Dhru Purohit Show - A Doctor’s Argument For Why Most Diet’s Fail: The Hidden Hormone Problem Driving Weight Gain and What To Do About It with Dr. Jason Fung

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, LMNT, Maui Nui, and One Skin. When we think about weight loss, it’s usually framed as a matter of willpower. Eat less. Move more. Try harder. But this episode explores an alternative perspective. Dr. Jason Fung argues that obesity isn’t simply about calories, but about hunger, hormones, and what he describes as a biological “fat thermostat” that may be working against you. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Jason Fung to unpack his framework for understanding weight gain and fat loss. Dr. Fung explains why he believes calorie restriction often fails, the three types of hunger he describes, and how what he calls “over-hunger” may drive weight gain more than overeating alone. He also breaks down his concept of the “fat thermostat,” metabolic compensation, and what he believes we can learn from other cultures about food environments. He shares his views on GLP-1 drugs, protein needs, and the three “golden rules” he recommends for resetting hunger naturally. Dr. Jason Fung is a Nephrologist, researcher, and bestselling author known for reshaping the conversation around obesity, diabetes, and fasting. His books, The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting, have sold over 1 million copies worldwide and have challenged conventional treatment approaches for type 2 diabetes. He is also the author of The Cancer Code and cofounder of The Fasting Method, a program that helps people lose weight and reverse type 2 diabetes through evidence-based fasting. His work has been featured in CNN, Time, The Atlantic, and Forbes. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Fung dive into: (0:00) Intro (00:37) The Real Problem Isn’t Overeating. It’s Over-Hunger (5:26) The 3 Types of Hunger (And Which One Is Controlling You) (13:08) Are Some Calories Actually More Fattening Than Others? (17:07) The “Fat Thermostat” That’s Secretly Defending Your Weight (33:51) How Ultra-Processed Foods Hijack Your Hormones (41:46) The “Healthy” Ultra-Processed Foods Hiding in Plain Sight (45:10) What Other Countries Get Right About Food (That We Don’t) (52:00) Who Told Us We Needed to Snack Every 3 Hours? (55:50) Are You Eating Enough Protein?  (1:03:23) GLP-1s: Breakthrough Tool or Temporary Fix? (1:12:34) The 3 Golden Rules That Actually Reset Hunger (1:19:45) Can You Overeat “Healthy” Food?  (1:21:45) Why Mindless Eating Is More Powerful Than You Think (1:29:35) The Hidden Habits That Keep You Hungry (1:37:12) Health Markers That Reveal Your Metabolism Is Struggling (1:45:10) Where to Go Deeper with Dr. Jason Fung Also mentioned in this episode: The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food Dr. Jason Fung Masterclass  The Biggest Ozempic Mistakes: What to Do After GLP-1 Drugs to Keep the Weight Off for Good with Dr. Holly Wyatt and Dr. James Hill For more on Dr. Fung, follow him on Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, LMNT, Maui Nui, and One Skin. Right now, get 20% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Check out LMNT’s new refreshing slim sparkling cans in Pineapple Salt, Lemonade Salt, Black Cherry Salt, and Orange Salt! Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free electrolyte sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Right now, Maui Nui Venison is offering my listeners a limited collection of my favorite cuts and products and a FREE 12-pack of venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more! Just go to mauinuivenison.com/dhru to secure your access now, but hurry, supply is limited! Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Jason Fung, welcome back to the podcast. A pleasure having you here, brother. Oh, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. We're talking today about hunger, weight gain, and the drivers behind why people overeat. But starting at the basics, one of the most fundamental questions you want people to think about today is not why are we gaining weight, but rather why are we hungry? Why are we so hungry in the first place? what's the distinction between those two questions and why is it so important as the foundation of

what we're getting into today? Because I think that what we need to focus on is sort of the deeper reasons behind why we're eating, right? Because if you think that we're overeating, that's fine. But if your advice is just eat less, well, that's not super helpful because you never understood why you're eating in the first place, right? So it's just like if you have an alcoholic and you say, well, alcoholism equals alcohol in minus alcohol. Oh, just drink less alcohol. Well, it doesn't work like that, right? You can't just tell somebody. You need to understand why they're drinking more, right? And it could be depression, could be, you know, addiction. And you have to treat that root cause, right? So it's about getting to that sort of deeper level of understanding. If you think about, say,

calories and hunger, if you simply reduce your calories, but, you know, eat roughly the same food, just less of it, which is sort of the standard advice, what happens? Well, you get hungry, right? So, okay, so you're eating less, but you're hungrier. Well, that's not going to last. Like, and you're not going to be able to maintain that for very long because you're constantly fighting with yourself. So what if you instead, you focus on the hunger, right?

If hunger goes down, then the calories will go down as well. But notice that you're not fighting with yourself anymore, right? And that's the real lesson of weight loss drugs like OZMPIC, right? So OZempic clearly is very effective, right? It's very popular and so on. But it doesn't restrict your calories in any way, right? There are ways to restrict your calories. In the 60s people, you'd wire their jaw shut for weight loss.

You could cut out somebody's stomach, right? That's bariatric surgery, the sleeve gastrectomy or the Ruan Y. It didn't work in the long term. So we thought in the 2010s, this bariatric surgery is going to cure everything. Obesity just went on and on, right? The number of surgeries have the Ruan Y surgery. which is the most powerful type of bariatric surgery, it peaked in 2010, right?

So why are you doing less of these surgeries if more and more people are suffering? Well, clearly, it's not working, right? Because that focused on the calories. Now, if you focus on the hunger instead, like OZempic, right? Because OZempic works because it decreases hunger. It's very successful.

So you see which one is important. Do you need to control hunger? Or do you need to control calories? And clearly the more powerful effect is the hunger because it's more of the root cause. So if you think about it this way, there's this concept in logic, which is called the three whys, which is if you really want to get to the heart of the matter, the real underlying root analysis, you have to ask the question why three times. So you might ask, for example, why did the Titanic sink, right?

And the wrong answer is because it hit an iceberg. And it's like, why is that wrong? Well, it's because it's a very superficial sort of first order thinking. If you simply were to say, okay, then how do you avoid this in the future? You'd say, don't hit icebergs. It's like, that's not really very good advice. It's pretty simplistic, right? So that's only the first why.

The second why is why did the Titanic hit the iceberg, right? That's what you really want to know. And the answer is, well, the captain couldn't avoid the iceberg. time, couldn't turn around. So why couldn't the captain turn it around in time? Because it was going too fast. Right. So that's the real answer. So now when you say, hey, how are you going to avoid future marine disasters, you're going to say, well, in inclement weather or limited visibility, you need to slow down. And that's going to be way better advice than don't hit iceberg. Why? Because you got to that underlying reason. It's the same if your if your car on a winter's day flies off the

side of the road. You don't say, well, it's because the force of gravity and the force of friction were exceeded by the centrifugal force of the turn. It's like, no, you went too fast. That's the answer, right? It's not the force of gravity or whatever. And calories lives at that very shallow first order thinking, right? So you say, why are you gaining weight? What calories in is greater than calories out. I agree with you, but that's only the first level thinking, right? I'm not interested that calories in is greater than calories out. I'm interested in why calories in is greater than calories out, right? And that's the real question. You can't just say eat fewer calories because that's not the answer. That's the don't hit iceberg's advice. And the reason calories in is greater than calories

out is because you're hungry, right? And that's fundamentally true. You eat because you're hungry and you stop eating because you're full, which gets you to the third why, which is to me the most interesting, which is, why are you hungry? And that's where when you start to look into the scientific literature, you find that there's actually multiple types of hunger. You don't eat for just one reason. There's the physical hunger that we all think about, you know, your stomach's growling and so on. And that's actually called homeostatic hunger. But there's also emotional hunger. You eat because you want to eat, because it gives you pleasure because it makes you feel better. That's like comfort foods, right, or dessert. You eat it because it gives you pleasure. Not because,

you know, you're hungry, you just ate a full meal. But you still eat dessert because you want to, right? That's called hedonic hunger. And that's this sort of emotional hunger. And that's where really the problems with ultra-processed foods and food addiction lies. And then there's a third problem, which is called, which is a sort of social environmental hunger. And this is called conditioned hunger, right? And this is drawing on a whole field of behavioral psychology. So conditioning is where you can sort of pair two things together. And the classic experiment was Pavlov's dog. So if you give dogs food, they'll get hungry, right?

They'll salivate, they'll get hungry. If you ring a bell and then give them food, they'll soon pair the two together so that when you ring a bell but don't give them food, they'll still get hungry. And that's because they've been conditioned, they expect to get food and they're going to get hungry. Well, if you think about what happens now, this is exactly what we've done. We've paired food with almost everything in our environment, right? So you get up in the morning.

Hey, you need to eat breakfast. Hey, you get a coffee in the morning. Hey, you need to get something with the coffee. Lunchtime, you have to eat. You know, you need to get after school snacks. You need to get before bedtime snacks. You go into car, you're thinking about eating. You go to the mall.

You're thinking about eating. You're eating in front of the TV. You're in front of the computer. You're eating in front of, everywhere you go is food. There's billboards. There's everything. So everything because we've paired it all together, we've become Pathlov's dogs, right? It's like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And this is what people call the food noise. Everywhere around you, you're triggering off this hunger because you've paired it so often, just like the bell with the dogs, right? And so if that's the problem, then you need to remove these cues or break these connections. That's completely different than just saying eat fewer calories. It's a completely different toolkit. Same thing with emotional hunger or hedonic hunger. It's a totally different toolkit

because if you're eating because you're depressed, the answer is not eat fewer calories. The answer is deal with the depression, right? Or if you're eating because you're stressed, the answer is deal with the stress, not eat fewer calories. There's no way that the calories sort of obsession is going to work because you haven't, identify the root cause of the problem.

It all lies in the hunger. You have to focus on the hunger. Because otherwise, the calories are downstream. That's the reason that you have to focus in on sort of root causes. And that's why I wrote the book, The Hunger Code. It's actually the first book I've written in about six years. And it's because there is so much new research into the ultra-processed food question about food addictions.

There's just so much new stuff that I felt, hey, nobody's talking about this. in an organized sort of way, right? I mean, people talk about calories endlessly. But you got to go beyond the calories, right? You got to go beyond that to see, hey, what's happening on the emotional side? What's happening on the environmental side? There's just so much to this.

