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Hello my friends, welcome to the Biohacker's Podcast where we explore the latest trends, technologies
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and insights into optimizing healthspan and human performance.
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I'm your host Teemu Arina and today we talk about the benefits of therapeutic fasting.
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A powerful strategy for rejuvenation, improving insulin sensitivity, boosting cognitive performance
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and enhancing longevity. Our guest today is Dr. Jason Fung. He is a world-renowned expert on therapeutic fasting
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and the co-founder of the Fasting Method.
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Dr. Fung's pioneering work on intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating and metabolic health
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has helped millions of people around the world to improve their health, lose weight and reverse,
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conditions like the type-2 diabetes. His books, including the Complete Guide to Fasting and the Diabetes Code,
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have become international bestsellers. In the following presentation from Biohacker Summit 2018 in Toronto, Dr. Fung shares with
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us his research and insights into therapeutic fasting.
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After his presentation, I will summarize top 5 reasons to practice intermittent fasting,
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and I will give you the exact protocols on how to perform fasting in a safe way.
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I will also introduce one meal a day, which is the method I personally use.
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So here is the presentation by Dr. Jason Fung. (Dr. Fung speaking) Okay, thanks for having me here.
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This is fantastic. So one of the things about biohacking that's really very seductive is that you can make
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a simple lifestyle change and then you get some impressive benefits.
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And one of the things in the nutrition space is fasting. And this is not a new idea.
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So we're not trying to bring newfangled things to the world.
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What we're trying to do is revive these old ideas that are tried and true.
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And if you look at fasting, that's been around for many years.
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And some very smart people like Benjamin Franklin, who's on the hundred dollar bill, said really
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the best of all medicines is resting and fasting.
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And to some degree, that's true, especially in this day and age where we're facing this
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sort of obesity epidemic, type two diabetes epidemic.
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It started somewhere around the 1970s. It had been increasing, but there's an inflection point where the rate of
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obesity really starts to rise and that's sometime in the late 1970s.
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And shortly thereafter, what you can see is about 10 years after that in the 80s,
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you can see this steep rise in type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes is really
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no joke because the thing about type 2 diabetes is that it causes a lot of diseases that we're worried about today. So heart attacks, strokes, also the leading cause of
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blindness and nerve damage and kidney failure and all kinds of things. So if you're trying to live
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healthy for a long time. Type 2 diabetes and obesity are really going to work against you.
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And if you look at where nutrition advice comes from, it started in about 1977 when the Dietary Rules for the United States was released.
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And this was a historic document because prior to that, the government never
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really told people what they should and shouldn't eat.
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Your mother told you what you should and shouldn't eat. The government really felt they had no business, but starting around 1977,
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they thought it was their business. And in their sort of wisdom, they got a bunch of scientists together and this is
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what they decided that we should really eat a lot more carbohydrates.
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So rather than the 40 or 40, 50%, they said, really, we should up that to about
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55 or 60% and decrease fat to about 30%.
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So that was what we got. So if you grew up in the sort of early eighties, like I did, what you got was
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the food pyramid, which is this, what we should be eating every day.
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And it's been slowly changed. So every five years they change it.
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But if you look at the original program on the bottom here, what you should be
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eating every day, five to seven servings is bread and pasta and rice and polenta.
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So not exactly slimming to most of us thinking about that today, but that's
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what we were told to eat and things like an egg, you should eat that once a week.
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Maybe that's full of cholesterol and so on.
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And that's exactly what we did. So people always like to blame the obesity epidemic on the people,
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because they say we told them good advice, but they just didn't listen.
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So they got really fat. But that's not really true, because if you look at what Americans ate and Canadians, we did exactly what they told us.
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So butter way down, eggs way down, animal meats way down.
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And lots and lots of grains, right? 40% increase in grains and all this low-fat sugar. Yeah, you're going to get rid of this,
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you're going to add more of this. So that's exactly what we did. We did what they told us to.
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And the result was, of course, a huge obesity epidemic.
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So, the other thing that people never really talk about...
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When they talk about dietary changes from the 1970s to the 2000s is this fact that we're eating
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a lot more frequently. And to some degree they're tied in, but on the other hand, you can see that
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in 1977, we'll just look at adults, but children show the same distribution. So if you look at
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they're eating around, this is the NHANES survey, they're eating about three times a day. So the
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big spike here is around two to three times a day breakfast, lunch, dinner. That's the sort of
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thing that we're, that's the sort of meal pattern that we're eating. By 2004, what you can see that
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is we're closer to five or six times a day. So we're eating a lot more frequently. And to some
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degree, it's related to the foods that we eat, because if you're eating a lot less butter and
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eggs and steak, if you're not eating steak and eggs in the morning, and you're eating a couple
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of slices of white bread with jam, you're going to get a lot more hungry. So then you wind up
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of eating more frequently. And then the other thing that we get told all the time is to eat six times a day.
