Habits and Hustle - Episode 163: Dr. Jason Fung, the Doctor who invented Intermittent Fasting

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Dr. Jason Fung is a nephrologist, known as the Doctor who Invented Intermittent Fasting, and NYT Best Selling Author. Everything calorie-related is covered in this episode. Dr. Fung is the professional, the scientist you’d want to hear from for calories, weight loss, intermittent fasting, diet, what foods are actually good and what foods aren’t, etc. And lucky for all of us he’s sharing everything. Debunking diet and calorie myths, finally explaining fasting in a way that feels achievable, and so much more. Tired of the old “calories in, calories out” conversation? Feel like you’re doing everything you can to feel good and have the body you want, but something’s missing? Interested in how fasting could help with certain diabetes even reversing type 2 and strengthening your body against cancer? Dr. Fung’s got you covered! Youtube Link to This Episode The Fasting Method Dr. Jason Fung’s Twitter ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email [e-mail]  📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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endorsements of two Nobel Prize winning scientists. So go check it out at TrueNyinggin.com. That's TRU NIAGEN. And we have a special offer for new customers to receive $20 off orders of $100 or more using the code Hustle20. So definitely run, don't walk, and scoop some up now. Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits in Hustle. Pressure. Press it! Today on the podcast we have Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Fung is a physician, a researcher, and a New York Times best-selling author. He currently practices in Toronto, Canada, of course, my hometown,

and we had a wonderful conversation. His books included the Obesity the complete guide to fasting, the diabetes code, and the cancer code. And he's actually been quite well known for challenging the conventional thinking of all of these diseases. And he introduces these dietary strategies to actually manage them. He is also the co-founder of the fasting method, which provides the education tools and community needed to successfully implement intermittent fasting. I really enjoyed this conversation. We talked so much about how we as an individual can take ownership and change so much of

disease that can happen to us by tweaking our nutrition and changing our habits. It was really an episode that I truly enjoyed and I really hope you do too. Please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts and if you found it helpful, like I did, enjoy. I've been trying to get Dr. Jason Fung on this podcast for a very long time and you're a very busy schedule. He is an author, he is a doctor, he is a researcher, and he's written a multiple great bestselling books, including The Cancer Code, which is your most recent book, correct? Yeah, right. And there will be CB code. And that's what we're just talking about right now, because let's talk about all of the, let's talk about

this and then we can talk about the other stuff after, but because you just mentioned the calories in, my first question was gonna say, what I was saying was to you, was we've always heard and me coming from the background of health and fitness, that really it's about the calories you bring in versus calories out, and you're saying, if you wanna lose weight, that is actually,

that's actually not correct information. It doesn't work as simplistic as that. Can you just kind of talk about that a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. So the whole idea with calories and calories out is that it makes a few false assumptions. First of all, people look at it and they say, calories represents one part of the foods that you eat.

That is the energy that's contained within that food. But when you're trying to gain or lose weight, there's actually much more to it than simply the energy that's contained in that food. So it's not just the energy, it's what your body does with that energy. So if you take 100 calories of cookies, for example, or brownies, versus 100 calories of, you know, salad or broccoli or, you know, salmon or whatever, the body can choose what to do with that energy right so you can either store it as fat or you can burn it and use it for energy you can

generate body heat for example. So simply you know taking in that energy doesn't mean that you're going to store more fat because if your spotty simply uses it, then you're not going to store fat. However, on the other side, if you take in a hundred calories of cookies in your body, immediately shoves it into body fat, which is simply the storage form of calories, well, you don't have any energy. So then your body is going to have a hundred calories less energy because you've put it into storage. And so therefore you're going to be hungry or you're going to generate less body heat.

None of which breaks the laws of thermodynamics. Because people always say, oh, it's thermodynamics. It's thermodynamics. And anybody who says that clearly doesn't understand thermodynamics in any way, because remember that it's the energy balance equation is body fat equals calories in minus calories out. And that's always true. But there's three variables there. There's body fat, which is storage. There's what goes in and what comes out, right? So if you take less in, for example, you're reducing your calories in, you don't necessarily reduce body fat. What could also happen is that if calorie, what comes in goes down, what goes out. That's energy expenditure can also go down. And your body fat can stay the same.

So that is one of the choices the body can make, but it depends on the hormones within your body. Right? So if you're eating less, but you're burning less, then your body fat is not going to go anywhere, right? And it doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics. So simply eating less doesn't automatically translate into lower body fat. It depends on what your body does with it.

And that's all about the hormones in your body, right? So we know, for example, that insulin is a hormone that promotes storage of those calories. So if you simply take foods that, you know, have a very high insulin stimulating effect, your body is going to want to store that because that's what you've told it to do. So therefore, what happens is that you don't have energy to burn because you've stored it away. So just like if you go to the grocery store, for example, and you take that food and you

immediately put it all into your freezer, well, you have nothing to eat, right? So you're either going to have to eat less or whatever, right? Same thing. If you take those calories, store everything away. You have no energy. So then your body is going to burn less because it has no energy to you. So that's one of the most important things. When you eat, the food contains not just the calories, but also contains information as to what to do with those calories. Right? So it's not just important. So I have two questions.

Is that why when people are in their, in their, when the heat like kit middle age or over, over 40, they tend to have more body fat? Not is because, you know, a lot of times your hormones are changing and you have, it's all about the hormones and they're gaining a lot of weight in their midsection and what they try to do to offset it is eat less, but they're still not losing that body fat, right? Yeah, because it really depends on, and it happens to everybody, so everybody notices this, right? Right. So if you look at teenage boys, they are eating a lot.

And they're not generally overweight. I mean, if you look at sort of middle age and older men, they're more overweight than sort of 20-year-olds. But those 20-year-olds, if you've ever had a teenage boy, boy, they eat a lot of food. Yes. And everybody knows that. So therefore, they must be also burning a lot. And that's probably

just the stage of life they're at. They're the hormones and their energy and what they do, their lifestyle, that kind of thing. So it plays a role. But the point of the whole thing about calories is that you have to really look beyond the calories. And you really have to look at what the information contained within that food is as to what your body is going to do with it. So if you are taking certain foods that have more fattening, then it's because of the hormonal response to those foods. That is as soon as you put the cookies in your mouth, first is when you put broccoli in your mouth. The hormonal response of our bodies is completely different. We know

that. That's just science, right? So we have to pretend that those hormones don't play any role in body fat, but it does. Everything depends on the hormones. That's how our body works. So this whole idea of calories is completely unphysiologic. That is, there is no system within our body that simply monitors the calories in, calories that. We actually have no way of measuring how many calories in. The only way our body knows, should I store body fat, should I burn it and generate body heat, should I, you know, have too much sugar and become diabetic. The only way our body knows what to do with it is the hormones, and that's really what you have to focus on.

And it doesn't break any laws of thermodynamics, it doesn't go against, it doesn't mean you can eat everything you want. The only thing it means is that certain foods are more fattening than other foods. And you know, that's sort of common sense because your grandmother would have told you like, nobody gets fat eating broccoli. It just doesn't happen. But the people, all those sort of scientists who are sort of real, it's all about the calorie sort of thing, will try and convince you that, you know, well,

100 calories of cookies is just as fattening as 100 calories of broccoli. But it's not true in any way. Cookies are very fattening. Everybody knows that. But yet somehow they tried to convince everybody. And did, they were quite successful to a certain degree, that they did convince everybody.

