The School of Greatness - Science-Backed Strategies for Lasting Weight Loss

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

The Summit of Greatness is back! Buy your tickets today – summitofgreatness.com – Have you ever wondered what foods are actually good for you and what foods you should avoid? Today 4 experts come together to share science-backed strategies for achieving sustainable weight loss. Through their diverse perspectives, the experts discuss the complexities of nutrition, the influence of societal factors on our understanding of food, and the importance of a holistic approach to health that considers both the physical and mental aspects. Their collective insights provide valuable guidance for individuals seeking effective and lasting weight loss solutions.Dr. Sten Ekberg, shares information that helps to take away the nutrition guess work. Dr. Ekberg is a former decathlon athlete who competed in the 1992 Summer Olympics for Sweden and was a Swedish decathlete National Record holder. Sten won the Swedish Championship in both decathlon and heptathlon. Ekberg currently resides in the United States where he works as a chiropractor and nutritionist at his office Wellness For Life in Cumming, Georgia.Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. is the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center, Director of the Cleveland Clinical Center for Functional Medicine, and the Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is a New York Times bestselling author with books like 10-Day Detox Diet and Eat Fat, Get Thin. His latest book Food: What The Heck Should I Eat? provides an explanation of the nutritional science around food and why the political, environmental, economic and social issues corrupt our understanding of food.Dr. Kyle Gillet is a dual-board Certified MD in Obesity Medicine and Family Medicine. His practice includes preventative medicine, aesthetics, sports medicine, hormone optimization, obstetrics and infertility, integrative medicine, and precision medicine including genomics. He believes that each human is a unique creation that requires attention to their body, mind, and soul to achieve optimal health.Dr. Jason Fung, MD, is a Toronto-based nephrologist and a world-leading expert in intermittent fasting and low-carb diets. He is also the bestselling author of The Diabetes Code, The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting, and the creator of the Intensive Dietary Management program as well as co-founder of The Fasting Method.In this episode you will learn,What foods you should avoid at all costs.How to adjust your diet to optimize your hormones.The connection between sleep and weight loss.The issue with counting calories and alternative weight loss gimmicks.The top 5 foods to eat for a healthier life.For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1493For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone]Listen to the full episodes:Dr. Sten Ekberg – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Mark Hyman – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Kyle Gillet – https://link.chtbl.com/1315-guestDr. Jason Fung – https://link.chtbl.com/1030-guest

Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jaspreet Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero and many more. You'll also be able to

dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts and connect with others at our evening socials. So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there. So what type of physical activity should we be doing to lose the midsection weight? Aerobic exercise. And aerobic means with air, which means that it's at an intensity low enough that we can breathe comfortably and supply the oxygen. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. So as soon as you start huffing and puffing, it's not a bad thing for short duration, but if you go and you do a 45 minute spin class every day and you're just huffing and puffing, you're going to make way, way, way too much cortisol. Really?

Yes. So you might be hurting your chances of losing the weight if you're doing that intensive a workout every day. Correct. If you're doing a HI a workout every day correct if you're doing a HIIT training two three times a week for 45 minutes is that okay you feel like that's still intense if it's 45 minutes it's not hit gotcha yeah HIIT high intensity means that it's so in to me my definition 10 15 minutes it's not, maybe the total duration would be 10-15 minutes. But if you do interval, high intensity interval training is what HIIT is, then the intervals

should be so intense you can't even do them for more than 30 seconds. Like they should be so intense, provided you're fit enough to do that, of course. But if you do 30 seconds and then you do 30 second rest and then 30 seconds, you should be able to bring your heart rate up to maximum in maybe four or five intervals. That is hit. Now you're done. Right. You've created your positive hormones, your growth hormone to stimulate fat burning,

your growth hormone to stimulate muscle building and to stimulate new brain synapses to enhance learning and focus. All the good stuff in the brain depends on on hormones and two of those hormones are human growth hormone and bdnf which is brain derived neurotrophic factor and those two hormones are necessary to make new synapses. So your brain is constantly remodeling and every time you learn something, whether you're 20 years old or 80 years old, you make new synapses. And the synapses you use, they get stronger. The ones that you don't use go away. But these two hormones, which some of the strongest ways to produce them is high-intensity exercise and fasting, are pretty much required to build a brain and to learn. Really. So what type of high-intensity exercise are you doing on a weekly basis?

doing on a weekly basis? My favorite to really get the heart rate up is I go to my favorite mountain close to where I live where there's a trail and it's like four miles around and I walk a little bit, I jog a little bit, I walk a little bit, jog a little bit jog a little bit just kind of enjoying the movement and my heart rate probably stays around 100 to 120 130 maybe and then I there's some hills and then I do some sprints up the hills so now I push it a little bit and 30 second push and my heart rate's 160. And then I walk a little, jog a little, there's another hill and I push it a little bit more and my heart rate hits 165, 170. And I might do that in 30 seconds or it might take a minute to get to that heart rate. And then I'm done. You do a few hills. Yes. What if you did 20 hills? Then too much, a 10 to 30 second. That might be okay if you're 20, 25 years old,

you're an elite athlete and that's part of your event. But if you're 45, 50, 60, and you just try to stay as healthy as possible, I think that's too much. Really? And in any event, it's unnecessary because it's not about the quantity. Quantity is good for fitness, but not necessarily for health. Interesting. So you only need a few sprints every couple, is this every day or every few days? I would say it's no more than twice a week.

