Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Psychology of Hunger | Dr Jason Fung

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Why do diets so often fail... is it discipline or biology?Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, nephrologist, and one of the most influential voices challenging how we understand metabolism, obesity, and chronic disease. He is the bestselling author of The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and his newest book, The Hunger Code, which explores a deceptively powerful question: what is actually driving hunger, and what does the answer tell us about why so many people struggle with their weight?In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Dr. Fung explains why the standard advice of "eat less and move more" isn't just ineffective, it's missing the point entirely. The real question isn't how much you eat. It's why you eat. And the answer, he argues, is far more complex, and far more interesting, than anyone has told us.At the center of the conversation is Dr. Fung's framework of three distinct types of hunger: homeostatic hunger, driven by hormones and biology; hedonic hunger, driven by pleasure and reward; and conditioned hunger, driven by environment and learned behavior. Each has its own cause, its own pattern, and its own solution. And until we understand which type of hunger we're dealing with, we'll keep solving the wrong problem.Dr. Fung also digs into the science of insulin, explaining why it is the master switch of fat storage and release, why ultra-processed foods are designed to spike it in ways that leave us hungry again almost immediately, and why intermittent fasting can be one of the most powerful tools available for driving insulin down and letting the body do what it's built to do.The conversation covers a lot of ground: the GLP-1 debate, the gender differences in fasting, what perimenopause does to appetite, how food order affects insulin response, why walking after a meal can reduce your insulin spikes, and why the cultural food environments of Italy and Japan offer a compelling blueprint for what sustainable health can actually look like.In this conversation, we explore:Why "eat less, move more" fails to address the root cause of weight gainThe three types of hunger and how each one requires a different responseHow ultra-processed foods hijack biology, behavior, and environment all at onceWhy insulin, not calories, is the key metabolic variable to understandHow intermittent fasting works, who it's for, and how to do it wellWhat perimenopause does to hunger hormones, and what to do about itWhy the Italian and Japanese food environments produce radically different health outcomesYour hunger isn't a character flaw. Learn what's actually behind it.__________________________________Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why do people get fat? Because we've been sold this idea that it's just math, calories in calories out. But it's completely untrue. Why do diets often fail? It's not because people lack discipline, but because they're fighting their own biology. People were saying that type 2 diabetes was a chronic and progressive disease, and there's nothing you could do about it, but take your drugs. It's a big lie because every doctor knew that if you lost weight,

your diabetes would either get better or go away. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Trevei. Who Pete Carroll brought into work with the Seahawks. Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project. Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough.

Today I am stoked to sit down with Dr. Jason Fung, physician, nephrologist, and one of the leading voices reshaping how we understand metabolism, obesity and chronic disease. He is the author of several influential books, including the obesity code, the diabetes code, and his latest book, The Hunger Code. When you say, okay, why is somebody gaining weight? The answer is because you're hungry. So why are you hungry? And there's actually at least three different types of hunger. I mean, you know, psychology is actually a hugely important part of what drives behavior. 100%. If you have a heart issue, you're going to want to pay attention. If you want to lose weight, then definitely pay attention. But if you look at overweight and obese, it's somewhere around, you know, 70% of the American adults. Other countries are often like 30% and 40%, right? The question is,

why? It's not the person. It's not the culture. And if you have type 2 diabetes or you're on the path to it, you are going to love this conversation. I think if you're really struggling with the weight loss, the main thing I would say is that with that with that, with that's jump into this week's conversation with Dr. Jason Fum. Jason, I'm really excited to sit down with you because you've got your arms around something that is really important for all of us. And so can you first talk about your background just a little bit to set the stage? And then I'm going to want to transition into why the current study and why the current book that you've written. Sure.

So I'm a specialist physician. So I trained in kidney disease and sort of seems a little bit out of the sort of weight loss thing. but there's actually a rhythm to it. So what happened is that I treat kidney disease. And for many, many years, I just sort of treated it conventionally like everybody else. But, as you know, we've had its real obesity epidemic, really starting since the late 70s. And that translated into an epidemic of type 2 diabetes. And that sort of pushed the numbers up.

And the number one cause of kidney disease is actually type 2 diabetes. So as I'm practicing, what we're seeing is just more and more type 2 diabetes causing sort of kidney disease. At the same time, hypertension, which is high blood pressure, which was sort of the second biggest cause of kidney disease, it was getting better because the treatments were better, were actually diagnosing people way earlier with high blood pressure. So, in fact, the numbers start to get skewed because I have less of the sort of hypertensive kidney disease and much more of the type 2 diabetes.

So about 2010, 2011, I started to realize, hey, I think we're doing this all wrong, which is quite pause there. Sorry to totally interrupt you because I want to know that moment. The moment that you said, we're doing it wrong. Can you go, can you call that back up? And I'd love to open the aperture and understand how you had a moment because what you've done from this moment has been meaningful and significant and really helped a lot of people. So I want to go into that moment. Yeah. So it just sort of came to me. I was just thinking about it one day, right? I think about kidney disease a lot, right? Because every day, that's who I see. And so I'm thinking about it, thinking about it all the time. But then suddenly, I sort of switched, I looked at it a little bit differently. And that's

when I said, I think we're doing this all wrong. Because if you think about it, the very word diabetic kidney disease means that you shouldn't just treat it with drugs or dialysis, which is what I've been doing, you should get rid of the diabetes. Because if you get rid of the diabetes, you don't get the diabetic kidney disease, right? So that's when I started to think, okay, so why don't you just get rid of the diabetes, right? Type 2 diabetes. And that's because people were saying that type 2 diabetes was a chronic and progressive disease and there was nothing you could do about it, but take your drugs, right? And then I thought about that for a second. And I thought, that's all wrong. It's a big lie because everybody knows. So every doctor knew, every patient knew, every nurse knew, that if you

lost weight, your diabetes would either get better or go away. And we're talking type two because there's actually two types, right? Therefore, this idea that, hey, you know, type two diabetes is incurable and progressive is all wrong because it's clearly a reversible disease. Everybody knew it. If your friend had type two diabetes and, you know, he's taking medication, then lost 50 pounds, he'd get off his medication. What are you going to say? You're a liar? No. He's obviously better. And everybody had seen it. So why would we say this to ourselves? And I thought about that for a while. And I thought, well, okay, so the problem is not necessarily the type 2b is.

You got to keep going back upstream, right? You got to keep going back up and up. The problem is the weight loss. You got to get people to lose weight. And that's really the key. And that's where I really became interested in the question of weight loss. And that's where I also thought, oh, the science behind this is like crap, right? And that was sort of how that whole thing started.

because the type 2 diabetes is actually a reversible disease. My second book was all about that, the diabetes code. And in fact, they changed the whole definition. So two years ago, the American Diabetes Association finally admitted that it's a reversible disease and put in criteria for remission, which means you can reverse this disease, which is a complete difference from the messaging before that. But now you get back to the stage where it's like, okay, the problem was that people needed to lose weight, right? So why weren't doctors working hard to get people to lose weight?

The training is not aligned with that potential solution. Well, the training was, it's all calories, right? Calories in, calories out. You could read this in any standard textbook, eat 500 fewer calories. I looked it up in actually one of the sort of very authoritative textbooks, and they said, eat 500 fewer calories a day, you'll lose a pound a week. But it never works. And that's what every doctor knew. You'd say this. to patients because that's what you're trained to do. But you knew in your heart that it didn't work. That's why because they couldn't lose weight,

you couldn't reverse the type 2 diabetes. And that's why they were saying to themselves, they're basically lying to themselves, that this was a chronic and progressive disease. Because they were so unsuccessful. They couldn't face that, hey, we don't know what we're doing here in terms of weight loss, right? They assumed it's all about calories.

That's not, right? And that's what my first book was about the obesity code. But the whole idea is that it was basically a big lie to themselves because if you looked at the evidence, it was obvious that this whole pathway was not correct. And if you focus on the weight loss, you're going to prevent all these sort of downstream effects. So one question about the narrative. You can have type 2 diabetes and not look overweight, right?