So there are doctors out there saying, oh, you could eat ice cream for dinner and not get fat as long as you count your calories. It's like, well, some calories are more fat than you're there calories. If you eat a block of wood, it has 100 calories, but it doesn't matter. Your body doesn't absorb it.

It just goes right through you. Your body can't process it. So it's not the energy. So it's energy plus what you're supposed to do with that energy. And that's really what's important. So there's a couple, you said a bunch of stuff for them very much, want to ask you about. So the first part of this is, is it because your body, it's what your body does with that particular calorie, right? Because you could have a bunch of cookies, a hundred calories, a cookies versus a hundred calories of broccoli, your body metabolizes it different.

So there's a couple of things. So I heard you say that, so the trick, by the way, is to not the trick, the thing is to keep your insulin leveled, right, not to spike your insulin. So are you saying that like cookies, processed food, of course, sugar, all of those things are obviously spiking your insulin? But I think I heard you say on someone's podcast, or even in your book, maybe, that protein can even spike your insulin, which is something that I've never heard anybody say before.

Is that, like, how is that possible? Yeah. Protein can spike your insulin, which is something that I've never heard anybody say before. Is that, like, how is that possible? Yeah, protein can spike your insulin, for sure. But it has other effects. It also, because insulin goes up, but then other hormones go up, like, glucogon. It doesn't tend to have any effect on blood glucose, as opposed to carbohydrates, where it does have a big effect. But then there's other effects. I mean, it's the sort of totality if you look at protein, for example. There's other effects. If you eat

protein, you're going to stimulate peptide YY, which is a satiety hormone, and it's going to make you not want to eat. That's why they have those, you know, contests where you, you know, you eat 120-ounce steak, we'll give it to you for free. They're not giving away a lot of free steaks because those satiety hormones are just so strong that you can't force yourself to eat that much meat because of the protein. So they're, you know, yes, insulin is gonna go up,

but if on the other hand, your body is gonna naturally stop eating it, like, you know, if you ever't gone to a buffet and just been super, super full, and somebody said, here, have another pork chop. You go, I'm going to throw up. That's just the way it is. Therefore, it's going to naturally regulate itself. And therefore, protein's not particularly fat. And a lot of people eat high-protein diets and do very, very well.

Carbohydrates, of course, is a little bit, especially processed carbohydrates. Natural carbohydrates probably less so, but processed carbohydrates, too, a big extent, is the big problem. And I don't think that's terribly controversial. I mean, it's simply sugar and... It's not at all. It's not. You refined grains and stuff.

A lot of stuff that we probably accept that is not good. The whole point is that the foods that you eat are important in many different ways other than just the calories. So you do have to look at these, these, these, these other things, because they're really, just really, really important. Okay. So the one thing that is controversial then is fruit. You know, you have 50% of people saying fruit is not good for you and you have 50% of people saying it is good for you, which you're take on fruit. Fruit is probably not the worst thing in the world, but you have to understand that some

of the fruits you're eating these days are just a lot sweeter than they used to be. So you look at things like the peaches and the white peaches and you have the pineapples and they have the golden pineapples. Everything's just a lot sweeter than it used to be, and remember sugar is sugar. So even though it's coming from fruit, it's not different than the sugar you get anywhere else. It's actually fructose, which is the same as you get in high fructose corn syrup, for example.

So it doesn't your body metabolize it differently than it would a cookie, even though it's sugar sugar. The sugar, not really. So the fructose is still metabolized the same. The thing is that there's a lot of other stuff. So if you take an apple, for example, there's all this fiber and there's all this other stuff in it. So it's really hard to overeat that because, again, your body sort of kicks in and then stops you from eating more. But fruit is probably, you know, it's one of these things that sort of falls in between.

It's not super, I don't think it's the worst thing you can eat, but I don't think it's, you know, that some people really have a problem with an issue with it. But one of the things, and the reason people talk more about added sugars is that there's sort of a natural limit on fruit. Yes, you have people who will overeat fruit, for example, but it's generally more difficult

as opposed to added sugars where you actually can put it as much as you want. You look at some of the sodas and stuff and they're just keep full of sugar. Well, you don't naturally get that much. Like nobody's gonna, you know, you can drink a glass of apple juice, for example, but it's unusual for somebody to eat the sort of six apples in one sitting that you would need to get the same amount of apple juice

or sort of thing. So it's on the, to me, it's on that side. If you're eating fruit and you're doing fine, no problem if you're not doing fine, then that's one of the things you might look at trying to cut down or cut out. In your opinion, where are the top five for foods that people should be eating to maintain their weight,

to have a healthy body, to stay lean, even as you get older, right? Because like I said, your body changes, hormones change, you know, and it's all about, of course, keeping as much lean muscle mass as possible, right? So you can burn more. What would you say, are you gonna say the same like Sam and what would you say besides the ones that everyone knows?

I mean, those are all great choices. And I think that, you know, of the foods, I don't think that there's as much disagreement as most people think. So if you look at it and people say, you know, avocados and salmon and olive oil and stuff, that used to be controversial, not particularly controversial

and more people are pretty good on that. I think that one of the you know so in addition to the foods that we're eating I don't I think what doesn't get enough attention is how often we're eating it and that's sort of what I talked about a lot in the obesity code, is that you're only getting half of the story here. Because if you eat, you know, what you think is a healthy food. And, you know, I think it's, you know,

as long as you're staying unprocessed, as long as you're keeping the sugars low, you're fine. But if you're eating all the time, you can still gain a lot of weight. And that's one of the things that has changed the lot. So if you look at the foods that we eat, yes, it's changed, but the other thing that's changed significantly since the 70s is how often we eat.

And that probably doesn't get any attention, at least when I wrote the book, got sort of zero attention. So people were eating six, eight, ten times a day because they were told to, like you'd see it as a high. To keep your metabolism high. Yeah, that whole thing was actually based on no science at all. There was no studies that said that was.

What was it based on? Because people were still like- I'm thinking, yeah. Okay. It was a total, it was totally made up. Let's just put it that way. So what happened in the 70s is that we went to this low, low fat diet, right? So this was the 70s.

And then the dietary guidelines says fat, all fat is bad for you. And therefore you should cut it out and then asked the processed food makers to please come up with foods that are low in fact because this was the idea was to lower heart attacks. So the heart attack rate had gone up significantly in the 50s and 60s. And nobody knew why at the time. You look back and it's like it was obvious. Everybody was smoking. They went to war.

Everybody came back. They smoked and you know, there was smoking everywhere. If you look at old shows, everybody's just smoking all over the place. They had those ash trays. They were airplanes. See, it's like there were dinging with so much people are smoking. Everybody's just smoking all over the place. They had those ash trays airplanes seats right? It was there didn't know how much people are smoking But everybody was smoking that's probably why you had a lot of heart attacks and but nobody knew it at the time Of course tobacco companies said, you know couldn't be the smoking that can't be true

So people said it was dietary fat and and that didn't make any sense, because if you look at the proportion of dietary fat, it had been stable for the last like 50 years. So how do you get this sort of five-fold increase in heart attacks when you're eating the exact same amount of fat? But anyway, that's what they said. It was very controversial,

but then the government says, yes, eat low fat. So everybody ate low fat. The problem was that they weren't eating more broccoli. They were eating more bread. Because everybody switched over from eating meat to low fat and low fat process, not low food sort of thing. So there's a lot of white bread, a lot of pastas, you know sugar macwells, snack wells, yeah,

the sort of poster child. And sugar got a free pass because, you know, everybody prior to that thought sugar was bad for you, but when fat became dietary, you know, villain number one, then sugar got a free pass. So sugar consumption went through the roof, refined carbohydrates went through the roof.