It's a complex medical problem, which somehow has been labeled as a single, you know, one problem of calories. It's like, no, there's a huge difference between different types of calories because they elicit different responses in our bodies, right? It simply makes no sense to equate the two. If you have a food that's triggering off all your dopamine receptors because it's an ultra-processed food like, you know, cheese puffs or something, well, once you start, it's very difficult to

stop, right? They tell you, like in their advertisements, right? So it's like, well, that's very different than eating a natural food like eggs where you eat them and then you're full and then you're done, right? Yeah, well, that's one of the examples that you put inside of the book. You talk about like the difference between 200 calories in a cookie and you compare that to 200 calories and something else. Like, break that down for a second. We spend so much time optimizing things like workouts, our diet or a supplement. But what about the clothes that we wear?

The sheets that we sleep in, the things that touch our body all day. and all night. Those little details shape your nervous system more than you realize. That's what I appreciate about cozy earth. They focus on comfort in the details. Their bamboo pajamas made from viscoss from bamboo are incredibly soft, lightweight, and temperature regulating. My wife genuinely looks forward to putting them on at night. It's one of those small rituals that's a signal to your body that, hey, we're winding down now and it's all good. When it comes to their other products, their comforters are breathable and cloud-like without feeling heavy or overheating. And even their essential socks are thoughtful, cushioned, and designed to carry you from your first step in the

morning to your last step at night. It's everyday comfort but built with real intention. And cozy art stands behind everything they make. You get a hundred night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty. Returns are super easy, but once you feel that level of comfort, you probably won't want to send anything back. Discover how care in everyday detail transforms simple routines into moments of true comfort and ease. Just head over to cozy earth.com and use my own personal code, Drew P, as in Drew Perroen, D-H-R-U-P for up to 20% off. And if you get a post-purchase survey, please mention you heard about CozyEarth right here. It really helps support this show. That's cozyEarth.com with the code D-H-R-U-P, my own personal code, to save 20% off today. Most people hit that midday

moment where they want something cold, crisp, and sparkling. You're not hungry. You don't need another coffee. You just want a reset. The problem? Most sparkling drinks are loaded with sugar, artificial sweeteners or ingredients that don't align with how you're trying to live. If you're going to grab something fizzy, it should actually support you. That's why I love element sparkling. You know, a lot of fatigue, brain fog, headaches, and even that wired but tired feeling can come down to electrolyte imbalance. It's not just about drinking more water. It's about getting the right minerals the right amounts. The new 12-ounce sparkling cans are built for the in-between parts of your day. Long recording sessions, school drop-offs, and afternoon walks. I'll grab an orange salt,

pineapple salt, or black cherry salt instead of something sugary or artificial. It's salty, it's crisp, it's bright, and it's actually hydrating. No sugar, no junk, no dyes, just refreshing. I've used element electrolytes for years now. It's been a steady part of my routine, and now I'm really enjoying the sparkling slim cans. It's a great thing. It's a great way to keep my energy steady and avoid that mid-afternoon crash. And right now, Element is offering my community a free sample pack of their electrolytes with any purchase. Just go to drink element.com slash Drew. That's Drink, D-R-I-N-K-Element, L-M-N-T dot com slash D-H-R-U. Drew, that's me. If you're searching for something sweet, something fun, something crisp, midday, make it something that

actually supports your body. Check out Element Sparkle. at drink element.com slash drew. Yeah, absolutely. Because if you think about calories, it's such a small piece of the whole puzzle. Let's take an example.

So if you eat a breakfast of an 800-calorie three-eg omelet with vegetables, right? What's going to happen is that you're going to be full until lunchtime, right? Maybe even longer because it's a pretty satisfying meal.

Why? Because the hormones that you release, so as soon as you eat the foods, your body's going to release a certain pattern of hormones, right? So the eggs, so there's protein, there's fat, it's going to stimulate JLP1, peptide Y-Y, colostocynin, those are satiety hormones, right? So you're going to feel full.

It's also not going to release a lot of insulin. Insulin is a hormone. This job is to tell you to store those calories, right? And you store it as body fat. So therefore, your body has lots of calories floating around, and your body has plenty of energy. So it's like, why do I need to eat? Right?

So compare that to an 800 calorie, say, frappuccino. Well, still 800 calories. All refined carbohydrates, what's going to happen? Well, your sugar will spike up, your insulin will spike up. You don't get any of the satiety hormones. You're hungry like five minutes later. Like literally, you could eat that full, you know, three egg omelet plus that. Well, since they're both the same number of calories,

why would you think that the only thing that matters is your calories? It's not. Because the hormonal pattern is completely different. So what your body does with the calories is just as important. Like, if you look at the energy balance equation, right? So the energy balance equation says body fat equals calories in minus calories out. That's fine. Body fat is a store of calories.

You can simply rewrite that equation. And you can say calories in or what you eat equals body fat plus calories out. So what it tells you is that for each calorie that you eat, your body could either store it, right, body fat, or it could burn it. but which one does it do? That's the most important question. Not the number of calories, but what your body does with those calories. That's the information, right?

So if you eat, you know, donuts, insulin spikes way up, your body says, oh, you took like 50, 100 calories of that. Let's shove it all into storage, body fat, because insulin's high. If you eat, you know, an egg instead, insulin doesn't really go up. Your body lets it float around, and you're going to burn it for metabolism. But it's so critical because that's the important thing.

What does it do? So we always think it's all about the calories you eat. But no, for each calorie you eat, there's two different, you know, the results are so different, right? You store it all, you get fat. You burn it all while you're feeling good. You have lots of energy. And you're not gaining fat, right?

But it's not the number of calories. That's not the only thing that's important. What's much more important is sort of what your body does with that, right? And the funny part is that in other circumstances, people understand this. Like you could say money in the bank, right? Money saved equals money in minus money out, right? So if you say, how do you save more money? According to the sort of calories logic, you'd say, just make more money.

But making money and saving money are not the same thing, right? If you make a lot of money and spend a lot of money, like some of those ex-NFL players and stuff, you could still go bankrupt. they're totally different, right? Same thing. For every dollar you earn, you could save it or you could spend it, which one you do is critically important to the overall outcome. And it's exactly the same with the calories. For every calorie you put in, you can either store it as body fat or you can burn it for basal metabolism. And it's very important which one you do. So why, and that's obviously controlled by your hormones, so why aren't we acknowledging how important it is?

Let's build on that. You talk about this concept in the book of a fat thermostat. Can you break that down for us? Yeah, the fat thermostat, the concept has been around for like 40 years, and everybody who has tried to lose weight actually knows this. This is a poor biological principle called homeostasis. So homeostasis is a sort of fancy word from balance. And it works like a thermostat in your room. So you'd set the thermostat and you say, okay, I'm going to set room temperature. If it gets too hot, the thermostat will sense it. It'll turn on the air conditioning. If it gets too cold, it's going to turn on the heat.

So that's homeostasis. And that's the only way we survive. So every single sort of mission critical system in the body follows homeostasis. So if you think about body temperature, the same, right? So if you are hot, you're going to sweat to cool down. If you're cold, you're going to shiver to warm up. If your sodium is very high, then you're going to pee it out. If you drink a lot of water, you're going to pee it out.

If you don't drink a lot of water, you're not going to pee it out, right? Your electrolytes are the same. Your body water is the same. You know, if you go into a bright room, your pupils, you know, shrink. If you go into a very dark room, you know, they'll dilate to, again, keep that homeostasis. And body fat is the same. How much body fat you carry is actually a crucially important for survival. If you think about basically all animals, they have to maintain a relative,

stable body fat. Why? If you're a predator and you're morbidly obese, you will never catch anything ever again, right? You're just too slow. If you're like a rabbit and you're morbidly obese, you will die because something is going to eat you. If you have too little body fat, you will die because you won't survive the winter. So how much body fat you carry is clearly dependent on these homeostatic mechanisms, which is critical because if you're not, If your body fat is set at a certain temperature, you need to know why it's up or down. Just like if you walk into a room and it's really, really hot, you don't say, oh, let me calculate all the sources of heat in minus heat out, right?

You say, why did somebody set the thermostat so high? Same thing with your body fat thermostat. If you're overweight, you need to know why is my body fat thermostat set this high? Because if you lose weight, your body fat thermostat set really high, you lose weight. The problem is your thermostat's up here. So it's going to naturally defend that higher weight. It's going to push you up. How is going to increase hunger?

That's the mechanism. If you still don't eat, it will reduce your metabolic rate until you gain that weight back. Right? So what's important is to control the thermostat. Some hormones push the thermostat up. Some hormones push it down. The cleanest experiments we have are really when we give people drugs or take away drugs because it's a single sort of thing.

So if I give somebody insulin, what happened? Well, they gain weight. Everybody gains weight as soon as I give them insulin or enough insulin. It doesn't matter how much you exercise, how much willpower you have, how good or bad your diet is, you will gain weight. Why is I told your body to gain weight, which means I'm pushing your thermostat up. If I give people cortisol, I can use a synthetic cortisol called prednisome. And again, same thing. I give it to people, they gain weight.

I don't even care how much exercise, you know, will power, all that stuff. They will gain weight. That means I've pushed that thermostat up. If I give GLP1, if I push the GLP1 system up high, what happens? Well, you lose weight, right? That's Ozempic and Munjaro and so on. Well, that means you've pushed it down how. You've activated these hormones, right?

The GLP1 system. It's not the calories. It's the hormones. Clearly, we have very clear evidence because that's what happens. Sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight response. It turns out that if you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, it pushes your thermostat down.

You lose weight. How do we know? You can give people sympathetic agonists. So in the 1960s, we used for weight loss amphetamines, which were called speed. right? You know, lots of other problems with that, but it cause weight loss. If a generation later, they use fen-fen, which is fenfluoramine, fenteramine. And again, stimulated sympathetic nervous system.

Or you use nicotine, people who smoke, they lose their appetite, they eat less, and they lose weight. It means you're pushing it down. And the important part about the whole thing is not the specific drug, because obviously I thought, you're not recommending people take speed and track and so on to lose weight. But the point is that this whole thermostat is a hormonally mediated system. Why? Because everything in our body is mediated by hormone. Why would you expect any different?

So neurotransmitters are also neurotransmitters are a type of hormone that they're specific to the brain. So you see that antipsychotics, antideprefins very commonly cause weight gain. They don't restrict or enhance calories. they affect the hormonal systems, a neurotransmitter, or it's called the neurohormonal systems, and that's pushing you up or down, right? It's not just that you ate more or more food was available, right? That's simplistic sort of thinking. There's this body fat thermostat, so you need to control that in order to lose weight on a long-term basis.

And the important part about it, of course, is that different foods are going to stimulate different hormones, right? you can use it as a drug, right? And that's very nice from an experimental standpoint, but obviously not something that we would highly recommend, although Ozumpic is a good example. But the foods are going to change, right? Some foods stimulate a lot of insulin, especially the ultra-processed foods, and some foods don't.