So there is a subtlety about type 2 diabetes and weight that I do want you to open up and and help us understand. Because weight loss alone only is for people that have weight to lose. Yeah, you can actually be normal weight. So if you define weight, which is normally defined by body mass index, right? Are you aligned with the BMI indicator? It's an indicator, right?

It obviously is not great because it only takes into account height and weight, right? So it doesn't take into account muscle mass and bone mass. Most of my friends, me included, when we look at the BMI, because of our muscle density, we look unhealthy from a BMI. Yeah, so it's not great from an individual standpoint. In fact, if you look at standard definitions of metabolic syndrome, which is sort of the syndrome of diabetes and hypertension and so on, they don't use BMI.

They use waist circumference, right? Weight circumference. Waste circumference. So that's the acknowledgement that BMI is not a sort of great measurement. And what does weight circumference mean? Waste circumference is sort of like 40 inches is the standard. Are you saying weight or waste? Sorry, waist.

Waste circumference. Yeah, I was like, what is a weight circumference? Like, are they measuring your arms? Like, what, like, yeah, okay. So it's the fat around the belly. So it's not actually fat that's the problem. It's the visceral fat. That's the problem.

So there's two types of fat. There's fat that's in your organs and around your organs. That's visceral fat. And that comes with your, that's like the big belly, right? So that's why you measure waist circumference. And there's people who have a lot of fat underneath the skin, which is called subcutaneous fat. And that fat is actually quite,

benign. So if you have a lot of subcutaneous fat but normal visceral fat, you're actually fine. It doesn't truly matter. That's why they say some people can be metabolically healthy and still overweight because they carry a lot of subcutaneous fat. So who are you in the hunger code, which, by the way, you are really clever in the way that you write. You move stories along. It's grounded in science. And you've got a humor in the way that you do it. Thank you. So well done. I was really excited to meet you because of how much I enjoyed listening and hearing the way that you speak and the way that you think. So that's a little subtext note for folks that are looking for a good read. But who are you speaking to in the hunger code? I'm really trying to speak to anybody who's trying to

lose weight, which unfortunately is more and more people. Give us the stats. Yeah, give us the stats on both diabetes, but also obesity. Yeah. So if you look at the rates of both, really, so obesity, again, is defined by body mass index. So they have sort of these numbers, right, 25, and then 25 to 30 is overweight, above 30 is obese, and then you have categories above that. But if you look at overweight and obese, it's somewhere around, you know, 70% of American adults. It's much higher than other countries. You know, other countries are often like 30%, 40%, right? Because overweight is, you know, 25 to 30, you can still be like quite healthy in that

weight range, right? Because BMI, as we're just saying, doesn't take into account muscle. So therefore, there's a lot of sort of very active people who look, are classified as overweight but aren't really. That's why these numbers seem so high. But that's an alarming number. It's still a lot. It's still a lot. Yeah. And the other thing is that you have to track these over time, right? Because you have to think that if you follow, say, the United States over the decades, right? If your BMI is trending up, it's generally not because people are just getting a lot more muscular, right? It's usually fat, right? Unfortunately. So it's great for these large sort of population

studies because when you average everybody together, it sort of washes out. But you can't take any one person like a professional athlete. Like, you know, their body mass index would put them in obese, but they have like zero body fat sort of thing. Right. So, but it's sort of this thing for averages. But yeah, 70% is like a horrifying number. So the whole point was, you know, and the hunger code is sort of a follow up to the obesity code. And it's this effort to understand the sort of cause of the obesity epidemic or why people gain weight. Like, why do people get fat? Because we've been sold this idea that it's just math,

calories in calories out, but it's completely untrue, right? It doesn't follow any physiology at all. And the whole, you know, and most people sort of don't understand, like, the nuances of what goes on. So you talk about their hormones, but there's so much more than that.

The hunger code is really talking about trying to get to the sort of upstream ideas of what is causing this weight gain, right? If the problem is overeating, then you need to understand what is driving this behavior, right? Because nobody wants to be overweight or obese. So why is this happening and why here in America, right? I mean, it sounds funny to say it. I read that line in your book and I was like, yeah, you're right. Like, I don't know anybody that says, man, I want to be obese.

That's not what, anyway. Now, I do think that there's some of my friends that they played sport. They stopped working out. They didn't change their eating habits. And they kind of like being big. Yeah. You know, but that's one small segment of the population. But I agree with you that, like, nobody wants to look or feel unhealthy.

Yeah. And this is the sort of focus. So, you know, there's a concept in logic called the three wise, right? So the idea is that if you really want to understand what's happening, you have to ask the question why three times. So if you were to say, well, why did the Titanic sink, for example? And you might say, because it hit an iceberg. And that's actually not the right answer. Because if you're to say, okay, from that, how do you prevent future marine disasters? You'd say, don't hit icebergs, right? And that's not useful, right? You're not getting to the root cause. That's why it's not useful, right? You're

treating the symptoms, not the cause. So then the second. The second why might be, well, why did the Titanic hit the iceberg? And it's like they say, well, because the captain couldn't avoid. You couldn't turn the ship in time. So why couldn't the captain turn the ship in time? Because it was going too fast. And that's the real answer. So when you say, how do you avoid future marine disasters?

The answer is slow down, not don't hit icebergs. If you stop thinking at that first superficial why, you get like a nonsense answer, just like if you're to say alcoholism equals alcohol in minus alcohol out. So the solution is don't drink alcohol. It's like, well, you're not understanding why people are drinking, right? You're not getting to that deeper reason. So when you say, okay, why is somebody gaining weight? And it's like because calories in is greater than calories out.

Well, sure, that's true. But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in why calories in is greater than calories out, right? And the answer is because you're hungry. That's the only reason, right? We eat because we're hungry and we stop eating. because we're full. So then you get to the third, and I think most interesting question, why are you hungry? Right? Because if the problem is overeating, then you could think of the problem

as overhunger. So why are you hungry? And there's actually three different types, at least three different types of hunger that you can classify. And when you go into the scientific literature, these are fairly well established. That's the sort of physical hunger, which is called homeostatic hunger, which is all about hormones and balance. And then, Then there's the hedonic hunger, hedonic meaning related to pleasure. So we eat because we like to, right? It gives us pleasure. It makes us feel better.

That's why you eat dessert, right? It's not because you're physically hungry. And then there's a conditioned hunger because you can have, and you'll understand this, you can pair two things with conditioning. A whole field of behavioral psychology that you can now bring to bear on this conditioned hunger because it's a huge problem. If everything you do reminds you of food, you're going to be hungry all day long.

So what do they call it? Food noise. Because everywhere you go, you go to the store, you go to the mall, hey, you feel like eating. You go in your car, hey, you feel like eating. You go sit in front of the TV. Hey, you feel like eating. You go watch a sporting event.

Hey, you feel hungry. It's lunchtime. Hey, you feel hungry. You go to the coffee shop. Hey, you feel hungry. So you're creating a lot of conditioned hunger. But there's ways around. it. So you can't just say eat less because you never understood why they were eating too much

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Let's keep pushing. Let's keep exploring. Out of the three types of hunger, each have their own, like, mapping of choices to make and how to get better. But which are the three are you most interested in? Because I'm definitely interested in the behavioral piece. But I'm imagining you have a different appreciation. I think all three are, they're different, you know, because one is sort of physical. That one to me is sort of the most closest to me because it's more biological.

than anything else. There's the emotional hunger. And I think that that one I think is probably one of the most important things that we talk about these days because it talks about two things are really important for hedonic hunger, which is ultra-processed foods and food addiction, those two topics, which I actually think are extremely important. Yeah, before we go into the hedonic hunger, let's stay here for a minute. Because the ultra-processed foods are problematic, but I think you're missing one. And I don't know what the literature would suggest, but there is eating out of boredom. Yeah.

Yeah. And I know that that sits under the emotional category, but I didn't hear you talk about that. But can you first hit on the ultra-processed foods and how that reshapes the idea of calories in, calories out? Yeah, because the whole thing is that the way you process a food makes a big difference to eating behavior because we're not simply eating for that physical hunger. We're eating for emotional reasons, right? so there's the emotional eating, there's the boredom eating, right?

