The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dr. Jason Fung Interview The Obesity Code & The Complete Guide To Fasting Books

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Dr. Jason Fung Interview The Obesity Code & The Complete Guide To Fasting Books , The landmark book from New York Times-bestselling author Dr. Jason Fung, one of the world's leading experts on intermittent fasting for weight-loss and longevity, whose 5-step plan has helped thousands of people lose weight and achieve lasting health. “Not only full of insights but also surprisingly funny. Read it to understand why the world became fat, how to reverse the epidemic—and how to stay thin yourself.” —Andreas Eenfeldt, MD, Founder of dietdoctor.com Everything you believe about how to lose weight is wrong. Weight gain and obesity are driven by hormones—in everyone—and only by understanding the effects of insulin and insulin resistance can we achieve lasting weight loss. In this highly readable and provocative book, Dr. Jason Fung sets out an original, robust theory of obesity that provides startling insights into proper nutrition. In addition to his five basic steps, a set of lifelong habits that will improve your health and control your insulin levels, Dr. Fung explains how to use intermittent fasting to break the cycle of insulin resistance and reach a healthy weight—for good. Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward. Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won. In The Cancer Code, Dr. Jason Fung offers a revolutionary new understanding of this invasive, often fatal disease—what it is, how it manifests, and why it is so challenging to treat. In this rousing narrative, Dr. Fung identifies the medical community’s many missteps in cancer research—in particular, its focus on genetics, or what he terms the “seed” of cancer, at the expense of examining the “soil,” or the conditions under which cancer flourishes. Dr. Fung—whose groundbreaking work in the treatment of obesity and diabetes has won him international acclaim—suggests that the primary disease pathway of cancer is caused by the dysregulation of insulin. In fact, obesity and type 2 diabetes significantly increase an individual’s risk of cancer. In this accessible read, Dr. Fung provides a new paradigm for dealing with cancer, with recommendations for what we can do to create a hostile soil for this dangerous seed. One such strategy is intermittent fasting, which reduces blood glucose, lowering insulin levels. Another, eliminating intake of insulin-stimulating foods, such as sugar and refined carbohydrates. For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control. The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Thanks for tuning in.

We certainly appreciate you guys being here today. Be sure to watch the video version of this on youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. You can see our wonderful guest in full Technicolor. They have this Technicolor that's out nowadays. It's not like the old black and white. It's got color, and you can actually see it and all that good stuff. So be sure to watch for that. This is a returning guest we've had on the show.

I'll keep you in suspense through the bio. And you can also go to our newest syndicator. We have a billion of them. You can find us everywhere but uh amazon music you can go on amazon music and there's a podcast section now search for the chris voss show or any of the nine podcasts and you can listen over there you know if that's your thing if you're an amazon music person now you don't have to go someplace else to hear the show uh also follow us on goodreads.com you can find me under chris voss just

search under there where the chris voss show is uh putting up a book club that we have over there to hear the show. Also follow us on goodreads.com. You can find me under Chris Voss. Just search under there. The Chris Voss Show is putting up a book club that we have over there. It has a lot of reviews, different things and topics, et cetera, et cetera. Some of our references, of course, to the interviews we're doing here. So be sure to check that out, goodreads.com. Today is a returning guest. He was one of our most popular guests we had on the show. He came here promoting his future book that we'll talk about. Many of you may know him, especially if you've been on a diet or read some diet books. He's very popular in that field.

His name is Dr. Jason Fung, MD. He's a Canadian nephrologist. Nephrologist, I think I got that right. He's a leading expert on intermittent fasting and low carb, especially for treating with people with type 2 diabetes. He's written three best-selling health books, and he co-founded the Intensive Dietary Management Program. He has his own websites at idm.healthandthefastingmethod.com. He graduated from the University of Toronto, completed his residency at the University of Toronto, completed his residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. And

welcome to the show. How are you, Dr. Fung? Very good. Thanks for having me back, Chris. Thanks for coming back. You know, let's plug your books first before we get into it. Give us your plugs on where people can look you up on the interwebs. Yeah, so that was my first book called The Obesity Code and really talking about sort of how to understand what causes weight loss and weight gain because the way that we think about how to lose weight pretty much is all wrong. That is, we have this idea that you're really supposed to just focus on calories in, calories out, just eat 500 fewer calories a day, and you're going to lose weight for sure. The truth is that everybody's done it, and it doesn't work pretty much for anybody. And there's

a good reason for that. And it's all based on the science of how the body sort of gains and loses weight. And that's what really the obesity code was talking about. And then at the end of that book, I start talking about intermittent fasting and fasting, which is a sort of ancient strategy used by people, and how that might play into, you know, another way that people can try to lose weight that's going to be hopefully more successful for them. But the point is that there's lots of different ways to lose weight. So the more things that the more options you have, the better off you are, because you can use it or you cannot use it. And that's what the complete guide to fasting is about, which is a sort of a much more practical guide to sort of thinking about fasting and, you know, what what the ins and outs are, what the problems are,

what the possible solutions are, and the different regimens and all that kind of stuff. So it's a much more practical guide about how to do the fasting. And those books came out in 2016, and I started using it and writing about it probably in 2013. So back then, of course course it was really just people thought the whole idea of fasting was a terrible terrible idea and luckily in the in those years since it's come out it's become much much more popular you can see it you know all over the place people are talking about it and the websites and the news and there's doing studies on it. But it's sort of, you know,

hopefully going to provide people a way to successfully manage their weight. And by losing weight, then they're going to improve their health because that's going to put you at much lower risk of a lot of metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, which may lead to other diseases like heart disease, you know, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, blindness, kidney disease, that kind of thing. So it does play, of course, a very important role. In addition, the weight, you know, causes joint problems and knee problems and back pain and all this sort of stuff. So there's a lot of reasons other than just looking good to try to lose weight. And this is just an attempt to get people to understand the process of weight loss

and also to give them some practical guides to how to do it. Nice. And let's give a plug to your forthcoming book that people should go ahead and preorder. This is The Cancer Code, A Revolutionary New Understanding of Medical Mystery, The Wellness Code. That's going to be out November 20th. I'm sorry, November 10th, 2020. So you can preorder that, baby.

And if you Google on the Chris Voss Show or some of our other shows, Dr. Fung, you should be able to come up with our prior show that we took and did on the Cancer Code book. And we spent a good hour talking about this. And it was very enlightening, very awakening, made a lot of logical sense to me, especially with my experience with taking care of cancer patients and also me losing a lot of weight. I should mention, too, that the obesity code, even though it came out in 2016, still is the number one bestseller in endocrinology and metabolism. So congratulations there.