Twice a week. For the average person now. And we have to, if you're watching this, you have to understand if you're in the elite athlete category or in the 50-year-old trying to stave off degenerative disease. Yes, yes. So if you're more of a, you know, if you're an athlete even in your 40s and 50s, you could push it a little farther. If you're competing and stuff or doing triathlons or marathons or just wanting to stay lean, it's important to be doing that a little bit more. wanted to stay lean yeah it's important to be doing that a little bit more yeah so there's no doubt i mean i i talk a lot of my videos about moderation like you do these hit exercises you you do it twice a week you keep it short but obviously that doesn't apply to someone who has a

a goal in an event if you're going going after fitness, there is no substitute for punishing yourself. Right. You got to do it. Yeah. Because if you're going to perform in an event, you need to do something similar to that event at that level of intensity and duration. So fasting and high intensity exercise, but it's not doing a crossfit every day, five days a week, because that creates too much cortisol. Correct. Especially if you're older, past 30 or something, it's probably not as good to do that. Is something like that, a 45 to 60-minute crossfit type of training once a week, you think okay? Or is it still creating too much cortisol?

training once a week, you think okay? Or is it still creating too much cortisol? I think once or twice a week for the average person, if you feel good, I think is fine. But again, when I have people come in to my clinic, those are people who have been to 20 different doctors. They have tried vegan and carnivore and low carb and yo-yo dieting and gluten-free. They've done all that. So these are people with challenges. And now if you're a little frail, now that's where you really have to be careful and get everything right but yeah if you're if you're in your 30s 40s 50s you're you're feeling fine then go for it do do one or two of those spin classes and what i would caution though is pay attention notice how your body is reacting how do you feel after the class are you exhausted are you are you stiff in

the morning do you have trouble getting out of bed do your joints hurt that the next day then you're probably doing too much too much yeah and what about you know we talked about fasting a little bit here what are the top three benefits of intermittent fasting or longer fasting, 24-hour, 48-hour fasting that you've seen in your research? So number one is lowering insulin. And with that, lowering blood sugar, losing weight, etc. The other big thing is that you induce something called autophagy, but that's with longer fasting. Autophagy stands for self-eating, and that's where if you're putting food in your body, if you're putting especially protein in your body there's plenty of resources your body knows hey there's some there's some more coming I can just use that to to build tissue and to do the stuff I need

but if you stop putting it in now it becomes a very very scarce resource so now your body has to figure out where else can I get this and that's where where autophagy, self-eating comes in. So now your body up-regulates its recycling mechanisms. How long does it take to fast before autophagy starts? So again, that's what everybody asks. And it's not a black or white. It's a continuous, it's a gradient. I would say that it barely starts around 16 to 18 hours. That's where you get like a trickle. But then it increases pretty fast, where there's a significant change between 18 and 24 hours and then it it sort of takes off from

there so 48 hours into it it's it's very significant 48 hours into it yeah so the longer you can go every you know extra few hours it continues to self-eat. Yes. The fat stored in your body more and more. Yes, yeah. So the self-eating now, part of what it eats is fat, obviously, because you're not adding any fuel. But the key with autophagy is protein. Because you need protein to build the tissue. Your cells have so much of a lifespan,

they break down and then you have to make new ones and you need protein for that so when you don't add any now you have to go look for some and a lot of people will say oh well that's where fasting is dangerous because you're going to eat up your muscles the body is too smart for that because you need your muscles to go on the next hunt. So we have all these mechanisms to spare muscles and that's why growth hormone increases also exponentially along with autophagy. And growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's basically telling the body, one of the mechanisms that tell the body, don't use the muscle, go find something else.

So now it gets much better at recycling these broken cells. It gets much better at finding any kind of resource like virus and bacteria and parasites that may also be made out of protein. Really? And kind of eating those things, the bad things first. Correct. Interesting.

What's the longest you've gone fasting? The longest I've done is five days or four and a half. No food, water only? Just water. Yeah, I've done three days. And you see the benefits a lot after a day and a half. You really start to see and feel the benefits. Yeah.

By day three, I went right up to three. And I was like, okay, I was starting to get a little tired. And I think I pushed it because I worked out twice, which you're probably not supposed to do. But I did like an incline walk for an hour, which I don't recommend, but I was trying to be extra. Yeah, that's probably too much. And this is where we come into this muscle sparing thing, that I'm all in favor of doing some exercise while you're fasting, because you're going to increase your ketones, you're going to increase your your growth hormone but if you're not adding any protein and you do something intense enough to break down muscle now your body

has to sort of juggle the resources like it has to repair those muscles and where's the protein going to come from so it might break down some other muscles to repair that. Interesting. I haven't seen specific research on this or anything. It's just kind of common sense. What would the body do? Sure. So I would exercise, but I would keep it to purely aerobic.

I wouldn't even do HIIT, not even brief HIIT during those times. Right, right. What did you do for those four and a half, five days? I probably didn't do much of anything. Right, right. Probably just, yeah, maybe a little bit of walking, but basically just my everyday activities. Yeah. Did you feel pretty sharp after two, three days?

Or did you start to feel a little slower towards the end? after two three days we start to feel a little slower towards the end i don't feel as great as people tell me they feel yeah i've got so much energy yeah so so i i do okay i don't feel any any dramatic improvement in in focus but i do know that that it happens because I get the testimonials. And I do know, especially for people who might have insulin resistance, when they fast, they're going to increase their ketones, which becomes the alternative brain fuel. Right. And it also kind of helps heal certain things. If you've been driving the insulin, it's allowing that to recover more, right? Yes. Yeah.