And so what happened was that people were eating instead of steak and bacon in the morning, which would keep you full until lunch. They were eating two slices of toast with jam, right? Super low fat, but super processed, all simple carbs. They spiked their insulin way up, they spiked their glucose way up, then it would crash because it was very processed, and by 10-30 people are just ravenous. So then they're like, oh, I need to go get myself a low fat muffin. So then they got

themselves a low fat muffin, you know, like a blueberry muffin, which was all white flour and sugar again. So basically, it's a cake. So then again, same thing. They spiked their glucose, spiked their insulin, then it crashed, that lunchtime there ravenous again by 2.30, they're super hungry again. So in the 70s, when people are eating the steak and, you know, steak and eggs in the morning sort of thing,

they could eat three meals a day and not be hungry. When you're eating sort of highly refined carbs all day long, you can't do that. And see people said, look, I have to snack all the time because I'm just really hungry. But it must be a good dietary pattern because I'm so low fat, right? So they took that sort of premise, which is low fat,

which was all wrong, by the way, which we didn't find out until 20 years afterwards. So then people are like eating six times a day, but then they thought it was good. So then they're like, oh, you have to eat snacks all the time. So it gets entrenched into this whole thing. You look at schools. They're all about snacks and after school snacks and after dinner snacks. And if you have like soccer, you have snacks in between because you're like, yeah, you

need to give these kids, you know, cookies and juice in between because you're like, yeah, you need to give these kids cookies and juice in between soccer. So anyway, that's how that whole eat all the time came about, but it was never something that was deliberate. It was never something that was studied. It was just made up and we just went with it. And then, of course, by the 2000s, people started to notice that, hey, people who eat nuts, for example, super high in fat,

were very healthy. People who ate Mediterranean and all the oil and avocados were very healthy, so then there's that whole healthy fat thing, which you had to specify because, of course, all fat was bad for you. Right. Then they had this healthy fat, but then it turns out that a lot of the natural saturated fats, like in butter, were also not that bad for you. So, you know, then, you know, even the saturated fats, sort of, everybody's starting to walk it back and start starting to say, well, I'm not sure if that was ever true, but it took 25, 30 years to get to that point.

Right. But even like, you know, in the fitness space, bodybuilders or people who are like super hardcore and the gym, people who are hardcore in the gym, they're not eating the processed stuff, but they're still having their five, six meals a day, these small portions, because the idea is, the whole idea of keeping your metabolism always burning, right?

So then it's sort of, that'll have like a little bit of a sweet potato and a little bit of a chicken breast and a piece of broccoli. And they're doing it in like small, you know, 300 calorie meals, right? But still six times a day. So why is that, why, how is that? Is it a basic calorie, is that kind of calorie restriction? I don't think it makes it kind of calorie restriction. It's just spacing it over time. Yeah, I don't think it really makes any difference that whole I think they could eat three meals

a day and you know you look at you know one a lot of them just burn a lot of calories anyway. So sometimes it's hard to get all of those calories. You see that with a lead athlete's a lot. They just are just burning so much calories through their training and so on that sometimes you have to eat a few extra. And for them, if there's working well for you, no problem. Go ahead and do it, right?

And the problem is that what is working for them, you know, and I see a lot of these people, they're in the gym like three, four hours a day, like that's just not the same as regular person. Yeah, somebody who's gym in the gym sort of three, four times a week. Right. It's a totally different situation. It's a different, it's a different lifestyle. But yeah, exactly. But let's talk about the fasting because I mean, I've had a lot of different people on here with talking about fasting and, you know, I know that you're one of the OGs on this fasting. So I have a few different questions. It's fast mimicking and fasting. Do you get the same results from that from fasting and fast mimicking and what's the difference?

Yeah, fasting mimicking diet is this this company called ProLon which is Developed by Dr. Longo who is sort of again one of the original Researchers into that whole space and it's essentially the idea is that fasting is difficult for people. So yes, and you create some foods which are going to mimic it. And it's sort of, I believe it's like plant-based and sort of relatively high and polyunsaturated fats. So you don't want a lot of carbohydrates like just spiking your insulin because then you're going to break that effect of the fasting. So the fasting, when you fast, insulin goes down.

So remember, your body sort of exists in one of two states. You either are in the fed state, so you eat insulin goes up, you store calories. When you fast, when you don't eat, then insulin goes down, you burn calories. That's the reason you don't die in your sleep like every single night because you store some, when you need it, you take some out and use it, right? So it's no problem. So I always find it funny because it's a natural cycle there. So therefore, you really just want to make sure

that those, you know, storing calories and burning calories are sort of in balance. Insulin is that sort of main switch. So when you do a fasting mimicking diet, what you do is you try to go more on the sort of polyunsaturated natural fats and so on that are not going to spike your insulin. Same idea as a ketogenic diet, for example, although some of those are very high in sort of animal proteins and that Dr. Longo is vegetarian, so he doesn't like that. So it's more of those. So it mimics the effect in that you're getting higher fat meals, which aren't going to spike your insulin there for going to mimic the effect of the fasting better.

But does it mimic, does it actually, is it six of one and a half a dozen of the other, or is it way more effective just to do the fast? And the other question I was gonna have is what happened to this whole methodology of like, if you don't eat, right? Your body goes into starvation mode and then you actually end up eating more and you end up gaining more weight

because you're eating more calories. Yeah, that's a good question. So the fasting mimicking diet, we'll just finish on that, is it the same? It's probably fairly close and to their credit, that company is doing a lot of research into it and has shown great results. So I think it's a reasonable alternative to fasting, but it's expensive and it's, you know, that's a layer of complexity that not everybody needs or wants. If it helps you, then great, go ahead and do it.

But you can get the same results for a lot cheaper and healthier, of course, because you're not taking anything, it's just going to be less expensive. I do. I think it's reasonable. Why do you not have to use ProLine? Is there a way to fast-mit myth without using them and having it just, do you know of any kind of system that you don't just kind of ease people in?

Yeah, I mean, I call them fasting variants. And what it is, it's not a true fast, but it's sort of a variation of a fast. And there's all different ones you can do. So fasting, a classic fast is water only. And the length of time is up to you. So you remember that if you eat at dinner at 6 PM and breakfast at 8 AM, it's like a 14 hour fast.

That's what people used to do every single day without thinking about it. And that's why I always think it's funny people are like, oh, fasting so unhealthy. It's like, OK, but think about it. And that's why I always think it's funny people are like, oh, fasting so unhealthy. It's like, okay, but think about it. Fasting is anytime you don't eat. So if you think that fasting is unhealthy, you must think that eating 24 hours a day

is healthy for you, right? Because that's the exact same thing, right? You're either eating or you're fasting, right? There's only two. And that's why we have the word breakfast. It's the meal that breaks your fast. So you have to fast. In terms of the starvation mode,

this part is actually very funny because a lot of the things that people thought were a problem with fasting were actually a problem with the calorie restricted diet, particularly the low fat diet. So one of the things, when they talk about the starvation mode, for example, is the idea that you're going to burn fewer calories.

And this is the main problem when you eat a calorie-restricted diet. So suppose you eat 2,000 calories in a day and you burn 2,000. So your weight's stable. Now you want to lose weight. You cut 500 calories, which is the standard advice. You go to 1500 calories. The problem is that your body quickly adapts and your body starts burning 1500 calories. And therefore, if you're eating 1500, burning 1500, you're also not losing body fats.