You're just running up the ratings there. So you've got two books here that you sent me, The Obesity Code, Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss, and The Complete Guide to Fasting. This one I like because it's got a lot of pictures in it. I went to public school, so I like pictures. So which should we dig into first? I think this one's kind of an expansion or like a graph, graphic version of this one, or how does that work? Well, they're different. One is the obesity code is more of a science book. It's really just talking about the, how sort of the body gains and loses weight.

And the complete guide to fasting is taking that idea and understanding and then really expanding it into the practical aspects of fasting and how to apply it what to expect and what the uh you know how to deal with it and what the different ways that you can do it are and that kind of thing sort of tips tricks that kind of thing so both are they're they're, they're, they're complimentary. They don't go for the same thing, but they're sort of, they sort of go hand in hand in that one is very much more understanding and one is much more sort of practical. So some people like to just jump in and say, tell me what to do. I don't really care about it, but, but why it works and so on, and just tell me what to do. And that's the complete guide to fasting. The other one is like for people who really want to understand,

well, why is it that all these Americans have gained so much weight? To me, it's a real mystery that is not well sort of explained because the problem is that if you look at 1970 versus 2020, so 50 years ago, the Americans are not, they're not obese, right? You can look at any sort of, you know, statistic. And if you look back at old pictures from the 60s and 70s, you can see almost everybody was fairly slender, but nobody's watching their diet. And people say, well, you know, there's more TV or whatever. But if you look at it, people are the same. Like, you know, if you had an office worker in the 1960s, he's spending all day in the office. It's no different than the, you know, us spending all

day in the office in 2020, right? It's the same thing. People played sports, they played soccer, they like to go to baseball games and watch basketball and whatever it is, right? They did the same things that we do today. They didn't eat quinoa, they was eating white bread and jam and Oreo cookies and stuff. So why is it that it was so much easier? And nobody did a lot of exercise. There was no LA Fitness. There was nothing like that, right? Jogging was one of these things that only crazy people did, right? You couldn't drink water in the 70s because, you know, it was brown. We had water catching on fire in America in the 70s.

Yeah, that's right. And rivers just lighting up in fire. So it's a real mystery to me that people don't, you know, never really thought about. What is it that's different about 1970, the habits of 1970 America and 2020? Because people say, well, why did people gain weight? And people always come back to, well, it's, you know,

calories in, calories out. It's what you eat compared to how much you exercise. So just eat less and exercise more, which is the sort of standard advice that people have been given. But it doesn't explain why is it that obesity went from sort of very low rates to very, very high rates we have today. Like did all of America all of a sudden just want to eat more and move less? Like that doesn't even make sense. Like nobody told us, oh, you should like eat more food, right? Like there was no public service. I remember seeing the PSAs on that. Eat more.

Only you can save forest fires in America. Yeah, more video games and TV. It's good for you, right? Nobody said that, right? It was never part of a conscious thing. So why does that change? And, of course, the thing that changed was the foods that we ate. 1977, for example, was the big turning point.

You can see that obesity rates are sort of very slowly moving up from say 1900 to 1970. Then in 1977, they take this big sharp turn up like that. And that's exactly the point where the government decided to tell us that we should be eating more bread. That's basically what they said. So it was this whole low-fat thing. Fat is bad for you. Fat causes heart disease. And that was the whole food pyramid, right? In the 1980s, we had this huge low-fat craze, right? The pyramid. And if you look at the original pyramid, there's pictures of like bread and potatoes and rice. And this is the stuff you're supposed to eat seven to eight of these things.

So seven slices of white bread a day. Well, does anybody really think that's really slimming? It's like, that's not slimming, right? And these are actually the foods that if you go back to the 50s, your grandmother would say, those are the fattening foods. These starchy foods tend to make people gain weight, right? So we're eating the foods that we had always known to be sort of fattening, right? Starchy potatoes, white potatoes, white bread, white rice. And yet we were being told then to eat more and more of

these foods. And hey, well, what happened? Well, Americans started to gain weight. So that's the point. It's not that people all of a sudden lost their willpower in 1977, right? That doesn't even make sense. It was this complete change in the way that we thought about food and the types of food that we ate all of a sudden changed because, and only one, you know, person, only one body can do that and the government of course because everybody trusts what the government does then of course they go into the schools they teach all the kids to eat low fat they put all the the the things I was saying eat low fat right and then all that that's how you change the behavior of a population so it was an official

government policy and that's the reason that people started to gain all that weight. So it was the whole thing was sort of this really bad confluence of events. And then you say, well, what was it about the low fat? And this is very interesting, too, because the whole low fat thing was a total sham as well. So what happened was that in the 50s and 60s, Americans were getting more heart attacks than ever before. So you'd have these, you know, 60-year-old business people, and they'd get a heart attack out of the blue. And nobody really knew the reason for that. And when you look back, the reason is fairly obvious. People were smoking a lot.

So, you know, they went to World War I, World War II, they came back, and basically everybody was smoking. So remember, doctors smoked more camels and stuff. So even the doctors were smoking. They smoke in the hospital. Yeah, they're smoking everywhere. Remember, they had these little ashtray things in your car. I'm not sure why you have lung cancer, patient,

but all of us doctors are trying to figure out why you have lung cancer a patient but all of our doctors are trying to figure out why you have lung cancer it's crazy yeah and then if you ever I don't know if you remember but on the airplanes they also had these little ashtray things I still see them on airplanes

for a while the old planes and it's like okay I was smoking with all this oxygen and pressurized caffeine that's a bad idea yeah so i remember watching dirty if you watch the movie dirty um so good so anyway so so everybody was smoking and that's why we were getting all these heart attacks but nobody knew at the time right because remember the tobacco company spent millions and millions of dollars telling us that smoking was safe and all that that took a long time and initially it was for lung cancer but then eventually it turns out it's a it's really bad for heart attacks too and that's probably the reason everybody's having heart attacks because it was just reflecting all this smoke. But at the time,

nobody knew it. So then they said, well, we don't know why. So they were looking for a reason why Americans had this epidemic of heart disease. And they landed on the idea that it was too much fat, especially saturated fat. So rates of heart attacks were two, three, four times what they were in 1900. But if you look at the diet of the Americans, it was actually rates of heart attacks were two, three, four times what they were in 1900. But if you look at the diet of the Americans, it was actually the exact same in 1900 and 1950. It was like the same thing. They weren't eating more meat. They weren't eating more fat. They were eating exactly the same, yet heart attack rates went up. So it's like, well, if you're blaming the fat, the animal fat, the butter, and so on, why would it all of a sudden jump when you haven't been

eating more butter? People were eating the same amount of butter. So it didn't even make sense at all. And the other thing is that, hey, people have been eating animal fats and saturated fats like coconut fat and butter for thousands of years. So why would it be fine for 5,000 years of human history? And then, hey, since 1950, it causes heart disease. So that didn't make sense either, right? Because these are not foods that were new into our system. So the whole thing was a bit controversial, to say the least. But the problem was that there's a group of very influential doctors who thought that fat was really the worst thing ever. So they sort of went before the government and the government says, yes, you guys are right.