So you're bored, you're looking for a bit of picking up, right? So you eat because it makes you feel good. And that's this dopamine spikes and so on, right? So the whole idea is that if you process a food, you can still have the same calories. You can still have the same number of carbohydrates and proteins and so on. But there's a lot of ways that you can change the food so that it changes the way we respond to it. So one of the most important is the speed of absorption. So how quickly you absorb that food.

Because the food doesn't go from the food into your bloodstream, right? It goes from the food. It has to be digested. It has to be, go into the intestines. It has to be absorbed, which influences your hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine and then influences your weight, right? So if you make a food, and this is what they do for ultra-processed foods, they make it, you know, super pleasurable.

So you can talk about bliss points and salt and sugar. and fat. But there's artificial flavors, artificial colors, because you know when it looks good, right? This is the whole debate around the lead-based dyes and how in the United States you get these super bright fruit loops and in other countries. They're a little dull. But there's also texturizers. There's emulsifiers. There's things to make sure you have the right mouth feel. Ultra-process foods tend to be very, very easily chewed. You need like half the number of chews compared to like regular foods. And when it gets down, it goes through the size. stomach much faster. So what happens is that you're basically mainlining this glucose because it's

refined carbohydrates that tends to be a problem right into your blood because it goes through you so fast. But that's the processing. It's not necessarily the carbs, calories, or whatever it is. And the speed of absorption matters because if you're thinking about addictive behavior, pleasurable behaviors, how quickly you absorb a molecule is very important. So if you think about tobacco smoking, right? You smoke it. Why? Because the nicotine goes from your lungs directly into the pulmonary blood vessels. Same thing with heroin. You inject it directly into the veins. You don't eat it, right? You don't eat the nicotine. You can, you can get nicotine gum, but it's much less pleasurable. That's why you use it when people are weaning off. You don't eat heroin. You sniff cocaine because it goes directly into the

blood vessels, right? So when you've got this huge spike, you generate a lot more of the dopamine, you get a lot more of this rewarding behavior, and it's the same with the food. So you're getting these sugar highs, but they're not normal sugar. It's not going in you slowly as you slowly digest it. Say you eat a piece of fruit, an apple or something, right? It's going to take its time. So your blood glucose is not going to spike like this. It's going to take your time. It's slowly going to get digested. It's going to stick in your stomach for a while. Then it's going to get absorbed. So if I eat two or three gummies versus an apple, equal number of sugar units for both. Yeah. But they're not treated the same.

They're completely different. You can do better. You can compare apples to apple sauce. You take the apple, you bake it, and then you puree it. So you don't add, you don't subtract. And it's completely different. The hormonal response is completely different. So you can measure how quickly it goes through the stomach, right? So for the apple slices, it's, I think, 65 minutes, and it's like 44 minutes for the apple sauce. So it's going through much faster. You can measure how many chews people take. It's like half as much, right? You can measure how quick. the glucose goes up. It's like 30, 40% faster. Yeah, that's great about apple and applesauce. So your point would be if you're going to have applesauce, use it sparingly. Yeah. And do not be confused that this is the same as an apple, even though it says organic, pured, no additives.

Yeah. It's not the same. It's the way you process it. So that's what people are focusing now on is you have to go past the calories, the carbs, all that stuff on the nutrition label. Ingredients, right? Because the apples and applesauce, identical. identical apple, right?

But it's the processing that makes a difference. Why? Because it's sort of pre-digested. The applesauceau is predigested so that you can sort of get through the digestion and into the bloodstream much, much faster. And that makes a huge, huge difference. It triggers something else.

It does not satisfy the hunger response, right? And so can you walk us through the problem with that? Yeah. So if you think about hunger, there's lots of ways that your body tells you when to stop eating. These are just called satiety hormones, right? So there's lots of them.

So, for example, there's GLP1 and GIP, and these are well known now because they're the focus of weight loss drugs like OZemPEC, for example, or Mungaro. There's something called peptide Y-Y, which is a response to protein, there's colocycina. So what happens is when you eat a food,

say you eat a steak or something, what happens is that the food contains calories, but it contains information as well as to what you're supposed to do. do. Okay? So when it goes down, then you activate all these satiety hormones and therefore you're going to stop eating. So you can eat one hamburger, but you can't eat like 40 hamburgers, right? Why? It's the same hamburger because of the satiety hormones and they're very, very powerful. So the point is that if you speed up the absorption and speed this up, you're bypassing some of these satiety signals. One of them is the

stretching of the stomach. So when you put food in and it sits in your stomach longer and it doesn't move out, well, you're going to feel more full. That's one of the signals to the brain. It's called the baroreceptors, which is mediated through the vagal nerve. Well, Ozenpic slows down the gastric transit time. So it makes everything stick in the stomach a lot longer than normal. So you feel way more full after you've eaten. Oh, that's how it works. It works on multiple levels. It works actually directly on the brain as well. Causes a lot of nausea. Let's stay here for just a moment. There's a buzz. And I see people in media and in life that have been on OZempic-like or Zemphic itself. I don't think they look great. So, you know, I know that it's designed for obesity, right? But when people are not obese and they

want to lose weight, what is actually happening? Well, part of the problem, there's a couple of concerns. A lot of people talk about this Ozempic face, right? And it's quite, yeah, it's not a good look, right? And the reason is that you're losing a lot of subcutaneous fat. So when you eat the way people eat when they're an ozempic, which tends to be very low in protein, because remember, there are certain foods like proteins and fats, which are very satiating because they release a lot of these peptide y-y-y-y-cholocycina and GLP-1. If you eat those foods, you're stimulating GLP1,

but you've already stimulated it with your OZemPEC, so therefore you're going to tend to avoid these. So that's why, for example, if you eat a big buffet, you know, they're really full, you can't eat another pork chop, but you could eat like some apple pie because there's not a lot of protein and not a lot of, you know, there's some fat, but it's a lot of refined carbohydrates, which don't stimulate the satiety response, right? So the whole point is that people tend to eat a certain way so that they can still eat, which gives them the pleasure, right? There's a ergonic. Okay, so if I take JLP1 or OZEPA as an example, and I feel full fast. is what you're saying. I'm likely not going to eat food

that helps me feel full in any of itself. So I'm starting to eat sugary foods. I'm starting to eat other stuff. Shigree refined foods. Yeah, that's the worry. And certainly what happens then is that if you're not having that, you could have the muscle loss.

So there's actually a big concern that there's more muscle loss on people who lose weight with OZempic than when you lose weight without OZempic. There's a big concern about that. And obviously that's going to be fleshed out. But the other thing is that the way that people eat, which is sometimes through this sort of constant snacking and stuff,

what happens is that for some reason they lose that subcutaneous fat more than normal. So then because you're losing the subcutaneous fat, you get this really gaunt look. It makes you look really, really old. If you look online, there's a ton of pictures of people and they really look terrible. I agree. Now, when it comes to weight loss for a certain profile, are you saying, yeah, this is a good choice. But for the majority of folks, are you saying buyer beware? Yeah, it's a drug.

So all drugs have side effects. So certain people are going to benefit. So everything is sort of risk versus benefit. So if you're very overweight and you have type 2 diabetes and you have all these health issues, then yes, the risk is probably worth the benefits. But if you're really just doing it to lose a few pounds to look good, then sometimes it's worth it and sometimes it's not worth it. And that's a choice you have to make for yourself because there are side effects too, right? There's gastric paralysis. There's like anything.

Because Zempeg stimulates the. GLP1 system, but at a very high level. You can't get that naturally. It's a super physiologic dose. What are some foods that trigger or some, let's call it, supplements, you know, that are not at the grade of medicine that also trigger GLP1? Yeah, if you talk about foods, I mean, protein, so protein is sort of becoming very popular. And one of the reasons is that it's great for satiety because it stimulates GLP1 more than, say, carbohydrates. The other one that's really good is like fiber. So fiber, it's not digested. So there's no calories because your body can't actually digest it. But it gets to the colon and it gets fermented into these short chain

fatty acids which stimulate GLP 1. The other thing that really stimulates a lot of satiety if you really want to feel full is sort of really bulky foods. So when you have really bulky foods, so if you're thinking like cauliflower, broccoli, like big, leaky vegetables. Yeah, it's like if you ever look at a salad, right? It's huge. So when it goes into the stomach, your stomach's sitting there, churning it's got to work it down, right? So it takes time. So it stays in the stomach longer, and it's big. So there used to be this very popular way of eating called volumetrics, which is eat big volume food. And it's playing along that line. When you stretch the stomach and let the stomach stay stretched, it's going to signal your brain that you're full and you need

to stop eating. Yeah, like chill out. Yeah. So eating. You push too far here. Yeah, okay. Exactly. So eating things like, you know, big leafy greens, things that are full of fiber, full of water, those are going to be better for you in terms of staying full. You introduced cadence, like the grazing approach, and you're obviously well studied on intermittent fasting, including one of the first docs to really talk about it many, many years ago. So I know you're learned here.

