Dr. Jason Fung: The Best Fasting Method for Visceral Fat and Insulin Resistance has Been Discovered

Dr. Jason Fun, you have four different types of fasting. He kind of divided into four categories. And this fourth one is wild because it's almost something that people wouldn't even consider fasting. It's it's really wild, really interesting with some newer research. We'll talk about that one in a little bit. But what are your four phases of f or your four types of fasting?

Yeah. So, I like to divide um into sort of like the 168 fast, which is, you know, a very popular schedule, but something you can really do every day. And then the nice part about the 16 is it slots really well into like a regular day, right? Like, you know, doing a longer fast sometimes if you go more than a day, it's difficult because there's people, oh, let's go for lunch. Oh, you're meeting clients for dinner. And then it's really awkward, right? Whereas a 168 you can just slot that right in and you can do that almost every day and it doesn't even really feel like anything. Right? So most days I think it's a 168 fast for me but I don't even think of it like that anymore. Right? It's almost like the regular day for me. Right? It's it's it be the day that I'm not doing a 168 is sort of the exception rather than the rule. Right? So that's sort of one type of fasting. And when I talk to a lot of people like to them that's like the you know that's like a strain, right? And I'm like that's like the regular, right?

And then I like to go into sort of the sort of the the the slightly higher than that. So sort of 18 to sort of 24 30 hours sort of you're getting into that 24-hour period where you're sort of a one meal a day schedule. And again, it still could work, but and but it's a little stronger and you don't necessarily have to go into the, you know, the fullon, you know, longer fast because it still can fit in very easily to a normal day. Uh, and you don't have to do it sort of every day, right? So, that's one and then two and then the sort of slightly longer one where you're going sort of past that. Now, you're getting real strength because I think when you go past 24 hours, you get a lot of bang for your buck. And what I mean is that when you go past that 24-hour uh period, you're getting that sort of sleeping period, right? Which is that eight hours that's like free because you're not thinking about eating, you're sleeping, >> but at the same time, you know that you've sort of burned through a lot of the liver glycogen. So, you know, you're getting into your fat stores and and you're getting through it all night. And the great thing about going sort of 30 36 hours sort of thing, right? when you're going past that is that the next day almost totally resets. I don't know if everybody feels like that, but I certainly do. So, you know, if you're a little bit hungry, you know, because you know, you haven't eaten for the whole day, you go once you go to bed, by the next day, it feels like to me it's like a reset. Like it's it's like, oh, it's like nothing happened. It's like a brand new day. I I I totally forget about that. Which is great because then I actually could do that again. And that's how you just sort of layer that on. So, I find it really really helpful if you can get past that 24 hours and that's sort of the third bucket and then I don't know if you want to go to the fourth bucket because I think that one is >> that's a really interesting one. >> That one is fascinating. >> It's going to require some dissection. So, let's let's get to that one just a little bit because that one that one's going to blow people's mind.

But, uh, yeah, it's interesting with the that third bucket sort of that 24 and beyond. You know, I've noticed from like a circadian sort of cue standpoint, I'm usually not hungry in the morning anyway, right? Because it's like I'm so conditioned to that. So, it's really nice if you're willing to go past 24 hours. >> If you normally 168, you'll find that when you wake up in the morning on day two of a fast from a circadian perspective, you're not hungry. Like your your body is so adjusted to Exactly. So, it's so easy to get another six, seven, eight hours on you right there because you're just like, I'm not hungry anyway because from again, every biological cue in your body is saying, "No, this is your normal routine even though you didn't eat the day before." So, it's like a free lunch, you know? You're >> That's what I think. It's like it's almost like the clock has reset. It feels like you're just starting a new. So, you got all the, you know, everything. And I think it's because that in the there's in the circadian rhythm like there's a normal peak at around 5 am 4 am 5 a.m. of these counterregulatory hormones right so you got growth hormone cortisol and other things sympathetic tone and that's regulated by your circadian rhythm. So when the sun comes in it hits the you know superismic uh nucleus and it re and it stimulates all this which is going to release sort of glucose or fat or energy into the system. That's what it's supposed to do to get you ready for the day and that's what suppresses your hunger. So then by the time you wake up, even though you didn't eat the whole, you know, other day, it's like there's no hunger. It's like it's it's actually super super interesting to me cuz people always expect the opposite. They think, oh, you know, if I didn't eat all day, then I'm going to wake up ravenous. I'm going to go eat like donuts all day, right? It's like, no, it actually just feels totally normal. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. And that's what's what's super super interesting about this, right? It's like, you know, it's not like, you know, the more you go, the harder it is, right? The more you do it, the the easier it is. And I think it's just because your body gets used to sort of releasing this energy, right? Because, you know, body fat is just a store of food energy, which is calories, right? The problem is that it's locked away. Like, if you think about um somebody who has weight to lose, right? So, um my audience is mostly, you know, sort of people trying to lose weight. So, if you're like 50 lbs overweight, for example, why are you hungry? Right? Because it's like, think about it. You have like 300,000 calories sitting in your fat stores. So, sometimes we tell people hunger is just a liar because you actually have all that energy. So, why do you have it? So, it's it's clearly telling you something that you don't actually need. You don't need calories. You actually have calories stored. You just need to release them, right? The problem is that it's all bottled away and that your, you know, your body is saying, "Oh, I need food. I need food." But it's a liar because you just need to unlock all that and it's going to come out. And one of the keys is really the fasting, right? Because the fasting is going to sort of do a lot of good things, but a lot this includes sort of getting your insulin down, which is going to make it easier. You're going to get fat fat adapted. So, we know that there's gene changes when you're fat adapted to make it easier to metabolize fat and so on. So there's a lot of changes that happen, not all of them immediate. So insulin is very fast, but there are also genetic changes that you see when people are more fat adapted um that take sort of weeks to months to actually that to actually um you know manifest.

>> What about that that second uh type that you were talking about? It's very interesting. It's almost as though the benefits of fasting kind of start kicking in after like 16 hours, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah, it's what's what's mechanistically like what's happening after 16 hours? It feels as though like 16 hours is great. Like you're getting loads of benefits. Awesome.

>> Um

>> but something shifts and what's what's shifting after that like 16 because there's such a difference. Like I've what I've recently been doing is I'm doing you know a few days per week where I actually am saying you know what I'm going to actually do like just 12 hour simple not even really fasting. I'm gonna deliberately have a breakfast, but then three or four days per week I'm going to do like 20our fasts because I'm like I want I want more of those 18 to 20our windows. I want more of those per week because it seems like

>> it exponentially increases after 16 hours. Something that'll definitely help you with fasting before we get into more mechanisms and discussion with Jason are going to be electrolytes. One of the main things you can consume whether you're water fasting, whether you're doing some kind of other soft fast. So, I put a link down below for Element, which is a link for a free sample variety pack with any purchase, but they have a bunch of different things that you can try now. They've got their traditional electrolyte packets, but then they also have their ready to drink cans. So, 1,000 millig of sodium, 200 milligs potassium, 60 milligs of magnesium, but now they have their smaller cans. So, they've got 500 milligram sodium. So, if you want to go a little less salt and you just want to have something that's going to going to curb your appetite, help you get through a fast a little bit better or help remmineralize you when you're doing a longer fast, that's the way to go. So, that link is down below. It's drinklnt.com/thomas.

>> Yeah, I think it's true. And and you know, they they you know, in one of my previous videos, we described like sort of the five stages of fasting, which was actually this was coined like I don't know, I think the research was from like the 70s or something. It's old like it's 50y old research but basically you start with you know the feeding phase when you're eating insulin's going to go up and you're storing energy right then you go into the immediate post uh feeding phase or the initial part of the fast you've got you know as long as you're eating some carbohydrates you've got glycogen stores right your body stores energy in sort of two two sort of uh ways glycogen which is glucose it's like chains of glucose it stores it in the liver and body fat fat, right? So, as you start to fast, so getting up to around 16 hours or so, you're using glucose mostly, right? But then once you break, you know, get through those stores of glucose, then you're starting now this shift into sort of you need other fuels because you don't have any more glucose. You haven't, you can't store that much, right? So, the glucose system is is is sort of a really quick way to get energy out, right? So, you're going to take the glucose, you're going to store it in the liver, it's going to come back out. It's sort of like the money in your wallet, right? Like you can you put it in, you take it out, no problem. But the fat is more like money in the bank, right? You can store a lot, but it's a little bit hard to get to. You got to go to the ATM or you got to go to seller or whatever, right? Same thing here. You've got sort of this short latency system which has, you know, immediate in, immediate out, but limited capacity. Then you have this sort of larger capacity storage which is sort of body fat which is sort of unlimited capacity but takes a little bit more to get in and out right and that's where you know that's why sometimes you can't do you can't get at it right and that's where you know you're going to get hungry and so on you have to bridge that. So during the phases of fasting, you start by getting through your glucose phase and then the next stage is when you're transitioning from the glucose to the fat because there's actually an intermediate phase which you're starting to get into in that period you're describing and that's the gluconneogenesis. That's the next stage of the fasting. So gluconneogenesis is glucose is glucose, neo is new and genesis is uh you know creation of. So you're creating new glucose and that comes from your protein. And people say, "Oh, that's a bad thing." You know, oh, you're breaking down muscle. This was the old thinking. It turns out that may may be the uh, you know, period where you're getting a lot of autophagy, right? Where you're actually breaking down. Yes, you've got some protein coming down, but it's also these subcellular organs and stuff, stuff you don't actually need. So, you're breaking that down and you're turning this protein into glucose because you can't actually activate your fats uh yet. So as you go it's so so you start by burning glucose then you start by this gluconneogenesis which is sort of this 18 20 24-hour window and I think it's going to be the same window that you're going to see a lot of autophagy and then you go into this sort of fat uh burning stage and that's the sort of fat burning and protein sparing. So you turn down your gluconioenesis. So the gluconioenesis goes up for a short period of time. But again, this is a very, you know, when you think about the human body, it's so smart. Like it honestly is so smart because then it's like, okay, well, you can't burn glucose forever, right? Like you can't I mean burn protein into glucose forever. Like protein is functional tissue, right? It's not all functional tissue because remember not all protein is muscle, right? People talk about lean mass, but there's a lot of connective tissue, right? skin like people get this flappy excess skin. It's like well you know that's protein actually that needs to be broken down connective tissue that's all needs to be broken down but then your body then turns off the gluconioenesis you get into this protein sparing mode and then you start burning fat. So once you get into this longer period then you're mostly burning fat. You still get a little bit of glucose that you need right but most of your body is now using fat. So virtually every organ in your body except the brain can use fat as a fuel. And uh what happens of course is that the fat goes to the liver gets turned into ketones and the ketones start supplying your brain with most of the energy but not all. So you still need a little bit of glucose and you get that from the breakdown of the glycerol. The glycerol is that sort of the one backbone with the three the triglycerides sorry is the one back glycerol backbone with the three triglycerides. The triglycerides are fat and the uh glycerol gets turned into glucose. So, so the it's it's such a such a beautiful system.

>> No, it really flows.

>> It's it's it's designed for everything. It's not it's not by accident. Which is why I always think, you know, people make these sort of assumptions that the human body is incredibly stupid, right? It's like, oh, calories in, calories out, like you eat an extra 100 calories, it's just going to get dumped into your fat like, you know, willy-nilly. Like nothing happens by accident in the human body, it's actually so intricate and smart, right? And then people, you know, think it's so stupid, but like even this period of gluconioenesis, which people used to say, oh, it's really, really bad. Now people are changing. They're thinking, well, maybe it's the autophagy. But the thing is that right after that growth hormone, growth hormone like goes way up, right? So if you look at uh even up to 5 days uh fasting, you get these massive growth hormone spikes. So the minute you start eating again, the minute you start refeeding, you're going to build back the muscle you need. So what you're going to do is you're going to break down the old protein and rebuild the protein you need, which is perfect, right? Because you're now it's a process of cellular rejuvenation, right? You get rid of the old stuff, rebuild the new stuff. So what we're describing here is like these sort of four buckets of fasting is roughly you know corresponds to these stages of fasting. You're seeing this transition and it's a transition from sort of glucose as energy protein glucose fat mix. That's that transition stage

>> and that's where you start to see the differences and then as you go longer you're getting to the fat the protein sparing sort of fat burning stage. It's interesting because if you pay close attention when you're fasting, you can almost feel around 18 19 hours. That often times is the most difficult period for a lot of people because it's like you're you're no longer riding the dural rhythms as much. You're you've got a lot of extra external cues telling you to eat and you haven't quite gotten into the ketone phase where your appetite's suppressed. So that is typically if there's going to be a hard point, I find that's the hardest point, which actually makes sense because it almost sounds as though it's when your body is transitioning and it's like if there's no one definitive fuel source. It's it's trying to find its footing and you can feel it. And I can't remember who it was years ago that said that sometimes like um the gray area is a good place in fasting and like putting yourself there sometimes in that transition and just letting yourself stay there because it's kind of hard.

>> Yeah.