So it wasn't like a scientific debate. It was just some politician who said, hey, the low fat people are right. Everybody should be eating low fat. So it was like a giant experiment in national policy because nobody prior to 1977 had ever told you what to eat. Your mother told you what to eat. That was it, right? It wasn't anybody else's business what you ate. Now from 1977, it was all low fat, low fat, low fat. So what happened was that they changed from butter and saturated fat was a thing they blamed. So we changed from butter, remember, to margarine, which was a total sham as well, because it turns out that the margarine was full of trans fats, which actually caused heart disease.

So the food that didn't cause heart disease, butter, was we got rid of it so that we could eat more margarine, which actually did cause heart disease. So in trying to avoid the heart disease, we actually gave ourselves more heart disease. And some estimates suggest that about 100,000 heart attacks per year were because of the margarine. So it's like, that's absolutely tragic that we were so stupid to turn away from a natural food like butter to that. But anyway, that was the low fat mania of the 1980s and 1990s. So of course, if you remember at the time, there's all this low fat this, low fat that. And everybody thought avocados were like liquid death, right? It was like, oh, that's terrible for you.

And those stupid Italians with their olive oil, they're going to kill themselves eating all that olive oil, right? And that was really the prevalence of the time. And I don't know if you remember at the time, people talked about the French paradox was that, hey, these French people are eating heavy cream, they're eating butter, they're eating like foie gras, which is this fatty duck liver, and they're having like a third of the heart attacks of Americans. So how can they eat so much fat and not have heart attacks? And they called this the French paradox, which wasn't a paradox because the natural fats

weren't causing heart disease. It was really just as simple as that. But of course, we didn't know it. So that's when, and then, you know, by the 2000s, people started seeing that, hey, Mediterranean diet's really healthy for you. Hey, avocados, olive oil, all those things are great for you. And then they started noticing that nuts, another very high fat food, very heart protective, walnuts, for example. And then they started noticing that nuts, another very high fat food, very heart protective, walnuts, for example. And then they started noticing fatty fish like salmon and stuff. People who ate a lot of fatty fish were doing way better and way less heart attacks. So the whole thing started to fall apart. So you've got these healthy fats. Now, a lot of these natural fats like butter are sort of back in. And so the whole thing took a big U-turn from, we went from

hysterical fat, you know, phobia to everybody kind of started coming around. But the upshot of that was that the low fat movement, of course, spawned this huge high carb movement, right? So when you look at the foods, foods, it's either protein, fat, or carbohydrates. Protein is very hard to raise or lower in your diet because unless you're eating just lean beef and egg whites all day long, protein, if you get too low-fat protein, like high-protein, low-fat, it's just inedible, right? It's dry.

It's hard to eat it's like uh you know really really lean meat it's just hard to eat there's no flavor there so the the thing is that if protein stays the same if you want to lower the calories of fat you wind up raising the calories of carbohydrates and we weren't eating beans and broccoli, we're eating white bread. So everybody started eating all kinds of high carb foods, you know, bread and rice and all those big plates of pasta. And then of course, the problem is that those high carbohydrate foods were not really great for us. The other thing is that these really refined foods, they really just don't keep you full. So if you're eating breakfast and

you're eating, say, steak and eggs, you stay full for a long time because of the protein, because of the fat. If you eat just sort of white bread and jam, well, there's nothing to keep you full, right? And we know that because when you eat fat and when you eat protein, you release hormones that tell you to stop eating. These are satiety hormones. So you eat white bread, which is highly refined carbohydrate. None of these sort of satiety hormones get released. So then you eat it. And then by 10.30 in the morning, all of a sudden you're ravenously hungry, scrounging around for a low-fat muffin. Then 12 o'clock, you eat a big plate of pasta, low-fat. By 2.30, you're super hungry again, looking for a bagel or a cookie or something.

So now all of a sudden, instead of eating three meals a day, you've gone to eating like six or seven meals a day. And then people thought it was a good idea. But the problem is, of course, if you're eating all the time, that's going to make you gain weight. But people thought it was the right thing to do because they're eating low fat. And, you know, so this whole thing, so the, if you remember in the 70s, it was breakfast, lunch, dinner, no snacks. You wanted a bedtime snack, no way you should eat more at dinner. You wanted an after school snack, no way you're going to ruin your dinner, right?

It was, there was no snacking. It just didn't exist because you should have been eating more at dinner. Now it was impossible to eat enough to stay full for the whole time. So people started snacking all the time. And so the two big things, which is what you eat and when you eat, they both sort of conspired to make us much more likely to gain weight. That is, if you're eating foods that are fattening and you're eating them all the time. Well, hello, that's just an invitation to gain weight. So it wasn't that Americans today have less willpower than Americans 50 years from now, or Americans today have less willpower than a Japanese person, right? That's not the case.

It's that the foods that we ate, what we're told of what to eat was exactly the foods that we needed to gain weight. So let's break that down. So fat is fairly good for us. Proteins are good for us. I would say, I guess, natural fats and natural proteins, right? Because we have all the synthesized stuff, especially like corn and different things and sugar that's been screwed with. I mean, I used to see all these people are like, I'm drinking diet soda that has, that has mice poison in it because it's, it's better. And you're like, I don't know about

that. Yeah. The problem with a lot of these things is that processed foods, whether it's processed carbs or processed meats or processed fats, our body doesn't know how to handle them. So if you look at foods that are very close to their natural form, so coconut or meat, that's the way it comes out. Or even a carbohydrate such as beans, right? This is the way they come, right? There's a bean, you dry it, that's it. So our bodies have sort of evolved for thousands of years and we can handle it. We know how to handle it. So we evolve hormones to tell us how much we should eat and when we've

eaten enough and that kind of thing. When you start processing foods, you get rid of a lot of those natural satiety signals. So it doesn't, you know, you wind up being very prone to overeating them. So if you think about overeating, suppose, you know, you go to a buffet and you eat like too much food, right? So you eat, you eat, you eat, you're really, really full. If somebody just drops like a pork chop in front of you and say, hey, have another one, you'd be like, oh man, I'm going to throw up, right? You can't eat anymore. Physically, you can't eat anymore because that pork or whatever has a lot of satiety signals. So you eat pork, your body's going to feel full. So you're going to say, oh no, I can't do that. I'm going to throw up, right? And that's why they have these, you know, those restaurants and give and give you oh you eat a 60 ounce steak in an hour we'll give it to you they're

not going out of business they're not giving away a lot of free steak it's really really hard to do that but if you have that buffet you're feeling really full and somebody says here have a chocolate chip cookie you're like yeah i can do that why because there's no satiety thing or here so here's some sugary soda have some sugary soda yeah i can do that now there's a lot of calories in that sugary soda but the point is that there's no nothing in that soda nothing in that cookie is going to make you feel full so therefore you can keep putting it in which makes it much more prone to overeating so the point is that when you eat natural foods you almost always won't go wrong because your body will handle it.