Can you talk about grazing, but more importantly, can you talk about intermittent fasting? Yeah, so intermittent fasting was sort of, one of these things that 10, 12 years ago was considered really, really bad for you. And again, I never skip breakfast. Yeah, you can't skip breakfast, never skip a meal. You got a snack all the time. And it became entrenched. So if you look at the schools, for example, it became entrenched that you had to have

breakfast and you had to have a snack in the middle of the day. You had to have an after school snack, right? I remember, you know, when my kids were younger, they'd get a note. The note was like, we're going on a school trip. They'll be back at four. Please pack two snacks. I'm like, why? It's like, are you not giving them lunch or am I not giving them dinner, right?

Because when I grew up in the 70s and you wanted an after school snack, it was, no, you're going to ruin your dinner, right? And if you wanted an after dinner snack or bedtime snack, the answer was, no. You should eat more at dinner, right? So somehow we went from that, which is that snacks are an indulgence. you're eating it because you want to, not because you have to, right? You need to have your three meals a day, but you don't have to have anything else to, oh, we need to eat all the time.

And it was really a huge shift that happened without anybody actually thinking about it. And there's no science behind it. People just sort of, it was like fashion, right? It was just like, oh, you should eat all the time. But what happens when you eat all the time. You know what I remember about that time before you get to the problem here is that during that time, the reason I remember thinking that, oh, this kind of makes sense was that. that you want to keep your system burning calories on a regular basis.

Do you remember this narrative? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Like a bunch of colon on a frequent basis keeps the energy or the train running. Yeah, it keeps stoking your metabolism. Yeah, right. And so you are saying that that is inaccurate. Oh, yeah, there's no science behind it. It's totally not true at all.

Yeah, okay. Eat when you're hungry, though, before you get to the fasting piece. Eat when you're hungry or no? Wait until a meal. Well, again, you can. I mean, it was at the time in the 70s, of course, it was still pretty regimented meals, right? But there's actually no reason why you couldn't skip a meal, right?

If you weren't hungry, you could skip a meal back then. And people wouldn't start yelling at you that you can't skip, you know, dinner or whatever, right? It was funny because it's like back then it was interesting because, you know, one of the sort of classic punishments for bad boys was, oh, go to bed without dinner, right? There is none of this. So people are going from lunch, which is like 12 o'clock until the next day breakfast at like eight of us. o'clock. Like you're going 16, 17 hours, right? And there was no thought that, hey, this is harmful, right? It was uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable. You hoped you learned your lesson, right? But that was about it, right? And the truth is that if you have any kind of body fat on you, then you have enough

to get by. Like, that's the entire reason you carry body fat. It's a store of calories for when you don't eat. So use it. You're using it for what it's for. How can that be bad for you? And this was the strange thing because it always bugs me because it's like I look back at stuff and I think where's the logic? Where's the science behind this entire way of thinking that gets entrenched and institutionalized in our entire society, right? So let's talk about the benefits of intermittent fasting and some of the risks and also the considerations across genders. In terms of the benefits, the benefits is that it gives you an alternative way to deal with weight loss, right? So when you're trying to, to lose weight, it's not about the calories, right? It's really about the hormones, right? You're

trying to drive your insulin levels down. And the whole thing about calories is that it doesn't work because that's only one piece of the puzzle, right? So if you think about calories, when you eat, food has energy. So for every calorie you eat, your body could either store it as fat or can burn it as energy, right? But which one does it do? Because that's the crucial question, right? In one case, you're going to get fat. In the other case, you're going to have lots of energy and you're going to feel full because you've got energy, right? So the question isn't the number of calories. The question is, what is your body doing with those calories? Right. And that's because when you eat, your body produces hormones and different foods produce different hormones. So, say you

eat cookies, for example, lots of sugar, lots of refined carbohydrates, insulin spikes way up. What does the insulin do? Insulin tells your body to push all these calories into storage, right? So you push, say you eat 500 calories of cookies, you push it into storage, your body has nothing left for the rest of you. So it's like, okay, 10 minutes later, you're like, let's go find something else eat because I actually have no energy, because it's all stored away. So you flip it and you say, okay, let's eat 500 calories of, you know, grilled salmon or something like that, right? insulin doesn't really go up. So you don't really store much of those 500 calories. Plenty of energy to sit around. It stimulates GLP1. It stimulates peptide Y-Y colostokinin.

So you feel full and you have plenty of energy. So why would you pretend those two things are the same just because they have the same number of calories? Completely different effects on eating behavior. So why pretend they're the same? But that's what people do. So insulin is your sort of main switch. Right? So when you eat, insulin goes up, tells your body store those calories. But different foods stimulate insulin to different levels. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Fatty 15. Healthy aging is not about chasing the newest trends and fads. For us at Finding Mastery, it's about taking care of the fundamentals consistently.

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very best, full stop. And the best part is, you can start anytime. To get started, head to finding mastery.com slash course and use the code mastery to get $50 off your registration. Again, go to finding mastery.com slash course and use the code mastery because your future isn't shaped by what you intend. It is shaped by what you train. There's a food scientist that I've done a lot of work with in professional sport. It was almost like a throwaway conversation, but it stuck with me a long time ago, which was if you sit down at a meal and bread comes out and then maybe a salad comes out or your main meal comes out. Whatever you do, eat protein first.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, right? He's like, whatever you do, Mike, don't eat the bread first. I know you're hungry, whatever. You might not even want bread, period. It's a different conversation, but eat the protein first. Can you talk about it's an interface on insulin is what I think's happening, right? Exactly.

So insulin is this sort of main switch that you want to know because that's a normal job. It's not an evil hormone. It's just that if you're stimulating. it too much, you're going to store more of fat, but that's what you told it to do. So not just the carbohydrates. So if you eat less carbohydrates, you generally stimulate less insulin, but there's actually a lot more to it than that. So the food order makes a big difference. So if you, and they've done this study where they had somebody and they had the carbs, which was milk and orange juice, and I covered this in the hunger code, and there's proteins and veggies, which was vegetables and

chicken. And they took a person and they gave them the carbs first, then the meat and veggies. And then they took the same person a few days later. They flipped it, right? So then you had the meat and veggies first, and then 10 minutes later, you had the bread and orange juice. And the difference in insulin response to the same foods was shocking. It was like 30% higher when you ate the carbs first. So your food order makes a huge difference. And it makes sense because what happens, of course, is that when you're eating the bread and orange juice first, it goes into the stomach. Remember, the stomach is a reservoir, holds the food, and then slowly parses it out into the intestines, where it gets absorbed into the bloodstream.

So if you just have pure carbs going down the pipe, then what's coming out is pure carbs and your insulin is going to shoot way up. Same idea is like when you drink alcohol on an empty stomach, right? It's not so good because you get drunk very fast because there's nothing to slow it down. When you eat the meat and veggies first, the meat and veggies are sitting in your stomach, then you're putting in the bread and the orange juice. Everything's mixed in. What comes out of the stomach to the intestines is a bit of meat, a bit of veggies, a bit of carbs,

and a bit of orange juice, right? So your absorption is not like, boom. It's like just slowly going up, right? And that makes a huge difference to the insulin effect. And it turns out there's a lot of things that affect the insulin response other than the total number of carbohydrates. So that's one example, food order, how late in the day you eat affects it. if you take a walk after a meal, that will affect it.

If you eat vinegar, for example, with carbohydrates, that can make a huge difference to your insulin levels, which I actually thought was fascinating. How do you do that? Well, what happens is that the vinegar and all organic acids, so vinegar is acetic acid. This is not apple cider vinegar. Any vinegar.