>> Um it's actually such an interesting sort of phase because I think you're right. It actually coincides. I mean that is always a struggle, right? So when you're going from 16 to 24, right? Uh and 24 onwards, it's usually that sort of dinner period, right? On a day, it's always that dinner period. And I think it's because um one, I think you're undergoing that transition. So you're you're sort of finishing up the glycogen, which is that easy to get sort of energy. So, that's relatively easy to get up to 16, right? But you're also running into sort of this um normal daily sort of most people have eaten dinner every day for like their whole life, right? So, you've got this sort of conditioning where you've uh you know, you're used to it. You've got a habit. So, you're expecting to eat almost, right? And that's the sort of conditioned hunger that I talk about in the hunger code is like this sort of social, you know, oh, it's dinner time sort of thing. So, you're almost expecting it. So it's sort of a double whammy in that you've got like not only this sort of phase of fasting that's doing there but also this sort of social sort of um you know impetus to to eat at around that time. I mean, other countries are different. Like some eat very late, right? In Spain, they eat at like 10:00 or something, right? So,

>> >> yeah, it's, you know, I a couple years ago, I was doing like a little experiment because I was very curious on that whole uh transitional period there. And I was like, what if I did like a 20 or 24-hour fast and then did like a miniature refeed? That was my deal is just by what you're saying was like, how do I actually keep myself in that gray zone? just a little like a small refeed just enough to like kick myself out of the fasted state but then me put me back into that gluconioenesis state again

>> I had no way of really measuring it but I was curious how I and one thing I can say for certain is uh I definitely leaned out even more but I think that was simply because I was able to do more frequent longer fasts so I think that was probably aside but I was curious just to that point it was just like okay what happens if I maybe do like a miniature refeed go 24 hours don't fullon refeed and break the fast entirely and keep going, but maybe have, you know, a little bit of macadamia nuts or in most cases a little bit of protein, right? So, just enough couple hundred calories and then go right back into it. And I would find like, okay, yeah, two hours later I was ravenous,

>> but that would subside after another hour or so. And I was kind of at least I was telling myself I'm like, I'm putting myself into that sort of struggle zone. Yeah. Almost like a masochistic kind of thing. But if it seemed to be it seemed to be interesting because I that transition seemed very important to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is. I think it is. And I think that's where the transition gets easier the sort of more times you do it. So like anything else, right? I mean, you you you struggle at that zone, but then the more you do it, it's just the easier it is. And I think it was interesting because years ago they did this study where they uh did muscle biopsies actually of people as they were sort of uh going I can't remember the exact reason because fasting wasn't big back then, but this this was studied in the '90s. So I don't they did muscle biopsies and they studied the genes of these muscles and then you know as they were sort of transitioning to a very low carbohydrate diet I think it was at the time they would find that the um the the genes that were necessary for fat burning. So you know the muscle cells they can they can metabolize fat for energy but the mechanism that like the the the genes and the gene products were not there to actually do it. So they turn it on, but this would take like a couple weeks to really turn on because it's not an instant process, right? So it's like, okay, so as I remember thinking, well, that's going to make the transition so much easier, right? Because you're going to be able if you have all the sort of machinery to burn fat. That means you could actually switch from glucose to fat really easily. It takes a few weeks to do it, but that's what they're calling the metabolic flexibility, right? How easy is it for you to go from glucose burning to fat burning? Well, if you never do fat burning, like if you never fast and you never do fat burning, well, it's going to be hard, right? And that's not just a psychological thing. It's because you don't have the gene, you know, machinery that to to actually metabolize the fat efficiently, right? So, therefore, it's going to be much more difficult. You're not going to have that metabolic uh flexibility to sort of go from one to the other and back. And of course a lot of research now is showing that that metapholic flexibility is actually super super important for overall health. So superant interest it's it's like it it all ties sort of ties together in a very very interesting interesting way. And it's like anything else, right? You need to stress the body a little bit. And you know stress sometimes gets a bad name but exercise is a stress. If you don't stress your system then you never develop the capability to deal with it. And fasting is a stress. You're stressing your body by not eating. But in the long term, and maybe it's uncomfortable and sure, but it's no different than running a long distance, you get micro tears in your muscles. You rebuild them, right? You rebuild them stronger to to handle it, right? And that's that's one of the things. So if you're if you're stressing your body uh in this way, it's really a form of hormesis, which is again another super interesting concept. uh hormesis meaning like if you take poison in small doses it sort of loses its effect and it makes you stronger sort of thing right so uh stress in small doses is actually not a bad thing it's actually very very necessary and it's like you know if if and it's actually true for so many things right if people who you know have a silver spoon and never experience adversity they're useless when you know it comes to things and then somebody who's sort of used to it is like ah they sail right through right so that that that bit of stress is actually what you need whether it's in a physical sense like you know uh exercise or whether it's like in a metabolic sense right you got to stress yourself then you develop the flexibility

>> that's so well said because I feel like sometimes it has to be the other way too in terms of um, you know, for years I spent so much time fasting and was extremely low carb for you know, like 10 years of my life then I realized that if I did have carbohydrates my glucose would skyrocket and I wasn't I was losing to a certain degree metabolic flexibility the other way I had gone so far and I'm still a very low carb fasting guy. That's how I am. But it's what I realize is that I do occasionally need to actually dip my toe in that water too because metabolic flexibility goes both ways. And if someone is metabolically dysfunctional or they're insulin resistant, it's a different situation, you know, then the carbohydrates might be problematic for them. Um, but I realized after 10 years, I was no longer, you know, having this mitochondrial dysfunction I was dealing with for so long. I was like, "Wait a minute. It actually in order to maintain a level of glucose tolerance, I actually do need to like throttle and go periods of extended fasting and then periods where I have a moderate amount of carbohydrates to sort of allow my body to actually adapt to that as well." So, it's kind of funny how, you know, no matter where you sit on it, sometimes you have these like you got to do things that stress you either way, right?

>> Yeah, that's right. And I've I've actually never been fully like keto for like years and years, right? I I I sort of do it as it goes, right? And sometimes I will have them a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Great.

>> And I think it's not just the carbohydrates because the there definitely is you definitely can eat carbohydrates and still not spike your insulin. Like it's the it's the real spike in insulin that's the problem. And I I I talk about this in uh you know about the homeostatic hunger. talk about these spikes because one of the things that people don't talk about enough I think is that it's the speed of the absorption that makes a huge difference right so if you take a natural carbohydrate you know sweet potato or something like that well the absorption is actually relatively slow right so if you eat beans or something that's that's still a carbohydrate but the the glucose sort of goes up slowly if you eat white bread which is sort of ultrarocessed and very finely ground flour you get this instant spike. So even though it's the same amount of carbohydrate, the insulin response and the speed of that response is different and that makes a huge difference. So if you think about it in other settings, you think about say nicotine for example. So if you smoke, what happens is that the nicotine goes into from your lungs into the pulmonary blood vessels, right? So you're getting that instant hit right into the blood vessels. If you eat nicotine, the absorption is way slower. So it's way less addictive, right? And that's why you use nicotine gum.

>> Yeah.

>> So, it's the same nicotine. It might be you can take the same dose of nicotine, but the speed of absorption makes a massive difference. It's it's why you inject heroin. It's why people sniff cocaine because it goes directly into the blood vessels in the nose. But it's the same thing with carbohydrate. So, taking a natural carbohydrate,

>> I always snort my carbohydrate.

>> I like to mainline it. But the speed that it goes through actually makes a massive difference. It makes a difference in these other things. But here it makes a difference too because you see that when you eat a certain amount of carbohydrate and you slow down. So you can compare two foods actually and they've done this which I actually think is really interesting. So they take uh Dr. Lewig who's um you know a really fascinating guy. He took um instant oats and steel cut oats and he compared them. So, same food, same calories, same carbohydrates. The only difference is how they were processed. And of course, when you take the instant oats, you get this massive spike in insulin. So, your glycemic index is much higher. You get this massive spike in uh glucose, insulin, and what happens is that you you it makes a difference later on because you have this massive spike in insulin. Insulin is going to tell your body to store all these calories as as fat, right? or as store it. So all of that gets stored and then you get hungry later on. So what they found is that when you eat the instant oats, you eat much more at lunch afterwards compared to the steel cut oats even though they're the same food. And they've done other studies where they take compare apple slices to apple sauce. And the applesauce was made by simply taking the apple, baking it, and pureeing it. So again, same food, same calories, same macronutrients, everything is the same because you're not adding or taking away. Huge difference in what happens because again with the whole apples, it stays in your stomach longer. So gastroit time was much much longer. Like it took longer to go from the stomach into the intestines compared to the applesauce and a huge difference in glucose and insulin. Right? So glycemic index much lower insulin like 20 25% lower but same food right. So if you simply focus on the food itself that's only you're only getting part of the answer. How that food is processed makes a difference because the thing is that if you look at um you know how you gain weight people think it goes from say calories to weight gain like that's not what happens. It goes from food which contains calories and you know macronutrients but it first must be digested which means it goes into the stomach. Stomach churns it around mixes it with other stuff. Then it has to go into the small intestine where it gets absorbed into the bloodstream. When it gets into the bloodstream it affects your hormonal levels which then affect your weight gain. And every step of that that pathway can be influenced you know. So there's, you know, if you eat carbohydrates alone versus carbohydrates with other things or carbohydrates with vinegar makes a big difference. If you eat um the carbohydrates first versus carbohydrates last, it makes a big difference. So all of these different things make a difference to the ultimate hormonal response, which is what you're really interested in.

>> Interesting. And I want to come back to all of that because that actually plays in a little bit to this fourth type of fasting. I think we've dangled the carrot long enough for people. Um, because this one's exciting and I think it kind of plays in a little bit because there's some there's some actual calories involved to this kind of fasting. So what is this this fourth type?

>> So the fourth type is sort of this more extended fasting but not necessarily a full sort of classic water only fast, right? And this is sort of once you're getting past that 36 hours, you're getting sort of 72 hours or 3 4 5 days, I think you start to see differences. And I hadn't I haven't talked about it a lot. Uh, because, you know, there wasn't a lot of data, but now there's starting to be a lot of data with um something called the fasting mimicking diet. For example, they have they do a 5day fast, but it's not a full fast. you can actually take some calories during the fast just as you used to do. Um, and it's it's somewhere around 500 to 800 calories uh on each of those days. So, it's sort of like uh sort of um this period where you're still getting a little bit of nutrients, right? You're getting a bit of calories, but you're going longer. And I think the data is actually fascinating because they're starting to show super like not only are you going to get the benefits of the fasting, weight loss, diabetes, and so on, but they're studying things like, you know, biological age and um cancer, like it's having effects on cancer progression and um and also inflammation, which is so interesting. like it's like okay because inflammation is one of these things that causes a lot of problems and um you know there's no easy way to do it like you might take anti-inflammatories and stuff but they're not they're they're like a they're not a great fix right so if you have tendinitis or something it's not a great fix but it turns out that you can actually affect some of these autoimmune cells autoimmunity and we've been hearing about it for years so you know at the fasting method where we help people fasting there'd Tons of people would say to us, you know, my thyroid got all better, right? And there's this thyroid disease called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is a very common type of thyroid condition. It's autoimmune. And as they started fasting, they all noticed that, hey, it was getting a lot better. So, we kept we heard about it over and over, but there's no data. So, we're like, well, we're not really sure, but if it's helping you, then that's great. But now they're starting to see a lot of data that hey, if you're taking this sort of extended fast with, you know, it's a it's a it's a bit of a modified fast. Then there seems to be this sort of remodulation of the immune system. And again, to me, that makes a lot of sense because as you're going longer, your body's really saying, "Oh, well, I'm not getting any nutrients, so I need to shut everything down that's not essential." Right? Because that's what you do if you're, you know, you're hunkering down. So one of the things is like oh well maybe we need to sort of reposition this immune system because this is energy intensive right so

>> especially immune system is crazy energy

>> yes exactly so let's let's move some of this because we can still maintain a little bit of immunity but we don't need all of this let's sort of reposition ourselves right and I'll tell you a story because it was it was to me crazy because so I've been f I I've been doing fasting but I've done mostly shorter fasting because that's where a lot of the data lived, right? But recently I had a lot of problems with Achilles tendinitis. So my Achilles were killing me and I don't know why. I don't even know what set it off but you know if I played basketball or something like for two days it was like agony. So if I played once a week it was like oh this is really tough. So I tried everything. I did stretching, I did physio, I did ultrasound. I did all kinds of uh stuff. I took anti-inflammatories and stuff. Um, and my friend was like, "Well, you know what you should do? You should try this longer fast like these four or five day fasts because then you can really pump up your growth hormone and stuff, right?" And he had used it for his tennis elbow. And I thought, well, you know, I've been suffering with it for about a year, right? I said, "Sure, why not?" So, I did this sort of longer fast, which was I still took a little bit. What I do is once a day I take a little bit of vegetables. So, and I take bone broth as well. So, you're getting a bit of that protein, but again, like you, 500ish calories, right? And and not super difficult, right? Um, but like right after it was like 70% better. I was like, whoa, this is insane, right? And then I thought, well, maybe it's just a coincidence, right? Yes, I'd been suffering it for a year, but I thought, oh, maybe it's a coincidence. So, about a month and a half later, I'm like, let's do it again and see. Same thing, like 70% better. And then after the third one, boy, it's gone. And I haven't had it since. I'm like, this is insane. Like, I'd been suffering with this for like a year. And like there is no like even if you search online, there's just no

>> Yeah.