When you eat processed foods, whether it's processed carbs or fat or whatever, then you're going to be in danger of not having the proper signal. That is just like an apple, for example. It's very hard to eat seven or eight apples in one sitting. But if you drink a glass of apple juice hey no problem right and that's the same thing because the apple juice has everything taken out of it except for the sugar and the water sort of thing and when you drink something that has a high amount of sugar does that that's going to cause your insulin to spike too as well right yeah and so it all comes down to the insulin and insulin is what you need to keep your eye on that's the most important hormone for how the body gains fat because the

thing is that when you eat um and you're i'm assuming you eat sort of a variety of foods i've eaten a couple things as you can tell looking at me the thing is that insulin goes up and the job of insulin is to tell you to store that food right and you store it as body fat okay so it's that's its job it's not a bad thing so but if you eat breakfast lunch and dinner you're going to take more food in at dinner time for example then you can use immediately so insulin goes up you, you store some of it, right? When you go to sleep, your insulin is going to fall. And then that's going to draw some of that energy back out so that you have energy. This is for your liver and your kidneys and your heart. And you know, all those organs need fuel. And you're not eating at the time. So you've stored some away,

you're going to draw some out. And the signal to do that is when your instance level starts to fall, you're going to start pulling some of that energy back out. So if you keep those two things in balance, that is when you're feeding, you're storing energy, when you're fasting, you're using energy. Okay, so you need to keep those in balance. So you think about 1970, a breakfast at six, you know, eight o'clock in the morning and you ate dinner at 6 o'clock because remember the women were at home and cooking dinner. So when you got home, you ate relatively early dinner at 6 o'clock. So 8 to 6 you're eating, so 10 hours of the day. And from then on, 14 hours is fasting. So if you keep the feeding and the fasting in balance, it means that on one hand, the amount of time you're storing energy and the amount of time you're using energy are relatively balanced. Now, of course, people are eating all the time. So you eat the minute you get up. And if you don't, somebody says, oh, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? And then it's like, and then you eat, eat, eat until you go to bed. So the most recent studies show that the average duration of eating is about 14 hours and 45 minutes per day. So that

means if you started eating at 8am, you wouldn't stop until 1045 on average. That's the average person. So there's no point in there that they've stopped eating. So now instead of 14 hours of fasting, you're talking about say eight hours of fasting. And now you've tipped the balance because you're spending way more time storing energy than you are using energy, right? And that's the big thing. It's just like if you go, you know, you fill up your car, so you fill up your car, you drive it around, right? Now, all of a sudden, if you just spend more time filling up your car and less time driving it around, you're going to have too much gas. That's the same thing. We have too much energy, which gets stored as fat. So the way you balance that is you increase the number of hours of fasting. Or remember, insulin is that hormone that tells our body to store fat.

You can change the foods that you eat, because different foods will stimulate insulin to different levels. So people say, oh, calories are the same calories, the same calories are totally different. So if you eat cookies, your insulin is going to spike way up. If you drink soda, your insulin is going to spike. If you eat an egg, it's not going to spike. So what it means is that, you know, even though they're the same number of calories, the effect on storing fat, like the instruction, you know, insulin is that instruction to our body to store fat. And you're giving different amounts of that instruction depending on the food that you eat. You eat cookies, you're telling your body, hey, you need to store fat.

You eat an egg, you're telling your body, you don't need to store fat. It's okay. Just use it. So therefore, what it means practically, and so many people say this, it's so stupid, a calorie is a calorie. It's like, that's not the question I'm asking, right? Did I ever ask you, hey, is a calorie a calorie? It's like, that's the dumb question i'm asking right did i ever ask you hey is a calorie a calorie it's like that's the dumbest question i've ever heard the word is a word yeah that's right it's like is a dog a dog it's like yes it is uh but so it's like that's you're answering a question

that was never asked except when it's not a dog. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know what the meaning is. The question really is, are all calories equally fattening? And to that, it's a no. Like, people don't get fat eating broccoli. That's just the way it is, right? You can eat as much broccoli as you wanted. You will not get fat. That's just life, right? And that's something that, you know, your grandmother knew. She wasn just life, right? And that's something that your grandmother knew. She wasn't so stupid as to think that all calories are exactly the same fattening ability. Some calories are fattening and some calories are not fattening. And it all is to do with the hormonal instructions. When you eat broccoli and when you eat a cookie the moment you put it in your mouth the hormonal response of our body is completely different so there's nothing equal about them so calories have different

fattening abilities and that's the real answer so these people who say a calorie is a calorie is like these people just haven't thought very hard about the problem they They're very, very simplistic in their thinking, thinking that all foods can be reduced like to their calorie sort of level. And that's sort of like saying, well, you know, we're going to reduce all people to, you know, their weight or something like that, right? So therefore, somebody who weighs 100 pounds, well, you know, you need two of those 100 pound people to do the work of one 200 pound person because all, you know, pounds are the same, right? It's like, no, because you have two people who are working and how much they work is, has nothing to do with how much they weigh. Right. But you're trying to reduce everything to a single measure,

like calories, when it actually has nothing to do with it. Because calories doesn't tell your body whether to store fat or not. So therefore, by understanding that, you can see why something like a low-carbohydrate diet could be effective. And you can see why fasting could be a very effective way because it's going to do two things. One, it's going to lower the insulin because you're dropping your insulin and two, you're giving it the time that it needs in order for your body to use that energy. You're saying go over there and eat that fat off your body as opposed to putting it in

your mouth maybe? Exactly. And this is the thing that always strikes me also is funny, is because if you think about body fat, body fat is a store of calories. It's a store of the food energy that you took yesterday and the day before and the day before that. That's what your body fat is. Literally, the reason you have it is so that you will survive if you do not eat tomorrow, right? That's the whole purpose of body fat. So you're actually, when you fast for say 24 hours, 36 hours, you are simply using the body fat for precisely the reason you are carrying it. So then what's wrong with that, right? People all say, oh, it's bad, it's bad, it's bad. It's like, what's bad about it? That's the only reason because it's not there. Your body fat is not there for looks. It's there for you to use as a store of calories, right? And then on my Tinder profile, I may be fat, but I just have a

lot of storage. You know, I can speak to what you talked about. i had kind of an epiphany on our last conversation that we had on the show uh a few years ago i had hit about i think it was 370 and i was just feeling awful and just at the bottom and and i i said fuck it and i quit drinking i was drinking probably 10 mountain dews a day i mean i would wake up and drink Mountain Dew. I switched from Mountain Dew to coffee, but I wasn't drinking 10 coffees a day. But just for clarification, I was drinking a lot of pop, sometimes more than 10. And I was eating out. I was eating Stouffer's frozen, you know, you want to talk about processed food. And I switched to being a vegan and I just would eat natural foods. Like I would go to the grocery store, I'd buy whatever was in the produce section and I'd leave.