And the only thing that means is that some foods are more fattening than other foods, right? So cookies are more fattening than broccoli. Why is that controversial, right? For the same number of calories, why would you think that 200 calories of cookies is the same as 200 calories of broccoli? The hormonal changes are different and therefore whether your body stores it versus burns it, that whole shift, the partitioning, is completely different. Again, since it's very clear that this is important, why ignore it, right? That boggles my mind.

And this is where this sort of obsession with calories, it's sort of boggles. my mind sometimes because it's like, you know, all these people are out there and they're sort of just denying all this stuff about calories. It doesn't matter. It comes back to calories and calories out. It's like they're almost like bullies. It's like these calorie bullies are like, oh, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's just calories. It's just calories. You know, you've studied human biology for like years and we've detailed maps of what happens, what hormones are released when you eat these foods and those foods, why would you think that's completely irrelevant, right?

It doesn't even make any sense. You know, pulling on a few threads that you mentioned, and there's a bunch that's there, the first one that I wanted to ask you was that you were talking about how, like, if you give insulin or pregnancy, was it? Pregnizone is like cortisol, right? The stress hormone.

If you get that to somebody, just to clarify that, were you saying that because you give them insulin, hormone, that changes that sort of hormonal milieu, and that essentially is the upstream thing that puts them in a place where they start to feel more hungry. Yeah. But if somebody was forced or in a controlled study to have the set number of calories, then they wouldn't gain weight.

But the reality is that in our real world is because so many things are pulling on those strings of those hormones, people do end up eating more. that thermostat is essentially continuous capacity. No, they will still gain weight. So even if their calories are completely controlled, they will still gain weight. You know, most protein snacks sound good in theory,

but you often eat them once or try them once and never reach for them again. Maui, Nui's venison jerky sticks are the opposite for me. I keep going back them. I keep them with me all the time, and I'm always handing them out to friends and family. Not because they're trendy, not because they're quote-unquote healthy,

because they actually taste good and they're built on real quality. They're tender, clean, not dry, not gamey, and they feel like real food. Flavor-wise, they've nailed it. The original has a subtle, savory sweetness. The sugar-free peppered has that bold, salty kick, and I've definitely crushed two back-to-back more than once. And nutritionally, they're around 10 grams of complete protein for roughly 55 calories. Low sugar and zero-sugar options, shelf stable,

easier to throw in your gym bag, a desk drawer, or a carry-on. But what really keeps me back to them is sourcing. This is wild harvested access deer from Maui. No feedlots, no antibiotics, no fillers. Just incredibly clean, nutrient dense red meat from one of the best possible source materials you can start with. And every purchase supports ecosystem restoration efforts in Hawaii, which makes it even better. So right now, Maui Nui is offering a free pack of their jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more. Just go to Maui-Nui-V-N-E-V-N-E-E-V-E-N-U-I-V-E-N-I-V-N-I-N-E-N-I-N-E-N-E-N-E-H-R-U-N-H-U-N-RU-D-HRU to claim your free Venison-Sstick

while supplies last. Try them, and you'll understand why I and all my friends keep on going back. We talk a lot about longevity on this podcast, reducing inflammation, clearing damage cells, and supporting cellular health. But did you know that? that your skin ages biologically too. That's what caught my attention about OneSkin. It was founded by an all-women team

of PhD longevity scientist who asked if senesin zombie cells drive aging in the body, why not targeted them in the skin? That research led to their patented peptide OS1, and it's the first ingredient shown to target those damaged cells and slow skin aging at its source. And one of the things that I love about One Skin

is how simple it is. One skin isn't about adding steps, It's about swapping in smarter once. I've been using their OS1 face and my skin feels smoother, more hydrated, and just healthier overall. This isn't about masking aging. It's about supporting skin health at the cellular level. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, one skin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the cells that cause the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age.

For limited time, you can give 15% off of one skin. with my code D-H-R-U, as in Drew, that's me, at one-skin.co-slash-D-R-U. Again, that's 15% off at 1-O-N-E-S-K-N-E-S-K-I-N-C-O-S-K-R-U. After the purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please tell them, we sent you. It really helps support the show. You fix the calories, then what happens, so that's your calories in. But because you've pushed the body fat up, right, your body fat thermostat up,

the way so say you eat 2,000 calories, you burn 2,000 calories, your weight is stable, right? So now you give insulin and now you want to eat 2,500 calories, right, so that you gain weight, right? 2,500 calories in, 2,000 calories out, you're going to gain weight. But you're, you know, very good willpower. So you only eat 2,000 calories. Well, you still gave the body the instructions to gain that weight. So even if you eat 2,000 calories, your metabolic rate now goes down to 1,500 calories. and you'll still gain that weight.

So I've seen people, because people have measured these things, right? And I've seen patients who have had, you know, they get this yo-yo dieting because they're sort of calorie obsessed, right? And they're burning like 800 calories a day. Their metabolic rate has been pushed down so low because people keep saying to them, well, eat 1,500 calories. You must lose weight, right? But the problem is that they're eating, you know, a lot of ultra-processed foods.

They're spiking their insulin. all the time. So even as they're eating 1,500 calories, they're burning 1,800. So they're still gaining weight. They're still gaining like a pound or two pounds. And people will say, how can you gain weight when you're only eating 1,500 calories? Because you're burning even less. And that's the hormones, right? It's the hormones that are affecting it. You don't get to choose your metabolic rate. Same as you don't get to choose your hunger, right? So it's not about willpower, because you can willfully not eat, but you can't willfully decide to not be hungry. You can't will yourself to have a higher metabolic rate. So this is the piece that sort of is missing from this sort of calories in calories

out. It's a dynamic thing. And I don't know why people are obsessed with this idea that your metabolic rate, so let's take exercise out of the equation, because that's obviously quite variable. If you look at the metabolic rate, people always assume that it stays the same. It's like, but every single study we've done tells you it doesn't stay the same, right? Your metabolic rate goes down. As you lose that weight, your metabolic rate goes down. They've done these studies on the biggest loser contestants, for example, and some of these people had metabolic rates of 3,000 and, you know, 200 calories a day.

And then as they lost that weight, it went down to like 1,600. So they're eating a lot less, right? So then they'll be eating 2,000 calories, which is a lot less than they used to eat, right? because they used to eat 3,200. But they're gaining their weight back. Why? Because their metabolic rate went down to 1,600. So they're regaining all that weight.

And then they're still saying, hey, I'm eating so much less than I used to. Yes, you are. But you didn't do it right because you didn't fix the hormonal issue, which is that body fat thermostat. And that's why you see these sort of naturally lean people, right? You see them all the time. They eat whatever they want. They tell you, I don't really look at what I eat, right?

when I want, when I walk, and they're really skinny. Well, that's because they have that thermostat. They do what they want because the thing is that as soon as they gain weight over that threshold of sort of skinniness, their body shuts down their hunger. That's the thermostat pushing you down. Their thermostats are set really well. And maybe it's genetic, maybe it's whatever. But keep in mind that in the 70s, people's thermostats were obviously working very well

because there was just not a lot of obesity. So then you have to say what's changed, right? What, you know, and what are the hormones that are involved? And insulin is one of the main ones, right? But ultra-processed foods plays a big role in, you know, the insulin response and so on and changing that whole thing. But it goes beyond that, not just the homeostatic side of things, but also the emotional side of things and the social side of things. Let's talk about some of those problems. What are some examples of some of the ingredients or ways that ultra-processed food is made?

that completely messes with that thermostat, the relationship that we have to those hormones, and creates all this food noise that drowns everybody. Yeah, that's a great question because ultra-processed foods actually causes a lot of problems because the way you process the food impacts your hormonal response to that food. You can take a food,

and if you process it in two different ways, you will have a different hormonal response. and of course the hormones is what drives it. So people think that you go from calories to weight gain. That's not the way the body works. You have food, which contains calories, but it contains macronutrients, but also contains something called the food matrix, which is the way that it's structured.

And that's important because it affects digestion. So after you eat the food, it has to be digested, which means broken down into a way that's available for the body to use. Then it goes into the stomach. So what happens? it goes into the stomach, it gets churned around, it gets held there for a while, and then little boluses get pushed out into the small intestines, where it needs to get absorbed into the bloodstream.

When it gets absorbed into the bloodstream, that's going to affect your different hormones, and there's a whole list of hormones I put in the hunger code, like 10 of them. And that is what affects your weight, right? And we know that this is an important thing. So, again, why ignore all these important pieces? So if you disrupt the food matrix, and you can do that in different ways. you take two foods, you have apples versus apple sauce. And the way you make the apple sauce, and they've done these experiments,

the way you make the apple sauce is you take an apple, you bake it, and then you puree it. So calories, carbs are identical. In fact, the food is identical. You started with an apple, but you change the way you process it. So you've changed the food matrix, which means that the digestion is much faster, because when you bake it and puree it, it's sort of predigested, right? It's like adult baby food. it's already like mushed up for you.

So you don't have to digest. So therefore it gets digested much faster. What happens? Well, the glucose is going to spike up much faster because the digestion is much faster. It's going to go through the stomach faster. It's going to hit the bloodstream when it hits the intestines. When it gets to the intestines, it's so easy to absorb. The absorption is very fast.

So you're going to spike your insulin, your glucose and your insulin really high. And of course, if you spike your insulin, that's telling your body to please store all that energy as body fat. So when you compare apples to apple sauce, by taking whole apples versus apple sauce, you actually have like, you know, 20, 30% less insulin effect for the same food. You can do the same thing with instant oatmeal

versus steel cut oatmeal. Same thing. One is high glycemic index. One is medium glycemic index. Same exact food. The difference is the instant oatmeal is ground up into a very fine dust. So again, predigested,

makes the digestion and absorption much faster. And it's that quick spike of ultra-processed foods, right? Now, these are examples not necessarily of ultra-processing, but of cooking and so on, which makes a difference. But the point is that when you get those big spikes, that's where you get into problems because you're getting the big spikes of insulin. And how quickly you absorb makes a big difference

because if you think about nicotine, for example, like when you smoke, the reason you smoke tobacco is that it goes from your lungs directly into the pulmonary blood vessels. So you're basically getting directly into the blood. When you take heroin, you inject it directly into the blood. If you eat nicotine, so nicotine gum, it's much less addictive, right? Same nicotine, same dose. But the speed that it gets absorbed is much slower.

So you take advantage of that and you use that when you're trying to wean somebody off. But it's the same nicotine, but the way it's delivered. And so it's the same with food. When you have ultra-processed foods, you're getting this sort of predigestion. So ultra-processed food, if you look at the characteristics, they tend to be very soft, easy. It doesn't require a lot of chewing. It doesn't require a lot of digestion, because it's predigested. Gastro transit time tends to be very fast.