>> No, nobody talks about this sort of stuff. I had only done it because I know about a bit about the, you know, the physiology of fasting. I'm like, this is insane. Like, you know, a lot of people have this tendinitis, tennis elbow, Achilles tendonitis, and it's like, that's crazy. And there's no I mean there's not enough people to really establish a good cohort to you know so you're not you're not going to find a lot of those I mean you some of Walter Longo's stuff um but he's you know

>> it's it's that that's that's it right we're seeing those kinds of fasting mimicking studies and then when it comes down to like tendonitis it's like how do you how do we measure this other than you know just that just uh you know an anecdotal experience we could reverse engineer and try to figure out the mechanisms you and I were talking offline before we were filming about that and it's, you know, it's probably like you mentioned the same thing we're seeing with autoimmune conditions. It's perhaps a, you know, a rehoming of those immune cells and ultimately a modulation where the immune system is recalibrating.

>> Yeah. You know, it's getting like a reset

>> and it's a lot of anecdotal data because and you know, to me, it's it's interesting.

>> So that was a couple year like a couple years ago. Then I got a bit of like about six months ago I got a bit of knee tendinitis like sort of and again out of the blue. I don't know what caused it. I I I do the same normal amount and then so that time I was like as soon as you know I didn't have anything on my schedule you know like social meetings and stuff I was like okay I'm going to do another fast I told my wife I'm like okay I'm doing it cuz I'm getting a bit of this it's starting to really bother me and like boom gone right it's like okay so I suffered like for you know a week at the most right as opposed to a whole year I was like this is insane and and to some extent you might say well it could be placebo effect and I'm It sure could be placebo effect, right? Placebo effect is very strong. On the other hand, we're hearing it over and over. And to me, it's like I don't even care if it's placebo effect or not.

>> Yeah.

>> My tendonitis is gone, right? So, you know, why do I care? Like people will say, "Oh, where's your evidence?" It's like,

>> >> you know, on the one hand, scientifically, yes, you should try and do a trial. On the other hand, I'm the one suffering it. Like if I wait the 15 years it's going to take to get data on this, I'm like going to be an invalid, right? If I can't exercise or do anything because I'm flaring up my tendinitis, you know, every single time I go, it's like that is not going to work, right? I'll have other issues, right? If you don't move, like, you know, very quickly your body just starts to, you know, we see this in people with bed rest. If you stop moving, like, it's not good, right? Especially as you get older, right? It's it's really really important. So, and it's really important because it's the older people who are getting the tendinitis, the knee tendonitis, the shoulder, the berscitis, all that kind of thing, right? So, it's actually doubly important because the young people are not getting the tendinitis, arthritis, right? And they're the ones moving. But when you get to like, you know, your middle age, 50s, 60s, 70s, and you stop moving, boy, it's it's it's a problem.

>> What do you think the the mechanism is with these like fasting mimicking sort of approaches? cuz you know you're obviously still suppressing insulin so that that whole equation is still valid but what do you think is is different in your opinion or what does some of the research say?

>> Yeah, it's it's it's they measure all these sort of um things. So, you know, they measure things like CRP which is an inflammatory marker which is you know sort of you know it could be an anti-inflammatory effect. So, I think that is a super sort of interesting piece of it. So the low insulin I think can play into the weight losses, can play into the, you know, the diabetes with the cancer because there's a bit of data with cancer as well. And I just saw this in in um like two weeks ago or something. There was another study looking at using fasting in conjunction with chemotherapy and it seemed to improve the effect quite a bit. I posted it on Twitter. Anyway, it's it's like, oh, that's really really interesting. And it's excuse me to some extent it's also due to the fact that insulin is a very potent growth factor right. So IGF-1 which is insulin like growth factor one is a very important growth hormone and it's not by accident. So insulin which we all think of as a metabolic hormone started if you look at primitive organisms they go back an evolutionary time. Insulin was not developed as a metabolic hormone. It was developed as a growth hormone. But what happens is that as we became multisellular organisms, you needed to be able to link very tightly the available nutrients to growth, right? Because you don't want to grow like you don't want it to grow when there's no food. You're going to die, right? So if there's no food, you need to shut down growth. So what you know, nature did was it linked and used the exact same mechanism to denote growth and nutrient sensing, right? So the nutrient sensor insulin is also a very potent growth hormone and actually holds true for mTor as well. So mTor, which is very popular, I think about eight or 10 years ago, uh you know, mTor signaling uh was in studied very heavily in cancer, right? because there's mTor inhibitors that they use for cancer. Um, and the thing that's interesting is that it too is a nutrient sensor and it's it senses mostly protein but it's also a progrowth hormone. Right? So exactly the same thing that you see with mTor, which is that it's not only a nutrient sensor, but it's also a growth hormone. So IGF-1 has been linked really to all the diseases. So cancer, heart disease, all of that. you get this sort of it's not quite a U but you get this when it's very low it's bad when it's very high it's bad right and it's it's sort of like this shape like it's you have this optimal one in the middle and then you go too low of course you're not getting enough growth signaling but then when you get too much growth signaling which is sort of the case uh that these days when insulin levels tend to be very high and that's due to like easy food abil food availability but also like people are eating for different reasons including you for you know for pleasure and eating because of just social conditioning but you get this very steep rise where on the other side where when IGF-1 goes up then your mortality from all of these uh diseases diabetes, heart disease, strokes and all this stuff goes way up. So I think it could be from the insulin but also not just insulin but the growth part of insulin because you know everybody assumes growth is good but really when you're older growth is not good. you don't want anything to grow sort of unchecked. So the the growth signaling I think is important and then I think the inflammation part you know to me is almost the most fascinating part because it's a little bit on the unexpected side. Although when you look back you might say well you know we could have you know maybe we should have thought that that was inevitable but you know when you when you sort of attack it on so many different levels and remember we're not doing it like every single day right because then you're going to get into the problem of you're fasting all the time you're not getting enough nutrients or proteins or whatever right you're talking about doing episodically stressing your body right same thing if you overtrain like we all know overtraining is a big thing right that's why you have load management in like the NBA and stuff even though the league is trying to you know really put a kaibos on it for sure

>> but overexertion overtraining is super bad well over fasting can probably be the same thing right it's you don't want to you want to episodically stress yourself because it's this idea of hormesis but you don't want to just keep doing

It forever without end, because that also is not good. And that's probably, to to some point, like your your carbohydrate, uh, experience too, right? Like you go very low, but maybe you should once in a while just make sure that you're able to handle the glucose and all that.

It's almost as though with like fasting mimicking, you're you're able to get these benefits of a longer fast without like this chronic severe deprivation signaling. It's like you you you give just enough of a signal to almost, I'm just going to say, colloquially, like, I mean, you're sort of like telling your body it's safe, right? Like just enough to where you're not skyrocketing and you're not going into such a severe deficit where maybe there's a misinterpretation of the alarms that are going off in the body, right? You're like, just giving it enough to say, because I think we were talking about earlier, there's there's a little bit of a benefit to, I've always, I've always been a big stickler for how you break a fast, because I, I firmly believe, and there's not, there is more data now, but I, I really believe, you know, 10 years ago or so, that how you break your fast is very, very important because you're in such a, such a fragile state, in a good way. Like you have, you have the, you have the ability to really do some damage or continue the benefits of a fast, right?

And I think like if you look at like even the gut stem cell research, like during a fast, you get like a proliferation of gut stem cells. Well, those stem cells have an effect during the fast, but they really go to work once you refuel a little bit. So it's like, okay, well, why would you want to eat a bunch of emulsifiers and a bunch of garbage that's just going to destroy your mucosal layer at that point? But I think the same holds true. This is pure speculation, but it's theory. When you are fasting and then you occasionally have this like little bit of food that's still within the realm of, you know, fasting mimicking approved foods, like veggies, some certain fats, and things like that.

Yeah.

It's like you're telling the body just enough of a growth signal to like put some of this stuff to work, and then boom, you go back into the fast, and it has the available energy to put those things to use. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, I think it's it's just like exercise, right? You can't just go 100% and then just keep going 100%, right? You got to, you know, take it back a notch when you're going longer, right? When you're going short, sure, you can do that. But when you're going longer, you can't just go sort of full-on pedal to the metal because then everything just goes down and you're going to put less stress on the body because it is a stressor, right?

And I think it's actually more than that because what I find, so when I do longer fasts, and I've done the five-day water fasts, too, right? And really the big problem with that is never the sort of physical hunger, right? That's the homeostatic hunger I talk about. I never am bothered by that because I know that that'll subside, right? So when I get hungry, it's the sort of hedonic hunger. Like it's by day three, I'm always like, oh, you know, I'm not actually hungry and in that my stomach is fine and stuff, but I'll see something like, "Ooh, I would really like to eat that," because I know that it's pleasurable because eating is pleasurable, let's face it, right? So it's not that. And and by giving it just a little bit, you sort of really not just from a physical side, but from an emotional side too, you're like, "Okay, I'll have a bit." So I'll have like, say, steamed broccoli or something like that, right? And it's like, this broccoli tastes so good, right? And it's like, that's amazing because that takes it down. So if you can maintain sort of 80, 90% of the benefits, or maybe more, like maybe it does even better, but it's 50% as difficult. That's a huge win.

Yeah.

Right. So it's like it's not just the physical side. Uh, but it's also the, and and this is, I think, why fasting is actually so powerful, especially this sort of fourth type of stuff that where the research is just coming out, right? I don't think I talked about it much in the first, you know, five years.

Yeah.

Right. Because honestly, you know, coming out, it was people thought 12 hours was too much. And I'm like, 12 hours? That's like not stopping eating at 7 and eating breakfast at 7. That's what you should have been doing every single day. But I was getting attacked all over the place. "Oh, 12 hours, that's too much." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" Right? So, that was a struggle. So that's why I never talked about any of the longer stuff. But now the data is all coming out. People are getting used to the idea, but it cuts across all these three different types of hunger because one, your homeostatic hunger, your physical hunger, it's going down. Your emotional hunger, it's it's working a bit better. But then the condition, like all these associations we have with food. Once you start doing these longer fasts, you're breaking them, right? Because you don't always have to eat at lunchtime. You don't always have to eat when you, you know, sit in the car. You always have to eat when you're watching a movie because you've set that you you you've done it without. So therefore, you're you're training yourself. You're creating these new habits. You're breaking old habits, bad habits of, you know, eating, you know, as soon as you get in the car or whatever, and you're creating these new habits where you're going to do something else, right? So, it's so important because it's it sort of cuts across multiple levels of hunger. So, it's it's it's sort of, you know, to me, it's it's really like a game-changer. Like it's to me it's like, okay, I still do the shorter stuff, so I still, you know, make sure I have sort of these other types of fasts, the 16s, the 24s, the occasional, excuse me, the occasional, you know, 30. And so, and then I'll throw in once in a while the longer ones. And sometimes I'll do them more often when I get a lot of, you know, I get a lot of inflammation. I'm like, "Okay, I'm, you know, I don't want to live like this. It's painful, right?" It's like, oh.

It's so, uh, you know, I've numerous guests. Most, uh, recently, Dr. Dom D'Agostino was talking about, you know, he does like 300 calories to 500 calories of sardines. Um, that's his sort of version of a fasting mimicking. Um, and I know like, you know, Dr. Walter Longo has like a lot of a list of certain foods that he, and they're surprisingly, they're not just like foods that you would think, you know, this isn't just like, okay, you're you're going modified ketogenic. It's some of them are pretty specific on his list. I know he gets pretty nuanced there. He's phenomenal. He's got some really cool stuff out of Italy and I think USC, right? I think he's at, I think I think he's USC. But I mean, just really cool stuff. I'd love to have him on at some point. But,

I think that people are, but it's great because I think it's it's helping people that perhaps only viewed caloric restriction as like the only way. They, they helps introduce them to this concept of fasting in a palatable way where they're like, "Oh, you're telling me just to reduce calories down to 500 with this and and then these specific foods." I've noticed a lot more people that were not even open to fasting become open to it.

Yeah. And, uh, it was interesting because that video with Dom where he talks about sardine fasting, pretty specific esoteric thing, but the number of views on that video and the number of people they're like, "Oh, I haven't been willing to do a five-day fast, but I could do that."

Yeah.

"I could do that." And then next thing you know, they're like, "Well, actually, that felt really good. I'm going to go ahead and just do a three-day water fast." So, it's like really just cool that we're we're seeing this. So, I mean, I encourage people to investigate that more. And I mean, Jason, I want to get into these three types of hunger. You alluded to them a little bit, but what are these three types specifically and let's double-click on each of them.