Your whole carbohydrate processing machine is recovering because you're not adding anything. Right, right. And one more thing about autophagy and fasting is for brain trauma. is for brain trauma. And this, I've hardly ever heard it spoken about, that the brain is kind of its own little world up there inside the cranium. We have the blood-brain barrier, and a lot of things that go on in the brain are different than the way they work in the body. So the reason, for example that that spinal cord injuries are so

devastating is that the nervous system is really poor at repairing itself right it's not it's it's encased in bone for a reason it's not supposed to get damaged you're not supposed to crack your skull or or break your spine and and that sense that the tissue is a little different is sensitive and it doesn't have the capacity to repair itself very well but the if you have a concussion for example you get some some tissue brain trauma you get some inflammation and about the only way that the brain can clean that up is through autophagy, the self-eating. Our government told us to eat six to 11 servings of red rice cereal and pasta today to eat a low-fat diet. And fats and oils were sparingly only at the top supposed to be eaten. And yet that advice led to the worst obesity epidemic and diabetes epidemic

in the history of mankind. That's like the food charts that we all saw in school, right? Completely opposite of what we should be doing. And so the science has caught up with this bad advice. And the advice, unfortunately, Lewis, was based on really shoddy science, on very weak evidence, on a few population studies, not really experimental studies. In fact, all the experimental studies that told us to eat low-fat diets, they actually didn't tell us that we should be doing that. They were actually contradicting the recommendations that were developed in 1980

by the UK and the USA. Really? So basically, if you looked at the actual randomized controlled trials, there weren't that many, but there was a few of them. They all said that eating low fat wasn't beneficial. These were outside of the US trials? No, trials all over. Trials in the US. They just didn't look at that evidence. So the guideline committees who were working on it didn't sort of dismiss that evidence.

And they had this theory, and they went with the theory. Because it made sense, right? If you look at calories, for example, fat has nine calories per gram. Carbs and protein have four calories per gram. So you think, well, gee, if it has more calories per gram, if you eat less of it, you're going to lose more weight.

Logical. But unfortunately, metabolism is not a math problem. It's a metabolic problem. Ugh. You know? Yeah. It's a metabolic problem. It's a hormonal problem. It's not energy balance. The whole idea of calories in, calories out. This is the biggest crock of you know what that's been pushed on the American public

because there's a message implicit in that, which is if you just told someone to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, if they don't do it, it's their fault. Just eat less, exercise more. And if you't do it, it's their fault, right? Just eat less, exercise more. And if you don't, you're a lazy glutton, right? So it's your fault you're fat, right? But the truth is that it's not. It's not just about calorie balance.

In fact, that's what the Global Energy Balance, quote, Global Energy Balance Network, which was actually funded by Coca-Cola. And they actually funded university scientists to kind of be the front people for this nonsense that's all about calories in, calories out. It has been completely discredited. The New York Times wrote a big expose of this. But what we've been taught is that all calories are the same. They're actually not. So food is not just energy. It's actually information. It gives instructions, right? So this is like a big breakthrough in science, right? So food is not just calories. It's

actually information. So the information in food communicates with your body every single minute. So every bite you take, it turns on or off genes that create health or disease that make you lose or gain weight. It turns on or off hormones that make you lose or gain weight or create health or disease. It's like a feedback for you. It's direct instructions. And it works minute by minute. It's not something that takes a long time. It regulates inflammation.

It regulates your hormones, as I said. It regulates your brain chemistry. It regulates even your gut microbiome, all the flora in your gut that we now know are linked to everything from weight gain, diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer, to autoimmune diseases, and so many other things. It's the gut health, right? Even depression and ADD and autism may be linked to changes in your gut flora. So we now know that when you eat food, it's not just about the energy in it. Because if that was true, then you could just survive on soda all day. And it wouldn't matter as long as you only eat 1,800 calories of soda.

And I had this argument. Right, right, right. I had this argument with the vice chairman of Pepsi. We had dinner together. No way. Yeah, we had dinner. And the guy in between us, because I was sitting here, he was sitting here. The guy was like being in the middle of like a war zone.

sitting here. The guy was like being in the middle of like a war zone. And I said to him, how can you say that eating 1,800 calories of soda is the same as having 1,800 calories of broccoli or almonds? He says, well, as long as you have that amount of calories, it's not going to be any different. I said, that's just not how the body works. You're not getting the nutritional value from that, right? Right. I mean, when you, well, it's not even nutritional. So just like look at 1,000 calories, let's say 750 calories of broccoli is 21 cups, 35 grams of fiber, half a teaspoon of sugar, and tons of phytonutrients, phytochemicals that upregulate your genes that actually help you prevent cancer, that improve hormone metabolism, so many things, right? things, right? Same calories from a big gulp, 750 calories, 46 teaspoons of sugar, right? High fructose corn syrup upregulates your liver to turn on a fat production factory that makes high triglycerides. Stores fat more, right? Stores fat, lowers triglycerides. I mean, raises triglycerides, lowers the good cholesterol, causes a fatty liver, raises hormones that make you,

and women make them grow hair on their face and have lost hair on their head. Men, they drop their testosterone. They have no sex drive and they lose their hair on their bodies. All this from the same calories, right? The number of calories. Calories are the same,

but the information in the food is very different. So now we have this concept that is actually really about the hormonal, I call it the hormonal hypothesis, which I talk about in Eat Fat, Get Thin, which is how do you change your hormones so you're not hungry all the time? That's the key. The typical advice, you eat low fat and your fat actually makes you satisfied, right? Because if you eat fat, you're not craving all the time, you're not hungry, and it actually is a brain

actually food because it actually stops the addiction center in the brain from turning on. So you never feel hungry or have any cravings. It also speeds up your metabolism. Fat speeds up your metabolism. So it helps you burn more fat at the same time, right? Helps you burn more fat. It releases fat from the fat cells. Interesting.