You're weight plateaus, even as you stay on that diet. So people always say, oh, you're not falling in diet. No, these people are falling the diet. They're just not losing weight because their metabolic rate went down. And this is what happens on, in virtually every study of the calorie or stricted diet, and there's been sort of hundreds for over the last sort of 50, 80 years of research. This always happens when you try to count calories.

We know that. That's why there's like a 90 plus percent failure rate in calorie-reduced diets. Like you look at any study, those calorie-restricted diets always fail in the long term for this exact reason. They studied it in contestants from the biggest loser, for example, same thing. You will all gain back their weight because their metabolic rate went down so much, and they're following a calorie-reduced diet, of course. So then people assume that fasting does the same thing, but in fact fasting does something completely different, which is

change the hormonal sort of Emilia in your body such that it doesn't have to and this is the way it works So if you look at fast things so you can take people and don't give them any food for four days And you measure how many calories they're burning on day zero versus day four on day four of no food They're actually burning 10% more calories than they did before they started fasting. And the reason is why, and it's because of the hormones. So as your body doesn't eat, your insulin goes down, but other hormones go up. And one of them is a sympathetic nervous system. So in fact, that's noradrenaline. So yeah, in fact, taking the energy from your bodies and you're actually keeping it steady. So it's simply a survival

mechanism. Your body is switching fuel sources from food to stored food because that's really all body fat is, and then giving yourself lots of energy. So think about it, if you're a caveman or cavewoman, and there's no food to eat, it's winter, there's nothing to eat. If your body starts to shut down in this so-called starvation mode, well, you die, because if there's no food today,

you have less energy to go out and hunt or gather, right? So that's a vicious cycle. Day one is tough, day two is tougher, day three is tougher, eventually you're just dead. So our bodies are just not that stupid. So what the body does is it switches over and says, okay, now I'm gonna get my energy from body fat. Okay, instead of food, I'm getting it from body fat. It's a storage. It's no different than anything else. And I'm going to pump up the amount of energy available in the system so you can go out and get food. So that's why when people are fasting, their metabolic rates are not going down because the hormones are telling them don't slow down so much.

As opposed to calorie restricted diets where you restrict your calories but you don't fix the hormones and therefore your body actually just keeps burning less and less. I mean think about it if you think about the you know the hungry wolf. It's not like you know falling over from hunger. It's like dialed in and ready to kill you because the body has increased the sort of energy production, energy usage so much so that it can get that food. So this whole idea that fast and causes starvation mode is actually a complete myth. There's actually no science behind it at all. It's actually first-year medical student and stuff like any first year sort of physiology student could tell you

that that is not what happens because you're actually increasing the energy in the system. You're pulling more out of the body, it's just where it's coming from, which is body fat. Now, if you have like 0% body fat, then of course that's not going to work. But if you have plenty of body fat, then yes, your body doesn't have to reduce the amount of calories and burns, and therefore you don't get this lower energy expenditure. But what's the point of doing a five day fast? I mean, if you can get the same benefits, like, what kind of benefits are you getting from a five day fast that you're not getting from if you do intermittent fasting or just do one

day fast every month. Like, why are people probably as well as you into these five day fasts? It's just another option. It's actually a lot easier, honestly. It's easier if you're trying to lose weight. It's actually much easier to do longer fast. And I'll tell you that I'm going to bet you that people in Hollywood do this all the time.

They just don't tell you because it's like cheating. So if you have a red carpet coming up, I'm going to bet that like 80% of the women and the men out there are going to be doing some form of fasting or very low calorie in the five to seven days leading up to it because they know that they want to look good on that red carpet and then afterwards less people are going to care. So the reason it's easier is for two things. One is that you have to understand that when you get into this sort of fasting state, your body needs to shift over from using food as a fuel to using your body fat as a fuel. And it's the transition that makes it difficult. It's the hunger, right?

Your body wants you to get food. The hunger actually starts to die down as you go into those longer fast. So if you look at Gerellen, which is the hunger hormone, what you see is that with fasting, it sort of peeks between day one and day two and then drops. And so by the time you're at day two, you're at like, oh, I can't do this.

By your time you're at day five, it's like I could go on forever. Why? Because you're at day five, it's like, I could go on forever. Why? Because you're feeling good. You've got lots of energy, right? Because you're pumping up all those, you know, sympathetic nervous system. And you're not hungry.

So it's like, one, you're not hungry, two, you feel good because you have lots of energy. You're flooding the system with energy. And three, you're losing body fat. So you transition into this phase where you're flooding the system with energy and three, you're losing body fat. So you transition into this phase where you're just almost purely relying on body fat, right? So the first 24 hours, and I talk about this in one of the YouTube videos, the five stages of intermittent fasting. Stage one, you're eating, you're post-pran, the old stage two, you're going through sugar,

stage three, you go into this sort of protein state, which is where you probably get this autophagy. And then by stage 4, stage 5, you're into basically fat. You're basically living off your body fat, which is okay because remember that's natural, that's literally the reason we carry body fat. So there's nothing unnatural about it. You store it to use it. Like the body fat is not there for looks. It's there for you to use. So use it, that's all you're doing. But by the time you're getting into the stage,

you're basically burning body fat for like 95% of your energy. So therefore, as long as you stay in there, you're continually using the body fat. So therefore, it's much more efficient as opposed to doing five one day fast, for example, because then you're going to sort of refuel, then you've got to go through the stages and then you know, you feel and then you've got to go through the stages. So by doing this, it's just a much more sort of condensed, effective way to do it.

And it just represents another option for people. If you don't want to use it, don't use it. But if you do want to use it, you have something coming out. Hey, it's a great option for you. If you come back from a cruise and you wait way too much food, well, it's a great option. You do a couple of days, you bring yourself right down, and then you don't have to feel guilty about all the dessert and, you know, overeating and the drinking and stuff that you did because you've done something about it in a very concentrated period of time. Do you have, okay, but then once you start eating,

we call that starving ourselves, we used to until it became a very kind of a fad and trendy to be doing fast. I mean, a lot of people I know who are doing a lot of intermittent fasting, it's because it's a form for the eating less, right? You're skipping out of that, you're skipping that one meal, right? It's a way both to eat fewer calories, right? Because calories is still part of the equations,

it's not the whole equation. Right. So it's part of that. So it's one, it's a way to eat less, but two, it's a way to let your body get the proper sort of hormonal environment to say, okay, now I need to go into body fat. So you're training your hormones basically? Yeah, you're setting the stage because if you, So you're training your hormones basically? Yeah, you're setting the stage because if you, for example, were to eat all the time, but just a little bit, right? So this constant grazing, then what happens is your insulin levels stay high because you're constantly eating. If your insulin levels stay high, your body can't burn fat because you're constantly

telling it to store fat. You can't store fat because you're constantly telling it to store fat. You can't store fat and burn fat. So if you tell your body 10 times a day, store fat, store fat, store fat. Well, you can't burn it at the same time. You can't go with it's one way or the other way, right? Right. So therefore you're not sort of setting yourself up for success. Because if you are not allowing yourself

to burn that body fat, and you can only do that when insulin levels are low enough, and eating fewer calories, so say you're only taking 1,000 calories a day, but you're eating constantly, so therefore you're not able to access your bookstores of body fat. But guess what, your body can only burn 1,000 calories a day.