Yeah. So essentially, there's the physical type of hunger, which is, you know, your stomach is growling, and that's what most of us think about when we think about hunger, right? You think there's only one type, but that's actually called homeostatic hunger. So homeostasis is a sort of core biological principle where you sort of maintain this sort of even keel. So it's like your room thermostat, right? You set the room temperature. If it gets too hot, it turns on the air conditioning. It gets too cold, it turns on the heat, right? So homeostasis is the same way. When you start eating, you actually start signaling yourself through hormones that you need to soon stop. And those are satiety hormones. If you don't eat for a while, you develop, you you produce hunger hormones that get you up. And it turns out that body fat actually follows exactly the same principles because you want your body fat to be at a certain level. So I call it the body fat thermostat, just to reinforce that it follows the principles of homeostasis. So homeostatic hunger is is that sort of on and off switch. But homeostasis is actually core. Any mission-critical system in the body has homeostasis. So if you think about your body temperature, it's set at a certain level. If it's really cold, then you shiver. If it's really hot, you sweat, right? If you drink a lot of water, you pee it out, right? Don't drink a lot of water, you're not going to pee it out. Your your electrolyte level, your sodium levels, your potassium levels, if you you eat a lot of potassium-containing foods, you don't die, right? Your body just gets rid of it, right? Same with everything. So, you can think about any system like you get into, you know, bright sunlight, you know, your pupils constrict. You go into a dark room, your pupils go open, right? So, all of these things, all of the body always follows homeostasis. And body fat's actually no different. And it, it, it has to because it's mission-critical. If you didn't have homeostasis of your body fat, you would die because wild animals, if you think about it, are never morbidly obese. Why? Because you're not going to survive. If you're a predator, you'll never catch anything. If you're an over, if you're a morbidly obese rabbit, like you're dead, right? You're going to get eaten in two seconds. So, how much body fat you carry is critical. If you have too little body fat, you'll also die because the minute winter comes, you're dead, right? So, you want to maintain it. And that's the reason why if you think about caloric uh balance, like if you think about the number of calories we have to balance, it's an insane number. Like 2,000 calories a day times 365 days. And the average weight loss or weight gain over a year for a person is sort of like one pound, right? So you have to be accurate to a degree of like 99.7% or something like that. Ma balancing your caloric intake and your output. Yet you don't know how many calories you eat and you don't know how many calories you burn. How does your body do that? It's clearly not because you're counting calories on a label, right? It makes no sense. Your body obviously senses it. If you eat more, then it has signals and your body is getting too fat, then it has signals to dampen it down, and that's something like leptin, for example. So that's been a well-studied hormone system. So if the body has this thermostat mechanism, then when you're overweight, you need to know what is pushing your thermostat up and what is pushing it down, right? So certain hormones are going to push it up, like insulin, like cortisol. Certain ones are going to push it down. So GLP-1 is a classic example, right? So you look at the weight loss drugs now, Ozempic and so on. They act on the GLP-1 system. People lose weight because it pushes it down. How does it do that? Well, it, it does it by activating hunger and satiety, right? So when you activate insulin, when insulin goes way up, it's it's going to make you hungry. So you're going to eat. So yes, calories in is greater than calories out. But the question is, why was calories in greater than calories out, right? It's because your your body is wanting to defend a higher weight. Whereas when you activate the GLP-1 system, pushes it down, turns off that hunger. And you see the same thing with other hormones too, right? So the hormones are incredibly important. So there's insulin, there's cortisol, there's GLP-1, there's GIP, there's glucagon. We know that because of all the studies that have been done on those hormonal systems, but also the sympathetic nervous system, for example. So increased sympathetic tone decreases weight. So how do we know? Well, because you look at any old drug. So the old drug Fen-Phen was a classic uh weight loss drug in the '90s. Very effective.

Is that phentermine? Is that Fen-Phen?

Uh, yeah. Is it, okay. Is, uh, phentermine, fenfluramine, fentamine, which was a combination. So it's Fen-Phen. People lost about 17% of body weight with it, which is basically on par with Ozempic, right? So very, very effective. It caused heart problems, so it had to get taken off. But it did it by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, which crushed the appetite, so people wouldn't eat, right? It doesn't physically restrict calories, and that's a really important thing because that's how you know that all of hunger and satiety is driven by your hormones because it's, you know, it's not calories, it's, it's, it's those hormones. So even though you don't eat much, like me with Ozempic, for example, even though you don't eat much, you feel full because you're hormonally signaling that you're full. So Fen-Phen, prior a generation before that, people used amphetamine. So speed was a classic weight loss drug in the '60s. Of course, other problems, right, addiction and so on. But crack and speed, when you read about people who use them, basically they'd say, "When I take it, my hunger disappeared." And nicotine. Nicotine is a sympathetic agonist. So when you increase sympathetic tone, you don't feel hungry. So smokers wouldn't feel hungry. And smokers weighed less than non-smokers, which means you're pushing that thermostat down. And therefore, that's what's causing the problem. But it's wasn't calories, it was the sympathetic nervous system. So all of these hormonal systems, testosterone, estrogen, you could go on. Not all of these are amendable to uh weight loss. But you know, like if you look at testosterone, so if you castrate somebody, if you take out the uh testes for somebody with prostate cancer, for example, or testicular cancer, what happens? Well, it's very predictable. They lose muscle and gain fat. And it wasn't because of what they ate or anything. It was because you took away the testosterone. The testosterone is a signal that you should gain muscle and lose fat. You look at puberty. When boys and girls are pre-pubertal, they have roughly the same amount of body fat. Post puberty, girls have about 50% more fat, and the boys have a lot more muscle. Why? It's not willpower. It's not calories. Have you like the boys are eating a lot, but they're turning it all into muscle, right? So the girls with, you know, as they go through puberty, they're developing breasts, they're developing hips. So they're developing more of the subcutaneous fat, which is, um, actually a good thing because it actually helps protect them, um, you know, a little bit from heart disease because it's more subcutaneous versus visceral. But the point is that they are gaining fat. So what you know is that this homeostatic physical system is trying to maintain your weight through the mechanism of this physical hunger and satiety. Now, what's interesting, especially when you do the longer fast, is that very few of us it get that on a daily basis because we're relatively easy to get food and we're fairly regimented. So, when you do these longer fasts and you feel it, you know, when I feel it anyway, I'm like, "Oh, I actually don't feel this all that much." So, the question is, what else is causing this hunger that's driving the obesity epidemic? Right? And it's interesting because, you know, so you've got the physical hunger or homeostatic hunger.

Okay, so that's hunger type one.

That's type one. And the second type is hedonic hunger. So this is eating for pleasure. Because you have to, you have to acknowledge that we don't simply eat for nutrients. We eat because it's a pleasurable activity. People like it. It makes you feel good. Makes you feel good about yourself. So if you're, uh, an emotional eater, say you want to, uh, you're a little bit depressed. Well, you might be eating to give yourself a little pick-me-up. If you're bored, you're looking for a little pleasure. So, you want that little dopamine hit. And so, you eat for that reason. And the problem, where you get into problems, is with ultra-processed foods. Because ultra-processed foods sort of are able to take the natural food and then make it and give you this sort of super-sized hit so that you're getting extra pleasure, extra dopamine, and so on, right? And again, none of it is by accident, right? You read about things like bliss points and salt and sugar and fat and, you know, making sure it's the exact, you know, right combination. But you know, there's artificial flavors, there's artificial colors, there's texturizers to make sure it feels good for the mouthfeel. There's emulsifiers, there's, uh, flavor enhancers like MSG or maltodextrin, there's things like carrageenan and guar gum and all this stuff. So none of it is by accident. But these ultra-processed foods are able to, excuse me. These ultra-processed foods are able to make you get this sort of super-sized hit. And at the same time, what they do is they minimize satiety so that you don't get full so you can just keep going, right? The bet you can't eat just eat one sort of thing, right? You just keep going and keep going because you're evading that whole satiety signaling and you're giving yourself that hedonic. Here, you're satisfying that hedonic hunger, and it can actually tip into food addiction. And I think these are, this is one of the most interesting areas of research. So both ultra-processed foods and food addiction in the last five years, the research has just exploded on how bad it is. And I think it's great because now we're starting to get past this whole, is it calories? Is it carbs? Is it protein? Is it fat, right? Which is, you know, part of the discussion, but how you process those carbohydrates or calories is also important because it changes how your body responds to it. And that's that's, um, where things can tip over is in in the, uh, sort of hedonic hunger into food addiction. And addictions are things that people will continue to do even though they know it's bad for them, right? And it doesn't have to be, not everybody has to be addictive for a p for a substance to be addictive. So alcohol, not everybody who drinks becomes addicted. Not everybody who smokes becomes addictive, but some people can. And the data is so interesting because it's clear that about 30, 35, 40% of people, depending on the study, uh, with weight issues are actually addicted to food. Like they can't actually stop, right? And some people will say things like, "Well, you know, it can't be addictive because it's natural." It's like, that's bologna. You know, nicotine smoking is addictive. It came from tobacco leaves, right? Morphine is addictive. It came from poppies. Alcohol is addictive. It came from fermentation of grains or rice or whatever, right? So, it's not the actual naturalness. It's the processing that makes it a problem because what you do is you take the sort of most addictive part of it and purify it, right? And that's what ultra-processed foods have the ability to do because there's no limit, right? When you have a blueberry, a blueberry is a blueberry. Yeah. You change it with various ways, but it's still a blueberry, right? Whereas with a blueberry candy, you can put whatever you want in it. You could put 100% sugar. You could put all this other stuff in it. And that's the problem with with that. So the reason it's important is because again, there's this whole other toolkit in addiction medicine that you need to use, right? And one of them is abstinence, right? So it's a completely different situation. So if you're addicted to alcohol, would your friend ever say, "Hey, just have a drink. Everything in moderation, right?" It's like, no, he'd be the worst friend ever because that one drink is going to lead to more.

Yeah.

So, if people say, "I'm addicted to bread. I'm addicted to pizza. I'm addicted to candy." They're telling you they're addicted. What it means, you need to abstain. You can't just say everything in moderation. And you know how many doctors and dietitians say that? And I'm always like, "God, would you tell a heroin addict, just take a little hit?" Yeah. A small one.

It's like, it'd be the worst advice ever. So, if they're telling you they're addicted, why would you say it's okay to eat bread if you're addicted to bread, right? Don't eat bread. Go eat something else. You're addicted to it, dude.

There I mean, there I mean, I'm even seeing cases of, um, you know, LDN, low-dose naltrexone being used for obesity now, right? It's just like, and this is, like, just in an, you know, LDN, low-dose form, but this is something that acts upon receptors in the brain that essentially at higher doses we've seen in addiction medicine, right? But even at the LDN level, it's like now they're saying like they're pairing it with GLPs, right? They're pairing it with GLPs because they're being like, "Okay, well, let's also get to the, what they're calling some of the root cause." So there's a thoughtful acknowledgement there, and we're seeing addiction medicine being applied here even for people that are just moderately overweight. Not people that are just more morbidly obese, but be but people that like, you know, I've got 20 pounds to lose. Well, let's see like, why are you 20 pounds overweight? It's not just because you're, it's not just because you're overeating in a blanket term, you know.

Yeah. Exactly. And this overeating is always assumed to be, well, 'cause it's your choice, right? That's where all the blaming comes from, right? The shaming and the blaming is like, you could have not done it, but you chose not to. No.

You wouldn't say that to someone with that's addicted to cigarettes. I mean, you would maybe, but it's not like you're not, we start, but when you're, when you know, we show them, you know, an alcoholic. When you started becoming alcoholic, sure, you had that choice at that point. Once you're addicted, we show them a lot more compassion because it's like, we understand like whether it's drug addiction, alcohol, or whatever. You say, "Okay, well, you're addicted at this point." So, like, it's useless to to go back. You can't go back in time. Like, let's let's move forward and how are we going to treat this addiction, right? But that sort of compassion never applies to somebody who's overweight, which is sad, right? And I think this whole naltrexone GLP-1 is interesting because it acknowledges the new sort of paradigm of thinking about this issue, right? So it's not a calories problem. None of these things affects your calories. The GLP-1 does not restrict your calories, right? It restricts your hunger. And there's a huge difference. That's why you have to understand what are the levers in the homeostatic hunger, or maybe it's hedonic hunger, maybe it's ultra-processed foods. And people also say stupid stuff like, "Oh, you can't not eat food." It's like, I'm not saying don't eat food. I'm saying don't eat ultra-processed food that you're addicted to, right? It's like, if you're addicted to alcohol, I don't say don't drink green tea, right? That's ridiculous, right? So, if you're telling me you're addicted to, you know, sweets, don't eat sweets. That's the thing. I don't say don't eat eggs, right? Why would I say that? So, you know, people make these arguments. It makes no sense, right? From a, you know, paradigm standpoint, I always think it's interesting because there's this whole calorie paradigm where calories are everything, calories are everything. It's so stupid because it's like, if you think about the energy balance equation, body fat equals calories in minus calories out, right? So what happens is that people assume calories out, which is metabolic rate plus exercise, remains stable. So therefore, if you simply eat 500 calories less, you're going to burn 500 calories of fat. But it's completely untrue, right? If you, if you eat 500 fewer calories, your body could release 500 calories from your fat stores, or you could burn 500 calories less and not release any fat, right? So that means which one it does is very important. So if we take that equation and simply rewrite it and you say calories in equals body fat plus calories out, right? So the stored calories plus the body out. What it tells you is that for every calorie you eat, your body has a choice. It can store it as fat, or it can burn it. But which one does it do? That doesn't, the the number of calories doesn't tell you which way it goes. It's only the hormones that tell you, hey, do, do you store it or do you burn it? And we have a hormone which is well known to tell you which one it does. Insulin. If you have a ton of insulin, that's the hormonal signal to store it and not burn it, right? And it's like, okay, I just don't understand these people who go on and on about the calories of calories, all calories, calories, calories. It's like, okay, you're sort of missing the main piece of it, which is like, what does your body do with those calories? Because food contains calories. Yes, that's the energy, but it contains information, right? Contains instructions because your body responds with certain hormones and depending on the food, they're different hormones, right? So, you're going to get different instructions on what you're supposed to do with those calories, right? And it's affected not just by the food, but by digestion, by processing, by absorption, you know, even things like,

by light, by, I mean, literally.