Right. So it makes you less hungry. It makes you burn more fat and it liberates the fat from the fat cells. So it's really powerful. Whereas if you eat sugar, the opposite happens. You get hungrier because you increase insulin. I used to have so much sugar. It's terrible.

I was addicted to it. All of us were. I mean, I was too. I was a vegetarian. I ate like tons of whole wheat bread and sugar and honey and everything. I mean, grape nuts and ice cream for breakfast that was my life right so when did you stop when did the research become known or the facts of the data become it's not even it's honest that's why you're a doctor and you're eating sugar

it's not when did you start to realize and when did this information about fat become you know well it's been mounting for decades right so it So it's building on a mountain of evidence. And in the book, I reviewed over a thousand studies or 500 quoted in the book that I referenced. They wouldn't let me put more because there was no room in the back of the book. Yeah, yeah. And it's all well documented. And the science of this is very powerful. One of my colleagues, David Ludwig, wrote a book called Always Hungry.

He's a Harvard professor. He's done a lot of the research that this is based on, where he gave two groups of people same calories, okay, same calories, but changed the percents of fat and carbs. And it was a very well-controlled study. And in the first group, they had 60% carbs, 20% fat, 20% protein. The other group switched it. fat, 20% protein.

The other group switched it. 60% fat, 20% carbs, 20% protein. So it's the opposite. And the group that had the high-fat diet burned 300 calories more a day by doing nothing else. Really? Just by having more fat?

By eating more fat. Their metabolism sped up 300 calories a day. It's like running. Same amount of calories, though. They ate the same amount of calories in, but they burned 300 more. Right, because their metabolism sped up 300 calories. It's like running. Same amount of calories, though. They ate the same amount of calories in. But they burned 300 more. Right, because their metabolism sped up. Interesting. Right. So in other words, it's like running an hour a day without getting off the couch.

Interesting. Right? That's powerful. Very powerful. Yeah. And I know for me, as I've seen myself and my patients, transformation's amazing. And their cholesterol gets better. It's totally contradictory.

Yeah. Right? Fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol. Right Right? Fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol, right? Eating cholesterol is supposed to raise your cholesterol. But for the first time since the dietary guidelines came out in 1980, the US government in 2015 completely reversed their stance on fat. Really? There's no more restriction.

Like January, first week of January 2016. This year? This year. Like a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago. They just changed this. They changed this completely. The whole guide.

Completely. Really? First time, they said, forget about fat. You can eat as much as you want. No way. No limit on fat. This is the government, huh? The government, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee established these recommendations.

This is a scientific group that establishes guidelines for the government, helps them shape policy, and then the government makes the policy. They kind of- Based around this research or this committee. Yeah. They said, you know, don't worry about fat. Don't worry about cholesterol. Eggs are back.

Right? Eggs are back. You know, forget about the egg white omelets. Just eat the whole egg. No way. Completely. And they said there's- It made me laugh.

They said, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern. Quote, nutrient of concern. Like, well, we got it wrong for 35 years.

No way. Yeah. So it's like, it's totally different. And they also said that we should, for the first time, they said we should reduce sugar.

Now, the policy advisors who are the scientists said we should limit sugar sweetened beverages because they're proven to be linked to obesity and diabetes. But the government, because of the food lobby, changed the wording to say, no, we should be restricting added sugar. So we should eat less added sugars. Now, what's an added sugar? It doesn't say added sugar on the label.

Right. So how do you know? Because the food labeling from the FDA't say added sugar on the label. Right. So how do you know? Because the food labeling from the FDA is also influenced by the food lobby. Right. So it should say added sugar on the label, not just sugar. Right. So you don't know. Right.

Interesting. So it's designed to totally confuse people. But the truth is that this is a huge advance. And now we actually have come to realize that this is not true. So the science around fat and how your body burns fat and what makes you fat is all really clear now. And it's all based on this hormone idea of insulin, which is a fat storage hormone. So anything you eat that increases insulin, which is sugar, refined flour.

I mean, white flour raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. So if you had two slices of white bread, it raises your blood sugar more than a tablespoon of table sugar. We have a whole wheat bread. It's just as bad. Unless the bread is so dense that you can stand on it without it squishing, then you shouldn't eat it. Shouldn't eat it.

No, like the German rye bread. Gosh, I love bread though. Yeah, everybody loves bread. The bread we eat isn't the bread we ate, right? So our ancestors ate very different bread. It's not the hard bread. It was very coarse. And we only had the grain mills that started in the 1800s before that we couldn't eat refined grain and and now even whole wheat is super refined it's just you know and are all

grains bad as well in your opinion no i don't think all grains are bad you know i joke i say you know in the book i talk about you know an induction plant like basically a way to get quick start to change you from like just being storing fat to burning fat to eating fat to makes you thin. And that's a 21 day plan. And after that, I talk about how you transition to what I call a pegan diet, which is pegan as opposed to paleo or vegan. It's kind of a joke because one day I was sitting between, yeah, I was sitting on a panel with two friends of mine. One was a vegan cardiologist and the other was like a paleo doctor. And I was like, well, I don't know. I guess it must be a pegan because I'm in the middle here. Okay. What does a pegan diet look like? So a pegan diet, you know,

what's amazing, Lewis, is that the principles of paleo vegan are often very similar. So both groups believe that we should be eating whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods. Yes. We should get rid of food additives, hormones. Foods from the ground. Yeah, everything. No antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides, no GMO. We should be having no MSG, no artificial sweeteners,

no high fructose corn syrup. Everybody agrees that that's true. We also agree that everybody should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables. Yes. Right? A little heavy on the plant foods. Yep.