Now you've just wrecked your metabolism and your metabolic rate goes from 2000 down to 1000, which is exactly the profit of course. Everybody gets when they use this calorie or strict diet. And you know, the fasting is just a tool, right? It's neither good nor bad in itself. And everybody says, you know, it's this, you know, dangerous thing. It's neither good nor bad in itself. And everybody says, you know, it's this, you know, dangerous thing. It's certainly, it's a tool, right? It's like a hammer.

You can, you can do, you know, build a house or you could kill somebody with a hammer, right? It just depends on how you use it. And fasting is the same way. It's not something that is good or bad in itself. It's really having the knowledge to use it. What we had done, of course, is we had said, oh, you should eat all the time because that's what's healthy for you. Even to lose

weight, you should eat all the time. It's like, is that make any sense? Like, how are you going to lose weight if you're eating all the time? Physiologically, the human body can't do that. Like, you can't lose weight while you're eating. More from our guest, but first a few words from our sponsor. So if you guys are anything like me, shopping in real life is almost impossible. It is so time consuming and I can never find that extra few hours. So I always online shop.

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internet connection, which is why we're committed to understanding your goals and helping you achieve them. Learn more at weaver.com. The path of least resistance, okay, what is the minimum amount of fasting we can do to get it to get the benefits without the pain? Is it once a month to do like a fight? What's the least amount you say have to do a long fast? I mean, you look at people in the 70s and they were basically doing three meals a day, no snacks, and... Intermittent, basically. Intermittent, yeah, 14 hour fast. You eat dinner at six, you eat breakfast at eight.

So you're still eating three meals a day with a 14 hour fast, every single day. Except for special occasions or when you go out or whatever. Is that what you do? Almost all the time. I generally don't eat breakfast, just... And that wasn't for any reason other than I like to sleep up to the point that I had. It was a habit I got long to like in medical school. I was just tired a lot.

And I'd prefer to sleep versus eating breakfast, which I never liked that much anyway. So, I usually eat sort of two meals a day. That's just something that I picked up along the way. So I usually eat sort of two meals a day. That's just something that I picked up along the way. And one of the reasons, in fact, that a lot of doctors to understand about fasting and this is that most of them have, you know, they had the same experience I had, which is that very often you just miss meals. And guess what? Nobody died, like none of my medical students died. Right. We were fine.

In fact, we were leaner than most of us are now. So most of the doctors, in fact, they look at this internment and fasting and they understand. It's not that you have to do three days or five days. You could do 14 hours. You could do 16 hours. And you could still do very well. It's about balancing that sort of feeding and fasting. And if you're trying to lose weight,

then you simply increase the amount of fasting so that your body has a chance to lose that weight. You're essentially just giving your body the time it needs to use that body fat because that's what it is. So, okay, so then you're, which, since you're a doctor, what would be your prescription then? Okay, you can intermittent fast to get the same results or if you did like a three day fast,

like maybe once a month, would that be as effective? Yeah, and it's really personal preference. So what fits into your life the easiest or best? Because if it doesn't fit into your life or lifestyle, you're not going to do it. The multiple day fast is difficult because a lot of us have dinner with the family. It's social. It's a social thing, yeah.

It's a habitual too. It's very hard to break habitually what you normally do. So it feels off-putting when you're like, with the off-putting. You can't go out because you're fasting, right? Like, are you comfortable for dinner with your family or your friends?

Yeah, it's super, super difficult from that standpoint, which is why you don't usually, like some people will do it and I'll do it when, you know, when I, when I feel like it, but I don't do it on a regular basis. On the other hand, you look at a lot of religions, for example, and they're a fasting period, you incorporate it all over the place, right? I'm Jewish. We have Yom Kippur, which is one day of fasting.

Exactly. When it of fasting. Exactly. One day of fasting. And, but the point is that your whole community is doing it. So therefore, yes, it's a little bit difficult, but it's not, it's not something that you couldn't do, right? Whereas if you tried to do a three day fast every month, and you're always, you know, cutting yourself off from friends and family because of that. No, that's not going to work. So you don't have to do the long fast. They're actually very difficult to fit into most people's schedules. So you do shorter fast. And that's what I mean.

Like you have to look at two things, which is one is the food that you're eating, the amounts that you're eating of that. And then the sort of schedule of when you're not eating, right? So it's basically what you're eating and when you're eating. You can adjust those two things to get the results that you want. That is you can adjust the foods or you can adjust and the sort of low-hanging fruit is to get rid of all the snacks because, honestly, if you look at current studies in 2022, the number of times people eat, and people have done studies where they'd use a smart phone to track it, it's something, it's not three times a day, it's closer to 10 times a day, eight to 10 times a day, average, the average duration of the eating period is about 14 and a half

hours a day. Okay, so you really? That's the data, yeah. So when they actually track people, they actually eat. And that means that if you start eating at 8 a.m., you eat until 10, p.m. on average every single day. In fact, that means that you actually have no fasting other than the period you're eating until you go to sleep. You're eating as soon as you get up and you're eating until you go to bed. And that's the average person nowadays. Why? Because we've ingrained it into everything. Oh, yeah,

actually breakfast, the after you breakfast, don't skip a breakfast. You're better off putting that muffin in as opposed to just drinking coffee, right? It's like, how does that make sense? Like, why would you want to eat something? If you're not hungry in the morning, why would you want to put a muffin in your mouth? That's not healthy for you. Now, it's better off. It's habit and the fact that people have been telling you for the last 20 years that you must never skip practice otherwise this not. Do you have it? Do you have any tips for people? I mean, when I've tried to do this, I get very nauseous, I get headaches. I mean, is there, are we doing it wrong? Is there like, do I add like

some salt, magnesium? I mean, is there a are ways to do it so it's not as brutal or to bring it to the game. Yeah, do it. One, the headaches is very common and it usually goes away once you sort of get used to it too, is to make sure that you're eating foods that are natural foods, because natural foods really keep you full for a lot longer, so making sure you're getting enough protein and fat.

If you're just eating a lot of sort of simple carbohydrates, well, it doesn't kind of keep you full for long enough. So you just want to make it easier for you. And then, too, you can use these variations. So one of the things that you have to do is understand what happens during fasting and during hunger. So when you get hungry, everybody thinks, oh, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse.

It actually doesn't. It actually passes. So if you ever work through lunch, this is what happens. You get hungry at lunch time by four o'clock. You actually feel much the same if you ate lunch or if you didn't eat lunch. So if you know that it's going to pass and just do something or schedule something or, you know, put something that's going to distract you, you know, say

you're going to meet somebody and go for a walk, right? And then when you get back, you go back to work. And therefore, you're taking your mind right off of the eating because you're just so busy. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that because your body is just going to eat the calories it needs from your stores, which is the glucose or fat, which is why you can use this to reverse type 2 diabetes, for example, and I wrote a couple of articles about that, or you can use it to lose body fat. So there are definitely a lot of things. I mean, you know, trying to make sure you're eating unprocessed foods makes it easier, making

sure you have lots of sort of fat in your diet, like not eating a super low fat diet, makes it easier because your body is already using fat as a fuel. So therefore, there's less of a transition when it goes to body fat. There's you know things you can use salt for example to make you know some people get a little light headed so they use bone broth because it's easier to put salt because it's a little bit strange to put salt in water. Although people do that as well some people use water. Although people do that as well, some people use certain things like green tea, which is very good. You take a big cup of coffee or green tea, by the time you finish, the hunger has mostly passed and just get on with your day. So there's lots of different things that you can do. And this is why it's so important to talk about it, because these are all options.