Exactly. If you don't sleep enough, right? So, everybody knows, right? It's been well established. You, you, you go into a sleep deprivation state, right? And you can do this experimentally. Deprive somebody of sleep for like, you know, a week. You know, you give them four hours a day or something like that. And they gain weight. They're eating more. They're gaining weight. It's like, okay, yes, calories in is greater than calories out. But why? It's clear because we did it experimentally. It's the lack of sleep, right? So, it wasn't the calories was not the, that was the result. It wasn't the cause of the problem, right? And that's where the calories thing bothers me all the time because it's like these calories in, calories out people are always like, "Every single problem is solved by eat fewer calories." It's like, to the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. So, it's like, you didn't get enough sleep, so the solution is eat fewer calories. Like, I don't think so.

It's a good point. It's a really good point.

If it's ultra-processed foods, the solution is eat fewer calories. Well, isn't it to eat less ultra-processed foods?

Yeah. If your problem is stress, the solution is eat fewer calories. Like, isn't it deal with your stress?

Yeah. I mean, you would need a manual this thick for every certain use case in which, you know, oh, you, you know, my, my wife yelled at me today. I guess I got to pull with that manual. How many less calories should I eat? I know. I mean, it's, it's an interesting. You said a very important word a number of times, and it's for whatever reason, a word that keeps popping up for me lately, and that was signal. Right. Our body, our brain is interpreting signals.

Yeah.

Constantly bombarded with signals.

Yeah.

Some we detect, some we possibly don't detect, right? Some that we environmentally, uh, you know, influential signals that maybe who knows, right? Who knows what, you know, BPA are doing. Who knows what stuff that breathe in is also signaling too, right? We just, there's a lot we don't know, but we're just coming this bombardment of signals, and that is what's determining,

Yeah. Yeah.

The output, or in a lot of cases, like where our homeostasis is, because no one's denying that calories are indeed a signal.

Yeah.

But they're not the signal. Like, that is, maybe they're, maybe they're even an important signal. I would even go so far as saying they're an important signal, but so is light. Like, so is how many photons are hitting my retina. You know, all these things that change the magnitude of importance of that calorie.

Yeah. Some might even make it nil. Yeah.

Right. Some might make it way more.

Yeah.

And I think that sometimes, the mental gymnastics that I'm seeing some of the die-hard calories in, calories out people going through.

Yeah. I mean, they're, it's like, you have some of the people that have been saying calories in, calories out, and now they're making thoughtful, you know, there's one particular, I interviewed a guest, you know, very well-known researcher, uh, probably one of the probably one of the most well-known fat loss researchers, and he's currently doing a lot of work on like menopause. And he's a guy that's been calories in, calories out for so long. And like he flat out is just saying like, "I don't have the answer when it comes to menopause because I've spent my whole career talking about calories in, calories out." He's like, "And then when I get to menopause, I'm just like, well, maybe, maybe there is something else going on, right?"

It has to be, but it has to be, right? Because the whole dialogue around perimenopause. So, first of all, perimenopausal weight gain is real. You can measure it, right? It happens. So that like, if it's due to calories in, calories out, which is ultimately caused by personal choice, which is the sort of paradigm that we've all been taught, why is it that every single perimenopausal woman is choosing to eat more? That makes no sense at all. All at the same time, come on, right around menopause. That's the stupidest argument ever. Clearly, there must be a hormonal reason. And it's not really that hard to see. So if you look at estrogen, estrogen and progesterone are actually quite interesting because estrogen is an appetite suppressant. So if you follow how much women eat during their over the period, the menopause, like the menstrual cycle, it actually follows a very stereotypical pattern. So from the first day of the cycle to ovulation, so about the midpoint of the cycle, estrogen is building up. And because estrogen is an appetite suppressant, they actually start to eat less. And you can measure it when you measure. There's been multiple studies. And you can see when you measure large numbers of people that women will eat less. Then it flips. As you, as you ovulate, the progesterone starts to go way up afterwards. And progesterone is an appetite stimulant. So as you, you know, over the first part of the cycle, women are eating less and less and then they eat more and more. So over the, the, the 28-day cycle, it sort of flattens out, right? But there's a, it's, it's not the same all the way through. So as you go into the perimenopause period, your estrogen levels are going down. So you're getting hungry. So you're eating more. It's not a choice because you don't get, you can choose what you eat, but you can't choose to be less hungry. And that's the real important thing to understand. Same with the calories out. You can choose to exercise, but you can't choose your metabolic rate, right? None of these are in your control. It's only controlled by your hormones. And the thing about progesterone that I think is fascinating is that you can use a synthetic progesterone. And we've been using it for like 35 years. It's called Megace. It's a drug that's used in cancer medicine. It's a synthetic progesterone to stimulate appetite. So if, like, we understand that, why wouldn't you simply say, "Hey, this synthetic progesterone stimulates appetite. Hey, in the latter part of the cycle, we see that women are eating more. Why? Well, progesterone is growing up." Hey, that wasn't too difficult to figure out, was it? But again, it comes back to this again and again. It's the hormones. It's the estrogen. It's the progesterone. It's the testosterone. Right. Testosterone very clearly linked to to amount of body fat. Estrogen very clearly linked. Progesterone clearly linked. Like things like neurotransmitters, right? So antipsychotics, anti-depressants, well known for like 35 years to cause weight gain, right? A lot of these antipsychotics cause weight gain because they mess around with those neurotransmitters that are affecting you. None of it is due to calories. None of it. None of the Ozempics, none of the, you know, Fen-Phens, none of the amphetamines, none of this stuff is related to calories. When you physically restrict calories, you can do that. You can cut somebody's stomach out, right? Bariatric surgery was, you know, had a heyday in the 2010s, right? We're going to cure obesity. Everybody thought it was the next big thing. The number of ruin-wide bariatric surgeries peaked in 2010. The only reason we're not doing more is because it didn't work. In the long term, people regain that weight. Why? Because you're physically restricting calories, but you never solve the hunger problem, right? Because the hunger is the underlying problem, whether it's the homeostatic, the hedonic, or the conditioned hunger. And I think of it this way. So there's this, there's this concept in logic called the three W's. So if you want to understand a problem to sort of a very deep level, you have to ask the question why three times. So if you ask the question, for example, why did the Titanic sink? Right? The wrong answer is because it hit an iceberg. And then you say, "Why? That that makes no sense." Because that's very superficial first-order thinking. If you simply say, "Okay, well then how do you avoid future marine disasters?" Your advice would be, "Don't hit icebergs." It's like, that's not very good advice. Like, I know that already, right? So then you ask the question, your second why is, why did the Titanic hit the iceberg? And the answer is, well, because the captain couldn't turn it in time. So why couldn't the captain turn it in time? Because it was going too fast. So the answer is, the Titanic sank because it was going too fast, not because it hit an iceberg. So now you can say to future captains, "Make sure that when you can't see or you have inclement weather, slow down."

You say the third part of that is under what condition. Right. Exactly. Because then you also can't tell like certain ships like you don't go too fast because what if the conditions are perfect for it, right? So then you have these other. Yeah. Exactly. It's the same thing. If, if some, if you're, if you get into an accident, your car flies off the highway or something, what is wrong? You went too fast. It wasn't because the frictional gravity and, you know, friction and gravity was less than the centrifugal force of the turn in the road, right? Nobody ever says that. So, if you apply that same sort of deep-level thinking to to weight gain, you say, "Why is somebody gaining weight?" It's because calories in is greater than calories out. Yes, I agree with you. That's not my question. That's the "don't hit icebergs" advice, right? It's the superficial advice that actually is not helpful. You want to know why is calories in greater than calories out, right? I'm not questioning that it's greater. I'm questioning why it's greater. And the answer is because you're hungry, right? That's why you eat because you're hungry. You stop eating when you're full. That's the answer. So, you get to the third why, which is the most fascinating to me because I don't think we talk about it enough. Why are you hungry? Is it the physical hunger, which is the homeostatic hunger? Is it the emotional hunger, which is the hedonic hunger? Or is it this third conditioned hunger, which is a sort of social hunger? Because I think that is actually the most interesting because I think it applies so much to our sort of modern-day living because this sort of influence of the environment on our personal decisions is actually extremely powerful and one that we don't, you know, we, we recognize it's important in certain certain, you know, conditions like social influence, right? Influencers and stuff, they're very important because, you know, they affect how we see things. So the people around you have a huge impact on what you eat, what you do, how you eat, you know, it just makes such a huge difference. So why wouldn't it be important in body weight, right? And it's clear that it is because there's lots of studies, for example, they did a study where they, they tracked people through social networks. If your best friend becomes obese, your own risk of obesity goes up by like 170%, or something like that. I mean, huge. You can take military families and move them into a place where there's high obesity prevalence, and their risk of obesity goes way up, right? Because the people around you influence what you do, right? If you're always going for a hike, if you're always going, you know, to the beach, right? You're going to go, you, if your friends are doing that, you're going to do that. If your friends are just, you know, going out and drinking beer and, you know, eating pizza, then that's what you're going to do too. That's just the way life is. That's being human, right? I see it because when I go out with my high school friends, the diet's not good, right? There's a lot of like junk food and fried foods and stuff. But when I go out with my family, it's generally pretty good because we're more, more adept to that. So it's not my issue only, it's about the people that you're with, right? So it's like, okay, that's important. So why don't we acknowledge that? How are we going to change that? Right? And you, you see it on a country level as well, right? Even within a, like you take a, um, people like a Japanese person or an Italian person, their rates of obesity are extremely low. But like Italians, they love food, right? But they don't eat the ultra-processed food. They eat natural foods and they eat in a specific way, right? And they don't have a lot of obesity. But now take that Italian or Japanese person, plop them in New York City or San Francisco, what happens? The rate of obesity goes way, way up. Like there's a five-fold increase in obesity. Like the minute you take them from Tokyo and plop them in San Francisco, and then by the second generation, their risk of obesity has, you know, matched the Americans. So clearly, it's an environmental issue. So what is it about the sort of food environment that's what we need to figure out, right? And ultra-processed foods play a big role, this sort of conditioning of food, right? Where food is available all the time, but not just that, but it's encouraged almost, right? The snacking is encouraged. There's constant reminders all the time. So this is called conditioned hunger because this is an area of behavioral psychology. So conditioning is where you pair two things and you can actually link them together. So the classic experiment was Pavlov's dogs. So what they did was they took dogs, they gave them food, and the, the dogs would get hungry, they'd salivate. Now, you ring a bell and then give them food. And pretty soon the dog learns that when it hears the bell, it's going to get fed. So then when you ring a bell, but don't give it food, it gets hungry because it's expecting food, right? And the problem is, we're all now like Pavlov's dogs. Like we've linked food to everything. So the minute you get up, "Oh, never skip your breakfast," right? You got to have, you go get coffee, you got to have something with your coffee, a donut or something, right? Lunchtime, you got to eat. You get in the, you know, and then you have to have a snack after school. You have to have a snack before bed. You eat when you're in the car. You eat when you're in the movie theater. You eat when you're watching a sporting event. You eat when you're watching TV. You eat when you're walking. Everywhere, everywhere you go, it's food, food, food, food, food. So, what you've got is you've got this conditioned stimulus and you're responding all the time. So, you're creating a lot of conditioned hunger, which is going to make you eat because it was the hunger that drove the eating, right? You can't just say eat fewer calories, that's like saying to an alcoholic, or you're saying to a drug addict, "Just take less cocaine." That'll solve your problem. No, you haven't solved the hunger piece of it. So, where in other countries they've done a much better job, right? Uh, in the United States, of course, it's everywhere. Like, you don't even have to think about it. Like, you know, there's foods, food cues everywhere. And that's what people call this food noise, right? Because you get outside, people, it's not people, but these cues are screaming at you to eat, right? You go to a meeting at work and you're used to having seeing a plate of bagels or a plate of cookies, right? You walk down the the hallway, "Oh, there should be a bowl of candy on so-and-so's desk." "Oh, we're having so-and-so's birthday. We're going to have cake, right?" So, cues all the time screaming at you in your face, "You must eat." Well, guess what? After a while, you're going to eat. But it wasn't the individual problem. It was a sort of environmental problem, right? Because you could take that person and then plop them in, you know, in Japan or something, and they'll lose that weight. Like, I, I read these stories actually all the time. They're actually quite interesting. It's like, um, you know, somebody will write, for example, "Oh, you know, I came from Italy or Japan or something. I I went to the US to study. I gained like 30 pounds. I went home, my mom like cried or something, right? Then then I lost like all the weight in like 30, uh, you know, in the two months I was home. Then I went back and regained it." I'm like, "Yeah, how much more clear do you want me to be? It's the environment." And that's where things like the new dietary guidelines and these discussions we're having about ultra-processing, about environmental cues are so important because we need to move past this whole calories, calories, calories, and then the unwritten accusation, it's your fault.