Basic principles. Both agree that we shouldn't have dairy, which is interesting. Yes. Right? We'll talk about that. In paleo, no dairy as well. No dairy. Right.

No dairy. I guess there's some of them that say like some specific cheeses or something. Yeah. You know, grass-fed butter. Yeah. Like there's some things, but the proteins in dairy are very inflammatory. And dairy again we eat isn't the dairy we ate we've hybridized our cows all fertilized by one bowl it's not organic dairy and it's not organic it's not raw it's not how our ancestors ate it right yeah even organic cows they pump uh milk them when they're pregnant and

they're just full of hormones so okay also you know it's it's just not always tolerated well by many people right And then- What else do they both have in common? Everybody agrees that we should be eating foods that are phytonutrient rich, that are nutrient dense, and we should be lots of nuts and seeds and lots of good oils like avocados and olive oil. What's phytonutrient? What does that mean?

Phytonutrient is a chemical that's in plant foods. Phyto means plant. And it's not a vitamin or mineral. It's not a protein, fat, or carb, or fiber. It's something else. So, for example, like broccoli has glucosinolates, which upregulates detoxification. Catechins are in green tea, which are powerful detoxifiers of metal, powerful antioxidants. powerful detoxifier of metal, powerful antioxidants.

Tomatoes have lycopene, which is a powerful cancer preventer for prostate cancer. So anthocyanins, you're going to have black rice, which has anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants that are in black rice. It's emperor's rice. Love that. It's also very low glycemic. So I think the things that they disagree on are basically beans, grains, and meat, like where you get your protein from. Everything else is the same.

Paleo and vegan is the same except for meat, beans, and more. Yeah, and protein. I mean, beans, grains, and protein. Beans, grains, and protein. Okay. Right? I mean, you know, like, you know, meat. Right. And so, you know, what I realized is that, you know, I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic.

So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic, which affects a lot of people, I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is, there's a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means if they eat a lot of starch, that they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans,

it can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains and non-gluten grains in particular because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think meat is the big issue, right? The meat is the big issue.

So should we be eating meat? We just had dinner the other night. Right. We both had meat, right? We had fish. We had fish, yeah. We had black cod. Yes, that's great.

Which was awesome. I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod? Is that what it was? Yeah, I had the black cod. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had the black cod. The guy next to me had meatballs. Yeah. The guy next to me had meatballs.

Yeah. The guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so the issues around meat also, I think, are everybody agrees, and fish, everybody agrees, that if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised. It should be sustainably raised. It should be grass-fed. It should be not harming the environment. The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are

big and they're real. Many Buddhist patients have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's a diabetic and he's never going to eat an animal. So I need to help him understand how he's never going to eat an egg. How to eat a higher fat protein diet which is

low glycemic. So we can do that. So more nuts and seeds, you know, less rice, more beans, you know, just there's strategies for doing that. Sure. And he did great. He lost 35 pounds, reversed his diabetes, and now I have like tons of bun people, you know, praying for me. That's great.

Yeah. And then the meat thing is tricky because, you know, it's also an environmental risk. If you're eating factory farmed animals, there's antibiotics in that. And there's runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers that damages our water supply and rivers and lakes. There's climate change that happens from the methane produced. It's more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. And there's high energy use. One-fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption.

Our water is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals. There's basically, I think, 70% of all water use, and there's basically only 5% of the world's surface is fresh water. It's usable. It's fresh water. 1% is in Russia. Wow. And at least 4% for the rest of us.

And 70% of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. So I think a factory farming just should be not supported in any way, and we need to change that. And that means we need to change our patterns of consumption around meat. We need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having condom meat. Condom meat.

Condom meat, as opposed to like a condiment. Like condom meat. It should be a side dish or a dressing if you're going to eat it. And I think— Not a full plate of steak, you mean? I think there's three issues with me, right? There's environmental issues, there's moral issues, and there's health issues. So we kind of talked about the moral.

I think people are entitled to their beliefs, and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy. The environmental issues are real. And I think everybody would agree, whether they're paleo-vegan, that we need to stop harming the environment. And I think even if you're not paleo vegan everybody really releases believes that in fact the dietary advisory committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact right now if you every if you if you have grass-fed meat if you have sustainably raised i mean you can't there's it's not as as abundant you can't produce as much and so we all have to eat less of it.

Right. And it's more expensive. So, but that's okay. And I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in Eat, Fat, Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was, I'm like, well, I don't know.

You want to know for yourself too. Yeah, I'm like, I'm recommending to my patients. I'm, you know, a human too. And I want to live a long time and I don't want to be doing something stupid. Yeah. So I recommending to my patients. I'm a human too, and I want to live a long time, and I don't want to be doing something stupid. So I wanted to find out, what does the science tell us about meat? So you did all the research.

So I looked at all the research, and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat. That's a lot of research in there. And I addressed all these issues, environmental, moral. And the health issues were quite interesting. When we look at the studies on meat, and anybody can quote anything saying anything right right so you want the paleo people like a meat's healthy here's all the research and the vegan like meat's gonna kill you here's all the research so it's like and then you're at the average joe you're totally confused and your average doctor you're totally confused because we get no training in nutrition they haven't done the research themselves no they're going off of their opinion or their theory yeah they're like

average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science. They don't know because it's not what we learn, right? I mean, I just am at Cleveland Clinic, and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school there that's integrated in, which is so great. That's awesome. And I helped Tim Ryan, who's a congressman from Ohio, introduce – Tim. He's great. He's great.