And I started losing three to four pounds a day. Like people were just going insane with it. I would post every day on Facebook, like, here's my proof. Um, and I lost over three months, close to a hundred pounds. Um, and I had thought that a lot of it was cause I went vegan, you know, I started eating natural foods, but the, the thing that clicked in my head as an epiphany when I was talking to you was one of the, one of the strategies I enabled was I would drink coffee in the morning instead of my usual one or two Mountain Dews. And I would wait as long as I could, usually till about lunchtime before I'd have my first meal. And then it would be a small

meal. And then dinner would kind of be a little bit bigger, like a little bit more normal mealish, but not a lot. And that was it. And then anytime I felt, you know, like I needed something, I'd drink coffee. And I didn't realize it at the time until I talked to you that really, I don't think it really was so much the veganism. It was really that intermittent fasting where I wasn't eating in the morning and I would just power through. And I actually, after I got off with you on the podcast i think about a month ago uh i actually started doing that again not quite as good as i should be let's put it that way but now i'm drinking coffee in the morning which i usually do and i'm trying to go as far as i can before i make that first meal and i've noticed a significant difference in my body

and how i feel and everything i need to do better with it. Yeah. And I think that the thing is that when you start doing it, you start to notice that a lot of the stuff that people tell you about fasting actually just was not true. So people, you know, the main concern, I'll tell you the number one concern, there's two big concerns with fasting and I, is one, the hunger, right? So people always think, okay, well, you know, it's fine. I can fast, but I'm going to be so hungry. And when they start to do it on a consistent basis, because there's about two weeks in there, people do get quite hungry. The actual hunger, the physical hunger actually starts to go away, which is really, really interesting. So if you

look at the study, we measure something, a hormone called ghrelin, which is really, really interesting. So if you look at the study, we measure something, a hormone called ghrelin, which is called the hunger hormone. And the hunger hormone, the higher it is, the hungrier you feel. So what's interesting during fasting is when they look at people over 24 hours, they see that ghrelin spikes in a regular, in an average person, three times a day at breakfast lunch and dinner so people who are used to eating three times a day they get hungry three times a day but the interesting thing is that if you simply don't eat so say you skip your lunch what happens to ghrelin well it turns out that it will stay high for a little bit and then it'll just drop and by so at one o'clock you're hungry

if you don't eat lunch by four o'clock your ghrelin is actually at baseline which means that your level of hunger is actually the same as if you ate lunch and same thing for dinner so it spikes up if you don't eat if you simply ignore it for an hour or hour and a half, by nine o'clock, that hunger dissipates. In fact, we've all had this, of course, where you start doing something. For me, it's like when I get really busy, usually with some project like home renovation or something, like you're painting the house or something like that. I always thought about this because every time I start doing it, I get so into it. I wind up not eating, but not even being hungry. Like the hunger just dissipates. It just goes away. Because when you don't eat, what happens

is that your body gets the calories it needs from your body fat. So what you've done in essence is you've fed your body with your body fat, and therefore your hunger just goes down. When you start talking about doing multiple day fasts, like two, three, four days, what you see is that the ghrelin peaks at around day two, and then by day four, day five, the hunger actually just goes away. So by day five, people are doing their regular, everything they normally do, and they're like, well, i'm not hungry at all so if you're not hungry and you're using up your stores of body fat and losing weight it's like hey now you're working with your body to lose weight because the hunger has actually gone down so

people always come back and they say you know what i thought i'd be hungry but what happened i think my stomach drank i can't eat that much anymore's like, that's perfect because what's happening is that you're getting your body used to eating your body fat. So therefore, you're not as hungry. You don't need to take so much excess food, like exogenous food, because you're using up your stores of food, right? So your body is still using it. And that's the other thing that people worry about.

People say, oh, your metabolic rate's going to go down. You're going to go into starvation mode. It's like, it actually doesn't happen because again, your body doesn't go. So what people are talking about when they say their metabolic rate goes down or they're going into starvation mode is that the number of calories that they burn every day is going to go down. So this happens when you diet. When you do that 500 calories a day decrease, your body actually starts to burn 500 calories a day less. And that's why your weight plateaus. It's not that you're bad on your diet. It's that the body, you know, your body just is burning less. The problem when you're burning less is that you feel bad. You feel cold, you feel tired, you feel hungry, that kind of thing. That doesn't happen as much during fasting because what your body has done is it hasn't shut down its metabolism.

It's simply switched its fuel source. So instead of using food, it's using your body fat. Then your body's like, hey, look, I have a ton of this energy here. So why do I need to use less? I have a couple hundred thousand calories of body fat. Let me just use it. I'm not going to reduce what I'm taking. So your hunger goes down, your metabolic rate stays up. And then the other thing people worry about is that they can't concentrate and stuff, or they have no energy. And again, that's a total myth. It actually doesn't happen. Because during fasting, what people have, what we've known for many, many years is that when your insulin goes down,

other hormones go up. And these hormones include the sympathetic nervous system and our adrenaline. So you're actually pumping up. You're actually increasing your metabolic rate. You're increasing your energy. So that's why people can concentrate better when they haven't eaten. So you think about Thanksgiving, you eat a big meal. You're not really sharp, right? You just want to sit down and watch some football. When you're hungry, that's when your concentration powers are at its highest because you're focused. Your body has pumped up those hormones, the adrenaline, the sympathetic nervous system.

It's actually revving itself up when you're fasting, not shutting itself down. Because you think, okay, if you're in the wild, do you really want to face the hungry wolf? Or do you want to face that lion who just ate? It's like that hungry wolf is much more dangerous. It's much more tuned in, it's concentrating, and it's got the energy to come and kill you, as opposed to the lion who just ate, who just says, go away, right? So it's really interesting because the metabolic changes that happen with the fasting are so beneficial,

and they're exactly what you want if you want to lose weight, compared to, say, cutting 500 calories a day, which is almost guaranteed to fail. And this is one of the reasons people can't lose weight compared to, say, cutting 500 calories a day, which is almost guaranteed to fail. And this is one of the reasons people can't lose weight is because the advice that they take, which is cut 500 calories a day. And so that's one advice that's just very, very bad. Because when you just cut 500 calories a day and you eat low-fat foods, what happens is that you never allow the changes. You never allow the time for the body to switch over into utilizing its own body fat. And the other advice that turns out to be really, really bad is that people say, well, it's all about calories.