It's a red wine vinegar or white vinegar, any vinegar. It actually inhibits the enzyme amylase, which breaks down the carbohydrate. So carbohydrates are chains of glucose. When you eat it, your body starts to digest it with amylase and chops the glucose into small pieces so that it can be absorbed. The organic acids, so that's vinegar or fermented foods like kimchi and sourcrow, which is lactic acid or lemon juice, which is citric acid,

any of those organic acids will inhibit the salivate amylase. And when you inhibit the amylase, then the absorption is much slower because it's not getting chopped up. So therefore your insulin effect, is actually like 20, 30% more. There's another interesting one called resistant starch, which is that if you cook and then cool your rice and then reheat it, you get less absorption of the carbohydrate.

Cook, cool, and then reheat. And how cool do you get it down? Like to refrigerator. So if you cook it and then put it in the fridge overnight, for example, or you can freeze it. And there's no risk, there's no bacterial risk in, I don't know where I'm reading this or learning this, that stored rice is potentially problematic.

If you leave it in the fridge too long, yeah. You can freeze it too. That'll do the same. Okay, so I cook my rice. First, I rinse my rice. Yeah. Yeah. How long do you rinse your rice?

I usually do like two, three times. Two, three times, right? This is just to get some of the pesticides, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Is that right? No, no, no. There's also a little bit of that powdery stuff on it.

Okay, good. So you rinse the rice, heat it up, boom, 10 minutes later. You pull it out, you cool it down, and then put it in their fridge? Yeah. And then when you're ready to eat it for dinner. Yeah. What happens is that the crystals in the rice actually crystallizes. That's why when you eat, you can't eat cold rice because it's actually quite brittle because

it crystallizes. When you reheat it, not all those crystals sort of go back into the liquid state. So therefore, you've got this resistant starch because it's a starch, which is a chain of glucose, but it's resistant so your body can't absorb it anymore. So even though it tastes exactly the same, because I do this all the time now because it's sort of this simple way to do it. I cook it, I put in the freezer, and then when I want to eat rice, I reheat it. But I'm getting way less of the starch because your body simply can't absorb it. Good to know. That's a great little process there. Okay, let's go back to intermittent

fasting and hit some of the benefits of it, you know, concretely, and then the gender differences between. Yeah, so the intermittent fasting has a huge number of benefits, actually. So weight is one of the big things, right? So it gives you an alternative way to manage your meals, manage your weights, because if you're not constantly being, you know, eating, then you're allowing your body to use the calories that's stored, right? So that's the whole point of fasting is that you're switching. When your insulin's high, your body wants to store energy or calories. When it's low, it wants to release calories, right?

That's why you don't die in your sleep every single night because your body is releasing calories for you to use. So the whole point is that you want to drive the insulin low, and fasting is the most efficient and effective way to do it. So it gives you sort of an alternative method to control your calories, but it gives you an alternative method to drive your insulin down as well. So can be very effective in weight loss, can be very effective in type 2 diabetes. So type 2 diabetes, there's a bunch of trials now that show that if you get people to stick to it, you can reverse about 50% of type 2 diabetes.

Through intermittent fasting. Just through an intermittent fasting. It's crazy. And so to be concrete, are we talking about 12 to 14 hours? Most of them are sort of like 16 to 24 hours. 16 to 24 hours. Like three times a week sort of thing. There's different regimens. Okay, so let's talk about the different regimens and the recommendations and also include the gender piece as well.

Yeah, so the different regimens would be, so a normal fasting period should be around 12 to 14 hours, right? So if you eat dinner at 7, you eat breakfast at 7, it's 12 hours, right? That's what you should be fasting. It doesn't actually happen most of the time in these days. for different reasons, like the conditioned hunger. But if you want to push it, you can go up to 16 hours. And again, it's better to do it early.

So again, eating late tends to be a problem because, again, if you eat late, then you get more of an insulin response to the same food. Like you eat the same food in the morning and at night, you get bigger response at night. If you're going to do a 16-hour fast, it's good not to push it too late. So you want to try and keep your meals relatively early. Then you can go up to the 24-hour fast, which is sort of a one-meal-a-day scale. schedule. So a lot of people like that. And it doesn't have to be every day. Yeah, how do you get enough protein? How do you get enough calories to, if I'm interested in being athletic and having

the right composition of weight as opposed to just losing weight? Yeah, it all depends, right? So if you're a competitive athlete and you need that, then yes, that may not work for you. On the other hand, you have all these people who are like, you know, Terry Cruz has talked about how he does sort of one meal a day. It doesn't have to be every day, too, right? You could do it. it a couple of times a week. So obviously there's a couple of bodybuilders that use intermittent fasting. It's quite popular these days. That's 24 hours. And then if you're not a competitive athlete, then you don't need to worry about the calories because your body is carrying so much body fat. You're trying to use it up, right? And that's the whole point. You're just not eating so that

your body can use it up. The whole idea of protein, I mean, protein is important, but you don't have to have it all the time because your body does break down some of the protein and it will rebuild it. The interesting part about fasting is that it also really raises your growth hormone quite a lot, which sounds like it's really bad because people are like, why would your growth hormone be up if you're fasting? It's like it's because your body starts by this process of autophagy, which is another, you know, very interesting topic, where when you fast, your body actually starts to break down some of the old sort of senescent cells.

The zombie cells. Yeah, the stuff they don't need. The dirty stuff. Yeah, and then the stuff that's just not necessary, right? But that doesn't happen after one 16-hour cycle. Probably starts around 20 to 30 hours. Yeah, right. You need to get past, I thought, that 24.

But you're saying between 20 and 30, you begin the autophageal process, which is a cleansing and a cleaning of the senescent cells. Yeah, the old cells, the stuff that just not needed anymore. At the same time, you're pumping up growth hormones so that when you do eat again, you will replace the cells that you need. So, you know, it's basically a rejuvenation process, but it always starts with breaking down cells. Just like when you renovate your kitchen,

the first thing you got to do is throw out all the old stuff, right? Okay. So it's a huge benefits, and that's why a lot of people think it's very beneficial from a longevity standpoint, a health standpoint. So maybe one way to account for the difference, the biological differences for people is, could you walk through, like a cadence that you might consider,

and maybe a cadence that you would consider for your sister? Yeah, so for sure, the 16 hours and the 24 hours, anybody can do, right? And there's no reason, you know, other than you don't like it, right? There's physiologically, there's really no reason why you can do it. Because the number of calories that you have in body fat is more than enough. You only need about, right, like 2,000 calories roughly. That's like a half a pound of fat, right? And most people are sitting at around 25% body.

body fat, right? So you're talking about 30, 40, 50 pounds of body fat on an average person, right? So a half a pound is sort of nothing. So anybody could do those. And then the other thing you can do is you can push it longer if you want to. So there are longer strategies. And then the other sort of metric where people differ on is what's allowed during that fast. So you can be a purist and you can say water only. But I think you can actually preserve a lot of the benefits by using some of these other things like teas and coffees and a little bit of cream and bone broth and that kind of thing. How clean the fast is and how long you do it for is different because certain fasting protocols, there's two others that have been fairly well studied, which is the five to two regimen,

which is five days of normal eating with two days of 500 calories. So that's not actually a true fasting because there's no defined period when you're not eating. You're just eating 500 calories in that day. So even when you drop it down, you're actually going to and preserve a lot of the benefits. And then there's another protocol called the fasting, mimicking, which is five days of somewhere around five to 800 calories. They have a proprietary sort of blend of stuff, but it's around 500 to 800 calories. So five days of the month. That's their protocol. Five days a month, five to 800 calories a day. Yeah. So again, not a true fasting period. I would rather do the intermittent fasting. So tell me if I'm wrong, the way I do this,

is that on a regular basis, probably four days a week, I am, I'm on, 16 hour of fasting. And so the remaining is my window to eat, the eight hours remaining to eat. And then I am working to get about a gram or less a protein per body pound. I'm active. I'm working out that composition between muscle and fat is something I'm trying to optimize for. And then the two, three other days, you know, I'm just kind of doing my good choices, if you will. I'm not fasting. But I can't remember the last time that was inside of a 12-hour window. That's a normal kind of thing for me. Yeah.