He's been on your show. He's been on here, yeah. He's great. Tim, you love Tim. He's great. He's been on your show. He's been on here, yeah. He's great.

Introduce a bill called the Enrich Act, which was a bill that is funding $15 million to fund nutrition in medical schools, nutrition education for doctors. That's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food. Oh, my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease, and yet doctors know nothing about food. And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad.

I mean, I use food as medicine. Food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class. Like, that's what doctors should be doing because that's how I'm going to get people healthy. That's real medicine, right? That's real medicine that's real medicine now just just a quick side note what is your involvement with what is functional medicine and what is your involvement at the cleveland clinic can i finish my meat yes go ahead because i was still i was still rolling on the meat about functional medicine and then we'll talk about

cleveland perfect perfect because people want to know like they're like well what about me they're like probably listening yeah let's do it so so the science um 8 000 words i'm not going to give you a thousand but i'll give you i'll give you a few hundred perfect so the science- 8,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8,000 words, but I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating. So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, followed them, and then they asked questions of them.

What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last month? And they basically do these food frequency questionnaires, And then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And I try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death. But what else was-

They were smoking. They were drinking. Yeah, exactly. They weren't sleeping. Right, exactly. Stressed out. So if you look at the data, they ate 800 more calories a day. They almost ate no fruits and vegetables.

Tons of sugar. They had tons of sugar in processed food, lots of fried foods, drank more, smoked more, didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals. Well, guess what? They weren't as healthy as the other people. So most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few studies that were interesting I found. One was a study of 11,000 people who shopped at health food stores.

And they found there were like a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. So who are the people who are like healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or who, because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on factory farmed meat, right? So then again, how do you generalize that? Sure. But then there were these 11,000 people and they followed them for many years and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes.

Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference in health outcomes. And you have a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference. What is the main cause in your mind to why it's so hard for people to get rid of that extra 20 or 30 pounds of belly back fat? So when you think about fat burning, there's two different phenomenon at play. One is thermodynamics. So there's more calories in than calories out. And then the other is lipolysis. So if you're going to restructure or recomp a building or

your body, you have to remove blocks in some places and then put blocks in other places. So a lot of fat burners help with lipolysis. So they break fat molecules down and they increase, for example, mitochondrial beta oxidation, which is basically just you're metabolizing fats and then using them in the electron transport chain of the mitochondria. The details don't really matter, but that's essentially the powerhouse of your cell. And you can do that all you want, but if you're still at caloric maintenance or even excess surplus, then you're just going to take all those blocks and then put them right back into fat cells. Gotcha. So you need a caloric deficit, it sounds like, somewhere at some point in order to remove. You need to be exercising more than you're consuming and burning more calories than you're consuming.

Correct. Or consuming less than you normally would. There's many tools and ways to achieve this, of course. Sure. What ways? So the OG way is just counting calories. Right. And even if you look at doctors and dieticians, we usually underestimate the amount of calories that we consume, I believe by at least 10%. Wow. And we overestimate the amount of calories that we burn by about 10%. We think we're burning more.

Correct. We're not. Even doctors and dieticians. Really? Yeah. And we think we're eating less, but there's always hidden calories in something, right? Or you maybe didn't weigh it perfectly or it was a bigger size or something, right? Okay.

So that's the original ways to count calories. Do you recommend that strategy? For some individuals, it's particularly helpful. Most of the time that I see a patient in my clinic, and a lot of what I do is obesity medicine, I am board certified in obesity medicine, they have already done that. And many of the time they say, it doesn't work, and I eat like a bird. And there is nothing quite as powerful to destroy a physician-patient relationship than to just tell the patient that they're lying or that they don't know what they're talking about.

So it's not helpful to push that angle of vector. That's just a tool, and there's many tools in the toolbox. For some people, whether it's genetic or epigenetic or just their situation that they're in in life or their mental health or their hormone health, it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, almost like it's more difficult for someone in quicksand to get out. So you can teach a person how to dig. That's your lifestyle interventions. But you should also give them a shovel to help out. It doesn't necessarily mean

that you throw a shovel at them, but that's where medications and supplements come in to address, whether it's insulin resistance or whether it's their mental health or their hormone health, to help give them the tool to do it themselves. Okay. So the counting the calories works for some, doesn't work for everyone. What else would you suggest they do then? What have you seen has been really effective consistently for people you've worked with? When I write a prescription for this, I have several different areas or boxes that I can circle. And one of them is number of meals per day. One of them is macronutrients, for example, carbohydrates. One of them is timing of meals. One of them is eating speed.

So there's a lot of strategies to develop good eating speed habits. For example, split your meal into three different portions. Consume one, wait 10 minutes. Consume the next one if you would like, wait 10 minutes. And then consume the last one if you would like. So don't just put it all in your mouth in 10 seconds is what I'm hearing you say, which is kind of my whole childhood. Just like eat as fast as you can, not know that you're full, and just keep eating more, right? These are extremely powerful for pediatric patients for

childhood obesity. I believe in the New England Journal of Medicine did a study, and it was called the Turtle Bite Study, where every five or ten bites at some interval, the kids took one bite that was extremely slow. And it was helpful for recomposition of those kids. Really? You mean recomposition of their bodies? When you're in the field of pediatric obesity medicine, you're not really going, your end target's not weight loss. Sure. It's usually weight gain, but a body recomposition. Huh. So less fat. Correct. Weight gain, but more like you're growing as a child either way, but it's diversifying the weight gain, I guess, right? Correct. Directing it in another place. diversifying the weight gain, I guess, right? Correct.