You know, just cut your calories. You can have ice cream for dinner if you want. It's like, no, you can't. That's really dumb advice. So you have to change the foods that you eat into those foods. All natural foods are pretty good for you but you can't just eat like processed foods even like these bars and stuff they're all very highly processed and artificial and they're probably not good for you and then they tell

people don't fast right it's like must eat breakfast might eat snacks eat six times a day well how is eating six times a day going to make you lose weight? Tell me that, right? Because if I eat zero times a day and you eat six times a day, I'm pretty sure that I am going to lose more weight than you. It's not that difficult to understand. So if you have a strategy, which is like fasting, so you've got all these benefits, right? So many

benefits. So it's free. So anybody can do it. It's available. That is, you can do it tomorrow. You don't need special equipment. You don't need special permission. You don't need anything. It's convenient. You can do it anytime, anywhere. It's flexible. You can do it today and not tomorrow. Or if tomorrow's a bad day for it, you do it another time, right? Totally flexible. And it's been done for thousands of years. That is, if you look at every major religion, whether it's Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism, they all have periods of fasting, right? So you know that humans have been fasting literally for thousands of years. If there was something wrong with it, we would know.

Why? Because say you take a religion like Buddhism, where they fast fairly regularly, or the Greek Orthodox Church, where they fast regularly. If it was really bad for them, you wouldn't have any more Buddhists. They would have died, right? You know, it's like, it's that simple. But there are a lot of Buddhists and there are a lot of Christians, right? So during Lent, for example, all that Mike Priest talks about is fasting for weeks and weeks. It's just all about fasting.

And it's like, okay, so Christians fast during Lent and Good Friday and all these other things. So if fasting was so harmful to us, there would be no Christians in the world today. We'd all be dead, right? It just doesn't work that way. So you have, you know, the time has told you that this is safe because people have done it before and you can do it and there's no problem with doing it. And, you know, you're saving money because you're not eating, you're not doing anything fancy like that.

It's just a great way to get better. Is it fun? No, it's not fun. That's the problem, right? And that's why we did the Fasting Method. Sweet stuff is fun. Come on, Dr. Fung, you're taking away all my fun. You know, it's interesting. That's why we did the FastingMethod.com.

That's our website. We try to put people in a community where they'll get the help they need get their questions answered like oh what do i do if i get headaches what do i do if i get constipated what do i do you know there are things that that do come up with fasting and um that you know the book goes over that but community having people who encourage you and the tools that you need, you know, to track all of those things we try to do on the fasting method.com. You know, it's kind of interesting. You were talking about how, you know, switching a power source.

I was thinking of like an analogy you could use of, of a hybrid car where you have two different power sources. You have either gas or you have electronics. And so you just think about from that thing. And that was one of the things i overcame when i was going through my weight loss was i would go to bed and i'd be like i should have a mountain dew before i go to bed or i should eat a cookie before i go to bed because i don't want to you know wake up hungry and so you know i i do that but but when i lost all my

weight i had cut that out i would eat and then when it was time for bed, I'd be like going to bed. And sometimes my body would be playing that game with me. I'm like, we're hungry. And I'm like, you'll live. You'll live till tomorrow. I have a good feeling. Well, actually, the interesting thing about hunger is that everybody thinks it's a function of having no food in your stomach for a long time. That's actually completely false.

It's all a hormonal signal. So if you think about the circadian rhythm, that is you take a lot of people, see how hungry they are through times of the day. What you'll find is that the time of the day that people on average are the least hungry. What do you think? What time of the day do you think people are least hungry?

Before bedtime? I don't know. No, the least hunger is 8 a.m. So most people on average are the least hungry at 8 a.m. And the highest level of hunger on average is 8 p.m. So that's interesting because 8 a.m. is the time of the day where you've gone the longest without food you've gone like 12 hours without food because you went to bed and you're actually the least hungry and it's because of the hormones in our system so what's interesting about that is that you can sort of hack that so if you can go through the night with the fasting so you know just like you're saying

the mountain dew or a cookie before bed if you can get rid of that cookie before bed or the Mountain Dew before bed, what happens is, of course, that you go to sleep. So you get all this time that you're just burning fat. And then because of the hormonal changes that happen when you wake up, everything's reset the next day. Your level of hunger is the same, no matter whether you ate three meals the day before or no meals the day before. And it's very interesting because, you know, from having done some longer fast, like three-day fast, five-day fast, what's really interesting is that the hunger actually totally resets. By the second day, you totally forget that you didn't eat anything the day before. It just sort of slowly goes down. And as you get into day four, day five, the hunger is actually

completely like, you just don't notice that at all, but you feel a lot lighter. You feel a lot more energetic. And it's really a very freeing sort of thing. And the reason I say that is because it gives you this really powerful tool because where people feel helpless is when they try to lose weight and they can't do it. So, you know, you have these very successful people and that what we can do is, you know, we, you know, you're very successful and you've done all this important stuff and then they can't lose weight. It's like, well, how does that work? Why is it that these people are so successful? They can drive themselves so hard, have willpower, have, you know, all this stuff and they can't lose weight. Well, it's because the information that they're given was just very bad.

So give them the right information. And, you know, it's and you can see how they're going to improve in terms of the weight. And one of the simple ways to do that is sort of fasting because it's been in our DNA for so many years. It's been part of the human sort of history, whether you're talking about the religions or whether you're talking about people religions or whether you're talking about people who did cleanses and all that sort of stuff. So it gives you a tool. So it's very

freeing because it gives you something to keep in your back pocket. I do this all the time. So for, like I go, you know, obviously I haven't been away anywhere for a long time because of COVID, but you know, in the summer, I used to take a vacation, and sometimes I'd go on a cruise or wherever. And I eat all kinds of stuff, like not good stuff, right? It's like, you know, pizza in the middle of the day, it's like, oh, free pizza, ice cream is like not good stuff. It was, but you know, I had made that decision that I'm on vacation, and I'm going to enjoy it if I want it. If I don't want it, I won't. I'd always gain about five pounds or something like that. It's quite a bit for one week. Then what I always did was do

a long fast afterwards. I'd do it. I'd do maybe three days plus a couple of 24 hours. Then within a week, I'd be back to my normal weight. It's like, okay, so I got to enjoy all of that stuff, all of that stuff that wasn't good for me. And within a week, I'm back to where I was. Well, that's very freeing. That's incredible knowledge that I have something that I can use to keep myself from steadily gaining weight, right? So it's giving people power back over their body, using this sort of simple, free, available tool that nobody can take away from you. It's not even free. It saves you money, right? You're practically being paid to lose weight, right? So it's incredibly powerful. And what's important is to get the information, but also get the education, get the tools, get the knowledge that you need, whether it's from books or from from website or whatever.