So how long it stays in the stomach tends to shoot right through the stomach, right, as opposed to like natural foods. Like, think about like eating a lot of beans or something like that. still carbohydrates, but it's like there's a lot of chewing, there's a lot of, you know, digestion. It's not a fast process. So that makes a difference to the ultimate hormonal response, which is then going to partition the energy into this sort of do you store it or do you burn it sort of thing. So this food matrix is very important. That's why ultra-processed foods are dangerous.

It's actually only one of the reasons they're dangerous. They're actually dangerous for multiple reasons. But from a hedonic side, that is from a pleasure side, the foods are engineered, of course, to give maximum pleasure, right? And people have well documented this. You talk about bliss points and salt and sugar and fat, but you also have artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors. You've got artificial colors. You've got flavor enhancers like MSG and multidextrin. You make sure the mouth feel is good by putting in texturizers and emulsified.

So you can do anything with these things. There's no limit on how much sugar you put in. Things can be 100% sugar, right? There's nothing sort of natural in the natural world except maybe honey that is 100% sugar like that. So the whole point is that it's going to give you maximum pleasure, very quick hits because you're getting this huge dopamine spikes and all this sort of thing. At the same time, they ratchet down your satiety. So anything that turns on satiety signaling, they get rid of it. it. Why? Because they want you to eat more, right? You can't stop eating them because they're giving you this dopamine hit pleasure with no satiety. So you can keep going. You can't stop eating, right? They've already told you that. They've already told you, we're engineering this thing. So you can't stop eating it. It's like, yeah, that's going to be a problem if you're trying to lose weight, right? So that's the hedonic side. And then from a condition side, because the foods are cheap, easy, and visually appealing, and heavily advertised, you link them.

You start to link them with everything, right? So you go to the movies and, hey, popcorn, you know, candy, you know, you see on TV what's advertised. Rarely are you going to see like eggplant to advertise. You're going to see, you know, packaged whatever it is, right? hamburger helper, whatever it is, right? So the ultra-processed foods are actually extremely, extremely dangerous because, not because of the calories, but because it cuts across all the different types of hunger, the homeostatics or the physical hunger, the emotional hunger, and the social environmental hunger. And that's why they're so dangerous. And the problem is the American diet

is full of ultra-processed foods, like 70%. And you can compare it to a place like, Italy. And it's like Italians love food, right? Everybody knows that. But their ultra-processed foods is like 25%. And guess what? Their obesity rate? It's one of the lowest in Europe. Okay, but these guys obsess about food, right? About their pizzas and pastas. Why? But they're not eating the junk food. You're not getting all these problems. You're not getting the ultra-processed food problem. Now you take that Italian, stick them in New York City. Guess what? They gain weight.

They gain a lot of weight, right? The Italian-American, unfortunately, is like much, much more prone to obesity than the Italian-Italian. But what's the difference? It's not the individual, right? Because you could move one to the other and see a problem. The problem is the environment, the ultra-processed foods. Are there examples of things that, you know, Think about this audience here that's listening, especially on audio,

generally people that are pretty health-aware and think of themselves as being healthy, even though that can mean a lot of different things. Right, you go to Times Square or Hollywood over here, and you go to the average person, you say, are you healthy? They're going to say, yeah, yeah, I only smoke one cigarette a day. Everybody has a different definition of it.

But for the person that's listening to this podcast, it generally thinks like, hey, listen, I'm very intentional about stuff. And also, I want to lose weight. I'm not obese, but I have maybe 30, 25, 20 pounds extra that I want to lose. What do you see? There are some of the most common things that might be in their diet that they don't think of as being ultra-processed, but actually are ultra-processed. Are there things in that category that people are eating?

Yeah, there's quite a lot, actually. the most common is actually commercial white bread. And bread itself is actually not an ultra-processed food. But on the other hand, if you look at bread from a bakery, bread from a bakery, it should have like four ingredients, three or four, right? Flower, sugar, water, sort of thing, plus or minus egg. When you look at like commercial white bread, it's got like 15 ingredients, right? Most of which you're not going to know how to pronounce, right?

And it's because there's all this other stuff in it that's going to the texturizers and muscle fires and so on. So it's an ultra-processed food. It stays soft for like a week, right? Well, you know, the bread you bought from bakery is hard like the very next day. Why? Because it's natural. That's what's supposed to do, right?

But this one, it holds onto the water. So, you know, you might think, oh, white bread, well, you know, that's not ultra-process. It's just bread. It's, you know, a staple. It's like even if you compare the commercial white bread from the 70s to today, it's very different. Like you can look at the ingredient list or McDonald's French fries, right? French fries should have potatoes and that's it, right? And deep fried.

I mean, McDonald's French fries have, you know, flavoring and, you know, beef flavoring and all this other stuff that makes it, you know, much less natural. So there's, you have to be very careful. Sour cream is another example. So if you look at sour cream, it should have. have two ingredients, right? It should have sort of cream and bacterial cultures, right? That makes it sour. Well, when I go to the grocery store, there's the sour cream, which is, you know, the natural one. And then there's a whole lot, like there's five other ones that have guar gum and carraginen and milk solids and all this stuff. I'm like, what is this? I just want sour cream. So even when you look at it and think, okay, sour cream, that's not bad or yogurt. Oh, that's not bad. But then when you actually look

at it, it's actually very heavily processed. And same thing with a lot of these supplements and powders and stuff, right, wave protein and stuff. They sell them, you know, to you to try and make you feel better about yourself, but they're ultra processed, right? It's not a natural sort of thing. So you have to be kind of careful about a lot of foods to be what you think is pretty natural. Of course, they make it seem natural. You know, the packaging will often make it natural, but a lot of them are actually ultra-processed foods. And one of the great things about your book, and we have a link of the show notes for anybody that wants to check it out. It's available everywhere, books are sold. You have, I think, 50 plus different tips inside of there. You were talking about

there's some people that are just naturally lean or some societies, a lot of Italians, a lot of the Asian communities that are out there. You know, if you go to Japan, you very struggle to find an obese person, unless they're American tourists, that's there, which there's a lot of them there right now. There's things that these cultures and these individuals are doing. You have 50 plus in the book, but let's just give one tip right now. We've been largely talking about the problem, and there's more to talk about with the problem, but let's give a little bit of optimism of what can we learn from those people and those societies who don't really struggle with that hub. hunger thermostat being all the way on all the time.

Yeah, and I think this really speaks to the sort of conditioned hunger, that sort of social hunger, because you could take that Japanese person, plunk them down in San Francisco, and guess what? That obesity risk goes way up, right? And there's lots of data on this, right? So, you know, what other people around us do has a huge influence on what we do, right? So if everybody around you is going for a hike all the time, you know, going to the beach all the time, hey, you're going to go to the beach because your friends are going to be it.

Or you're going to go for a hike in the mountains, right? If you're just sitting around watching a game, having beer and French fries, right? Guess what? If your friends are doing that, you're probably going to do that too, right? That's what being human is all about, right? We're social creatures. That's why social influence is such an important thing. It basically tells you what the sort of limits of acceptance.

activity are. And the problem is that if you go to places, you know, that have more defined food, food rules, if you will, that sets the guardrails and therefore you're not getting all these conditioned hunger, right? So you go to Japan and it's, you can't eat walking around the street. It's very much frowned upon, right? You go to Italy and they're enjoying their food, right? But you are expected to eat it with family at a table, right? It's not like, you're not like, you're not. like you should be eating it by yourself, you know, in front of the computer, right? Then you've got all these issues with mindless eating, you know, you're just eating, eating, eating, but you're actually not even paying attention to what you're eating, right?

So mindfulness is a very important thing. But those sort of social, you know, conventions that are in place in those other countries, they get lost by the time you come to America because, of course, you come here and everybody's like, eat whatever you want, just watch your calories, right? eat whenever you want, eat however you want, you know, all of that sort of stuff that forms the sort of scaffold of a natural, your normal eating day, if you will, get lost. Like all this snacking, like you don't see it in other cultures. Like nobody else thinks we should be snacking like constantly, constantly, not like, you know,

North Americans. And that's going to, that's going to play a role because nobody else is snacking, you're not snacking either. And I give an example in the book that, hey, consider this. In the 1970s, if you were going to a meeting in a boardroom or something, right? And you're really bored. Well, too bad. You just sit there.

Well, what if now somebody in the 2000s puts a plate of cookies in front of you? Well, you're just bored. You're not hungry. But you're bored, so you want a little dopamine hit or something. You want to feel better. so you have the cookies right there. It takes super willpower to not eat the cookie versus the 1970s where it would take a lot of willpower.

You'd have to get up, leave the room, go downstairs, get into your car, find somewhere that sold cookies, and then drive back. Would anybody really do that? So here it is the environment has basically set you up for failure, right? And that's just a little mini example, but it's everywhere, right? you go to the hospital even. Like there's food everywhere, right? The coffee shop is not a coffee shop anymore.

It's got like a lot of other stuff in it, right? And now it's like it's not just coffee, it's sandwiches, it's this, it's that, it's this, it's that, right? And then you combine that with all the food noise. So other places like other countries don't allow that same sort of do whatever you want and eat wherever you want. And that makes it easy to follow because of that sort of sort of. social modeling.

Everybody's doing the same thing. So, hey, it's not a struggle, right? You're not consciously trying to it. The difference is that you're not exerting willpower to not eat all the time, right? Because you have to exert willpower to eat, right? Like you have to get the cookie, go out and get the cookie as opposed to, oh, I'm going to exert willpower like all, like for the whole two hours, I have to exert willpower to not eat that cookie.

Right? So the difference in outcome is massive. But it's a simple fix. You just say, okay, let's do this. Let's get rid of cookies, right? But somebody has to acknowledge first that, hey, this is an important thing. That's why I wrote the book, right? Because people always pin it down, like weight loss, weight gain to an individual problem.

But it's clearly not, right? It's clearly a societal problem. Because think about it. If you have 70% of the American public as overweight or obese, well, how can it be an individual problem, right? If you had a hundred school children, one fails. Well, maybe that's their problem. But what if 70 fail? Is it the kids' problem? Or should you look at the teachers, the schools, the learning environment? Obviously, so why can't you extend the same logic to this, right? It's clearly not an individual problem. Because people go back, like, people go to other countries and then

find out, oh, like people say this all the time. I went to Europe. I thought it'd gain weight. I lost 10 pounds, right? Or you hear these stories. I actually think these are really illuminating. You read these stories of people who come from, say, Japan. They go to America to study, right? And then it's like they're there for like first year college. Then they go home and go, I realize I gained 20 pounds. My mom was like yelling at me, right? And then it's like, then they lose all the weight. Then they go back to America and gain all that weight. It's like, okay, well, what's the problem here? It's not the individual. It's the structure. that they find themselves in, right?