Directing it in another place. Interesting. Okay, so we have meals per day, timing of meals, eating speed, I think you said one or two others. Timing of meals, that would kind of incorporate intermittent fasting, which is not, it's more of a health tool rather than a weight loss tool. Meals per day, eating speed, timing.

I'm sure there are other tools, those are the ones that I remember off the top of my head. If you were just saying, hey, listen, I don't want to count calories. You know, I'm probably not going to do the intermittent fasting thing. I'm not going to eat slower or like split it up in three things. That seems like too much work for me, but I will eat one less meal a day, right? Or I'll only eat a certain amount of meals. And then I'll essentially be intermittent fasting in that process. But if I looked at it as, okay, what would my meals per day look like? If I wanted to consume a little less calories, obviously I'm going to feel hungry, but when can I do it where

I'm not going to want to munch on extra calories? What would that be? Skip dinner? Is that, you know, what does that look like? I would say skip eating after dinner and don't even worry about taking away a meal. No eating after 7 p.m. That being said, if you do remove one meal, whether it's breakfast or lunch or dinner, it is not helpful at all for weight loss or body composition. To remove one meal, it's not helpful? Correct. So in isolation, removing one meal is not helpful at all for weight loss. Really?

It's truly an intervention for health reasons if you would benefit from that. Less mTOR signaling, less growth signaling in cells in general, or more of a reprieve where your body's immune system has a chance to go throughout the rest of your cells and see if there is abnormal ones. For most individuals, unless they like doing that for mental clarity or whatever benefit, some people really like skipping breakfast. But many people, especially those that struggle with metabolic syndrome, have other pathologies. There are several new ones. There is sleep eating syndrome, where you eat, you wake,

you're sleeping, you wake up and then you eat and you don't even realize it. You see that there's, you know, a bag of chips and you literally don't even remember it, almost like sleepwalking. Wow. And there's also night eating where you consume almost all of your calories between dinner and bedtime. Often these individuals also stay up late at night. Those are chips, snacks, and other kind of emptier calories, right? Correct. But they don't eat breakfast.

Really? Ice cream, cookies, or whatever it might be, yeah? Correct. But they don't eat breakfast. Really? Ice cream, cookies, or whatever it might be. Yeah. So that's the time where you could really, if you just stop eating after dinner, you'll eat less calories. And that sounds like you're still at kind of like the even maintenance. You're not a caloric deficit, correct? Unless you eat less in each meal. Correct. And obviously it's possible to be in a deficit and do that as well. But that's your biggest bang for the buck is not eating anything after dinner because society values family dinners and also social dinners with colleagues and whatnot. It would be very difficult to tell everybody to stop eating dinner. But if you wanted to design the perfect,

like in a lab Truman Show style, whatever you want to call it, not eating after about 3 p.m. would be even more beneficial. For weight loss? For health reasons. Well, not weight loss. I don't think it would have any effect with weight loss.

Maybe it would, but that I know of it has not been studied gotcha so it's truly because you could still consume all your calories in the morning and in the afternoon before three o'clock for the day you could still consume a lot of calories is what you're saying so you'd still have to cut the amount of calories in that timing window and then you'd just be intermittent fasting longer, right? Which would help for health benefits and maybe it would, I guess, help cleanse some of the dead cells and kind of like regenerate new cells, that type of thing, but not necessarily for weight loss. That's what I'm hearing you say. But at the end of the day, it sounds like it's a caloric deficit.

Yeah. And it's just a matter of helping provide individuals with the tools that will work best for them. So for some, they might need a shovel. And for some, they might want and or need a backhoe. Sure, sure. It doesn't seem like you've ever been out of shape. Have you ever been overweight? When I had my first child, I was about 40 pounds overweight. Really?

Yeah. And I could hardly tell because I'm so tall. Yeah, it's hard to see. So it's kind of like the fat just a little bit overweight. Really? Yeah, and I could hardly tell, because I'm so tall and skinny. You're tall, yeah, it's hard to see. So it's kind of like the fat just a little bit everywhere, right? Yeah. So how did you burn that 40 pounds? What did you do?

I eliminated all liquid calories. I ate foods of low caloric density, but high nutrient density. Like what, these five types of food groups are, yeah. A lot of salmon. I love spinach groups are yeah a lot of salmon um i love spinach i had a lot of spinach that would kind of go under the fiber category i love carrots although carrots don't have a lot of dietary fiber they're just kind of empty uh insoluble fiber if you will not totally of course it's not not many calories yeah yeah um and a few months

later i was kind of back at my baseline really 40 pounds just like that a few months later, I was kind of back at my baseline. Really? 40 pounds just like that in a few months? Just by changing the way you ate? My biggest intervention was I eliminated all liquid calories, and I did not have any more than two caloric beverages, whether it was a coffee with a bunch of cream in it. I did learn to like black coffee during that time, and I still do, but no more than two beverages with calories in them per month. Interesting, because something like a Bulletproof coffee, which a lot of people talk about, intermittent fasting with a Bulletproof, that still has a lot of calories, doesn't it? I don't know the macronutrient profile on Bulletproof offhand, but I believe it's mostly

protein. So the one exception to that for some individuals could be a protein shake. And you would probably want to consume this in the morning rather than the evening. That way you can have the benefit of some degree of appetite suppression. Some protein shakes like casein, which is an interesting one to talk about because it can also affect prolactin and some people negatively, if their prolactin is too high, casein can increase it. But casein is also digested very slowly and it has a lot of amino acids in it that will activate mTOR. So during your eating window through the day, if you consume your casein at the beginning of the eating window, then it could be helpful to provide satiety and also help with anabolism. But if you consume it at the end of your day, then it's going to essentially cut short your fasting period.