That's the problem that bothers me, the "it's your fault" problem, because it's not.

No, I mean, shame is shame is one of the worst possible things that you can carry. There's so many of these calorie bullies, right? Calories. It's calories.

It's becoming bullying. It's becoming bullying. And the thing is, is and that is that is where I have started to become frustrated in the last, especially in the last year. It's it feels like bullying. And I don't know what has changed in me to to make me feel that way.

Something. I mean, I've always had a little bit of a riff with it, but it feels like bullying. And it's so much to the point where I'm realizing like, are we not seeing that we are shaming people inadvertently?

Yeah. Yeah.

Cuz we're not outright saying it, but we're inadvertently shaming people by somewhat gross negligence of some things that are, you know, and it's like, when you look at the literature, yes, Sally had a change in her life for whatever reason that now makes her eat more calories. And yes, she gained weight. So, I get it. It's the same thing with the Titanic. I'm not saying that those calories didn't cause the weight gain,

but I'm also saying that it's not always equal.

Those extra calories might cause 7 lbs of fat gain in Sally and 4 lb of fat gain in Bill with 3 L pounds of muscle, right?

So, and I know you're not saying that calories don't matter, but I think the overemphasis on it,

Yeah.

at the very least, leaves a lot to be desired. At the very worst, is actually giving people a disordered eating or disordered way of looking.

at eating.

I think so. And because when people are, I mean, I take many people that I know and let's just forget research for a second. I'll just talk about, you know, relationships and people that they get so frustrated because they will starve themselves. They will do these things like with, you know, go down to 1,200 calories. They'll drop weight and then their body adjusts and all they hear is move more, eat less, move more, eat less.

So, it's very discouraging, but it also develops an overfixation on one one thing, one signal, an overfixation where we are obsessing, obsessing over calories to the point where we're actually not surrendering and realizing that there's a lot going on. And let's take a wide angle perspective at all this and realize that if we get out of this myopic way of looking at just calories, we can embrace that we have an environmental problem.

Yeah. Right. We have a Q problem. We have a social problem. But no one wants to actually just sit like step back and admit we have an effing problem.

Yeah. Right. Because that takes taking a really good hard look at yourself, your country, your regulations, your environment. And that's difficult.

Yeah. And this is what I've always felt is that the people sort of in charge, these sort of nutritional sort of authorities have always been so on the calories bandwagon that when it doesn't work. What they do is they turn around and they say it's your fault, right? Which is basically blaming the victim, right? So you take this example of somebody who eats 1,200 calories a day, right? So 1,200 calories, then their weight plateaus because it always does, right? What it means is that their metabolic rate has gone down to 1,200 calories a day. And I've seen people down to 800, right? So it's like they measured it, it was like 800. Like that's an insanely small amount of food to be burning every day, right? You're so you're eating basically nothing, but you're not losing weight because you're eating 800 calories and burning 800 calories, right? And so obviously the question is why is your metabolic rate so damn low, right? You don't get to control your metabolic rate. So it's the hormones. Obviously, you screwed up your hormones. It was not the calories that's problem. It's their hormones which are all messed up, right? And that's the thing is that then but they can't admit that, right? So then they turn around and say you must be cheating, right?

Yeah. So there it is again blaming the victim and it's like this is just the most unfair thing that we do to people and it's like if you think about like you know say you had a school and one child fails fine that child didn't study maybe but what if 70 children out of a 100 fail would you say it's their fault or would you say no let's look at the school let's look at the teachers let's start to look at the learning environment obviously now you say okay in the United States 70% of people are overweight obese whereas in Japan it might be like 30%. Right? Well, the problem is not the individual. The problem is the system. But the people in charge of the system don't want to say the system is the problem. They don't want to say we're the problem. So, they like to go and point the finger at the individual saying you're cheating. You don't have enough willpower. You know, you're lying. You you have you're you know, you're you're like eating what you shouldn't be eating. That kind of thing. It's calories. It's calories. It's calories. Right. They keep beating the same drum and it's not helping. Right. Has it gotten better?

Has I was going to say at a certain point we got to start looking at results.

Exactly. All right. We got we got We have years of results and it's been horrible. The data is actually shockingly bad. So in in the book uh the hunger code I I there's a interesting p I went over this interesting paper where it says what's the chance of m getting to a normal weight if you're say over obese say BMI over 30 and it's actually like the failure rate you know and this is mostly calories in calories out the failure rate is about 99.7%. So that's crazy, right? It's like that's your failure rate. So understand that when you fail, you are expected to fail. This calories and calories and doctors know this, right? There's a reason doctors up until recently, like with the weight loss drugs never talk about weight loss. It's because they know the cal cutting calories is so so bad. It just doesn't work. The data bears it out. Like who hasn't done calories in calories out, right? Every single person who's overweight has done calories in calories out. It's obviously failed them. Virtually every single one, right? If you ran around and saw anybody who's overweight and you're to guess like they do calories in calories out, the answer is almost always yes, right? They've definitely done it. It's not like they have never heard of it. It's like these people come out and pretend like nobody's heard of it. Like come on. Like who hasn't heard of this stupid calories and calories? And it's not that calories aren't important, just like alcohol is not is important for alcoholism, but you got to get to the why are they drinking the alcohol? Is it addiction? Is it depression? Is it post-traumatic stress disorder? Because when you get to the why of the whole thing, that's when you can start making a difference. You can't just simply say drink less alcohol and then when they drink don't, you know, don't drink less, you say it's your fault, right? Like you look at Alcoholics Anonymous and they have 12 steps, none of which is like count your alcohol, right?

It's like it's all about forgiveness and family and sponsor like really important things, right? But we don't give that to the calorie people. We don't say, "Well, let's look at, you know, your emotions. Let's look at the addiction. Let's get you a friend who's going to help you, right? A sponsor or something, right? Let's let let's make sure that you're, you know, forgiving yourself and being kind to yourself and all this stuff. That's actually really good. None of that. You don't get that when you're trying to lose weight. You do when you're going through like alcoholism, but you don't get that when you're trying if you're dealing with a food addiction, for example. Right? Food addiction is so important because it's like it's actually like 30 40% of people trying to lose weight actually are addicted to it. And I think it's actually it's actually quite striking because it's like if you ever watch these TV shows, you know, where you have these thousand pound people or something like that, right? It's quite clear they're addicted, right? They show them eating and it's like you're not eating big heads of broccoli and stuff, right? It's all ultrarocessed foods. So, it's clearly the ultrarocessed foods and something in that processing has triggered off this sort of food addiction and you can't stop eating this even though you know it's going to kill you, right? It's not like these people are stupid. They know it's going to kill them. Of course, they know, but it's the addiction. So, why don't you use this whole playbook of addiction medicine that we've developed, right? forgiveness and emotions and friendships and purpose and all this sort of stuff and help people. Like seriously, like we have three different types of hunger and everything is calories, calories, calories. Each of these has a different toolkit. If you don't sleep, you need a different tool than if you have, you know, environmental cues, the food noise, or if you have um, you know, hydonic pro, hydonic hunger problems with like, you know, uh, there's too much advertising, like there are ways to do it. Like, you know, for example, um, if you know, for for me, for example, like I used to go to I get a coffee like most of the days, right? And it's like there's always like donuts and stuff and before I'd like get some sometimes, right? Now it's like, well, since I know that that's going to be a temptation, what do I do now? I order all my coffee on the app. Then I'm not tempted. I don't see the donut or whatever. I don't have to deal with it. But what I've done is I've redesigned my environment to make it easy, right? I get my coffee, I go pick it up, I see the doughnut there, but I'm not going to line up. I have my coffee. I'm done. I'm out. So you're only you're only like nudging people that little bit just to do it right. That's all it takes. But you have to treat people with understanding, right? Understand the disease. Don't just say calories, calories, calories because that's that so superficial simplistic thing. And that's what, you know, the obesity code was about was really getting past that idea. That's what the hunger code is like. Getting let's get past this idea that it's just about calories. It's like yes the hormone is important but this is sort of a it takes it further because it takes it into the emotional realm as well as the the social environmental realm right so because those are really important aspects of eating behavior that are driving the problem.

What about some of the um like even if we go back to the first type of hunger where it's a little bit more you know homeostatic hunger uh obviously the second two types of hunger directly influence that right because that's going to be like almost essentally downstream of that but you mention mentioned abstinence which sounds like almost like fasting right like in some ways like just just like cold turkey just just you know some of the best ways to downregulate some of the receptor activity and then increase you know sensitivity is to that's just, you know, and the nice thing about fasting is that it just kind of rips the band-aid off and you can do it in a short amount of time, right? It's like, where there's traditional caloric restriction, you might be like slowly regaining sensitivity of some of these, you know, leptin uh leptin sensitivity and whatnot. and and it definitely will happen and restricting calories will get you there ultimately in in some ways, but by ripping off the band-aid and kind of like a stronger signal or a stronger uh removal of the stimuli will ultimately allow for sensitivity. So, I think that's what you meant by abstinence, but what are some other things that people can do for that homeostatic side? Because I find people like to have be like, "Yes, I am dealing with this." You know, what is something that I could throw into the mix that might help me with X?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that's actually the the first part of the book which is talking about homeostatic hunger. There's I actually try to keep it practical. There's like 50 weight loss tips and sort of three golden rules of weight loss. But there's lots of ways to sort of modulate the carbohydrate content say um to get lower insulin response because what you're trying to do is lower insulin because insulin is the hormone that tells your body to store more fat. So there's things like for example if you eat natural carbohydrates versus processed carbohydrates that's a big difference right so cutting the number of carbohydrates works yes but changing it from processed unprocessed and that's like the sort of instant oat versus steel cut oats or applesauce versus apples right so that that's one way of doing it if you eat natural carbohydrates like beans and you know peas and stuff it's a lot less um insulinogenic and and you can see this on things like the glycemic index, right? So, those are very well-defined things. If you look at the the highest glycemic index, it's all ultrarocessed foods. It's all white bread and Cheerios and corn puffs and rice puffs and stuff. So, some way that you've changed it. When you get to natural sort of squash and all that sort of stuff, they're still carbohydrates, but their glycemic index is a lot lower, usually about a third of what uh the ultrarocessed carbohydrates are. So changing it to less processed carbohydrates, eating more fiber is another great way. Changing the food order is really really interesting because if you eat two meals and they've done this study where they had sort of carbs versus sort of uh meat and veggies. So it was bread and orange juice versus um uh chicken and vegetables. And what they did was they gave one group the carbs first, then the meat and vegetables, and then they simply took that same group and flipped them. So they take the same person measure and they gave them the meat and vegetables and then the carbs after like 10 minutes, right? And what you see is that when you change the simply the order of the food, the insulin response is significantly lower. It's much better, which means that you're getting less of that signal to store fat. It's like 25% lower. Uh and the thing is that if you think about mechanistically what's happening is that when you eat the bread and orange juice, what happens is that that's 100% carbohydrates. So carbohydrates are glucose and the ultrarocessed carbohydrates are easily digested glucose. So it goes down into the stomach. It goes out of the stomach very quickly into the intestines where it goes into the bloodstream. But that what goes into the intestines is 100% glucose. If you switch it and you put the chicken and vegetables first and then 10 minutes later put the bread and orange juice. What happens is as it gets down is turning through the stomach, it's going to get mixed up, you know? So what goes into the intestines is not 100% glucose. There's a little bit of chicken. There's a bit of vegetables and a bit of bread and a bit of orange juice, right? So you're talking about much less. It's not like 100% glucose. So therefore, the rise in glucose, and this gets back to the sort of speed of absorption, is much lower and therefore your insulin response is much lower. But it's the exact same foods in the exact same portions. But it's simply the order that you switched. The you know what's important is that then you say, well, how do you apply that? Well, don't eat the bread at the beginning of the restaurant meal, right? Ask for it to be served with or have it after. You're actually going to do way better if you don't eat the bread at the beginning of the meal because of course when you have it at the beginning of meal, you're going to fill up. You're going to eat more of that bread than if you had the chicken vegetable first. So even though in the experiments they have the same portions, if you actually eat the the the the meat and vegetable first, you're going to wind up eating less of the bread because you're full, right? Because the tidy signaling has already gone on. So food order is very important. Um food time meal timing. So if you eat very late at night, it tends to cause more insulin response. So if you take the same meal, you can measure this. If you take somebody and give them the exact same meal in the morning versus at night, there's a much higher response insulin response if you take the meal at night. It's because in the morning time you actually have the signal from the uh brain, excuse me, you have the signal from the brain that is uh the counter regulatory hormone. So this is part of the circadian rhythm at 5:00 a.m. or so. you got all this growth hormone and cortisol and sympathetic tone which is going to antagonize the effect of the insulin. So therefore when you eat this meal you're not going to get as much insulin response as you will later on at night. So you're actually getting much less by simply moving your meals earlier. And that's the reason a lot of people are using this early TR which is the early uh timerestricted feeding. So instead of saying, you know, okay, we're going to do an eight hour feeding window, but it'll be like sort of like 2 PM to 8:00 PM, they're saying, let's move that up to like 10:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. sort of thing, right? So that's the ETR, the early timerestricted feeding.