In one case, you have clear guardrails of what you're supposed to do, what you're not supposed to do. And the other is like, do whatever you want as long as the calories are in line, right? You go to certain places and it's like, no, you shouldn't be eating

in the streets, you shouldn't be eating in front of the TV, you should be sitting down with people to eat, like all these rules that they make which keep you in line. Because you know what? When you eat with other people, when you're chatting and all this sort of stuff,

You're enjoying yourself, you know, just as much, but you're not going to like be doing this distracted eating and, you know, eating like, you know, you have people just shovel in, like, eat really, really fast and stuff, right? There's a lot of ways that it improves you. And that plays out in the end result. Well, you kind of hinted at it, but one of those tips that I'll pull out from something that you said earlier is eat less often, not smaller portions. And from the book, a little quote that I pulled out of there is that snacking may be sabotaging you even if it's clean. Do you want to talk a little bit about this? People have this idea that snacking is really, really good for you.

Sometimes I'm in a bubble, right? I've never struggled with being overweight. So who's saying that snacking is really good for you? Like, where do you hear that just so I'm in the loop? It's been institutionalized, basically. So it basically comes from the schools now, right? So ever since you're a kid, it's like, one, you can't skip breakfast, then they give you snacks in the middle, like, you know, the mid morning and then at lunch and then they give you after school snacks, right? And then they try and say they're healthy snacks because it's fruit or something like that.

And it's like, okay, but keep in mind that a snack, which is eating in between a meal is completely unnecessary, right? That's the entire point. People in the 70s ate three meals a day, no snacks. And they had no problem. Nobody died, right? Because you're eating enough. And if you didn't eat enough, you're a little hungry, you'll eat more at dinner or you should eat more at lunch the next day, right? But then it becomes, and it came without any sort of evidence.

It just sort of came into being. I have theory on why that was. But it was the, eventually, if you look at how often people are eating, and there's data from the Enhanes study, which is these giant sort of dietary questionnaires that the government does. In the 70s, people were eating like just above three times a day, like, you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner. And then by the 2000s, they're eating closer to five to six times a day, right? So they're eating twice as much. And the only reason they are is because they think it's, you know, they think it's an acceptable

sort of way to eat. And I think it's because we had switched from eating sort of real foods to very low carb, sorry, low fat foods, which tends to be high in carbs. And so instead of eating eggs for breakfast in the 80s and stuff, there's this whole low-fat obsession, remember? So instead of eating eggs, which was sort of a classic breakfast food, people would eat like a muffin instead, right? And it would be the same calories. But the problem is that, again, the muffin is going to be full of refined starches. So therefore, instant is going to spike way up.

You've got no satiety signaling because you don't have much protein, don't have much fat. So what's going to happen, of course, is that your insulin is going to tell you to store all those calories away. You haven't activated any satiety signaling. By 1030, you're just ravenously hungry. But you ate what you thought was a good eating pattern, which is low-fat, high carb, right? And it's all refined carbohydrate. So then you're ravenous by 10 o'clock, 1030, so you're looking for a snack. And then so people, I think, thought, hey, look, I'm eating all the time now because I'm so hungry, right?

because remember, hunger is what drives eating behavior. But since I'm eating right, which is lots of muffins, right, low-fat muffins, this must be good. Snacking must be good. And I think that's where the whole thing sort of took off. And that's where, you know, a lot of fasting and stuff. And I always say there's really no such thing as a healthy snack, because by definition, a snack is an indulgence.

It's superfluous. You don't have to eat. you want to eat, right? So there's nothing healthy about it if you're trying to lose weight. Now, there are ways that you can eat frequently and still lose weight. I'm not saying that. Like, there's ways you can sort of get around it and stuff. But if you're conditioning yourself to be eating constantly, right,

then you're sort of fighting an uphill battle from many sort of standpoints in that, hey, you've got like, you know, all these things sort of aimed against you. Why don't you just go back to the 70s and eat three meals a day of real food, right? And now, of course, people are talking about proteins. You have to make sure you get enough protein, right? Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? I think that there's some, some truth to that, I think, because proteins are going to activate a lot of GLP1, for example. So the GLP1 is a satiety signal. So when you eat proteins, you're going to, you know, you're going to activate satiety signaling. So that's, that's a good thing. Also, it's going to be, you know, if you're

eating proteins rather than carbohydrates. Again, that's displacing something else. So I think it can certainly work. Now, the question is, you know, how much protein, right, is really the question. And it's always a difficult question because, you know, the high protein, if you're eating natural foods, right, and you're eating a lot of protein, then you're probably doing okay. Should you like supplement protein like you see these days, right? High protein coffee is like, you know, coffee's not really supposed to have any protein, but it's a selling point. And it's like, do you really need some ultra-processed protein? Like, is that actually good for you? And that's a good question. And it's a bit nuanced, but the thing about protein is that it actually gets turned into glucose

when you eat too much of it. Okay. And the reason is that your body can store energy, so calories, as sugar and as fat. It doesn't store protein, which is amino acid. is energy because it's not. So if you eat an excessive amount of protein, you can't store that protein. What you have to do is turn the protein into glucose, right? So obviously that's not a great thing. But the question is then for an average person,

how much of the protein they eat in a day is being turned into glucose. Because if it's zero, then hey, maybe there's room to push. up the protein. And the problem is, and they've done these studies, is that how much percent of your protein is getting turned into glucose? Because obviously if, you know, it's zero percent of your protein goes into glucose, then you can push the protein up a little bit, right? But it turns out that for an average person, it's around 60 or 70 percent of the protein that you eat is actually

getting turned into glucose. So now if you push that protein up, what's going to happen? Well, All of that, like 100% of the excess protein you're going to eat, is going to get turned into glucose because you've stored as much protein as you can. Right. You can't store protein for energy. So that's the reality. So can a high protein diet work? It can still work because it can still work on satiety signaling, GLP1, displacing carbohydrate, that kind of thing. You can still work.

But it's a little nuance. I don't think it's like a magic bullet where I'm just going to eat a lot of protein and I'm going to lose weight, right? And there's also differences if you're a bodybuilder and really, really, you know, working out a lot, very muscular, then it's different. The entire thing is different. But, you know, for the most part, I think that people are eating enough protein and this whole sort of put protein on everything is more of a, it's more of a selling point than anything else. And, you know, it can work, but it's not like the be all and end all. It's part of. It's part of, of this whole thing.

And that's why there's so many tips in the book because weight gain is very complicated. There's all these different nuances so you can affect them at different points. It's not a single calorie in calorie out thing. Just because we're on protein, I think you've had, you know, you've done Instagram live with Dr. Gabriel Lyon.

A big part of her sort of message is that especially for people as they get older, frailty is like a major risk factor of all-cause mortality. you know, breaking bones, breaking hips, decline. Is that still something that you feel needs attention? I think it's, I think the research is still ongoing, right? How much protein does somebody need?

I think that's a really, really good question. Because there's some evidence, some evidence that the older people need more protein because you're not turning that protein into muscle properly. You're not as good at turning it into muscle. Yeah, exactly. So therefore, you might want to take a bit extra so that the less efficient, because of the less efficient sort of turning it into muscle, you're going to supply it with enough. And I think that there is some validity there. That's why I think protein is a very nuanced sort of topic because, you know, maybe older people need it.

Maybe bodybuilders need more. Like it's a very difficult, it's a difficult question because there's so many special circumstances. And what we're trying to do, of course, is say, this is what everybody should eat, right? And it's like, well, I don't know if it's that, you know, black and white that we can say, this is the number, right? It's a difficult question because there are a lot of sort of facets of it. Now, of course, like Dr. Lyon and most of these other people who talk about protein are also big on resistance training, right? Which I think is actually the more important aspect, right?

You got to put, like when you're talking about building muscle and stability and all this sort of stuff, It's really about resistance training because the way you gain muscle is by exercise, right? Eating protein does not make you gain muscle. But if you do resistance exercise and don't eat enough protein, and there's a whole medical term for this, which is tea and toasters, right? So these little old ladies in the past, like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, who were just ate tea and toast, right? They were frail like anything because they weren't eating any protein.

So even if they're to exercise, they don't have the protein to build up, right? So, you know, those tea and toasters definitely needed more protein, right? But they also need to do the exercise, right? Because so, you know, how much protein do you need? Well, it might depend on how much exercise you do because the exercise is going to sort of break down your muscles, right? As you exercise, you get these sort of, you put your muscle under stress, and then you rebuild the muscle to become stronger, right? So as you rebuild, you're going to need protein. And so maybe older people need it, but you know, you realize that a lot of people are also, they, a lot of these people that are high protein, they also advocate a lot of resistance training, core stability, like a lot of this stuff. And I get that. Like I completely agree that that can definitely be, you know, something that's useful. But again, to me, I've always biased towards real foods as opposed to what we see now, which is like, oh, we dumped a bunch of

into your coffee or into your yogurt or into your whatever, right? It's like, I don't know how good that really is, but. I want to ask you, just zooming out a little bit, for the first time ever in America, we saw, I don't know if it was last year, the year before that there was a dip in the obesity numbers. You saw the numbers come down for the first time, largely being attributed to these gLP1 drugs that now millions and millions of people on. I don't know if you know how the latest numbers, but it's like it's exploding every month.

More and more and more people, more and more different types. You have the oral ones coming. They have new versions. You have GLP3s coming down the line. It's all changing. What's great about that and what's missing the mark about that? I think what's good is that it's sort of putting focus on weight as a really important marker of health. because for years, it was not even acknowledged.

So, for example, type 2 diabetes, which is the most, it's like obviously weight and type 2 diabetes are highly linked. Like, that was obvious to anybody. But it's only in the latest American diabetes guidelines that they said weight is a legitimate target for, you know, to look at for type 2 diabetes. It's like, duh. Like, isn't it, wasn't it obvious, like 20 years ago that if you have type 2 diabetes, diabetes, like weight loss is actually a really good thing for you. But no, it wasn't. It wasn't even in the guidelines.

So what it's doing is it's focusing in on what benefits weight loss really has, right? So there was, you know, type 2 diabetes. But type 2 diabetes is a huge risk factor for heart disease and kidney disease and blindness and stroke and all that. And then you're seeing less arthritis. You're seeing less fatty liver. You're seeing heart benefits. You're seeing weight benefits.

So what it's exposed is that, hey, this is actually a super important thing. Because remember, for years, doctors actually didn't care about weight loss because they just, they knew that's this sort of calories and calories that wouldn't work. So they didn't even talk about it anymore because it's so futile. So the whole thing is that that's great because now we're talking about a really important topic, right? And you've got treatments for it. What's bad about it is that I think that it's masking a lot of issues, which is that, you know, America's not suffering from a GLP deficiency, right?