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And it's like that advice never came from science.
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Nobody ever thought that was a good idea.
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It was just because we were hungry. So then we had to eat a muffin at 10 30.
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But we're eating a lot more frequently. And that's one of the really big changes of the last sort of quarter century.
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So this is more recent data from 2015.
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And which people, they did is they gave people an app. And they measured how frequently they ate.
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So what you can see here is that the 10% of people, so the lowest decile, which is the 10% of people
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who ate the least frequently, ate three times a day.
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Three is 0.3 times a day. And the 10% of people that ate the most frequently, ate 10 and a half times a day.
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It's like, that's the big change from the 1970s, where there really wasn't a lot of obesity
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people were just eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now it's breakfast, snack, lunch, snack,
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dinner, snacks, sleep. Because that's the only way you can get to ten and a half times per day.
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And the median time of eating was 14 hours, 45 minutes, which means that if you ate breakfast at 8am,
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somewhere around here, you didn't really stop until 10.45pm.
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So basically you're eating the entire time that you're awake.
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So that fasting period, which is this time that you should be allowing your body to sort of digest and to use the energy that you've taken in,
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no longer exists because all you're doing is putting food and putting all these things into your body
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and your body has to somehow deal with that.
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And then of course, we wonder why we're getting all fat.
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So one of the ways you can hack this of course, is to simply turn back the clock and say,
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look, your body really only exists in one of two states.
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If you look at the physiology and that's what we're really gonna talk about
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in the next little bit, is the physiology of what happens.
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And your body can only exist in two states.
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You're either putting food in and insulin goes up. So insulin is the hormone that tells your body
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to store food energy.
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And your body stores it as sugar, as glycogen, or as body fat.
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So you're either in the fed state where you're putting food in your mouth,
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you're sending your body instructions to store body fat, or you're fasting, insulin falls,
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and then you're going to use up some of that energy.
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Okay, and that's a normal thing. That's what you should be doing every single day.
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And that's why you don't die in your sleep like every single night,
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because your body has the ability to pull that energy back out and use it.
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But what it means is that you're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state.
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And if you're in the fed state, you're storing fat. If you're in the fasted state, you're burning body fat.
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But you can't do both at the same time. So if all of a sudden you are always in the fed state,
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you're constantly storing body fat because you've told it to by eating so frequently, okay?
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Now, if you wanna hack that, you simply turn the reverse and say, okay, let me spend more time in the fasted state.
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And that's a simple, free, easy to do thing. So again, the idea is not new.
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It actually goes back to the very origins of medicine. So Hippocrates, who is considered
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father of modern medicine, said our food should be our medicine,
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our medicine should be our food. But then to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.
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And what he means by that is that it's actually instinctive.
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So people think that there's something inherently unhealthy about fasting.
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But of course, it's part of a natural cycle of life.
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And that's why you have the word breakfast. That's the meal that breaks your fast. So that means you should be fasting every single day.
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And what happens when you get sick. When you get sick, the very first thing you do is stop eating.
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So if you have the flu or you get really sick with something,
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you don't really want to sit down to a buffet dinner.
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You really just can't eat. And the body has naturally told you that you need to activate these hormones,
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not store body fat. You need to activate your body to fight this infection and so on.
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So it's actually a very healthy state.
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So if you look at the physiology, you hear all kinds of people who say really crazy things like,
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oh, you got to eat 130 grams of carbs every day to feed your brain.
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If you go more than 24 hours without eating, people don't start having seizures, right?
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Like your body needs 130 grams of carbohydrates to function, but it doesn't mean you have to eat it.
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You can take it from your body stores because that's what it is.
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So if you look at the physiology of what happens to our body during that time, you can see,
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and this has been all worked out for many years, that in the first stage, which is the fed state,
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it's all exogenous. So the glucose you get is all from your food. As you get into stage two,
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what you do is you start to burn glycogen. So the carbohydrates has gone down very low. So
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four hours after a meal, you start using your glycogen, which is the stored sugar in the liver.
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As you get to 20 hours, 24 hours, what you start is you're tapering off the amount of glycogen
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because that's getting used up. And then you start doing gluconeogenesis, which is producing
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the glucose from your own protein and also from your fat because your fat, you can take glycerol
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and turn it into glucose. So what you're doing is you're really describing a transition from
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using carbohydrates or sugar. So as you fast, so this is physiology of fasting, over 30 days of
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fasting, what happens is that you stop burning sugar and you start burning body fat. The protein
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after this initial little spike goes down. So you're not really burning protein.
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And you hear this all the time, oh, you shouldn't fast, you're gonna burn muscle.
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It's okay, let's think about that for a second.