Get those things and you can implement it right now. Right. There's nothing stopping you. So in your book, there's a chapter on cortisol and the Atkins onslaught. Do you want to expand a little bit on what that's about? Yeah, so the Atkins diet was a low carb diet, and initially was a very high fat diet. So when Robert Atkins, when he did it, he didn't make up the diet, actually. It was quite interesting, because in the 1960s, Robert Atkins, who was a cardiologist, was actually gaining a bit of weight himself. So then he said, well, let me see what the top doctors are doing to lose weight. And they were eating a low carbohydrate,

sort of a relatively high fat, right? So they would cut down the carbohydrates and that's what he did. And it wasn't particularly controversial at the time. It was in all the leading, it was standard practice in medical. It was written up in these New England Journal, which is the best medical practice, medical journal of its day and still today. So he basically followed that, lost a lot of weight. So then he started his clinic and he was using that. Then the whole low fat thing came along. So his thing became sort of contrary, a little bit controversial because of the high fat. So it sort of got rebooted. And so the whole low fat thing took, took Atkins way down because instead of eating low carb, everybody was told to eat high carb, right? Lots of bread, lots of pasta. So that thing got taken down basically and through the seventies and eighties,

it was sort of this quackery sort of thing, right? But it was always actually not quackery, it was based on good science. And then it sort of got relaunched in the nineties as a sort of a high protein sort of thing. They're like, okay, you can be low-carb and low-fat too because there's snack wells. You can eat all these fake foods. It sort of became redone as a high-protein sort of a diet. That led to a bit of a boom in the 2000s, but that sort of faded

because the high-protein turns out to be not so easy to do and not necessarily good for you. So that kind of got recast because protein can affect the insulin as well. So then that's what led to the whole more recent movement where people are sort of low carb and high fat, not just sort of normal fat, but not high protein, protein sort of normal, but high fat. So lots of natural fats. And that's the sort of ketogenic diet that has recently become very popular. Because again, it can cause some good weight loss. People always worry that it's going to cause heart disease. But again, the key is to focus on natural fats that our bodies are able to process.

So that's sort of the reasoning behind that. And it was the sort of story of the Atkins, which sort of started out sort of a high-fat diet, did well for a bit, got sort of sidelined by the low-fat movement, and then got sort of reborn as a, as a high protein diet, which became a bit of its undoing because, and then sort of gave way to this more recent sort of low carb ketogenic

movement, which, you know, has its proponents and has its detractors. But, you know, on average it's, it's a reasonable sort of a diet. I would meet these people and they're like, I'm eating steak 24-7. And you're like, I don't know, man, about that. I'm on the Atkins diet. You're like, I don't know that eating porterhouses three times a day is like the thing you should be doing. In your book, in the appendix, it has some sample meal plans,

it has a practical guide to fasting, meditation, and I guess your other book, A Complete Guide to Fasting, this kind of goes more into depth along the lines of what's on your website. I like it because it's got pictures and it's big, big pages, easy to read for stupid people like me. But you can look at the graphs and you can understand what's going on and what's being talked about. Yeah, thanks. look at the graphs and you can understand what's going on and what's being talked about yeah thanks i mean that's the the ideas uh you know and people say oh how come there's recipes it's like well it's because you want to eat sort of the right foods when you're not fasting as well um you know so other than fixing this sort of fasting period you want to make sure that you

eat foods and the thing is that when you eat foods that are like very high in refined carbohydrates, they make the fasting a lot harder. So if you're eating bread and jam, for example, then you get these big spikes in insulin, which wind up making you hungry. So if you're eating foods that are going to keep you full for longer, like, you know, natural fats and protein, then it's going to make it easier to sort of move into fasting because you're going to be able to go longer without getting hungry. So, but you can do it from both. It's not a, it's not a problem, but there are some recommendations. And, and you also talk in the obesity code about, uh, obesity, uh, child or childhood issues, obesity, uh, people

who grow up poor obesity. You know, I, one thing I did address when I was living on that weight was some of the mental things that I had where, you know, like one rule that, that, you know, was given to me by my parents. A lot of people did, you know, your, your mom said, eat everything on your plate. And so I learned that to try and listen for the signals of when I was done eating, you don't have to eat everything on your plate. Uh, you don't have to eat before you go to bed. What was the other signal that I started paying attention to that was really important? But, oh, it was the reward signal. I used to have this thing where it's like, if you go to the store and you don't buy fatty foods, you get a reward of a

candy bar or you get a reward of a Mountain Dew. And I couldn't believe when I started really listening to how much I played that tape in my head, how much I played that tape in my head. And that was contributing to a lot of my fat and stuff. Yeah. And I think that's the problem. And I think that's the, that wound up being a huge problem in this pandemic is that, Hey, there's nothing to do so i'm gonna have some ice cream and i'll tell you that i was just as guilty as the next guy it's it was it was tough

like uh you know because honestly when you take away everything fun except eating people are gonna eat right and you're worrying no more hanging out with friends i wasn't watching the game you know it's like okay well what is it to do hey there's some ice cream let's go have some ice cream right and it's tough because there's a lot of these non-food things that you have to think about like and the thing about eating everything on your plate i mean for sure i heard that a lot too, when I was growing up. But I noticed this sometimes when I go to restaurants is that like, you can take it home, like you don't have to waste it. They just put it away and, you know, take it home,

eat it the next day. So it's, it's, it's quite funny because you know, I, it used to strike me as very strange to do that. But now it's like, you know, now I do it all the time and it's like, okay, well this is, this is just normal for me because you know, of course, if you send it, if you don't eat what's on your plate in a restaurant, that actually is just thrown in the garbage, right? Nobody, nobody ever eats it. You take it home and eat it later. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, I'm absolutely going to take this home. So I used to feel funny about that whole thing thinking, Oh, I should really just eat it. Now I don't feel funny, but i've done it for so many years now it's like no i'm just gonna pack

this up and i'm just gonna take this home and same at home right so you know i remember uh a while ago um you know sometimes we'd have a dessert this years ago and uh it wouldn't taste very good like we'd buy something and you know the cake wasn't fresh or something like that right so it's like yeah it tastes terrible i remember thinking oh it's a waste like i should eat it i'm like now it's like no if i'm eating dessert it better taste good because otherwise it's better in the garbage than in my stomach right so it's these little things like you really have to think about these things sometimes because they get these habits they're just sort of automatic sometimes and they're detrimental to your to your you know weight loss efforts and there's no reason to do that that is if you're full already just

put your knife down pack it and at home of course it's easier you just pack it in a little container put it in the fridge um but even if it's just a little bit of stuff i won't eat it i'll just put it away or i'll get a box and i'll take it home and uh you know these little things to really think about and rewards are not always food right so you get a big promotion you can do something else you can go out and get a nice uh massage or you can treat yourself and buy yourself some tickets to the baseball game or you can go out with some friends and you know hiking or there's other things you can do but we wind up celebrating all the time with a lot of food and again it's funny at first to do but then after a

while it just gets normal like you don't need to do all this stuff so one last question i have for you uh is you know a lot of people i had people saying to me you don't need to be doing this vegan thing and and stuff what you need to be doing is exercising you know and i'm sure exercising you know plays good but i mean what's the if if i have to choose between insulin and exercising uh in in fasting which is better or is both good? Yeah, it's not even close. Like exercise is such an inefficient way to lose weight. Like exercise is great for a lot of things, okay? So it's good for your heart.