Yeah. And see, that's the key, right? If you do the 12 to 14 hours, like if you think about the 70s, you're getting this 12 to 14 hours of fasting every single day without even thinking about it, right? Because it was just life, right? You didn't think about it, right? Your mom would be like, no, you should eat more at dinner. And there's nothing in the pantry anyway, right?

So, and that's probably enough to keep you pretty good. because people just were not watching their diets that closely, right? They weren't obsessing over it the way that people do now. But that's enough to keep you there. If you want to lose weight, the 16 pushes you up into it. And you don't have to fast to lose weight. There's lots of different ways to lose weight. But, you know, like the quality of the food, the processing of the food,

like there's so many other variables that you can attack. What about menstrual cycle? How does that show up? Yeah, the menstrual cycle is really interesting because it really gets to the fact that women, women can fast, first of all, right? So when you're talking about fasting, if you have body fat, as long as you're not in the very, very, very low sort of, if you're like sort of malnourished, then no, you shouldn't be fasting, right?

That's obvious. But for most people who are fasting, you want to time it within the cycle because there are certain sort of better times than others. So if you think about the first half of the cycle, so from menstruation to ovulation, That's probably your best time because estrogen is going up and estrogen's actually an appetite suppressant. So it's easier to fast.

After ovulation, which is the midpoint of the cycle, then progesterone starts to go up and progesterone is an appetite stimulant. So if you track how women eat over the cycle, you'll see that there's a very distinct pattern. They actually eat less and less as they approach ovulation and then more and more. So the thing is that if you're trying to fast during the latter half of the like the second half, half of the cycle, you're going to be hungry. It's just going to be harder to do. Right. So why do that? You want to fast, not the beginning, but sort of just before that ovulation period when you're going to be the least hungry. Well, I love science. It's so practical. What an advantage just to know that

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So the appetite starts to go up. And that's why perimenopause is actually the highest risk period for weight gain in women. Like you see this. And perimenopausal women will tell you straight up, right? It's like I used to be able to do this when I haven't changed my diet, I haven't changed my exercise and I'm gaining weight. Yes, because of your hormones. It's not because you don't have willpower.

Like, do you really think every woman that goes through this just loses willpower? No, obviously not, right? So this whole idea that of calories and willpower is clearly misguided because everybody has the same problem at the same time. Therefore, it must be a hormonal issue, right? The hormone in this case is the estrogen. So it's actually a problem anyway because that's where you can say, okay, well, if that's the case, then maybe you have to fight it with some of these other things, right?

whether it's fasting or changing up some of the eating schedule or cutting out ultra-processed foods or that kind of thing. So let's say somebody that is menopausal or shouldering it and they're eating leafy vegetables, they're doing kind of the grilled salmon, they're doing their thing. Would you suggest intermittent fasting during this phase? It can help, but again, because the estrogen is down, it's a little harder, right? And here is where the conditioned hunger is really, really important because it puts those sort of guard rails on. because what happens with conditioned hunger.

So this is that sort of social hunger, right? There's the physical hunger, which is homeostatic. There's the emotional hunger, which is the hedonic, and the sort of social hunger, which is conditioned, right? If the environment around you doesn't allow you to eat, then you won't eat, even if you're hungry. And this was the experience of, you know, the 70s, right? Because it was really frowned upon to do a lot of the stuff that we do today, right?

You ate in the cafeteria at lunch, right? Nobody's like eating in their car. It's not takeout, right? You don't eat at your desk. You don't eat in front of the TV. Like that whole thing was like, no. And snacking's just not allowed. Like say you have a meeting, right, or something in the middle of the afternoon.

In the 70s, that's it. You're bored, too bad. Get a little hungry, whatever, right? Too bad. You're stuck. Now what happens? You're in a meeting. Somebody orders a plate of cookies.

You're not even hungry. But you're super bored. So what do you do? You eat that cookie because you're not feeling very good about yourself because you're so bored. You want a little pick-me-up. There's that hedonic hunger. The condition hunger is the social condition that allows you to eat in that meeting. So what do you do in that environment?

Well, you have to change the environment. Yeah. Do you ask people to not bring in cookies? I totally would. If it was up to me, I'd be like, you know, we shouldn't be having food at the desk. We shouldn't be having candy bowls and the thing. There's all meetings that are in the boardroom. There's no food in the boardrooms ever, right?

Because this is the way it is. Because it's not fair to somebody who's trying to lose weight, right? Everybody thinks, oh, you're so mean. You're so mean, right? But it's like, no, I'm actually trying to be nice here. Because it's like, look, it's so unfair for you to put cookies in front of somebody who's trying to watch their weight. Or is paring menopausal, right?

You're paring menopausal. You're in the boardroom. You have nothing else to do. Your estrogen's downs. you're actually a little bit hungry too. You're hungry and you're bored and there's a plate of cookies. You've hit the homeostatic hunger,

the hedonic hunger, the condition hunger. Guess what? You're eating that cookie. You can't stop eating that cookies, right? That's so unfair. Because I know that if I simply take those cookies away and say this is not allowed, they would be so much healthier.

What if it was a different snack, oranges, apples, if it was mixed nuts or something like that? Yeah, you could do that, but that only fixes one of the problems, right? that fixes your homeostatic hunger because it's obviously a much healthier snack, right? But it doesn't fix the conditioned hunger, right? You're still conditioning yourself to associate being in that meeting, being bored with eating, right? You don't want that, right?

So, you know, the classic example of conditioning is like Pathlov's dog, right? So you take dogs, you give them food, they get hungry. You know, you ring a bell and give them food. Soon they learn that when you bring a bell, they should get hungry. But now you're conditioning them people to be like boardroom. eat, boardroom eat, boardroom eat, boardroom eat. So you're not taking care of that. And you haven't taken care of the hedonic hunger because it's like even if it's relatively healthy snack, right, there's no reason to eat it. What happens in the processing? We are talking about processing,

the way that you process calories. What happens between standing up and eating, eating at your desk, or eating at the dinner table? Really, it's the way you perceive it, right? It's the conditioning that's happening, right? So the dinner table is always a place that you associate. with eating, but nowhere else, right? So if you simply stop eating at your desk or in the boardroom, then what you'll get is extinction, which is that by pairing the boardroom with not having food, you're going to be able to extinguish that sort of conditioned response, right? And so really you have to think sort of broadly in these terms of hunger because it's like there's a huge difference. So now the only place that you're stimulating that hunger is going to be in this very narrow

condition of the kitchen table at dinner time or lunchtime, right, or the cafeteria at lunchtime, right? Rather than hunger everywhere in the car, at the table, everywhere, right? Got it. Okay. So you're more interested in the pairing, not the actual processing. The processing makes a huge difference, actually, for different reasons. When you're standing, do you process the meal, your food different?

Not a huge amount. The only thing that makes a difference is walking after a meal really helps that insulin response. 20 minutes, relatively vigorously. You get up to about 30 minutes. So the effect almost disappears at about 30 minutes. So it's best if you... Prior to 30 minutes.

Yeah, after the meal. So they've done these super interesting studies where they took people. And they give them sort of a meal and they make them walk, right? So it's like a, you know, 15 minute walk or something. So they have them walk before dinner and then give them dinner or they do dinner and then they walk. And what you find is that if you get people to walk immediately after dinner, you can again reduce the insulin response by a good 20, 30%, right? And then that slowly wanes.

So the longer you wait between eating and walking, the less and less you get. And then after about 30 minutes, you don't get any benefit in terms of the glucose insulin response. And I think it's because, again, it's one of these things that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Because it's like your body's essentially saying, hey, you're doing exercise. let me leave some of this energy for you to use and not store it, right? Because normally you're going to store it. The insulin is telling you to store it. But by walking, what happens is that you're going to increase some of these counter-regulatory hormones,

the ones that counter the insulin, which tells your body, hey, leave a little bit out here for us, right? It's like, that makes a lot of sense. So when you think about it, it's like, oh, that's easy to do, especially here in California, because then it's like make it a habit every day after dinner. Do you know if there's a difference in gender in those two, especially if somebody is paramenopausal or menopausal about eating afterwards? I don't think there's a big difference from that for activity. For the insulin.