I never say, oh, you have to do this, you have to do this. Like, they're all options for you. So understanding more about it about fasting, which is a completely taboo topic at the time I wrote about it. Right. Because it's like, it's sort of everywhere now, but five years ago, people thought it was completely insane to do it. And now you look around and it's like, oh yeah, like celebrities do it. And you know, they talk about 16 hours of fasting, do Jackman and Jennifer Aniston and all these people who do it. And it's like, you know what,

they actually look really good, you know, these people because they're eating healthier and fasting is just a part of that. It's one piece, it's one piece. It's one piece of it. Yeah, so remember, it's just that balance between feeding and fasting. So if you say fasting is really bad for you, then what you're saying is that you must eat all the time, which is of course what we did say.

It just probably wasn't true because you're never giving your body that break from eating which is storing calories. What about the idea when you're really, really active, right? Like I'm very active, other people are athletes. What's your take on athletes in fasting? Should they not be exercising, working out hard when you're fasting? You have no energy, I guess. No, no.

In fact, you have more energy. So a lot of people do this so-called training in the fasted state. But what you do is you fast, and then you train. So you do two things. One is that your sympathetic nervous system is activated. So you actually have more energy to work out, just like the hungry wolf.

You wanna be the hungry wolf. You don't wanna be like that lion that just ate, right? Right, so that's gonna give you more energy. It's gonna make it easier to do the training, but then the other hormone that goes up during fasting is growth hormone. So then when you, what after you finish working out then you eat, your body's actually gonna recover faster because it has all that growth hormone.

So therefore, it's going to be able to rebuild that muscle a lot better. So that's called training in the fasting state. And it's actually a great way to do things. Now, if you're an elite athlete where you're just training all the time, it's actually the difficult part is to get enough calories in. So it's very difficult to do any sort of longer fast because you're just not getting enough energy at the time. Like you need to break it up into a few things.

So there's differences, right? But those are people again who are doing two a day workouts in three to four hours a day. Like it's just very difficult for those people. But if you're sort of the regular sort of exercise, or even the... No, a little bit extra. Like someone who works out every day, a card,

can they, like, these are people who are like high performers, right? Who they wanna be doing all this biohacking stuff, right? They wanna be at their highest optimum level. They wanna work out, they wanna fast. I was wondering if there's like a balance of how to make it work. But so you're, you're of the believer then, like before you even, you should be working out in the fastest

date. So in the morning, before you even eat anything, that's because that's another whole thing about that. Do you eat first? There's you exercise. Yeah, it's probably better to not eat first. I mean, and then work out. I mean, you know, keeping in mind that even if you eat three meals a day, you're still talking about a 14 hour fasting period. Right? So to push it up to 16 is not very difficult if you wanted to. You could still get all the nutrition and stuff you need in the eight hour eating window, for example.

And this is for even for people who are sort of that little extra when you get to the very neat level than it's very difficult. But even for those people extra, it's like everybody, everybody ate three meals a day and didn't think too much about it until people started saying you had to eat 10 times a day. Then all in the sun, three seemed like a real stretch. But you can do it as long as you're eating natural foods. When you're eating super low fat foods, it's hard to just eat three times a day. And that's where we've all caught into trouble. Right.

So you're talking, so basically it's not about what you eat as much as it is, how often you eat. And that's the real thing. And of course, the hormonal piece of it. Keep your hormones at bay. It's all about the hormones, and this is the thing that's really important is that different foods are going to have different effects on your hormones. So if you eat cookies versus broccoli, different hormonal effects, if you don't eat different hormonal effects, and therefore it's not simply that, oh, let's just tally up the total number of calories

that you put in your mouth, so track this amount, right? And this is the whole thing about the calories and calories out sort of debacle, is that they assume that the calories out, that is your body, how much energy it uses every day, is independent of what you eat. It's not. It's actually very dependent on what you eat because what you eat contains not just those calories, but that information, right, has to do with those calories. So therefore, you eat, you

know, if all you're eating is cookies, 2000 calories of cookies, all of it goes into storage into your body fat because you told it to, right? The insides telling it to, 2,000 calories of cookies. All of it goes into storage, into your body fat, because you told it to. The instant is telling it to. Well you have no energy to do anything else. You all want to just start. Right. Your body naturally has to shut down its metabolic rate. So think about it like an energy plant.

So you get a ton of coal or whatever you're burning, you burn it, right? What if you take that ton of coal and put it into storage shed? Well, you can't burn it. You're generating no energy. So your calories out, your body's energy. If you shuttle all your calories into storage,

your body can't burn anything. So therefore, it's going to reduce its calories out. Metabolic rate goes down. So that that that sort of unspoken assumption of this whole calories and calories out is that their calories out stays stable except for exercise. It's not true in any sense. Because an exercise.

It's an exercise. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, you wrote the cancer code, which I haven't even gotten to yet. And I'm sorry, because I don't know how much time you have left. But, you know, one of the things, and I love, I really, really love that book, is that you say that fasting could be a strategy for helping prevent cancer? Is that like, so before you tell me that though,

I wanted to know before I ask you about that. So is there a lot of, what are the other health benefits from doing the fasting or from eating less or from time, kind of like eating the intermittent fasting way or the fasting or just eating less time. What are the other health benefits? Is it longevity, of course?

Yeah, so there's actually quite a lot. One, of course, is it's use in terms of losing weight. Second is, in terms of treatment of type 2 diabetes, if you simply don't eat your body, you will use up some of that sugar that's in your blood. And therefore, your blood sugar goes down. So that's obviously very useful. And it's a natural strategy. There's nothing artificial about it. It's been used for thousands of years.

And it's totally free and totally accessible to anybody in the world, even if you have no money. And that's great. The other thing, of course, increased energy, right? Your body is actually, as long as you have sufficient fat storage, your body is going to use it and therefore increase the energy because that's the natural, that's what happens in your body naturally when you don't eat, is that you're increasing

your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight response or you're getting increased energy. You're getting increased levels of concentration. So when people don't eat, it's the same thing. You're actually pumping up the energy in your system. We can measure people's memory, people's focus, people's concentration. It's actually better than when you're eating, which everybody knows, of course, if you eat a big Thanksgiving meal, you're not really sharp afterwards. You just want to sit down and relax and watch in TV, because all the food needs to be digested and stuff. If you don't eat, that's that hungry wolf, right? You're sharp, you're right on it. So, that's a huge benefit for people who make their living, and this is one of the reasons why in Silicon Valley, it's sort of fasting took off because

you know, these sort of geniuses were like competing with just a candle to make a lot of money. So it's like, hey, any edge they wanted, they wanted that edge, not physically, but mentally. So an interesting story in one of these books unbroken by Lauren Hillibrand, which is a biography of this World War II prisoner of war and American prisoner of war in Japan. He was literally starting. They had nothing to eat.

And he would observe these other prisoners doing these incredible mental feats. One guy read a book entirely from memory and other learned Norwegian in a week. And he's going, yeah, that's just the astonishing mental clarity of starvation. And he's just sort of blasé about it. It's like, yeah, people do amazing things when they're starving. I'm like, yeah, how can nobody have to talk about that? I never heard that.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's because the fasted state has sort of gone away. But you have the mental clarity, the longevity which you see with calorie restriction. You have this thing called a topogy, which is very people are very interested in because it's this state where you're sort of, it's a state of rejuvenation basically.