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You think our body is really just so stupid that we would store body fat as our food energy,
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but when we actually need it, we are going to burn muscle, right?
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That doesn't make any sense. If that was the case, we would never have survived.
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Every time we fasted, we'd lose muscle and gain fat.
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We'd really be nothing more than little balls of fat walking around the convention center.
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But it doesn't happen. What happens, of course, is that you transition from using sugar to using
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fat. And then your body says, whoa, I have tons of this body fat. Let's just use it. No problem.
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But there's other very important hormones that go up when insulin goes down. So as you get into
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this fasted state, it's not simply a matter of insulin going down. You get this other
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counter-regulatory hormone surge, which is the sympathetic nervous system,
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adrenaline, growth hormone, and cortisol. All of these hormones go up. So if you're eating all the
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time, you're not getting this. So sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight response.
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So when you activate the sympathetic nervous system, you're actually activating the body.
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You're taking the glucose and shoving it into the blood so that you can use it to prepare for
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action. Same thing with noradrenaline and also growth hormone. And this is why we don't lose
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muscle over time when you're doing fasting on a regular basis is because your body actually
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activates growth hormone. And when you eat again, your body is going to rebuild all of
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those proteins that you need. So what you're doing in essence when you're fasting is actually
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something extremely powerful because what you're doing is you're activating the body.
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By switching fuel sources. So instead of relying on your food, you're relying on your body
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fat, but then you're pumping energy into the system. You're getting more energy.
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You're getting, so people say, Oh, you can't concentrate. That's actually the
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opposite. People actually concentrate better. They actually think better. They
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actually move better. So we work with a number of elite athletes and I always say to them, well...
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Think about it for a second. If you just ate a huge meal, do you think you're really sharp? Think
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about Thanksgiving when you eat a huge meal. Do you feel really sharp or do you want to just sit
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on the couch afterwards? If you are an animal, do you really want to be like that lion who just ate
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or do you want to be like the hungry wolf? The hungry wolf is not sluggish lying on the couch,
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right? The hungry wolf is activated. And the reason is physiology. The reason is that sympathetic
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nervous tone is up, noradrenaline is pumped way up. And then growth hormone, what you're doing is
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you're tearing down old proteins in your body and building up new ones. So you're actually.
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Renovating your body. You're rejuvenating the body. It's actually a form of anti-aging,
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but it's available to all of us for free. If you look at the science of what happens during this,
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that as insulin and glucose go down, nor adrenaline, ketones and fatty acids go up,
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because that's what you want to burn. So in fact, where do those fatty acids come from?
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Comes from your fat. That's the only place it can come from because you're not eating.
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So you're putting out fatty acids into the blood so that your liver, your kidneys and so on can
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use it. And look at growth hormone. Total control is if you're eating three times a day, it's around
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the two and a half jumps up to close to eight,
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with a single day of fasting, your growth hormone has gone up like two and a half times
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and it continues to go up even up to day five of fast.
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So for diseases like osteoporosis and sarcopenia and all these sorts of things,
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you actually need that growth hormone and a low growth hormone is going to lead
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to weak bones and weak muscles. And this is the idea that your brain needs the glucose. It actually doesn't because in a normal state
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in the fed state, where you can see as your brain is using all glucose, in the
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fasted state or starvation, which is longer than a certain period of time,
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what you're doing is you're using ketones. This is all derived from fat.
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So in fact, your body has the ability to not.
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That's why we carry body fat. It's not there for looks.
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It's there because our body needs it when we don't eat.
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So we can survive, but not only survive, but if we introduce these regular periods, it's going to be healthier for us.
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So the longest the world record for fasting was actually 382 days of fasting.
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This guy was monitored in the 70s. He went for more than a year without eating anything.
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And he's monitored by his doctors. What they noted was everything was pretty normal looking at the beginning and at the end.
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That's exactly what happens, right? So his glucose went down, but it wasn't too low and it stayed down.
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Calcium was normal, his phosphorus was normal, your acid was normal, creatinine, urea, all of that was normal.
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All his electrolytes, everybody says, oh, your electrolytes are going to go out of whack.
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They don't. Like this guy went 382 days without eating anything. And we're worried when we go more than three hours without eating anything.
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Somebody's going to tell you, oh, your electrolytes are going to go out of whack.
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You should eat a muffin. No, you could go another 300 days if you wanted to. So if we're talking more specifically about weight loss, this is an extremely
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powerful hack for everybody to use, because there's actually two problems with weight loss in the longterm.
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And it's not calories. Calories is a measure that is not physiologic.
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The body doesn't sense calories. It doesn't have calorie receptors.
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It doesn't use calories. It doesn't know anything about calories.
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What the body responds to is hormones. And the two things that really derail longterm weight loss are
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basal metabolic rate and hunger.