And it makes a lot of sense because the point is to try and lower the insulin, one by restricting your feeding window, but also moving it up earlier. So you're taking advantage of the the ways that you can change the foods. So there's different ways. Another one is resistant starch. So another fascinating topic. So resistant starch is a starch that your body doesn't absorb. So you can get this by taking rice, you cool it down like in the fridge or freezer and then you reheat it. And when you do that, what happens when you cool the rice is that some of the starch crystallizes. And that's why when you eat cold rice, it's it's it's inedible. It's brittle. It's really hard. So when you um when you heat it back up, it sort of redesolves into sort of a normal state, but some of the crystals remain. You can't taste it, but again, because some of the starch is now resistant starch, your body doesn't absorb it. So you're getting again 10, 15, 20% reduction by using that simply cooling and then reheating rice. And they'll taste exactly the same cuz that's what we do when we make fried rice. you actually cool it and then and then uh cook it, right? And you can do the same with potatoes except that you actually can't cool it and then reheat it because when you reheat it, all that resistance starts just melts away. But if you eat cold potatoes like potato salad, uh vinegar is another one. So organic acids when you eat them with carbohydrates reduces the insulin levels, reduces the glycemic index. Why? Because these organic acids, so vinegar is acetic acid. um fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut as lactic acids and citric acid from lemon juice they will inhibit salivary amalayise. So what happens when you eat say bread which is a starch you break it down with uh uh this enzyme called amalayise which breaks the glucose into small pieces which makes you absorb it. If you inhibit the salivary amalayise with vinegar for example then the glucose doesn't get chopped up and the absorption goes way down. So instead of getting the big spike, you're getting this sort of slow rise, which is so important. It's the speed of absorption. So again, very simple, like if you're going to eat the bread, have it with the olive oil and vinegar. Don't eat naked carbohydrates, right? Naked carbohydrates are sort of this 100% carbohydrate load. So if you're eating breakfast and you're eating white bread and jam, that's naked carbohydrates. That's all carbohydrates, all refined. And it's the same idea as don't drink on an empty stomach, right? Because the alcohol is going in. you got nothing else to sort of balance it with. So, you're getting all this absorption very quickly, right? Same thing with carbohydrates. Don't do it. Right? So, there's all these different ways. Walking after a meal is another one that's super super interesting. So, they've done these studies which I think are fascinating where, you know, they give somebody a meal, but then they they have them walk. So, they walk them sort of before the meal and then give them the meal. They measure them without walking and they're roughly the same. So if you walk before a meal or if you, you know, don't walk at all, it's about the same. But if you walk after a meal, it blunts the rise in your glucose, right? So you're going to get like 10 or 20% lower insulin, lower glucose effect. And you get the best effect when you immediately walk. And it lasts for about sort of 20 to 30 minutes. So once you get past 30 minutes and you can go for a walk, you're actually not getting that sort of extra little boost, right? And and and it's it's so again, the human body is so smart because it's like, why would that be, right? And it's like, well, think about it. If you're going to walk immediately after a meal, your body is going to want to leave the energy out there for you to use because it's like, hey, you're you're you're exercising, you're walking, right? So therefore, if you just, you know, spike up your insulin, all that's going to go into storage. So the body's like, "Okay, let's not push the insulin so high so that we leave some of these calories just floating out there for for everybody to use, right? The glucose for everybody to use." So you see this effect and it's like, okay, well, how do you do that? Well, that's very simple. In California, it is anyway. After every meal, go for a walk and then come home and clean up, right? And you might go for 15, 20 minutes, right? But it's like, oh, that's very simple, but you're going to have major effects because you could go for a walk, but if you go an hour after your meal, you get whatever walking benefit, but you don't get that extra little boost, right?

It's sort of like, you know, with muscle growth and protein, right? When you exercise, there's that, you know, if you take protein sort of after after exercise, there's actually this window where you get a little bit of extra sort of muscle, right? It's the same thing because the body's so smart. like it it works in ways we don't even understand but then when you look at it you say oh that's pretty smart right leave some of that energy out there so therefore you don't want so much insulin right so these are all different ways you can use to sort of change the diet in ways that are not necessarily just cutting down carbohydrates right and then you think about okay well let's think about how people traditionally eat right you take your bread with olive oil and vinegar it's like whoa That's brilliant, right? You're avoiding the naked carbohydrates. You've got the vinegar. Or you got vinegared rice with sushi. Oh, that's brilliant. Dumplings. What do you do? Classic condiment is vinegar. You dunk that thing in some vinegar. Like vinegar and ginger is sort of classic for dumplings, right? From Chinese cuisine. But it's like, oh, that's so smart, right? because now you're sort of taking it and and and sort of antagonizing it. Any any natural carbohydrates come with a lot of fiber. It's like, oh, well, that's going to work. That's going to counteract the whole, you know, a lot of the negative effects. So, it's not just about carbohydrates. It's about the it's about the hormones, right? And so, you have this process. It's the food that goes to digestion to absorption to hormones to weight gain. And what's weird is that, okay, so we've worked this out. We know all this stuff. This is not new research. So why ignore it? Like why pretend that digest speed of digestion or gastro transit time or speed of absorption? Why pretend it doesn't matter? Why pretend hormones don't matter? Why are you pretending that the only thing is calories? So in in my book I have this diraph and there's like 40 different items which I list as you know being important. Some of we talked about it's like so why is everybody focused on that one thing? the one calories thing, right? It's like that makes no sense. Like it's so unscientific, right? It's it's it's it's it's like you focused on, you know, a single item, right? It's like if you're working out and you only work out your right bicep, you won't be healthy, right? You lot of muscles that you need to exercise, right? It's like, come on. Like, why would we do that in in cal like calories? Yes, sure. But hormones, sex hormones, even testosterone, estrogen, because you can manipulate them in different ways, whether it's hormonal therapy or whatever, right? Um, but again, it's like, you know, you can manipulate the the ultrarocessed foods, you can manipulate the sort of uh addiction piece. You can, you know, you can change so many parts of the diet to make a difference.

Yeah. I mean, you can see, you can see it with the testosterone literature, too. is like, you know, where protein allocation and where does, you know, you give someone x amount of calories and x amount of protein and they're on testosterone replacement, they're going to build more muscle with those calories. And then that has a downstream effect of influencing their basal metabolic rate. And then so then so then it's like what was calories in calories out on day one is not the same as what yes you could still make the argument that it's still calories in calories out but that's not again we're not a closed thermodynamic system where that would apply like linearly.

Um, you mentioned the the protein piece but have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis before?

I've heard of it. Um, I mean, I don't know a lot about it. Um, I mean, I think it's, you know, the protein leverage is, I think, and I'm not that up to up on it, but I think it's where essentially the argument is that we're trying to get enough protein.

Yeah. You'll eat you'll eat until protein needs are met. Yeah.

Yeah. I I I'm not really convinced by it. I mean, I think protein is good in a lot of ways, right? Right? So if you look at protein and satiety for example, so you know that protein stimulates a lot of GLP-1. You know it stimulates a lot of peptide Y. You know, you know it doesn't have a lot of carbohydrates, so therefore not a lot of glycemic effect, right? So there's a lot of good things about eating protein. But on the other hand, is there really evidence that we're not eating enough protein? It's like I'm not really sure about that, right? I don't really think so. I think people subsist on much lower proteins than we have and been healthy. That's not necessarily to say optimal, right? So if your goal is to build a lot of muscle, then eating more protein is probably a good thing. On the other hand, it's always been an open question. Um because about you know say 10 years excuse me 10 years ago there is this whole question about protein and mTor right and I think that is still an open question and the question is so we know that protein stimulates this insulin uh this nutrient sensor called mTor and if you eat a lot of protein maybe you're stimulating a lot of mtor which you definitely are uh the question is that bad for you right and it's like it's possible because um you know if you're increasing mTor you're going to increase growth signaling and growth is not always good especially in something like cancer because in cancer for example we know that mTor inhibitors actually do good in terms of certain types of cancer right so rapamy which is mtor inhibitor are is used in many chemotherapeutic regimens was developed as a chemotherapeutic agent also is an anti-inflammatory agent so man, is this mTor really driving a lot of inflammation? Possibly. You know, so that's where it gets really confusing. So it's like, okay, I'm not really sure if it's good or bad, right? Because it's like if mTor is so good that we should be eating more protein, then why is it bad from this other sort of viewpoint that is rapamy may have some prolongevity effects in animals, right? and it has anti-cancer effects and it has anti-inflammatory effects and you're giving him and and you're stimulating mtor by eating all this protein. So, it's like

It's context dependent for sure.

Yeah. It to me it's hard to really put together as a full like I know a lot of people there are lots of proponents of just eat lots of protein and I'm not entirely convinced that that's that's going to be true. Like obviously a lot of this is very sort of preliminary, right? So if more data comes out, we might have more clarity on that. But you know, to me, the clearest sort of experimental evidence is from drugs because you can infect a single system, right? And and this is, you know, relatively clean. So whether I give you like what happens to your body when I give you insulin? Well, here's the cleanest experiment. Let me give you insulin.

Yeah. Fair. Fair.

Or what happens when I increase cortisol? Here's an experiment. Let me give you cortisol. Let me give you GLP1. Let me give you GIP. Let me stimulate your sympathetic nervous system with empmphetamines. Let me stimulate mTor. If works on the other side, let me block this. Right? So, mTor, let me block mTor. What happens? Ooh, there is a lot of good things that happen when you block mTor. So, it's like, oh wait, like, and obviously all of these hormones are natural hormones. So, too too much is good, not good, and too too little is also not good, right? So, you know, that's why some people they go crazy, right? They go, "Oh, mTor is bad." It's like, "No, no, no, no. It's natural. It's just you need to be in this sort of optimal range, right? Don't go too high, don't go too low." Nowadays, we're eating more protein than we ever have. So, maybe amar is a little higher than it than historically. So, should we eat more? I don't know. I I I I I I just don't see a lot of convincing evidence to me that there there's evidence of a protein leverage unless you get to very low levels. Like obviously when people are eating super low levels of protein, yeah, then you give them protein, they're like, "Yeah, let's you know."

Yeah. My my hunch is on it that I think sometimes we have an overfixation on macronutrients and I've become more and more interested at a micronutrient level and what is what is missing in ultrarocessed foods and things like that and that perhaps when you you have the literature on the protein lever hypothesis is interesting but it's definitely not conclusive. Um, and it does tend to come from people that are more protein deficient, like you said, like where where then then it becomes more important. But the question starts to become perhaps it's downstream of the protein because there's some other literature that shows that well maybe we eat until calcium needs are met. Maybe we eat until specific micronutrient needs are met. And maybe it's just the fact that when you're looking at protein as a whole, there's also, you know, because meat is generally fairly nutrientdense, like when you look at beef, nutrient-dense. So maybe it's a zinc issue, maybe it's a calcium issue, maybe it's a so it's hard to point at any individual thing. Uh but I think that the potential still stands that it's more about our body is asking for signals and specific micronutrients and the whole food matrix that we are not getting from processed foods, right? So it's regardless of what it is, protein, calcium, zinc, this, that, when you're talking about it in processed foods, which maybe possibly are fortified, but fortified in really random man-made amounts that is not found in nature, right? That we some guy decides that this is this is the perfect amount of calcium to put in, you know, just a random amount that doesn't take into consideration the rest of the food matrix.

Yeah. So you're getting again there's that word all these cattywampus signals. Yeah. that are leaving the body with a lot to be desired in terms of like what is considered complete for me and how hungry am I going to remain until I get name that nutrient right?

I think there's actually you know this this concept called food synergy or nutrient synergy which is that if you look at um you know nutrients individually like vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C and then try to like, you know tinker and put it in like Are you going to do as good a job as eating a piece of liver or something like that, which is, you know, nature's multivitamin, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff in there in the proportions that are probably good for you because we've evolved to eat foods like, you know, meat and liver and kidney and all this sort of stuff, right? So instead of taking this multivitamin with this sort of, oh, I think you should take this and this calcium, this magnesium, this phosphorus, this, like, wouldn't it be better? And there are actually supplements that do this. There's one called ancestral supplements where they say where this is basically freeze-dried liver, right? It's like, that makes a lot more sense. And you're taking this and giving a whole food solution. Yes, it's freezedried and put into a capsule, but at at the end of the day, it came from a liver that you freeze dry, right? As opposed to, oh, I synthesized a bunch of vitamin A and B and C and D and E, F and K and then stuck them all together, right? What do you know about the proportions, right? That that multivitamin does not exist in nature.

Dude. It's you know, the way that I look at that is like um individual like mic or nutrients that are put into like a multivitamin. That's like if you're a tech person like that's like eight bit, right? That's like looking at it in like eight bit where you're like okay like I can see it like that but but okay then obviously like the food matrix probably goes up to infinite bit right like you know whatever now you're looking at 64-bit.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there's also probably even other things that we're not even looking at. I mean depends how how woo you want to get but right I mean the energetic signature the value of a food like like how the animal was raised. There's probably even intent behind it if you start getting, you know what I mean? The point is is like we look at it individually in this small lens where be like, okay, 8bit characters, here we go. My my view of this in this really low resolution is that like we need vitamin A, we need vitamin D. What about possibly even other things that we're not even thinking about or looking at?