So it was the 2016 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to one of the researchers in it. And essentially it's a time during fasting where your body is breaking down certain proteins. And everybody says, wow, that's really bad. Turns out it's really good. Because when you break down those proteins, your body breaks down the stuff that is old,

and then your growth hormone goes up. So when you eat again, you're going to rebuild it. So if you're getting rid of old stuff and putting in new stuff, that's a process of rejuvenation. And that's potentially one of the big benefits. We're also talking about things like Alzheimer's disease, for example, potentially there's a role in that,

potentially there's a role in cancer prevention. You know, so is that because you're not letting it sound. That's very, yeah, that's very theoretical, but one of the things that is clear is that your body, when it fast, you know, your body sort of has this balance between growth and longevity. So when you want to grow, building things, everybody thinks that's good, but the problem is that you don't, that's usually at the expense of longevity.

So your cells are either trying to grow or they go into this sort of maintenance repair mode. As you get older, it's more important to get into this sort of maintenance repair mode and you get that by going and doing it and the fasting. So therefore, when you're shutting down the growth signals, so remember that insulin and all of the, you know, if you protein, you activate m-tore and these are all nutrient sensors. So your body senses the nutrition. When it senses nutrition, it increases growth signaling. So you're telling your body, grow, grow, grow.

Well, if you're telling your body, grow, grow, grow, that's generally not good for cancer. When you donate, when you fast, you're actually telling your body, don't grow, don't grow, which is good when you're an adult, not so good when you're a kid, but when you're an adult, it's good. So therefore, you're reducing your growth signaling and therefore reducing risk of cancer. So obesity, for example, is a huge risk factor for many types of cancer, for example. And cancer is hugely complicated because that's not the only thing that's happening. There's lots of other issues like smoking and alcohol and cirrhosis.

There's a lot of issues with cancer, but one of the things that might be very important is sort of the effect of obesity, the effect of type 2 diabetes, and that's where fasting by preventing the weight gain is going to lower your risk of those obesity-associated cancers, of which include breast cancer and colorectal cancers, or the two of the big, big one. But what part that is genetics in terms of cancer? Like, are you genetically prone to cancer? They say, you know, the breast cancer. Yeah, certainly. The cancer is certainly multi-multifocal. So it's not just about nutrition and obesity and so on because you saw cancer a long time

ago. But you increase your risk of cancer. So for example, if you look at Japanese cancer, breast cancer rates, for example, versus American, it's like three times higher in North America compared to Japan. So not all of the risk of cancer is related to nutrition and obesity, but you can sort of tilt your odds. genetics plays a big role, but if you look at overall cancer, it's about 25% of risk. So 75% of the risk of cancer is still other things.

The two biggest ones, number one is tobacco smoking, and it's about 30% of the risk of cancer is related to smoking. So that's obviously important. Everybody agrees on that. The second most important thing, very close behind it, is diet. And that's at about 30%. So yeah, it's a very interesting thing,

because it's a huge part of cancer causation that we don't often talk about. We talk about things like carcinogens and other things, which are like 2% to five percent of cancer this. So even if you're genetically predisposed for it, you can modify the chances by your lifestyle, by what you eat. So I guess for that purpose, like you're saying the fasting could be a good tool to use for that more or less.

It's a tool. Yeah, exactly. It's a tool within that sort of lifestyle piece. So if you look at sort of, and there are other causes of cancer like viruses, for example, certain viruses cause cancer, like human papilloma virus causes a cervical cancer. So no amount of nutrition or weight loss is going to affect that because that's nothing to do with it, right? But some of the, they used to be called lifestyle associated cancers and you'd look and, you know, people used to go up to Northern Ontario actually to study the Inuit because they said these people just don't get any cancer.

Then of course, they started eating a lot of sugar and flour and then they got all the same cancers that we got. But in the 20s, people would send expeditions. Queens University used to send an expedition to the North to see why these people were sort of protected against cancer. Turns out they weren't at all. It was that their lifestyle was so, you know, was so anti-cancer that they just never got it, other than those viral cancers.

So like sugar though, because I guess when you, when you, it doesn't sugar, it doesn't sugar for your cells or it doesn't kind of feed on something in your body that makes things kind of go Arey is that possible or cancer sort of loves sugar and glucose You know carbohydrates are types of sugar. Right. Right. If feed on them almost exclusively So therefore it is a little bit easier like it's it's not the whole story, but sugar clearly plays a role, likely related to obesity and type 2 diabetes as well. It's all in that sort of mix of metabolic diseases.

And that's why it's so important because that's the one thing that we can control. We can't control our genetics, but we can control the foods that we eat and how often we eat them. So if you're sort of increasing your fasting, curing and stuff, you're going to allow your body to use some of it and therefore turn down the growth signaling. Right.

You're telling your whole body basically to not grow as quickly and that translates to slower growth in cancer as well. Are there any other strategies that you want to talk about that for us to kind of help prevent cancer besides of course what we just talked about like the potential of fasting or... Yeah, I mean the again cancer is a huge topic and there's many different types of cancer. But in terms of... Can you talk about the cancer of paradigm? Yeah, it's trying to transition us because we came, again, through the 90s and 2000s,

we sort of looked at cancer as a purely genetic disease because genetics was, you know, as a field was just expanding at such an incredible rate. We could map genes and map whole, you know, the whole human, you know, all the DNA and the human body sort of thing, right? That was the, in 2000, the big gum, a human genome project. But so we sort of started to look at cancer as this purely genetic thing, but it turns out it wasn't. Most of it is still environmental, and it's not just about nutrition,

but it's really about chronic damage, chronic inflammation, which can come from multiple sources, one of which is like tobacco smoke, for example. So chemicals, tobacco smoke, so it's really about not just your diet, but also your environment, you know, trying to make sure that you're not getting any sources of chronic inflammation, chronic damage, and that can include doing things like exercise, which is a great way to lower your stress levels and so on. So all of those things combined can be very important.

But yeah, it's part of it, the one part that's most within our control is other than smoking to die. We can you stress your body too much from exercise if you overdo it because- So for sure. And then does that connect cause your immune system to be, I guess, not just kind of weaker? Does that have anything to do with it? Yeah, although most people never get to that state, but yes, you can. I mean, just remember that everything is a stress on the body. Stress on the body is good because

your body then responds to it by getting stronger. If you overdo that stress, that's when you get into real trouble. So even fasting, fasting is a stress on the body, absolutely. If you do too much, yes, you're going to do damage. You need to have proper nutrition. So everything there is a balance. But nutrition is one of the big fields that is left. And it turns out it's mostly related through obesity. So there's no one specific diet that has been shown to be the cancer preventing. Some people

say, well, if you just eat, you know, vegetarian, you're going to be protected, but not necessarily. I mean, it's much more complicated than that. How about hydration? Does that play a piece of it for diabetics or for obesity? Not a huge amount. I mean. Most of us are reasonably hydrated. I mean, if you don't drink enough, you get thirsty, which is a very powerful stimulus to get drink more water. So it doesn't play a huge role. It's important, but it's not something that in this day

and age with easily accessible water and stuff, we're not in the Saharan Desert, for example. Therefore, it's like- No, but people mistake hunger for hydration a lot of times, and their Thursday they should be- Yeah, but that's not really one or the other. It's not really, yeah, it's neither really here nor there, because most of us are well hydrated enough.

I think the point about hydration is that if you do sort of ignore that hunger, it very often goes away. If you're hungry, it doesn't mean you must eat. I mean, this is this whole thing that we got into this thing where like, oh, if you're hungry, you have to eat. Otherwise, it's super bad for you. It's like, no, if you don't eat and you have a source of calories sitting there on your body, then you will use that. How is that unhealthy?