It's the same? That's about the same. And let's stay on the menopause, one more turn here. Are g-lps and paramenopausal, is there an more interesting combination between those two at that phase? Or do we not know yet? I don't think we know yet. they're effective in both males and females because they work on the GLP1 system,

which is separate from the estrogen system, right? So even though your estrogen is going down, which is going to increase your hunger, the GLP, you can activate the JLP1 system and still trying to counteract that. Great. Good call out. And then what about diabetes and other diseases? Type 2 diabetes, I should be more specific, and heart health and maybe cancer. And can you talk about some of the other reasons to get this to work at the insulin

slash diabetes interaction via weight loss is kind of your premise. But are there other kind of alarming factors that you can point to? Oh, completely. So if you think about the disease of too much insulin, you start with weight gain. So if you measure people who are overweight compared to normal weight, their insulin levels are much higher, which again makes sense, right? If you have more insulin, then you're getting the message to store more calories. And the way you store calories is body fat.

So therefore, there's a clear distinction there. When it keeps going and going, then as insulin keeps going up and up, then a lot of people will get type 2 diabetes, which is sort of, that's why there's a link between the type 2 diabetes and obesity, because they're really both diseases of too much insulin. And then you get into this really interesting thing, because insulin is not only a metabolic hormone. It's actually a very powerful growth hormone.

And you can clearly link hyperinsulinemia, which is too much insulin. to a number of cancers, particularly colorectal cancer and breast cancer, which are very important. They're sort of the number two and three cancers that we deal with. Lung is number one, but falling. So it was interesting because it wasn't until the year 2000, so relatively recently that most doctors accepted that, hey, obesity is actually associated with like 13 different types of cancer. They're obesity-associated cancers. And really, insulin plays a huge role in that, Again, if you think about it, you've got a disease where you've got all these cancer cells that are growing. If you now sprinkle and fertilize them with all this insulin, guess what's

going to happen? It's going to grow because you've got all this insulin and what does the insulin do to the cancer cells? Well, the cancer cells are going to use the insulin to suck in all this glucose so it can grow and grow and grow. So a lot of these diseases are related to hyperinsulinemia as well. If you look at a breast cancer cell, it has like six times the number of insulin receptors as a regular breast cell. So it loves the insulin. It loves the glucose. Oh, my goodness.

Yeah. So really important. And then diabetes itself increases your risk of heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, perforvascar disease, amputations, infections, you know, the whole gambit, right? So it's like it actually plays a huge role in almost every single one of these diseases that we face today. And are you putting more emphasis on getting the insulin dialed in or the downstream effect of the diabetic response? They go hand in hand.

Yeah. So it's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. They're really, it's the high insulin. That's the problem. And that's where, say, GLP ones may be of benefit because they actually, because they work on the GLP one system to really cause, they cause nausea, they slow down your stomach

so that you can't eat. When you can't eat, your insulin levels are going to fall. So it's one of the first drugs we have that really significantly drops insulin levels through a different pathway, right? Through the nausea, through GLP 1, through the hunger pathway, right? This is the hunger and satiety pathway. But the point is now we're seeing all these benefits, right? You hear that, oh, hey, it's preventing heart disease and it's preventing kidney disease

and we're finding all these benefits. And it's like, yeah, because finally you're using a drug that lowers your insulin level. But really what it's getting at, and that's what I was going to say, the insulin. So let's just round up a few things really quickly to be great with insulin. One, I'll work kind of backwards, but my memory's not going to serve me exactly properly here. And that's why I have you here to help me through this. One is if you want to be better with insulin, after you eat, walk. Within 30 minutes, you know, I thought it was 20, but you said 30, but relatively vigorously.

Like, this is not just a casual walk. Like, get on walk a little bit. Yeah. Right. Okay. So that's one. Ultra processed foods, reducing ultra processed foods. full stop, that's the big one.

That's actually my number one sort of golden rule of weight loss that I wrote about in the hunger code is get rid of the ultra-processed foods because they actually, again, they work on multiple levels, right? So they affect all three different types of hunger and they affect insulin in multiple ways. So one, they're very processed. So the absorption is very fast. You get this huge insulin spike. Give me a couple ultra-processed foods are a little sneaky.

I get that the fruit loops and like gum and I get all those, right? But what are some sneaky ones? There's studies on what the most common ultra-processed food in. It's actually commercial white bread. So that's probably like 11% of calories. Cereals is number two, but then the bake goods, but that's probably fairly well known, right? Is sourdough the same? No.

In fact, if you look at, this is interesting because if you look at bread, sourdough bread, for example, but it's made from a bakery or something, that's actually not considered an ultra-processed foods. I thought so, right. It's actually class three. So there's this Nova classification where they have sort of unprocessed and then minimally processed and then ultra process. The ultra process is very specific in that, you know, it's got all these chemical additives and stuff. So if you look at bread, it should have like three or four ingredients, right? Flower, sugar, water, maybe egg, right?

And then you look at the commercial white bread. It's got like 15 ingredients, most of which you've never heard of, right? That's right. And it's like, well, think about the different. difference. Okay, if you get a commercial white bread, it stays soft for like a week. Like, what happens to your sourdough loaf? Like that day after, it's like a raw. Because that's what it's supposed to do. So you've got all these chemicals in the commercial white bread. Okay. But it's super soft, right? So there's no chewing. They've sort of created this sort of ultra-process

monster. But it's going to cause way more insulin than you want. But it's also because you're getting these huge spikes, you're getting the extra dopamine, extra, you know, extra pleasure in eating it. So you're getting the hedonic hunger. And then because they're cheap and convenient and easily available, you're getting, you can condition them everywhere, right? Everybody gets used to it. So it cuts across all three different types of hunger. That's great. And not coincidentally, like American diet is like 70% ultra-processed foods. And if you look at other countries, like Italy, I think Italy and Japan are fascinating comparisons because they're modern, they're very similar in terms of the technology and all that, right? But their obesity rates are like half of the Americans, right? But Italians

love food, right? They're famous for it. They love food. But what don't they eat? Ultra-processed foods, right? They're like 25, 30 percent, same as Japan, right? And the other interesting thing is that you take an Italian or a Japanese person and their risk of obesity in Italy or Japan is very, low. Now you plunk them down in like San Francisco or New York City. What happens? Their rate of obesity sky rockets, right? It just goes way up. Why? It's not the person. It's not the culture. It's the food environment you're surrounded with because the environment influences you in so many ways. What's acceptable, what, you know, the social sort of mores that you deal with. That's why social influencers are so important, right? And then the quality of the food, it's all ultra-processed, right?

And then it's like they get here, they go to Costco and they're like, oh, wow, this stuff is so cheap, right? Well, that's going to influence how much you eat, right? So the entire environment is sort of geared, all the ultra-processed foods, but also all these sort of acceptable eating behaviors that we tolerate that they don't tolerate in a lot of other countries, right? Eating on the streets, for example, there's not a big no-no in Japan, for example. But that means it's not an individual problem. It's a social problem. It's an environmental problem.

So we need to acknowledge that and say, how are we going to change our environment or make our own food rules such that we're going to be able to counteract it? It's so frustrating because obesity gets plugged into this sort of moral sort of lens. Because everybody thinks it's your fault, right? you didn't have any willpower, right? And it's like, that makes so little sense, right? And it's always there. But there is a choice that people do get to make.

There is a choice. Unless you can't afford options. For the most part, there is choice. But I do think that many people are, I don't know, maybe uninterested. You know, I know our community is very interested in living a great life. And that involves being really healthy and, you know, strong and mobile and all of the, quote, amazing things that our human bodies can do and our minds can do. So our community is, but I do think that other people are just not that interested.

I think it's that. I mean, you see it like, you know, if you go to, in California, there's all this emphasis on fresh local cuisine, right? That's true. I am contextually. Yeah, it's less, but in other places they don't. But, you know, even if you look at it from a, you know, a societal standpoint, like how much emphasis have we put on the processing, right?

almost not until this most recent, like dietary guidelines, like, you know, a month ago. It was all about calories, all about lowering fat, lowering calories. So how much is it our fault? So if we knew what you knew, how would we parent differently? How would we feed our kids differently? Well, I think you have to sort of take it all. Like you can't just say no this, right? Because that's obviously a strategy that doesn't work, right?