Yeah. It's this reductionist view, right? We've reduced it to a problem of vitamin B or something, right? It's like, oh, but there's actually more to it. Or, oh, it's a potassium problem. It's like, but what you don't realize is that the magnesium levels affect your potassium levels, right? So, you actually need it in the right proportion. And how do you know what that right proportion is? Right? And this is to me this bias that we sometimes have where we think we're going to be smarter than than nature, right? It's it's the whole breast milk fiasco all over again. Yep. Where, you know, so my mom raised me on formula like everybody. So the 70s was a big formula period, right? And it was because they convinced she actually had no problems breastfeeding. But everybody was convinced that formula was better than breast milk, right?

Because humans are smarter.

Because you were smarter. We outsmarted like nature, right? And what is interesting, of course, it turned out to be the exact opposite. Breast milk is the best, right? But it actually took a concerted public relations effort in the 90s, the breast is best campaign to bring back breast milk because the conceit was not it wasn't limited to breast milk but it was this conceit that we are actually so much smarter than mother nature where I think we do a lot better if we just say I think whatever was natural is probably the best not because of any you God ordained whatever is because that's the way we evolved, right? We evolved to be best with what is natural. So, you can't do better than that, right? So, if you're taking, you know, a multivitamin, take natural, like take some liver, take some nutrient-dense thing that's better for you. If you don't like liver, you can take these supplements or whatever. But at least that is going to be a better approximation of what's good for you than some guy who decided that you needed a bit of A and B and C and D and E and K and zinc and cobalt and you know it's like okay

You're not going to win that mathematical equation either. You know, you're not going to like because you know you mentioned the potassium magnesium. Okay. Well, then you're stressed out and you burn through more and more magnesium stores. Okay. Well, okay. Sorry, that formula doesn't work. We need to, you know, it's just it's I think you've got with how complex we can get with this and how detailed we can get into the mechanisms, it's almost as though simple is better.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think that the the point also is that well there we're we're not at the pinnacle of knowledge. Like we're always learning, right? Like you know, we always think we're at the pinnacle of knowledge, right? like you know in the 1900s right there's this patent office guy who said I think everything that's invented has been now invented right we can't get better so we always think we're at the pinnacle of knowledge but then when you look back right in the 80s you thought we were that pinnacle of you know knowledge but clearly not right and everything advances it's the same thing like nature is sort of way ahead of us because it's developed over millions or even billions of years of evolution and we think we're at the pinnacle of knowledge but they're actually way up here. So, you can't see all of what's going on, but they've actually developed all these things, all these homeostatic mechanisms, all these hormones, all of the ways that the controls and it's been relatively successful. And then we come in thinking we're at the pinnacle of knowledge that we're going to actually do a better job, right? It's like, okay, come on. That's that seems ridiculous. That's why you have this concept that Nim Taleb talks about. I don't know if you've read his books. The guys are like brilliant. So he wrote the black swan antifragile. Anyway, he has this concept called the Lindy effect. So uh what it is is basically uh for something that is non-p perishable, the older it is, the longer it's likely to last, right? So if you have a um a song that's been around for a long time, right? Say happy birthday, it's probably going to be around a lot longer, right? If you have a song that's really popular now and then fades, you know, it it's probably gone, right? Or a book, if you have a book like, you know, Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, it's been read for 400 years, it'll probably be around for 400 more. And that's a Lindy effect. So it's basically the test of time, right? So the time has weeded out all the stuff that isn't useful, right?

So that's the same with advice. So something like fasting is like the oldest advice in the book. It's literally in the Bible, right? So you know it's at least 2026 years old, right? At least. So, if it's relevant for 2,000 plus years of human history, it's likely to be relevant for 2,000 more as opposed to like something like say seed oils, which is controversial, I'll give you, but seed oils have been around for, you know, a few decades, right? Really took off in the 50s, so six or seven decades. That sort of pales in comparison to this idea that, you know, of not eating ultrarocessed foods, which has been around a lot longer, right? And that was the same conceit, you know, same as the breast is best. This whole thing about margarine.

Yeah. It's like God, we know. Let's give you guys trans fats. Let's just like go.

So the whole thing, right? And I grew up through that whole thing. Yeah. Don't eat butter. Eat margarine. So much healthier for you. It was horrible, horrible stuff, right? And why? Because it's the Lindy effect. The margarine had only been eat like butter has been eaten for millennia probably, right? Thousands of years. Margarine's been around for like 30 or 40 years. It didn't take that long, like a few, you know, a few decades to figure out, wa that stuff is toxic. It's like toxic garbage, right? Now, like you can't even barely find margarine around. It's so it's so bad, right? Because everybody's gone back to butter, right? And it's like, but was denied. Same with um avocados. Like in the 80s, right? I I you'd get an avocado and people like, "Oh, you're gonna get a heart attack." It's like, actually, it turned out to be really good for you. Or olive oil. Olive oil has been around for thousands of years, right? You go to Greece and Spain. Coconut oil, they've been eating it on these, you know, in in the tropics for hundreds, thousands of years. Clearly not going to be that bad for you. If they've been eating coconut oil for, you know, hundreds, thousands of years in those places where it grows very abundantly, that's probably going to be fine because it's obviously not doing anything bad.

Yeah. We come around in the sort of 80s and say coconut oil is the worst thing because it's so much saturated fat. So remember this whole thing about popcorn being popped in coconut oil, right, in the theaters? It tasted good, so people did it. And then it's like, oh, saturated fat, it's going to kill you. Then they popped it in polyunsaturated oils. And it's like when you deep fry in polyunsaturated oils, it's actually super bad for you because the high heat. Yeah. It's actually super bad. You're actually better cooking in saturated fats because you get less of this oxidation. But, you know, but it's again this conceit that, oh, we're so much smarter than nature. Forget that we've been eating butter for thousands of years. We'll give you margarine. That's the the whole uh formula argument too, right? It's all over the place. It's like, oh, let's take creatin powder. It's like, okay, maybe maybe like I don't say that it's not, but the evident like I'd rather you eat some steak because that's the Lindy effect. You've been eating steak. Humans have been eating steak for a long time. It's likely going to be fine. you know, whey powder, creatin powder, whatever powder, not that much. You know, we don't have that that it hasn't withtood yet the test of time.

No, especially Yeah. I I it's a is a tool in your toolbox and it is an absolutely positively not because we know better than the universe, God, nature, you name it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. No, this is I think this is the the drum that needs to get beaten hard right now because I feel like we have reached a point of um optimization exhaustion and this ridiculous perfectionism where um and you can complicate fasting as much as you want. You know, you can do different things. You can make it complicated uh if you want to. You can you can do olive oil fasting. You can do sardine fasting. You can do X fasting. You can break a fast this way. the end of the day, all those things are fine and dandy. If they, you know, if they uh float your boat, that's cool. But the underlying message is simple, right? It's we go back to these we go back to these basics and we and we we learn the systems and we become in touch with our bodies again and we we we stop easier said than done but having these constant uh barrage of just signals that are making us hungry all the time and we come back and you know face facts with who we are right?

And the two you know I have three golden rules right the one is sort of avoid ultrarocessed foods right that's number one so basically eat real food. The second is make sure you do some fasting. It's like, is there any older rules in the book for good health than eat real food and make sure there's a period of time that you don't eat, right? Fast sometimes, right?

It's like that's like the most basic, the most ancient wisdom that we have. Yeah.

And that's why I made them the golden rules. The third is to sort of redesign your life so that you get rid of some of these social cues. So maintain a social environment that allows you to succeed. So make sure and and this incorporates it's a little sort of more nebulous but it actually is important. This this is the whole thing about you know the food cues and surrounding yourself with the right people and stuff right and having a purpose and having community and all this sort of stuff. Having the right mindset e it is nebulous but on the other hand it's actually really really important. It's like optimism, right? Like you can't measure it, but there was a study I saw. There's a clear association between people who are optimistic and people who live longer, right? It's like because when your mindset is positive, that influences how you see things.

Yep. And it just changes your whole outlook.

It you could even argue it changes your outcome, right?

Oh, I think it outcome. get like double slit experiment, right? It's it's everything is just a frequency until it collapses into observation, right? So, it's like how you view it, your intent, that gratitude that that that makes a difference. And it's probably not it.

isn't measurable, but that may literally shape your reality.

>> I think so. And it certainly, you know, you can see snippets of it like if you are optimistic or you have forgiveness or you have mindfulness, like you know, you'll see things differently, right? And maybe if you have less anger, you have less cortisol, which clearly is a good thing, right? If you do meditation and stuff, you can sort of artificially do it. But if you change your mindset, you can also do it, right?

>> And it's like you look at these people who are, you know, the happiest, right? And it's like, you know, people, you know, you see them, right? It's like they're they're happy because they're, you know, able to walk around. They've got their family. They've got good friends. They've got food, right? It's not that they've got $30 million in the bank, you know? Those are like the most miserable people sometimes because they're worried that somebody can take that money away from them, right? Whereas like the happiest people are like, you know, those and I have a lot of these patients who are like 90, 95, 100 and still doing well. And you look at them and like they live simply, they walk a lot, they move a lot, they have family, they that surrounds them, and you know, they do things for the family, the family does things for them. It's like what else do you really need? Right? What else are you really looking for? Right? That's the good life right there.

>> Yep.

>> And it's like and and sometimes a lot of these longevity people they're talking about, oh this, oh that, oh grip, strength, oh that. It's like um I think you're missing some really important other stuff, right? Like purpose.

>> You want you want to hold on and control so much

>> that you're missing the point, you know? It's like you just it's sometime sometimes it comes across borderline narcissistic. It's like you really want to live that long by holding on to that one thing or do you want to just

>> like

>> love, have gratitude, embrace connection, like enjoy your life and maybe not try to squeeze in this one thing. And it's uh man, it's just it's eye opening once

>> you feel what gratitude and just

>> positivity, right? And and I think this is one of the things um that religion has done very well, right? And this is not one particular religion, but almost all religions, right? what they do is of course there's um a lot of prayer which is very similar to meditation right you you're bringing people together all the time so whether it's once a week or every few days right you're getting together you're doing the same thing you feel like there's a purpose to your life right oh there's this divine plan whatever it is right and obviously different religions have different emphases on things that's like oh you know you're like ticking off all the boxes here right you you have fasting right? You have community, you have purpose, you have love. It's like, ooh, just because you can't measure these things like purpose and love doesn't mean that they're not important. It means you can't measure them, right? That's all it is, right? It's it's it's not V2 max, right? It's uh you know it's like you know that but but I I I just think that sometimes you have to sort of step back and just say well let's look and see like these are the people who are doing really really good like it's you know and how can organized religion have survived this long

>> in whatever form right whether it's Buddhism or you know Judaism or Christianity or Islam it it doesn't matter right they have they share these sort of things, right? The community, the love, the purpose, all of these things, the fasting. So, they share all of these same attributes and yet they've all persisted over thousands of years, right? That's the Lindy effect. What is it about these, right? Well, clearly there must be something there cuz they're not idiots, right?

>> Yeah.

>> It survived. Religion has survived.

>> Maybe because it does people good. and and and maybe it it's maybe we need to learn a little bit like be a little bit more sort of open-minded to the possibilities just like the calories discussion, right? Like it'd be good to be a bit more open-minded about the whole thing. It's like fasting 10 years ago, I was taking tremendous heat because it's like, "Oh, you're going to kill people. You're going to kill people like 12 hours. Oh my god."

>> Yeah.

>> It's like people can't do that.

>> Yeah.

>> It's it's when it all becomes a religion that it's a problem, right? It's just like just like the calories discussion can become a like when I say religion, I mean this dogmatic religion, right? It's just like if you would looked at religion in the world today, like yeah, a lot less hate would probably happen if there was a little bit more open-mindedness to the other religions, right? And understanding that what what's the commonality? What's the common denominators here? Some of these things like the connection, the the fasting, the purity, the connection to source, right? These are the things that, you know, fill in the blank. It's these common denominators and it's the same sort of thing like when you look at like the simplicity of diet like what is okay across the board with all these different kind of diets like what is sort of the common denominator right you're listening to natural cues you're not eating processed foods you're you know you're coming back to the basic you're taking breaks from food okay hm interesting right exactly so we're coming back to this common denominators here but

>> and where can everyone a find your book and where can everyone find you online

Yeah. So, the book is available everywhere. It's uh you know, I'm really excited about this book, honestly. It's a sort of follow-up to the obesity code. It's my first book I've written in about six years, and it's because I think that there's actually, you know, I thought I was sort of done, but then as I reading more and all this new research, I like there are really important aspects that need to be sort of brought forth, right? this these whole I all these ideas about sort of hideonic hunger conditioned hunger environmental stimulus really important so that that's available everywhere now and you know I've read read a lot of books but there's really not a lot of discussion about what is hunger how do we deal with hunger right and that I think is is is an important change to make um and on social media you can find me on YouTube under Jason fun or uh follow me on x.com or Instagram under Dr. Jason phone.

>> Perfect, man. Thank you very much.

>> Thank you.

>> Real pleasure.