Like just tell me, please, because if you have 200,000 calories sitting in your body fat and you don't eat that 500 calorie sandwich, like tell me how this is a problem. It's not, you know what it is. This is all very habitual. It's a book, but the quite I guess the real question and this is it last question and I'll let you go. But it's about breaking bad hat, but bake not even bad habits, breaking habits that you

have, it's you've been kind of taught to do for so long. It's like so in like your DNA already. And to me, all that's what this all is, right? Like that's why we eat off. And that's why we we think we think psychologically fasting is horrible. Like God forbid, I'm hungry for three minutes. Like, especially, you know, it's also cultural, you know, like I'm a Jewish girl. Like I, the thought, like even the thought, like I tried to fast. And like in hour two, I'm like, I can't believe I'm doing this to myself, the thought, even the thought, like I tried to fast and like in hour two, I'm like,

I can't believe I'm doing this to myself, you know, like I feel so deprived, you know. Exactly. And the whole point, and we talk about this, so I have this coaching business, the fasting method, dot com, and the very first lesson we have with our coaching is reframing that mindset. Yeah. It's all about your mindset. If your mindset is that I should never ever be hungry and I should be able to eat whenever I want and whatever I want, well, you're not going to be as successful as you should be.

Because think about it in the 70s. Again, I choose the 70s because it's a time when food is easily available, but there's not a lot of obesity. Well, it's simply not okay to be eating at 2.30 in the meeting with your boss. Now it is. Like you have a meeting somebody's ordered a plate to cookies. So it's okay to eat in the middle of the day, in between lunch and dinner, not in a place where you're eating in the office setting. Wow, you're doing work. It's okay. So the whole mindset is that one, hunger is super bad for me, which is not true. It just means you're hungry. I mean, that's all it means,

right? If you ignore it, it will go away. And two is that I should be able to eat whenever I want, wherever I want, no matter what. It's like, and that too is not going to be a successful mindset because it's the same thing. If you walk by the donut shop, you are gonna be tempted to get a donut. That's why they put it at there, right? Totally. If you have no opportunity to get it, well then you're not going to want it.

You're never hungry. You just wanted that donut because it's delicious. So that was the only reason and if your mindset is that I should be able to get that because you know, I haven't eaten in an hour sort of thing. As opposed to sort of a mindset of the 70s, which is like, you don't eat after school, you're going to ruin your dinner. You don't eat after dinner because you should ate more at dinner. Like there's no foods until tomorrow morning, and that's the mindset, right? That's the mindset we all had so if you're hungry at 10 p.m. You're just like wow

I'll just go to sleep because I'm just gonna suck it up You know my mom's gonna yell at me if I go make something to eat now It's like oh my poor dear like let me make you something to eat well You know what if you didn't you would have just gone to bed. You know, to keep burning those body fat, right? That's what you would have been doing. Instead, you put, you know, some yogurt in your mouth or whatever it is that you decided to eat. So you're sort of sabotaging yourself,

not because you're hungry, not because you're anything wrong. It was purely from your mindset. And that's what you got to work on is the habits, the mindset. Because we're not different people than we were in the 70s. We don't have less real power. We're not like worse people. We just, we just changed that whole idea of how we should be eating, which is we change it to you should eat the minute you get up and never stop. Fasting is super bad for you. Yeah, exactly. It's so true though, because I remember when I was a little girl,

I was like, very think, oh, two or three, well, in the 80s more. But that was the thing. It's like, you better eat now because that's there's no dessert for you. Or you can't eat now because. And then somewhere along the line, it was like, you're depriving my, like with my kids, like I feel like I'm depriving them, like they're going to go starving if they don't eat every four and a half minutes, you know, I'm running around with the spoon of food all the time.

Even that whole thing about dessert is very interesting because again, our mindsets have changed before it was, well, you eat all that broccoli on your plate or you get no dessert. Yeah. Now it's like, oh, well, you can have dessert anyway. Exactly. Obviously I shouldn't be depriving. And the cookies in the broccoli are the same, right? They're all the same.

In fact, it's good. It's so true. Oh my God. Like people say this all the time, driving crazy. It's like, well, since I saved those hundred calories of broccoli, I'm going to eat those hundred calories of cooking. And it's okay. It's like, my grandmother would have, I know totally.

Totally. Like, you can't do that. You eat the broccoli, then you can have a little bit of dessert, like not the other way around. But when you equate the two based on calories and not by the foods, right? So they're purely the calorie equivalent, then that's where you get into the problem. Because your mindset now changes.

Don't eat the broccoli so that you can eat the cookies. Not, you must eat the broccoli. Then if you have room, then you can have a cookie. I agree. It is all mine. It's also like just, also we can tell, we can convince ourselves of anything, whenever we want to convince ourselves of, right? Like we can think we're just being deprived

so then we can like, we can tell ourselves whatever we want so then we can actually do it. But people don't like delayed gratification, right? They don't like delayed gratification. And it's been sold to us, right? It's been sold to us. That's the other problem. Exactly.

And everything has its time and shifts, right? There'll be another evolution. You know, like, so, yeah, I mean, I can go into a whole other thing. But Jason, you've been great. Thank you very much for taking the time to be on this podcast and taking, you know, this amount of time at every schedule. It's been a really good conversation and I've learned a ton. Where can people and I've learned a ton, where can people find you if they don't know who you are? First of all, this book is called The Obesity Code. You have the floor.

Yeah, so you can go to my website. So there's the fasting method.com. You can look on YouTube. I post a number of videos every week. Just look under my name Jason Fung. You've great staff by the way on YouTube. Oh thanks. Yeah, I tried to make it accessible. I used to have just a bunch of medical lectures there, but of course nobody wants to spend like 60 minutes with a very dense technical stuff. So I broke it into sort of like 10 minute chunks and it's made a lot easier. So I'm, you know, I'm hoping it just makes it easier for people to understand.

Because really, I think people just need to understand what's happening and they can make those choices for themselves. And then you can follow me on Twitter as well at Dr. Jason Fun. And that's it. Well, it's been great. Thank you so much for coming on. And I hope to have it up. are you writing another book now soon?

Or no, I've, I've, I've, I've, I'm sort of done that for now. I'm taking a break from the books. I have, you know, I'm sort of focusing now on some of the other things like the videos through you too. It's totally different. Interesting. Actually, it's a very different medium, but gratifying in a totally different way. Sort of, you can do things on there. There's certain sort of limitations that are, but it's a different, it's just a different way

to do things, a different way to get that information across, but it's great. Yeah, I mean, you kind of like, how long you've been on YouTube? Because I feel like did you just blow up on YouTube? I feel like your videos are all over the place. Yeah, well, my, I was, I was, I joined then 2013. But again, it wasn't until about a year and a half ago. I just posted lectures I was giving. Yeah.

There's lectures that, you know, I'd give and they taped it and I put it on YouTube. And people watched it, but it wasn't easy. Very few people sit down for an hour and watch this sort of stuff. So then about a year and a half ago when I finished doing the books, I said, well, let me try this, which is a short video format. And that's when I started to really get more viewership through that, because I hadn't been focused on that before. So that's why it's all in the last year and a half or so. I want to ask you something about that, but I'll let, I'll let's say good, don't hang

up, but let's say goodbye. Thank you again for, thank you again for being on the podcast. And everyone, go check out his YouTube channel. So informational, it's ton of about weight loss, fasting, everything health-wide. Well, those are the main ones though, right? Which people love to know about. So it's great. I watched them all the time.

So thanks. Thank you so much. Haven't had the habits and hustle pockets, power by happiness