body.

56:43Dr. Burn the gas. Burn the gas. Dr. Burn the gas, exactly. Think about your body. Your body has too much energy. What are you going to do? One, stop putting it in. Two, let it run without putting it in for a while. That's intermittent fasting. That's all you have to do. And think about the situation. You've got a disease state, which has become an epidemic, which contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer. But you have a solution which is completely free and has been used for thousands of years, which is not anything more complicated than let your body run off of the fuel that's already sitting on there.

57:29Is it fun? No, it's not fun. Is it healthy? Yes, it is. In those situations, very healthy. And people used to say, well, people won't do it. It's like my job as a doctor. is not to tell people what they will and won't do. My job is to tell them how they should get healthy and I'll help them. So if fasting is a good solution, which I believe it is, then I'll help them. Whether they do it or not is up to them. But the point is that it's free, it's simple, it's been used for thousands of years, it's available to everybody. You don't need special equipment. You don't need a special diet. You don't need a special anything.

58:13Everybody in the world can do this at any time, like literally like today, tomorrow, anytime they could do it. It's not like, you know, I have this great drug for people. Yeah, but it's up to cost $500 ,000, right? That's crazy. No, fasting is not doing to that. You're going to save time. You're going to save money and you're going to get healthier. So what could be better than that? Like it's a crazy situation where we have this huge health care issue, but the solution is completely free, which explains why there's so few people telling you to do it because who's going to make money on it, right?

58:52But that's not my concern. My concern is telling people what they need to do to get healthy, right? What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to fasting then? I think the single biggest mistake is sort of overeating afterwards. So you fast for a period of time, then you say, Oh, well, I deserve that ice cream. It's like, you could do it, but you're going to sort of get a lot less benefit. You're like, you got a great benefit from the fasting. Now, you know, you're, you're, you're losing some of that because you're eating the foods that you didn't eat. And that, that really is a temptation for people to do.

59:28And I it's natural and we've all done it. And, you know, but the point is that after you fast, you should really just eat as normally as possible. So if you eat, you know, a normal breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner, the next day is your fasting day. You don't eat breakfast. You don't eat lunch. You should eat a normal dinner. Don't try to eat all three meals crammed into one, right? That's not the point. Like the point is to drop those meals and let your body take the energy from your body fat. So you drop breakfast, your body normally gets 500 calories from there, you want to take it out of your body fat.

1:00:04Same thing for lunch. If at dinner, instead of taking 1000 calories, you decide to stick in 2000 calories, well, you've negated a lot of the benefits that you should have gotten, because that energy is going to go in, right? So the good thing is that it's hard to do that. So when you restrict the time, and you don't tell people what to eat or how much to eat, they actually naturally eat less. So it's actually an interesting thing because this gets to the question of hunger. In terms of weight loss, there's sort of two big issues that trip people up. One is metabolic rate and two is hunger. So hunger, people think that hunger will just go up like this with fasting.

1:00:49It's actually not true. So you can actually measure the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which is basically it goes up high and you get hungry. So when you fast, ghrelin is high. So if you normally eat lunch, you're hungry. So ghrelin is high. What happens when you don't eat lunch? You skip your lunch. Well, a couple hours later, your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline. So you don't feel hungry anymore. No, your hunger goes back to baseline level. Interesting. So if you eat lunch at 12, you're hungry at 12. Now you skip lunch, you're hungry at 12. You're hungry at one by four. It's no different than if you ate or didn't eat.

1:01:28So people are like, what happened? Well, your body took the energy from your body fat stores. It took the 500 calories from body fat. You basically fed yourself off of that body fat. So why would you be hungry? The answer is you're not. And that's why it goes right back to baseline. Same thing happens at dinner. If you do multiple day fats, it's actually even more interesting because ghrelin actually, after day one to two, it actually starts to go down and down and down. So your hunger actually disappears. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

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