The problem is much deeper. So, you know, what's causing people to gain weight? What's causing people to eat more? What's causing all that hunger? You can suppress that hunger by hitting the GLP1 system because GLP1 is a power. powerful satiety hormone, you're not getting a little bit of extra gLP, you're getting massive super pharmacologic doses. Like you cannot get those levels of gLP 1 naturally, like with foods and whatever, right?

Certain foods, protein and fiber, they'll raise GLP 1, but they'll raise it a little bit, physiologic, not pharmacologic, which is massive doses, right? So these massive doses sort of just overwhelm everything else and create this satiety, which is going to take care of all this hunger, right? The homeostatic, the hedonic, and the conditioned hunger, right? So even if you have all these bad habits, well, you don't want to eat because you're just feeling nauseated. The problem is that if you ever go off of these

and you never figured out what was driving all this, what would happen? Well, you're going to gain all that way back, which is precisely what we see, right? So unless you stay on these long term, So can you just, people are like, can people just stay on this long term? Like a blood pressure medication, right? It's like we'd like them to as a doctor because of these known benefits.

The reality, and they've done lots of studies on this, is that only about 50% or less of people actually stay on these GLP1 drugs at one year. And it's like you'd think, well, why is that? We're saying all these benefits. So why don't people take them? It's very simple. If you're nauseated all the time and you derive no pleasure from your food, right, because you're just full all the time, right? Just think about when you're really, really full. Do you derive pleasure from eating a hamburger?

No. When you're hungry, hey, that hamburger is terrific. But if you're really full, there's none. So if you derive no pleasure from food, remember that eating is one of life's greatest joys, right? we celebrate with food, we get together, we have food. If you take that away, that's a huge loss. It's a big gaping hole in your life. So that's a problem.

Because if you say, okay, for six months, you're losing weight, everything's fine. Yes, you're not getting any pleasure from food. But it's like, so every time you go out, you get together for somebody's birthday, everybody's enjoying themselves, you're not. because you're nauseated. You can't eat what's in front of you. You go to Christmas dinner and you're not just not enjoying the food. Like, because you're on Ozmpic, right? How fun is that? So how long can you really keep that up? And the answer is most people can't keep that up for more than about six months to a year. So there's a huge drop off. And I've prescribed, you know, these drugs like hundreds and hundreds of times because there are health benefits to them. I struggle to keep people on them. I struggle to keep people on them. right, because of the problem. And I think that's really where the issue is. Not that they're not effective,

not that they don't have benefits and so on. But it's like they're not affecting one thing, right? They're affecting, you know, a huge piece of why you want to live sort of thing, right? You want to live because you want to enjoy yourself. But it's, you've taken this, you sort of leave this big hole. You know, even from enjoying things with your family, right? Can you enjoy dinner when you're nauseated? Can you enjoy somebody's birthday when all you can think about is, oh, I need to, like, you know,

throw up, right? It's difficult. So I think that it can be effective. I think what we really need to do is sort of maybe use it as a teaching tool. Like you can use it sometimes. It's an aid. Maybe then learn about the types of hunger, how to deal with the hunger, you know, what the best eating rules are, get yourself the right mindset, set yourself the right habits, get the

right guardrails, and then as you pull off, you have something to sort of guide you along your weight loss journey as opposed to this sort of, oh, just eat whatever you want, but fewer calories, right? And I think that's the real opportunity, right? It's, it's the, you know, maybe we can do some good with this. If people do well with it, then sure, just stay on it. right, I'm not against it. Like I'm a doctor. I prescribe a lot of this drug, right? It's not something that I have a problem with.

Yes, there are side effects, right? And there's legitimate concerns about certain things, including muscle loss, right? And also GI paralysis and stuff. But like any drug that has side effects. So there's good and bad. It's a mixed bag, right? And some of these new drugs are going to be better or worse.

You never know. But, you know, there's both sort of opportunity and danger, sort of at the same time, right? So I think that we can, you know, we just have to be thoughtful, right? There's this tendency in medicine to just say, you know what, this is good. Just do that.

Right? It's like, yeah, I don't know about that, right? Like, oh, forget learning about good foods and bad foods and fasting and, you know, hedonic hunger. Forget about that. Just take the drug, right? It's like, okay, good luck. Like, I hope you do well.

But I know that in many cases, they'll stop the drug, right? And then you don't get any benefits. Yeah, we just had two researchers on the podcast, one a medical doctor, one a researcher, and they were behind one of the largest studies that followed people that were on this. We'll link to the show notes. It's a number one reason that people stop on these drugs is side effects, right? some of the nausea that you're talking about, lack of feeling joy.

Second reason was cost and insurance, right? People are always, you know, their cost and insurance is sort of changing. And they talked about for the people that successfully kept off the weight, what are the core principles that are there? And it's very similar to a lot of things that, you know, at least some of the stuff is similar to a lot of things that you've talked about, like figuring out how to eat in a way. where you have more inclusion of fiber inside of your diet, right?

And not eating, going to, which generally means staying away from like a lot of these ultra-process foods that are there. And, you know, coming back to your book, there are these core rules, these core principles. You know, now that we've talked about so much of what's causing the problem in the first place and the right whys and the questions to be asking, let's touch on some of those. What are the foundational things that you want people to know that, whether they're on these drugs, whether they're just wanting to approach things naturally, if they're struggling with food noise, if they're struggling with hunger,

if they're struggling with excess weight that they feel that they want to drop off, what are some of these core tenants that they want to be thinking about incorporating into their life that you cover inside the book? So I call them the golden rules of weight loss. And what I'm trying to say is that they're sort of more important than, you know, some of the tips that I put in. So I've tried to keep the very, very practical. And the number one is sort of avoid ultra-processed foods, right?

And that's because of what we talked about, it cuts across like multiple sort of levels of hunger. And second is, you know, make sure you incorporate a natural fasting periods because, again, it cuts across several different types of hunger. Like if you set yourself a period of time that you're not going to eat, I'm not going to eat after seven and not before seven the next day, or whatever it is, whatever you say, right?

Or I'm going to do 24 hours of fasting. You're going to do a lot because you're, you're going to not only help yourself feel that hunger, but you're going to break a lot of the sort of hedonic hunger with like food addictions where you really have to deal with, like cutting down a lot, but also things like the conditioned hunger. So what you're doing is you're doing all your daily activities

and making sure that you're not doing it with food, right? So you're not linking, you know, TV and food, movies and food, sporting events and food, car and food, mall and food. like you're breaking a lot of those social sort of conditioned hunger, right, that food noise. So the fasting is very, very effective for that. And also from a homeostatic standpoint, it's the fastest way to drive down your insulin, right? So those two are, you know, sort of core foundational principles. The third is really a little bit more nebulous.

And it's really to redesign your life to make sure that you deal with the social aspect. because that's the most important thing that, you know, we don't really talk about so much, right? And I talk about, you know, if you have a successful plan, right? So you want to plan for weight loss, right? You need to address the sort of who, what, when, why, how sort of thing, all the questions of what you're supposed to do. Like, who are you supposed to do it with? When, where, why? Right.

The problem with, like, eat fewer calories advice is that does it say anything about who you're supposed to eat with? No, when you're supposed to eat, why you're supposed to eat, where you're supposed to eat, right? So there's all this stuff about mindfulness that's very important and like who you eat with determines what you eat, right? When I eat with my family, I eat pretty good. When I go out with my high school friends, diet's not that good, right? There's a lot of ultra-processed foods there. And so that's important.

Where you eat is important. if you're eating at a table with a fully cooked meal versus on the go with ultra-processed foods. So all of these questions form that sort of scaffold. And that's the sort of third sort of golden rule is really design your social environment for success. Right. And that's a little bit more nebulous because it's going to be different for different people. So the thing about the golden rules, right? If you think about it, they're very, very old rules.

Like it's not just like I made them up sort of thing. It's like, if you think about the golden rules, it's like don't eat junk food, right? Don't eat all the time, right? Make sure you spend some of your time, you know, some of your day not eating, right? Because when you eat, you store calories. When you don't eat, you're going to burn calories. And make sure you're with the right people and doing in the right environment, right? Just like school.

Like, you don't want your kids to fall in with the wrong crowd, right? Why? Because the crowd turns them, you know, can turn them into somebody very bad. So make sure you have the right friends and right. the right environment. Those are not new rules. They're practically the oldest rules in the book. I bet you if you went back to your grandmother,

that's like the first thing she would say. Don't eat crappy food and don't eat all the time. And make sure you're with the right people and in the right setting. Right. And if you asked her grandmother, she would have said the same thing and her grandmother would have said the same thing, right? And so there's this concept that Nassim Teleb talks about in his books, right, called Lindy Effect, right?

And so the idea is that, you know, ideas that are not perishable or things that are not perishable, the longer they've been around, the longer they will be around, right? So it's because they've sort of withstood the test of time, if you will, right? You take an idea that has been around a long time, like don't eat junk food, don't eat ultra-processed foods. If it's been around that long, it's going to be around a lot longer. Fasting. Don't eat all the time, right? It's like in the Bible. So you know that this idea has been around at least for 2,026 years, right?

So it will probably be around for another 2,026 years because of the validity of it, the Lindy effect, right? Make sure you fall in with the right crowd. You have the right environment, right? Like, yes, everybody's mother told them. My mother told me, her mother told her, and her mother told her that, right? So these ideas are not new. They're sort of the old ones, right?

And as opposed to say something like, you know, infant formula, right? So there was a period of time where people were like, oh, infant formula is better than breast milk, right? How long did that last? Like 10 years at the most, right? Breast milk has been around for thousands of years until the 70s when we convinced mothers that they should not breastfeed. They should feed their kids formula because formula was better than breast milk, right? And it seems strange, but it actually took a concerted effort in the 90s.

And this was the Breastisbest campaigned to convince mothers that breast milk was better than infant formula. Like that sounds so weird now because, of course, that was very successful because everybody's like, yeah, duh, right? Sort of like the butter debate, right? For humans, we're eating butter for thousands of years. And then in the 70s or 80s, they're like, no, you should eat margarine. It's like, yeah, that margarine was not good. It was not good for you. It didn't taste good.

It was a disaster. Like, now you go and it's like, you can barely find margarine on the shelf because nobody's buying margarine. It's like, no, because of the Lindy effect. What's been around will likely be around and likely because it has validity. Same thing with the golden rules. They're not new rules. They're old rules. Right. But we got to listen to that sort of old ancient wisdom if you want to avoid these sort of modern diseases like obesity.