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So if you look at basal metabolic rate, what happens if you lose weight by cutting a few calories here and there is that your metabolic rate goes down.
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So we know this because they take subjects and they force fed them to gain weight and then measure their metabolic rate.
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What you find is that when you force them to a 10% weight gain, so they take
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these shakes and they tell them, okay, you have to drink this many shakes until you gain weight, after 10% weight gain, they're burning 500 calories per
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day more so that their body is actually trying to burn off all that excess those calories you're feeding it.
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But when you return them to their initial weight, their metabolic rate goes down.
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But then when you lose weight, 10% weight loss, you're burning about 300 to 400 calories per day less.
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And that's a real problem. And we always think that if you keep that weight off,
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it's just gonna go back to normal, right? So if you're burning 2000 calories a day,
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normally you lose weight. Now you're down to 1600 a day that you're burning.
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And then if you keep at it, it'll go back to 2000, But it never does.
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And we know that. It never does. So you can go out to a year,
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what you see is that their metabolic rate is down.
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If you look at the hunger signaling, that's the other big issue.
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So when you cut calories and you lose weight, your hunger goes up.
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So you can measure a hormone called ghrelin.
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The higher it is, the more hungry you are. And what you find is that after initial weight loss, the hunger goes up and it stays up even after a year.
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So these are the two physiologic responses to weight loss. You're going to lower the amount of calories that you're burning.
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And then you're going to get really hungry. And this is not because their weak will.
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This is just physiology.
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This is what we know happens when you tell people to cut 500 calories a day.
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It never works for these two reasons. OK, because if you cut 500 calories a day, then you burn 400 less.
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You're not getting anywhere. Then your body is going to tell you to eat. So it's not a failure of willpower that these people are eating.
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They're actually physically more hungry. And if you can't deal with these two issues,
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you are not going to be able to keep that weight off because being hungry all the time is no fun.
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It's one of our most primal instincts.
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So you have to respect that. So how are you going to deal with a lowered basal metabolic rate?
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What happens during fasting? So instead of eating six times a day, what if you eat zero times for four days?
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What happens to your metabolic rate? If you think about the physiology, we know that adrenaline goes up, sympathetic tone goes up.
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So your body's gonna burn more energy, not less. That's exactly what we find.
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So after four days, this is the weight.
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The weight is steadily coming down. This is the resting energy equivalent.
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It goes up. In the VO2, which is a measure of how much metabolism is going on, it goes up.
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In fact, after four days, your metabolic rate is actually 10% higher than when you started.
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So everybody tells you, oh, if you don't eat, you'll go into starvation mode, your metabolic rate will shut down.
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Well, that doesn't happen. Because if it did, we wouldn't be here. If you think about it, if we're cavemen, for example, and you,
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don't eat, then you start to shut down. It's going to be even harder to get food.
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So then you're going to not eat and then you're going to shut down your body again. We'd all be dead.
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The body's not that stupid. What it does is it simply shifts its fuel sources and then pumps
21:38
you full of energy so that you can go out and hunt.
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So you actually have more energy at the end of that four days than when you started.
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If you look at studies of alternate daily fasting, it's the same thing.
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This is the resting metabolic rate. It starts at 6,600 and ends at 6,300,
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but it's not statistically significant. So there's not a big change,
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even after 22 days of alternate daily fast.
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And what you see is that you've gone from burning carbohydrates, burning sugar, to burning fat. That's exactly what you want to do.
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So this is the effect on metabolic rate.
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So again, another study from 2016, where they compared calorie restrictions.
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So the standard advice, cut a few calories a day, cut 400, 500 calories a day, eat 10 times a day.
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What happens is that you will drop, you'll burn 76 calories a day less.
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And if you use alternate daily fasting, instead you'll burn 29 less.
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So it's a significant difference. So less than 50, 40% of that.
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But it's actually not statistically significant. The P value of 0.41 means that there's actually no statistical difference between the beginning and the end.
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And this is after 32 weeks of alternate daily fasting.
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And this is a huge advantage. If you're burning three, four hundred calories a day less, naturally, that's a huge advantage when you're trying to lose weight.
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And the other problem is hunger. So, again, everybody says when you're fasting, you're going to get so hungry
23:06
that you're not going to be able to control yourself. You'll be forced to stuff a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts in your mouth.
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That doesn't happen. So this is ghrelin. So that's the hunger hormone.
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And what is that when you fast somebody for 24 hours, so they get this little spike of ghrelin at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
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So you get hungry at breakfast, lunch and dinner. But what happens to you when you don't eat lunch?
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Say you're busy, work through lunch. What happens? Do you just get more and more hungry until you stuff a muffin in?
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Not really. What happens is that after a while, your ghrelin just goes right back down to baseline.