If you say no to everything. But what you have to do is set the sort of scale. scaffolding in place. So you can say, well, you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner and no snacks, for example. Snacks are an indulgence, right? And that's just taking you back to the 1970s, right? Eat normal foods, right? And that's the big push of this dietary guidelines. Like, none of this stuff with a lot of chemicals. If it has all these chemicals, don't eat it. It's not good for you. I love it. What about things like, we're in Southern California, tortillas are in a lot of restaurants, Mexican food, tortillas, tortilla chips, flour, corn, tortillas.

I'm asking about in chips. What do you make of those? I mean, I think that depends. Stone ground is probably better. So again, the machine ground is very fine. So the processing is much higher. So therefore, it's absorb faster. So stone ground.

Stratias and stuff are probably a better choice. And it's not that you can't eat carbohydrates. There are ways to get around it, but don't eat them by itself. And this was one of the big sort of things that got missed is that, again, if you eat carbohydrates with other stuff, this is back to that sort of meat and vegetables. veggie thing, right? So you're putting meat and veggies in it. You're not getting that super high rise. In the sort of heyday of the low fat movement, I don't know if you remember, but it was all carbs, carbs, carbs. That was wild. All day long because protein, everything, low sugar,

or high sugar, low fat. Low fat was the big, big, big thing, right? So you had the snack wells. You had all this stuff. And it's all pure carbohydrate and pure refined carbohydrate. So you didn't have any fat, you didn't have any protein because there's those two. Constantly hungry. Everybody was hungry all the time. And that's why people started to eat constantly. And this was the thing that was weird, right? So if you ate a breakfast of, you know, you have a three-egg omelet, right?

Lots of protein, fat, and so on. You're full at least until lunch. You could have like a frappuccino and a muffin. Same 800 calories. You're hungry like 10 minutes later. Like I know I've had that before. You're hungry. Why?

Because insulin spiked way up. you stored all those calories, now your body's like, get me more. That's interesting. Ultra-processed foods actually can come in the form of your coffee. I love tea. Oh, me too. Hulong, greens, black teas, like I'm super particular about my tea. The more exotic, they're more interesting.

And so I really appreciate tea. So I don't put anything in it. But I do see people that have plenty of, like, is oak milk processed? It's quite processed. I mean. So that's an ultra-processed food? Yeah, because you're basically taking the oat, which is the whole food, and then changing it in a way.

that it's actually much easily absorbed. Milk is not considered. On their coffee, would you say choose a milk versus an oat milk? I'd go with the natural. There's oat milk's not all that natural, right? Because it didn't really exist like more than a few, you know, 10 years ago. Same with almond milk? Almond milk and nut milks are sort of half and half because some of them are more protein-y, right,

because of the nuts and stuff. So they're maybe not as bad, but they're still processed, right? So again, it's all sort of relative. I don't think you can ever go to zero percent ultra-processed foods, but you're trying to come down from 70, right? Yeah, that's really good. So if you can get to like 20, 25, 30, which is sort of what a lot of these other countries are at.

Like when I was in Italy, I was like surprised because everything's just different, right? It tastes different. Like the fruits are different, right? Three raviolis are actually quite satisfying as opposed to the 13 that we get here. Yeah, yeah. Listen, I've really appreciated the conversation. I loved your book.

You're on it. You're speaking something. that makes perfect sense from a logic and a science standpoint. And I thank you for introducing it to our community. Is there anything that you hope that we haven't covered that would be materially important that you would want people to understand to go live a little better in their own lives? I think if you're really struggling with the weight loss, the main thing I would say is that understand that it's not your fault, right?

It's not your fault that you were told that it's calories, calories, calories, and forget everything else, right? you get all this stuff, which is a calories, a calorie. It's like, no, there's tons of complexity and nuance to those calories. There's good calories and there are bad calories, right? All that means is that some foods are more fattening than other foods. Like, isn't that pure common sense, right? But that's not what we're taught.

I know, because I was taught that in medical school. It's all calories, right? Don't worry about the rest. You could have ice cream for dinner. It's like, that's a terrible idea, right? You are not going to lose weight by having ice cream for dinner, right? because of this other hunger, right, to donic hunger, conditioned hunger, the rest of it. So understand that if you're trying to lose weight, you really have to dig in to what the hormones are,

but also the root of the problem, which is the upstream sort of hunger, right? Because that's why you're eating. So if you don't understand the hunger, and the more you know, the better you're going to do. The whole problem with this weight loss, which is everybody says, eat fewer calories, that's the whole answer, right? It's like, okay, but that means for every single problem that causes weight gain, it's the same answer. That's like the man with the hammer, every problem is a nail, right? So if you don't get enough sleep, the answer is eat fewer calories? No, the answer is get proper sleep.

That's great. If the answer is you're stressed and you're eating emotionally, the answer is eat fewer calories. No, the answer is deal with your emotions, right? If your problem is you eat too much processed foods, the answer is not eat effectively. few less ultra-processed foods so that you eat less calories. The answer is deal with the ultra-processed foods, right? So there's so many different problems and it gets lumped in. But nobody talks about this stuff, like a few people do, right? But for the most part, the establishment doesn't talk about this stuff. And they don't talk about it enough. They don't talk about the hormonal problem.

And they don't talk about the hunger problem because I think it's a real issue. I mean, you know, psychology is actually a hugely important part of what drives behavior. You know, one we didn't get to is statins. And so one of my colleagues is on a statin right now for a heart condition, and he's now pre-diabetic. And this is something that takes place, right? And so I don't know. I mean, that's not, that's a real concern. So what general guidance from my friend, somebody that you don't know. Yeah, then you have to sort of, you have to push on some other levers. Because one of the studies that it's actually been flagged a long time, like over 15 years, it's always been flagged as a cause of diabetes, right?

And it turns out that now that people are really measuring GLP1, is that, so OZMPIC raises GLP1, which increases satiety. Stantins decrease GLP1. So it's basically the opposite of OZMPIC, which is going to make you diabetic as opposed to not make you diabetic, right? So Uzampic is used to treat diabetes. If you do the opposite, you're sort of creating diabetes, which is exactly what the statins do,

because they actually can crush the GLP 1 to 0. So you're becoming, you're just interested in eating more? Is that why? Yeah, because it's, how? So there's a behavioral component. It's a behavioral component because you're turning off the satiety signaling, right? So normally when you eat, you should be signaling GLP1 and it's going to tell you stop eating. But with a statin is not doing that because you've turned that off.

Oh, so now you're eating and then you're like, I'm going to keep eating because I'm still hungry, right? You haven't turned on the satiety signaling. So it turns out that's what's happening with the statins. maybe why. So yes, it ultimately comes down to you're eating more, but that's not what we're interested in. We're interested in why are you eating more, right? That's the real problem. Love it. Great. That's clean. I did not know that. Look, this is great. I felt like I talked to you for a long time because it's so intricate. And you've made the big rocks clear. And my big takeaway from this conversation is, again, reminder, reduce ultra-process foods. And it's the subtle ones

that I'm more interested in that kind of slipped by me. So those and then really work the insulin to my advantage. Those are two big takeaways. Okay. Doc, thank you so much. You are awesome. You're a real gift to our community. And your social media is really fun.

So can you give your Instagram handle as well? Yeah. So you can follow me on YouTube. That's Jason Fung. Or you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram. That's at Dr. Jason Fung. Well done. Appreciate you.

Thank you so much. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Dr. Laurie Santos, Yale professor and host of the Happiness Lab, who created the most popular course in the university's history on the science of well-being. In this conversation, she unpacks a growing mental health crisis among young people, where anxiety, depression and burnout are rising and what it reveals about how all of us are chasing happiness. She explains why our minds are wired to compare in ways that make us feel worse and the simple shifts that can actually help us feel better. Join us Wednesday, April 15th at 9 a.m. Pacific only on Finding Mastery.

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