You know, when I think about my audience and the journey that they've been on and we're all on a journey and learning different things, learning from different educators like yourself, I think that many of them, including myself, these are people that have a natural wellness bias, right? These are people that naturally have a bias towards wanting to do things naturally, wellness. They generally have a skepticism of over-medication, but they're still open-minded and understand that medications have a role. You know, that's the psychographic of the individuals that are largely listening to this podcast. When I look at the journey that a lot of them went through, and I went through this journey as well, too, and I talked about it on my podcast as well, I used to believe that you couldn't overeat healthy food.

I used to think that like no amount of olive oil was too much, no amount of a healthy dressing, even with like fantastic ingredients inside of there. And I used to believe, because I felt like I had heard people talk about this, is that as long as you just focused on, you know, staying away from ultra-processed food or minimizing them very greatly, then there wasn't too much value to auditing your calories. And then a few years ago, through my own journey of wanting to become more fit, less skinny fat, you know, as growing up as a, you know, under-muscled vegetarian kid, I started to look at a lot of things that I was eating and I was like, oh, wow, you can.

I don't eat any ultra-processed foods at all. why do I have a little bit of belly fat that's there? Oh, you can't overeat on healthy food. Yeah. And it's not that the entire world can be described through calories in and out, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't ignore calories at all if I have certain goals or things that I'm trying to pay attention to. And I'm not an obese person.

I don't feel like I'm suffering from like food noise that was there. It was more in the sense of like, oh, wow, one poor, one long pour of olive oil on a daily basis, that's an extra 500 calories that I was getting. And just by being a little bit more mindful, I'm not having olive oil. I don't eat butter because I don't react well to it, but I wish I could because it tastes so good. I'm not not having these foods. I've just been a little bit more mindful that even healthy food, food that's at

Airwan and Whole Foods or other things, you can overeat it and it can add up to excess weight on you. Oh, yes. I don't think that you would disagree with that idea. No, I don't disagree with that. And for sure, again, you have to go back to sort of which type of hunger are we really facing here, right? Is it the physical homeostatic hunger? I'll tell you, like, when you do fasting for long periods of time, right, if you do fasting for like

four or five days, right, you start to feel that physical hunger. And what I realize is that I actually don't feel it very often. So therefore, it's the other types of hunger that typically drive it, right? So that extra pore of extra virgin olive oil, and it's like, what is it that's really, what hunger is it that it's really satisfying? Is it the, you know, sort of the hedonic hunger or is it the conditioned hunger? Which one is it, right? Because there must be a reason, right?

You have to get back to the reason why you're doing it, right? And maybe it's because you feel that you can, right? And it's a free food, right? And there was this term that got popular a while ago called free food in the keto world, right? I'm like, there actually is no free food, right? Like, if you take olive oil, yes, you're not stimulating insulin, but the fat that you eat, the olive oil, still gets absorbed. It goes into your chylomicrons, which goes into your lymphatic system,

which gets deposited as fat, right? So you're eventually going to have to burn that off still, right? So, yes, you're going to have to be mindful of that. And that's where something like mindfulness is very, very helpful, right? Because then it's like, okay, what am I doing here? Like, why am I taking this extra? Do I really want it or am I just satisfying some other need, right? Because it's pleasurable.

Maybe that's what it is, right? I'm just doing it. Or maybe it's because I'm just bored, right? And I think, oh, it's a healthy food. I'm really just bored, right? I'm not actually hungry, but it's there. It's easily available. So I'll take it.

Right? Then it's like, actually, that's the hedonic hunger. That's the problem. Right? And that's the sort of value of sort of identifying what it is that you're really trying to do. And, you know, even if you're eating healthy foods and stuff, right, then, you know, if you do get into that state where it's like, okay, you're a little bit over, it's like you can still do something about it because the fasting is always sort of an option for you and that kind of thing. But I totally agree with you.

I mean, I've never said that you can eat as much of a healthy food. Like that, that to me, I think sometimes people put words into my mouth. And somehow, I don't think I've ever said that, right? There's this popular thing a few years ago, if you remember in the keto world, it's called fat bombs, where they'd be like these really high fat foods. And I wrote an article and I just said, what's the point of it? Right. Why take it?

Like, it doesn't make any sense, right? If you're not hungry, then don't eat. Right? If you are hungry, then eat. Right. But you have to understand why it is. But yeah, absolutely. I think that even if it's healthy, even if it's everything, like, there are still reasons why you're eating it.

right? And that's, you know, we have to understand what sort of, is it just that you're used to doing it and that's why you're doing it? Like, why are you taking that extra bit, right? That's the real question, right? That's the underlying fundamental reason. Because if you weren't hungry, if you physically, the homeostatic hunger, then what is it that that extra food is is doing for you? Because, you know, there often are these sort of hidden, hidden tracks. if you will. Because like, there was this book that was written a few years ago called Hunger by Roxanne Gay, terrific writer. And she describes her weight journey and she is like 500 pounds. And she realizes by, you know, very soon that it's a, you know, she wants to be big because she thinks it's going to keep her safe because she had some childhood sexual trauma. It's like, okay, well, that's very, very interesting because now you've identified the underlying issue and why you're eating. So no amount of advice to eat less or, you know, take less olive oil or take, you know, that's not going to help because that was never the problem, right? You've got to

identify the problem and then deal with it. So the hunger is not this singular thing. It's sort of, there's at least three different types. And I think that's where we have to start developing that conversation to get away from the, okay, there's calories here and that's the whole reason. But what's reason behind it, right? That's the harder part of thinking about things. And that's where people go off the rails. Because for you, it could be one thing. For somebody else, it could be something completely different, right? A completely different issue. Lack of sleep, for example. Well, then you got to identify it and say, okay, my problem is actually lack of sleep. So fix the sleep problem. Don't just say eat fewer calories or don't take that olive oil, right? The problem is the,

you know, the stress, the lack of sleep. And that's what's. triggering the cortisol, which is, you know, causing the hunger, you know, the body to want to gain more weight, that kind of thing, right? So it's always this thing, right? Everybody tries to pigeonhole it. Like, it's just calories, just calories, no, no, no. It's different for every different person. There's like a hundred different reasons why people will gain weight, right? The calories argument is this attempt to put everything as the same solution for every single problem, right? To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail, right? And it's like, okay, let's just try and think a little bit more, right? And that's where I think if we can get there,

I think it can help, right? So maybe mindfulness training is important. Maybe changing your mindset is important. I talk about that in the hunger code, like the importance of mindset, for example, right? Or maybe it's habits that are important, breaking bad habits, creating good habits. Maybe that's important, right? But it's not like, you know, because this work for me, it will work for every single person. That's not the case, right? It could be something completely different. For me, it could be mindset. For you, it could be, you know, sleep for somebody else. It could be stress for somebody else. It could be emotional eating for somebody else. It could be depression, addiction. Like, think about all these different issues that now come up when you start to think about the hunger issue

as opposed to the calories issue. And that's, you know, maybe we don't get all the answers, but at least start asking the right questions. As we're winding down for today is a part of your message that, you know, we have examples of traditional societies or societies that practice things more traditionally, the Lindy idea that they live in a way that's more in accordance, forget just eating, but the way that they spend time socially, etc.

But here in the Western world, America in particular, because we're surrounded by so much food noise, and then on top of that, our lifestyle is so different, how we sleep, our screens, caffeine usage, alcohol usage, drug usage, etc. Because it's so different than some of these more traditional ways that we lived, even taking principles that you were talking about in, you know, how life was. was more 50, 60, 100 years ago, even in North America, we have to be that much more vigilant because things have changed so much. You know, it's not that everybody's getting mindfulness training in these countries that are naturally more, you know, less obese.

It's just the environment that they were grown up in, right? But we have to work so much harder, but it's worth it because if we don't do it, our entire system will be hijacked and obese, will be one of many different problems we'll be dealing with. Exactly. So you take an example like mindfulness. So say in here, here we have the, it's acceptable to be eating in front of your computer and

doing work, right? Now, that was actually unimaginable. Like, honestly, like in the 70s, completely unimaginable. Eating food at your desk would have been like, wow, what are you doing? Right. So what happens, of course, is that now you've got distracted eating. You're eating, but you're barely tasting your food. So you really, when you don't taste your food,

you don't even recognize if you're full or you're not full because you're not even paying attention, right? You're paying attention to the Excel spreadsheet or whatever you're doing, right? So in other countries, of course, that's just not an issue because they're not working in front of their screens, right? Because it's not sort of socially acceptable to do that. So perhaps in some countries, that's just not something you do.

you eat with other people at a table sort of thing, right? So we can still do that, but then we have to take that extra step and say, okay, well, let's add that extra mind. We have to add that extra mindfulness step because we have a situation where you certainly could be in front of your computer doing work for different reasons. There's a big deadline or whatever, but now you have to pay extra attention to be mindful. Whereas the person, you know, in Italy who's like, you know, living la Dolce Vida, and just having a great time but not working, you know, like dogs, right?

Well, maybe he doesn't have to do this mindfulness because it's just not an issue for him, right? It doesn't mean that one's right and one's wrong. Our society is always going to change, right? But that means we need to change the tools. And, you know, all these different types of hunger, they need different toolkits, right? If you're dealing with distracted eating, it's a different toolkit. If you're dealing with addictive eating, that's a different toolkit, right? It's like, you know, you say, oh, everything in moderation.

But what if you're an addict, right? And food addiction is just one of these topics that are covered. It's very important, actually. But if you're addicted, you don't need to take moderation. You need to abstain, right? It's like an alcoholic. You don't say, hey, why don't you have a drink, right? Because it's like that one drink will lead to more.

So if you have food addictions, you need to treat it like an addiction, right? and there's so much actually interesting data on food addiction in the last five years. Like the field is sort of exploding about how important it really is. And so, you know, again, and it's really due to the ultra-processed foods, right? So in a country that doesn't have so much ultra-processed foods, they don't have to deal with that. You don't have to add that extra step, but we do because we have that problem with ultra-processed foods and food addiction. right? So therefore, there's a lot of things that we always have to adapt, but the underlying key is to know about it, right? The more you know, the better you do. Because now, if you know that

food addiction is a problem, now you can say, let's bring the right toolkit in, right? Instead of, say, everything is calories, you know, everything's a nail, right? Now you can say, well, the problem is this, let's reach into our, you know, toolkit and let's get this, right? Right? You think about addiction, which is fascinating because it's like if you think about alcohol addiction. So alcohol addiction is important because you have like, say, alcoholics anonymous, they do 12 steps, none of which is drink less alcohol, right? It's like it's about forgiveness and having a sponsor or friendships. It's about sharing. It's about, you know, being kind to yourself. There's so much in it, that's so good.