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So, you miss lunch, there's 12 o'clock, you're hungry. At 1 o'clock, you're hungry. At 4 o'clock, it's as if you ate.
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You ate. You're no different in terms of hunger if you ate or you didn't eat.
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Why? Because again, your body's just not that stupid, right?
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If you didn't eat, you will take that energy that you needed from your fat stores.
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You've basically made a meal of your own fat. And that's it.
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And we've all done this. We've all been busy where we went right through lunch by four o'clock.
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Let's go. Did I eat? Did I not eat? Can't remember.
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Same thing with dinner. You don't eat. Guess what? It just goes right back down to baseline.
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Yeah, you're going to be hungry for a couple hours because it's high here.
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And then it's going to go back to baseline. Nothing happens.
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Even over multiple days of fasting, which is that up and down.
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So you start here, you go up and down. But what's really interesting is that as you go for two, three,
24:40
four days of fasting, ghrelin actually starts to drift downwards.
24:45
The hunger actually starts to disappear during fasting.
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And that's as your body gets used to using your own body fat.
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It just says, hey, why do I need to eat? I'm getting all I need from the body fat.
24:57
And that's perfect because now you're dealing with the two actual issues that derail weight loss, which is metabolic grate and hunger.
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And people say, oh, women, the women can't do it. Well, this is the breakdown between men and women.
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This is durella. So the hunger. See, okay, men get this little spike, but women get this huge spike.
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So if you're trying to control hunger, then women are gonna benefit a lot more than men
25:25
from intermittent fasting. If you look at cravings, so the data on cravings is this. If you have cravings for sweets or high fat or junk food or whatever,
25:37
you can compare two diets, a low calorie diet, like 1200 calories,
25:41
versus a very low calorie diet. So basically very little, like a couple hundred calories a day.
25:46
And what you see is that if you measure how much cravings they get,
25:50
so a lot of people say, oh, I crave sugar and I'm addicted to chocolate and this kind of stuff.
25:55
A low calorie diet, cutting a few calories does nothing for your cravings.
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But if you go and just eat nothing at all, your cravings actually disappear.
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And it's really just for the parents out there.
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If your child has an itch, you don't say, oh, you should scratch it, but a little less.
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If no, you don't scratch it. That's what happens to cravings, too.
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So over 12 weeks, the cravings, the general cravings or whatever you want to look at
26:22
that virtually disappear by the time you follow these low calorie diets or fasting
26:27
is the sort of ultimate in that. But even as you start to eat again, those cravings don't come back for like at least six weeks
26:34
and then they start their way up. So if you were to do this on a regular basis, you could control some of these cravings again,
26:41
that derail weight loss efforts because people want to eat bread
26:44
and they wanna eat sugar and they wanna eat pizza and they wanna eat all this sort of stuff.
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So again, if you look at Dorelin and all studies, clinical studies, like real people doing this. What you find is that if you look at ghrelin,
26:57
which is the hunger hormone, how hungry you are with daily calorie restriction, it goes up with,
27:04
calorie restriction, but it doesn't go up with alternate daily fasting. That is, if you cut,
27:11
500 calories a day like they told you, you're going to get hungry. If you do the fasting,
27:17
you won't get hungry because you've changed the hormone so that in that time that you're not eating,
27:23
You're feeding yourself through your body fat.
27:26
It's just like a bear, just like during hibernation.
27:29
And here's the myth, oh you're gonna burn muscle, oh you're gonna burn muscle. Well, here's the study.
27:34
This is real people doing it. Here's the fat mass. Okay, so day 70 of alternate daily fasting,
27:40
the fat mass goes down 43 kilos to 38. Fat-free mass, or your lean weight, goes from 51.4 to 51.9.
27:49
You actually added lean mass. So for all those people, oh you're gonna burn muscle,
27:54
you're gonna burn muscle, you're gaining muscle. This is that study where you're comparing
28:00
calorie restriction to alternate daily fasting. You look at two things. One is
28:04
the truncal fat mass. So that's the fat that you carry around the waist. It's
28:08
much more dangerous from a health standpoint than fat that you carry anywhere else. Calorie restriction goes down by 0.3. Alternate daily fasting
28:16
goes down by 1.8. It's six times better at getting rid of the really dangerous
28:22
fat for type 2 diabetes. If you look at lean mass, because this is what they say,
28:28
oh yeah you're fasting you're gonna lose weight but it's all gonna be muscle. It's no okay so
28:33
this is percentage lean mass calorie restriction goes up by 0.5 and alternate daily fasting goes
28:39
up by 2.2 percent. In other words preserving lean mass is like four times better with fasting than
28:48
to calorie restriction. So the question is why are we doing this? Why do we tell everybody to
28:54
to do calorie restriction. You should never, ever not eat.