It's good for your joints. It's good for your muscles. Like no doubt. For weight loss, it's almost useless. Like if you ever have gone on a treadmill and looked at that calorie counter or whatever, it's ridiculously, you burn ridiculously few calories running. Like, you know, I went running the other day. It's a half an hour. It's a good run. I mean, and then it's like, oh, how many calories did I burn? And it's a guess, of course, but it's like 120 or something like that. It's like, wow. So if I had a cookie, I would have undone all the calories I burned in the last half hour of relatively strenuous exercise. So it's like, okay, if you're going to exercise three, four hours a day, sure, you'll probably do fine. But if you're doing like regular people, like half an hour, maybe four times a week or something like that, like, you know,

an average amount of exercise, the actual amount of calories you burn on that is almost negligible, right? It's the sort of rounding error of your day. So if you're eating 2000 calories in a day, for example, and then you ran, and it's like, okay, well, you ran and it's like, okay, well you ran, it's like an extra hundred calories. I mean, that's like not even, that's like 5%, right? So if you're thinking about it, like diet is sort of like 95% of the gain and exercise is like 5%. So don't treat them like 50-50.

It's not like Batman and Robin. Like it's like, you know, they're not 50-50 partners, right not like Batman and Robin. They're not 50-50 partners. Batman is the guy. Robin is just some sidekick. Diet is Batman. One of my problems is I have one of these systems where if I start working out, I start building muscle and I start bulking. My body goes on this whole, whole craving thing. Like, it's like you feed me, you know? Yeah. And I'll, I'll go through muscle cramps

and different, different things. And like, it will, it will take my hunger meter and it's probably just mental, but it just sends it right off the chart because my body's like, I need protein. Yeah. And that's probably one of the reasons why exercise is just a very inefficient because when some people, and like, like you're saying, they exercise and then they eat more. So you've just undone everything that you try to do to lose weight, right? Because what you really want to do is exercise and take the calories it needs from your body fat, right? But the problem is in the first beginning, until you really train your body to do that, if you're just increasing your hunger for whatever afterwards or thinking, oh, I just did a nice workout.

I'm going to treat myself to some ice cream. Like you just undid everything. So it's such an inefficient way. The only reason we think of them as equal is because the sort of Coca-Cola and stuff spent a lot of money trying to make us think that calories are calories. Everything's the same. You know, you're gaining weight because you didn't exercise enough. It's like, no, you're gaining weight because the foods, it was all about the diet. And I say, you've got to focus on where the money is, right?

So it's less like in baseball, right? It's like, okay, you can practice hitting and you can practice fielding and all this. It's like bunting. It's like a 5% part of the game. But you're not going to practice bunting 50% of your time, right? You'd be crazy to do that, right? Because bunting isn't that much. It's not that big a part of the game. So you're not going to practice it all the time as opposed to hitting or that, right? Because bunting isn't that much, it's not that big a part of the game.

So you're not going to practice it all the time as opposed to hitting or something, right? But that's diet and exercise. Why would you focus all your efforts? And it's a lot of effort to exercise for a lot of people. Why would you focus all your effort on such a minuscule part of the whole thing? Focus all your effort on the big part, not the little part. And that's the real key to, you know, the real key to winning is to focus on what matters, not the stuff that doesn't matter. There you go. Well, I'm glad we clarified that because, you know, people still argue that. And, and like I say, I, and part, part of it was, is it's really weird. Like I would would like i would start exercising and i'm

like i'm gonna eat less and then you wake up the next morning you're like why did my weight go up well it's because you put on muscle muscles weight and water weight and you're going the wrong way i'm like it used to in the old days when i was didn't understand any of this it would drive me mental because i'd be like well i started working out I've worked out for a whole week, and I put on all this muscle, but the weight, the scale's going up. Like, what the hell? So there you go. So check it out, guys.

You can go to Amazon.com. The two books we've gotten a chance to talk about today, The Obesity Code, Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss with Dr. Jason Fung, and also The Complete Guide to Fasting. You can go get these at your local bookstore, et cetera, et cetera. And you can also see our prior show that we did with this book coming out in November, November 10th. You can order this baby up. It is The Cancer Code, a Revolutionary New Understanding of Medical Mystery and the Wellness Code.

If you Google search it, you can, on the Chris Voss show, there's actually a little search box as well. You can search for Dr. Fung and find the cancer code discussion that we had. It was a good hour and a half of great eye-opening stuff. And you're motivating me to want to do better. And since we talked last, I started doing the coffee thing. I started trying to wait as long as I could. And I started really feeling better about my body. Even my digestive system started being like less.

I'm in my 50s now. So my digestive system has a body of its own. And so, you know, that whole system started working a little bit better. In fact, my shirt's sagging, which I probably need to get some better shirts. So I got to keep doing what you're doing, Dr. Fung. Any plugs or anything you want to say as we go out? No. I think that you cover them well.

The cancer code is coming up. It's actually a little bit different from, it's not talking so much about fasting and diet, but sort of an understanding of what cancer actually is and how nutrition contributes to it. It's a really interesting discussion of sort of an understanding of what cancer actually is and how nutrition contributes to it. So it's a really interesting discussion of sort of the modern way

we think about what the disease actually is. And it's sort of, I think it's just a fascinating sort of topic because it affects so many people, you know, to know what the enemy sort of actually is. I think you're going to blow up in the world with it. I mean, the discussion we had just blew my mind and everything made sense. The dots connected. And I think your approach to it is pretty amazing and gives people a better thing to do.

So look forward to that. November 10th, 2020, you can pre-order it right now in any different format on Amazon or local booksellers next to you. Thanks to Dr. Fung for being on the show again. We certainly appreciate him being here. Be sure to watch the video version of this on youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. You can go to our newest syndication, Amazon Music, if you like, or iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, all that places. And then what else is there? I think it's about it.

The chrisfossshow.com or the CBPN. Thanks for being here. Oh, goodreads.com. That's the one thing I'm thinking of. Look me up on goodreads.com. You can see our reviews and all that good stuff over there. Thanks for being honest, for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.