So now we have a food addict who's addicted to ultra-processed foods and we say, just eat less, right? If that's the just drink less alcohol, none of this sort of understanding about forgiveness and mindfulness and, you know, friendship and, you know, having the right people around you, right? It's like, okay, but why would you treat these two addictive substances differently? One of which you treat with great kindness and compassion, the other of which you start blaming the victim, right? You should know better. You should do better. It's like,

oh, that's, that's not fair, right? And that's where I think knowing about it is really important. And that's where I really try to focus on, you know, both the hunger code and the obesity code is really exploring what causes weight gain. Because I reject the idea that it's just calories in calories out, which is just personal choice, right? Because that's where all the blaming comes in. That's all where the fat shaming comes from because it's like, it's your fault. You chose to eat. It's your fault. It's like, no, no, no. There's a lot that goes into this decision to eat, the hormones, the emotions, the social constructs. There's a lot. So it's not their fault necessarily. It's the fault of the entire individual within the society, right? But it's not just

the individual. And that's where I think we really would benefit from sort of expanding the discussion. And you find it in some medical literature, like you can find all this data on ultra-processed foods, food addictions, you know, differences in obesity rates, right? You can find it anywhere. But somehow, when it comes down to the end, they're always like, well, there's all calories and calories out. It's like, there's more. There's more. Let's let's know more so that we can do better, right? So they're, you know, to me, they're, they're important books because, you know, the Hunger Code is actually the first book I've written in about six years. Yeah, I remember watching your webinar. You thought after COVID, like, you may not even write another book for a

while. Yeah, I was like, okay, I think I've said everything I need to say. But then it's like, oh, no, but look at all this interesting new data, right? It's like, oh, then I start to realize, hey, there's actually a lot more about it, right? And so it's like, let's tell people so that we can keep moving forward on these discussions so that we're not stuck in this sort of rough about, you know, it's just calories, therefore it's all within your control. A lot of it is outside of people's control, and that's where you have to sort of identify it. It's like anything in medicine. Identify the problem, then you reach for the right solution, right? You have an infection. Let's get antibiotics, right? Just like that. You have a cancer. Let's look for surgery, chemotherapy,

whatever, right? This is the same. What's the problem? It's not the calories. It's what behind the calories, right? Addiction, you know, social modeling, conditioning, homeostasis, insulin. Is it an insulin problem? Is it a, you know, let's know this so that then we can reach in and say, okay, your problem is sleep. Let's fix the sleep, right? You know, for our health-minded audience here today, are there a few numbers when it comes to insulin, A1C, or any other markers that they could use, especially now that there's so much different testing that's available and people can do at-home test or more and more places are offering things. Are there early markers or things that if they start crossing this number, you want to flag it as a warning to people that, hey, you may think

you're okay, but this might be a sign that you have to pay attention and double down on some of the things that we've been talking about today and definitely be picking up your book. This is a little bit more controversial, I suppose, but A1C is a well-defined number, right? So there's lots of studies on it. That's how high your sugars go. But that's not the first thing that happens when you develop either obesity or type 2 diabetes. The first thing that happens is your insulin levels rise. And this has been known for like 30 years.

Like I learned about this in medical school when I went, you know, in the 90s. So the first thing that goes up is insulin goes up long before that, before you. you get type 2 diabetes. What you find is that as you go through the spectrum of sort of normal weight to obese, insulin is up. And then you go to pre-diabetes, insulin goes up, right? As insulin goes up further, then you get type 2 diabetes. So, you know, if you're not measuring your insulin levels, you've missed that whole entire

sort of early part where your blood sugar, your A1C, is normal, but your insulin levels are going up. So I actually measure the C-peptide, which is not a perfect marker. It's a measure of insulin. So fasting insulin is a very variable measure, right? So fasting insulin is going to go boob. It's going to go up and down so much that you really can't make heads or tails of it.

C-peptide's a little less variable. And you can also do a fasting C-peptide. And that's going to give you an idea of how higher insulin levels are. So I've seen so many people who have fasting C-peptides or random C-peptides that are four or five,

times normal and low normal sugars like A1C is of 5.5%. So it was all that insulin that's keeping the sugar low. That's not a normal situation, right? Your insulin levels lean to be low and your blood sugar level be to be low in order for you to be off of that spectrum of sort of normal weight to obesity to prediabetes. Because that's where that insulin level goes up. I say C-peptide, fasting C-peptide, random C-peptide, is a good marker, but you actually have to follow it over time because it's quite variable. So because I follow patients over many, many years, I actually measure them routinely.

I see where people are high, and then I talk to them and I say, hey, look, let's adjust your diet a little bit because it's about the diet, right? Because insulin levels are related very much to the diet. And you can see them come down and you can see them go up, right? but following them over time is very important because it's going to give you a better idea. Because of this sort of variability, right? It's sort of like, you know, it's like stock markets, right? Every day, if you watch it every day, it's like, oh, there's no rhyme or reason.

But then when you sort of zoom out and say, oh, let's watch over, it's sort of this slow up and down, right? Same thing with C peptides. You have to follow it over time. So that's a really important marker. I've gotten so much blood work done over the years and I don't think I've ever seen like I've done like my Boston heart. panel, then I've done this, I've done that. I think anybody's ever ordered this CPTime before. I've actually

talked to people. It's not covered. That's the problem. So where I practice in Toronto, I order it and it's just paid for by the government. Yeah. So I can order no problem. But that's not the case in most places here. So you actually have to pay for that

yourself, which precludes like, you know, a lot of doctors won't do that because they don't want to put, you know, financial strain on their patients, which is the same thing I do, right? But I actually think that, you know, how else are you going to check it, right? Like, there are other measures you could use. There's this insulin resistance index, right? I think it's from the lipoprotein panel or something. It's bashoir. I actually don't use it because I just use C-Petide. But there are other measures of insulin resistance, which is the same as

hyper-insulinemia, so they're the same thing that you probably could use, but I don't think that's covered either. What do you think about people talking about hip-to-waste ratio, is being sort of like, is not the accurate term, but like the poor man's version of getting it done? Is that a good? It is. So there's fairly well-established criteria that are easy, right? So if you look at the metabolic syndrome, it's actually a five sort of things. And it's sort of high blood sugars, which you measure with the A1C.

It's the high blood pressure, which you use a blood pressure cuff. It's high triglycerized, low HDL, which is a standard cholesterol panel. and waist circumference, which is just measuring, right? So that's the five criteria of metabolic syndrome. And what interesting is that all of those are manifestations of the excess insulin. So therefore, if you really want to know about it, then you can check your A1C, your blood pressure, your triglycerides, and HDL, right? So remember, it's not the LDL, which is the number that people sort of obsess over.

It's the other numbers, which are actually way more important. And people forget that HDL is actually a way more powerful predictor of future events than LDL. The only reason we sort of focus obsessively on LDL is because there's a drug that lowers it, right? People forget that there was a drug that raised HDL, which failed miserably. And that's the only reason we're not pushing HDL. And then you can measure waist circumference. So the other measure you can do very easily, which is free, is the waste to height ratio. Waste to height ratio.

And it's very easy to take your waist to measure height. And it should be roughly sort of half. So if your waist size and, you know, your pants size is a, it's not exactly the same. But if you're, say, a 32 waist, then 64 inches is what your height should be. So if you're a 40 waist, then you should be 80 inches, right? That's the sort of rough estimate. And the further off you are, it means that your waist is getting bigger and bigger. The reason that's important is because it indicates the amount of visceral fat.

Because it's actually not the total amount of fat that matters. It's actually how much is visceral fat versus subcutaneous fat. So the subcutaneous fat is the fat under the skin. And it's actually not that dangerous. Like you could have a lot of subcutaneous fat and it actually won't matter to your health. But once you start getting all the abdominal fat, the visceral fat, and that's where you see these people, which are actually quite slatious, or normal weight, they have this big belly.

That's a problem. You actually see it a lot in South Asian, so we have a big South Asian practice where we are. And they're, you know, they're 120 pounds, right? And so it's like your weight is perfect. Your BMI is like 20 something. But you look at them and you go, well, you also have this really big belly, right?

You have very skinny arms and a big belly. That's trouble. Like, because that's the sort of, so you need to look at your bloodshed, sugars, your blood pressure, your triglycerides, HDL, and your waist circumference. Because those are your markers, and those are all well established, right? Those are easy to do. They're standard. Anybody can get them. The fasting C-peptides, a little bit more sort of advanced when you're really trying to say, hey, what's my risk? You know, so then the question you're asking is, do I have a lot

of excess insulin, like too much insulin? Insulin is normal hormone, but do I have too much? And keep in mind that the C-peptide is also quite variable. So it can vary, sort of, you do it one week, you do it the next week. It's going to change. But you're looking for trends, right? If it's always up, yeah, that's a problem, right? If it comes down and then it stays down, hey, that's good, right? So you're looking for these long-term trends.

Dr. Fung, as always, you bring the fire, the education, and the practical tips. Talk to us a little bit more about this book. It's the Hunger Code. We have a link in the show notes. People can get anywhere. Depending on when this podcast is out, it might still be pre-order. It might be out. We have the link.

Special website bonuses. Any fun things you're doing? Yeah. So just go to my website as Dr. Jason Fung. D-O-C-T-O-R Jason Fung. If you go to the DR Jason Fung, you get like, I think. Oh, no. I tried to get that website.

But it was taken already. So they wanted a lot of money. I was like, okay, well. So actually, I don't think they ever offer it to me. But if you go to the website for pre-orders, you can actually get a free masterclass that we're offering to go over the sort of implementation of some of these issues that we're dealing with for hunger.

And it's a great bonus. And I think it's the week of March 22nd, I think. So if you order it, pre-order or order before, then you can just go to my website, just show sort of proof of, you know, that of purchase, and then they'll send you a link to the masterclass. So it's a week-long masterclass,

the first one I've ever done. And it's really just sort of guiding people as to how to implement, not to go over the book again, but say, okay, let's figure how we can now implement this into our own lives. And we'll do it all together because that's one of the core principles

of what we do is that if you do stuff together, like it's much more powerful. I mean, it's 10 times better if you do it together, right? so much more fun to do with other people. You just don't feel alone and you feel like, you know, hiccups or things that you're going through. When you see other people talking about what they're going through,

you feel like nothing's wrong with me. I'm not broken. This is all just part of the process of figuring things out in this messy world that's filled with so much food noise. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Dr. Fine, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to meet you in person. been a big fan for a long time,

and I'm excited for everybody to pick up a copy of The Hunger Code. It was my absolute joy to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much. It's been really fun. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe,

just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about.

It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free

and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This. Or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.