28:58
It's like, why? Why don't you let your body just use that body fat? Because that's what's going to make us healthy.
29:04
That's what's going to get rid of the type 2 diabetes that's giving us heart attacks, strokes, and cancer.
29:10
And it's free, it's available to all of you and used by people like Hippocrates and Benjamin Franklin.
29:16
This is the other thing that people say, it's great and everything, but people won't do it.
29:20
It's okay, but you know that it's part of almost every major religion in the world.
29:25
So literally, the Buddhists do it, the Muslims do it, the Catholics, the Christians, Jewish people.
29:33
People, literally billions of people around the world do this on a regular basis and have
29:38
been doing this for the last 2-3 thousand years. You know that right? Before you say
29:45
that, yeah, nobody can do it. That literally billions of people do it? So yes, you can
29:52
do it. It's not fun. I'm not saying it's super fun or anything. But if you're trying to hack
29:58
your body to be healthy, to lose weight, to get rid of your type 2 diabetes.
30:02
You can do it. It's just a matter of doing it.
30:05
Other people say it doesn't work. Yes, we have studies that does work.
30:08
And obviously if you don't eat, you are going to lose it.
30:11
This is just to show that females get the same rate of weight loss as males.
30:15
For all those people that say, oh, women should never fast. It doesn't work.
30:18
It's like, where do you think you, what do you think is going to happen?
30:22
If you don't, you're going to lose weight. And then this myth that you need to eat to concentrate. I hear this all the time,
30:28
because we've done it in our IDM program for several thousand people,
30:32
and people say, oh, I have a really stressful job, or I have to concentrate, I can't fast.
30:37
This is what happens when you eat a big meal.
30:40
When you don't eat, you actually work from a mental standpoint at a much higher level.
30:45
And this is one of the reasons that the people in Silicon Valley in particular have embraced
30:51
the fasting so much is because it allows your brain to work at a higher level.
30:56
And people who do this say, wow, I can think really clearly.
31:00
Yeah, that's because your noradrenaline is up, your sympathetic tone is up,
31:05
you're being activated, you're pumping energy into the system,
31:08
and your brain is able to think more clearly. And in Silicon Valley, of course,
31:12
the difference is that they're competing based on their brainpower, right? So they're all
31:17
all these little computer geniuses. They're all trying to get the next best thing. And
31:21
that little edge in mental performance can be the difference of millions of dollars.
31:26
So they do this because this is what gives them an edge. If you read books,
31:31
there is a book called Unbroken by Lauren Hillebrand, which is a story about prisoners
31:37
of war, American prisoners of war in Japan in World War II. So these people are literally
31:41
starving. And what's interesting is that when you read the biography, they talk about how
31:47
their fellow prisoners are doing these absolutely incredible feats of mental capacity. So one
31:53
guy is reading books entirely from memory and another one learned Norwegian in a week.
32:00
And what he says is that, wow, this is just the astonishing mental clarity of starvation.
32:06
I thought, wow, that's really interesting that people who actually do this
32:09
have actually noticed that huge improvement
32:12
in mental functioning. We see it in our clients all the time.
32:14
They say, well, it's like a fog lifted. I can really focus now on what I'm doing. So if you're looking to hack your way,
32:22
into sort of a higher level, fasting is a great way to do that.
32:27
So not only just the physical side of things, but the mental side of things.
32:31
And that's, again, free. Why won't you do it?
32:34
There's another myth here of anorexia that, oh, you're going to cause eating disorders.
32:39
First of all, eating disorders are psychological disorders where people think they're fat but they're actually very thin.
32:46
And it is a real issue. It's a big issue. People have died from it, of course.
32:50
And it's all a matter of context, right? So if you're treating a 16-year-old girl,
32:55
with anxiety problems, weighs 80 pounds, then no, you don't want to be fasting.
33:00
But if you're 60 years old, male, and have type 2 diabetes, then fasting might just save your life.
33:07
So it's a totally different context. You have to use it. It's a very powerful weapon.
33:12
But don't use it in the wrong context, right? And that's not what biohacking is about.
33:17
It's about getting optimal human performance from a simple lifestyle change.
33:22
And then this myth that you cause hypoglycemia. So you're going to go hypoglycemic,
33:26
you're going to have a seizure. It's like, that doesn't happen.
33:29
Your body is able to deal with it. So here's a study where they took patients
33:33
and they actually fasted them for about 30 days.
33:37
Then they gave them a big whack of insulin just to see what would happen.
33:41
And they drove their sugars down to 227, which is extremely low.
33:45
It's 1.2 or something like that. And for most people, they would actually have seizures at this level.
33:51
But they were actually completely fine. All of them were asymptomatic.
33:54
That's because your brain is actually working mostly on those ketones.
33:59
So if you're using ketones and your blood glucose is low, it doesn't matter because you're using ketones anyway.
34:03
So these people actually felt completely normal. And this was the same study.
34:07
There are a few concerns. So the Zahn phenomenon is one where your blood sugars can go up slightly during fasting.
34:14
And this is very interesting. And it's other than knowing about it, it's not a big concern.
34:18
But some people notice, especially type 2 diabetics and so on,
34:22
that when they don't eat, their blood glucose goes up and they're always concerned.
34:25
And I'm always like, well, it's because of the counter regulatory surge.
34:31
So if your blood glucose goes up and you didn't eat, where do you think that sugar came from?
34:34
It could only have come from your own body.
34:37
Your body is actually liberating that sugar for you to use. So don't worry about it because you're just burning it.
34:43
It was in there anyway, but it's actually trying to get it out.
34:46
And that's those counter-regulatory hormone surges.
34:50
And then the other concern is refeeding syndrome, which again is a real concern if you are not well nourished.
34:56
So this is seen in people who are starving and people who have very low body fat.
35:02
Those are people who shouldn't be fasting anyway, at least not for extended periods of time.
35:07
Just remember that 12 to 14 hours of fasting is a regular amount of fasting.
35:12
That's what everybody should be doing because that's the word breakfast.
35:16
The meal that breaks your fast. So if you stop eating at 8 and don't eat till 8,
35:19
that's 12 hours. But that's normal. That's what should be done every day.
35:23
And these people who don't have enough energy, what can happen is that as you eat insulin,
35:28
as you start to eat again, the insulin goes up and the phosphorus goes down,
35:32
the potassium goes down, it can actually cause heart problems.
35:36
But the major risks for that are these issues of people who are basically anorexic, alcoholic,
35:42
cancer patients, people who shouldn't be doing this anyway. So again, just remember that this
35:47
is a powerful tool and you want to use it in the right context. It's just like a knife, right? A
35:52
very useful tool, but you can also cut yourself. So make sure you know what you're doing if you're,
35:56
you're gonna apply and make sure you talk to your physician.
35:59
But there's so many advantages to using fasting in this way because it's a simple thing.
36:05
Everybody can understand it. So you can have diets like the ketogenic diet is eat this, don't eat this, don't eat this,
36:11
don't eat this, sometimes eat this. It's very complicated for people.
36:15
This is not that. This is just don't eat for a period of time.
36:18
Let your body burn off that body fat.
36:21
It's free. It's convenient because you're going to save a lot of time, right?
36:25
You're not, you don't have to buy food. You don't have to cook food.
36:28
You don't have to eat food. But they're going to give you a lot of time back in the day and it's a way to simplify our life.
36:34
It's also very flexible in that what you can do is you can do it sometimes and not do it sometimes.
36:39
So if you want to, you know, it's the holidays or it's a vacation and you don't want to fast,
36:44
then don't. You can always do it later. So that's a huge advantage where you can use it to any diet,
36:53
right? Because this is not about your diet. You're trying to hack your way of eating,
36:57
but that this doesn't tell you what to eat.
37:00
It only specifies the periods of time that you're not eating.
37:03
So they work together. If you fix your eating, cutting out the sugar, cutting out the refined grains,
37:09
cutting, trying to eat whole foods, that's great. But fasting doesn't tell you anything about that.
37:14
Fasting is complementary to that and tells you there's a period of time where you really just shouldn't eat anything.
37:20
So whether it's you don't eat meat or wheat or nuts or you don't have time,
37:24
you don't have money, you're traveling, you don't cook, it doesn't matter because you can still fast.
37:29
You can still use this sort of biohacking and it gives you unlimited power. That is if you are
37:36
400 pounds and we have people who are 400 pounds, you need something really powerful. You can just
37:42
keep fasting. You can just keep letting your body use up that fat. You can do it as long as you need
37:47
to get healthy and that's the hope.
37:50
It's not something that sort of maxes out at, oh, I lost 10 pounds and that's it.
37:54
It's great if you only had 10 pounds to lose. If you had 200 pounds to lose, then, you know, you're sort of out of luck.
38:00
So it gives you a lot of power. And that's what Mark Twain, another very well-read, a very smart fellow said,
38:07
a little starvation can actually do more for the average sick man than the best medicines and the best doctors.
38:15
And that's very interesting as we're not talking here about, oh,
38:18
Let's get this expensive medication and this expensive procedure because it's
38:22
going to make us live an extra three days.
38:25
This is something that you do on an ongoing basis to stay healthy for your life.
38:30
And if you have type two diabetes, this is Elliot Joslin. So he's the most famous diabetes specialist in the history of the world.
38:39
He was at Harvard Medical School. He basically founded the entire floor.
38:42
And he said that temporary periods of undernutrition are helpful in the the treatment of diabetes will be acknowledged by all
38:50
after these two years of experience with fasting.
38:53
He wrote this in 1916.
38:57
That was more than a hundred years ago. The most famous diabetologist in the history of the world
39:02
knew a hundred years ago that you could actually just let your body burn off all that sugar
39:09
and you won't have type two diabetes anymore. After two years of doing it, he thought it was so obvious that Everybody's gonna know this.
39:18
And yet here we are in 2016 with a huge epidemic of type 2 diabetes,
39:25
which will give you heart attacks, which will give you cancer, which will make you blind,
39:28
which will give you kidney failure, which will damage your nerves.
39:32
We could have taken care of it all if we had listened in 1916.
39:37
So the point is that can we cure type 2 diabetes without all these associated medical problems
39:44
and do it without any drugs and without any surgery and really at no cost,
39:48
taking really control of the health back into your own hands? And the answer is yes. That's all you
39:55
need to do is understand the physiology, understand what we're trying to do. And now you have the
40:01
power to get rid of type 2 diabetes, to lose weight, take care of all these metabolic problems
40:08
that are now making us sick. And that really is the ultimate in biohacking. Thank you.
40:16
(Teemu Arina speaking) Thank you very much Dr. Jason Fung for such an in-depth introduction to the benefits of
40:21
therapeutic fasting. Here are the top five scientific facts of the day about therapeutic
40:26
fasting that have been backed by science.
40:29
Number one. Fasting and intermittent fasting have been shown to improve insulin sensitivity,
40:34
reduce blood sugar levels and protect against type 2 diabetes.
40:38
Number two. Intermittent fasting has been shown to be effective tool for weight loss
40:43
and improving metabolic health. Number three. Fasting triggers the process called autophagy,
40:48
which is the body's natural mechanism for cleaning out damaged cells and recycling their components.
40:54
This may help reduce the risk of chronic diseases and slow down the aging process.
40:58
Number four. Fasting and intermittent fasting may improve brain function and protect against
41:03
neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease.
41:08
Number five. Fasting and intermittent fasting have been shown to reduce inflammation in the body,
41:13
which is a key driver for many chronic diseases.
41:17
Next I will give you some tips on doing intermittent fasting in an effective way.
41:21
I do not recommend to go to a multiple day fast straight away as most benefits are achieved already with intermittent fasting.
41:30
But either case I will give you a short summary of what you would expect at certain hours,
41:37
while you are going into a fast. In a 20 hour fast also known as intermittent fasting one already improves insulin sensitivity and activates autophagy
41:48
which is the body's natural process for cleaning out damaged cells.
41:52
In a 24-hour fast one can improve heart health by lowering blood pressure and improving cholesterol levels.
41:59
In a 48-hour fast you're already regenerating part of the immune system,
42:04
you will promote further fat burning and you will get increased improvements in insulin sensitivity.
42:10
In a 72-hour fast you start to boost stem cell production, which can potentially help regenerate damaged tissues and organs.
42:18
It may also improve cognitive function and enhance mental clarity.
42:23
Fasting more than 72 hours on a regular basis doesn't really provide much additional benefits
42:28
and can actually lead to electrolyte imbalances, malnutrition,
42:32
gallstone formation and potentially also loss of muscle mass.
42:36
My recommendation is to first learn how to do intermittent fasting properly on a regular basis.
42:42
It already provides you a lot of metabolic and cognitive benefits,
42:45
so let's get started with that one. Personally, I highly recommend trying out the popular OMAD
42:52
or one meal a day method that involves fasting for 20 hours a day and eating all calories during a four-hour window.
42:59
That effectively means that you skip breakfast and lunch and then consume all meals of the day within a four-hour window.
43:06
When you wake up you are already in a fasted state, so it's easier to continue from there as you are effectively burning ketone bodies already.
43:15
Start by doing this once a week and then slowly increase to doing it every second day.
43:21
Eventually you notice yourself doing it every single day.
43:24
An advanced version of this is called time-restricted eating,
43:27
where you actually time the consumption of calories before sunset.
43:33
That has shown to be additionally beneficial for metabolic health and circadian rhythm timing.
43:41
If this all sounds too hard, feel free to drink a cup of coffee or tea with butter or MCT oil in
43:47
morning and then skip breakfast and lunch. MCT oil helps to kick start the process of fasting,
43:53
because it produces ketone bodies as a by-product. In either case it is important to stay hydrated
43:59
during the day and I recommend you to add electrolytes into your water. If you have
44:04
a medical condition first consult your health care professional. Thank you very much for listening.
44:11
To learn more about us and biking check out biohackercenter.com where you can find best content, supplements, technologies,
44:19
courses, retreats and events such as the Biohacker Summit so that you can take your
44:23
health and habits to the next level. That's all folks - see you in the next one.
44:27
Music.
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