So if you have a protein shake after eight o'clock, right? Say someone's working out consistently and they're doing a workout in the morning or the afternoon, they eat their dinner, but then they're still hungry and they say, well, let me just do a protein shake, right? It's 150, 200 calories, but it's 20 to 40 grams of protein. Are you saying having that because it's got the calories, it's extending the eating window. So it's not allowing to burn off those calories more? Or what are you saying there? That would be more for health reasons. For example, let's take an intermittent faster that right before bed every night, they have a shake of 50 grams of casein. So that's essentially making their intermittent fasting for health reasons worthless because their mTOR is still very active for many hours at night. However, if you are looking at the satiety benefit of specifically

protein, if your shake has just protein in it, then that's going to help provide some degree of satiety. Well, you're not hungry. So you mean, yeah. Yep. And there's obviously a lot of factors to this. One that has received a lot of press recently is called GLP-1. There's all these different drugs like semaglutide that are GLP-1 agonists. And if you look at carbs, carbs spike up GLP-1 very quickly. GLP-1 is produced in a lot of areas, but a lot of it is the gut and also the pancreas. And then fat will increase very, very slowly, but it will increase GLP-1 for a long time, and protein is somewhere in between. You had like a formula in there that you said about two minutes ago. You said no snacking.

You said a few other things. Can you share that formula again? Yeah, yeah. So one, you want to cut down the sugar because sugar is not good. And I think everybody agrees on that, right? Cut down the refined foods. So this actually applies mostly to carbohydrates, but refined other stuff is not good either. So refined fats, for example, are not good for you. So trans fats were pretty clearly bad. Refined meat, like bologna and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either.

So you want to eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you want to eat no sugar, you want to eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you want to make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of fasting. And that really just gets you back to 1970, where people were still eating white bread, right? White bread. I know I grew up in that period. Nobody ate whole wheat bread. Nobody ate whole wheat pasta. It was white bread. It was white pasta, right? But you didn't eat all Chinese are eating rice, the Japanese were eating rice, you know, those are all carbs, refined carbs, right, bread, rice, potatoes. But they were doing okay, because they weren't eating all the time. They give their bodies a break from eating, right, where now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat. We've lost the idea that it's healthy to constantly eat we've we've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating like why wouldn't you think that

that's important like balance everything else in life right why wouldn't you want to balance eating and not eating right don't you think that's like fundamentally important like i think it is but up until sort of, I wrote the obesity code, people just thought fasting was really bad for you, which is sort of odd, you know, because it's like up until then, they're everywhere saying, oh, fasting's so bad for you.

Right, you're gonna do so bad. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for a long time. So I'm curious then what effect does fasting have on reducing our chances of getting life threatening diseases and also which diseases are, are most people at risk if they don't fast and improve their, their diet? Uh, type two diabetes is probably the biggest one. And the reason is that it's a huge one.

It's become an epidemic. So lots of people have it. If you look at prediabetes and diabetes, which is sort of, and you do big surveys, it's actually about 50% of adult Americans, right? So it's very common to have prediabetes and diabetes. that have pre-diabetes and diabetes and the problem with it is that it causes all kinds of other problems it causes it increases your risk of heart attacks strokes cancer it's leading cause of blindness leading cause of non-traumatic amputations leading cause of kidney disease all of those things and you know in trying to understand type 2 diabetes you just have to understand that it's basically your body has too much sugar. That's it. So if you have too much sugar, remember, excuse me, your body really has two sources of energy it can use. It can use sugar, which is

mostly glucose, and it can use fat. And when your body stores energy, it stores it as sugar, or stores it as fat. Makes sense, right? So if you have too much fat, then you have obesity. If you have too much sugar, you have type two diabetes. But the situation, the solution is the same. So think about it, your body has too much energy, both situations, obesity, you have too much energy stored away. And type two diabetes, you have too much sugar, which is also too much energy stored away, because both fat and sugar are sources of energy for the body. So if you think about trying to reverse type two diabetes, because again, this was I wrote about this in the diabetes code. And I said, it's a reversible disease disease because your body doesn't have too little energy.

It has too much energy. So think about this situation. Think about your car. Suppose you go to the gas station three times a day. You fill up. Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas, right? So it's spilling out. It's spilling out.

It's spilling into your back seat, and it's now making you sick. But what are you going to do? Well, here's what you wouldn't do is keep going to that gas station three times a day. It's ridiculous. You have to do two things. One, stop putting gas in. And two, drive that car around so that you use the gas that's there. That's what you would do.

Now, think about your body. Burn the gas. Burn the gas. Think about your body what you would do now think about it burn the gas burn the gas exactly think about your body your body has too much energy what are you going to do one stop putting it in two let it run without putting it in for a while that's intermittent fasting that's all you have to do and think about the this is this situation you've got a disease state, which has become an epidemic, which contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, but you have a solution, which is completely free, and has been used for 1000s of years, which is not anything more complicated than let your body run off of the fuel

that's already sitting on there. Is it fun? No, it's not. Is it healthy? Yes, it is. And those situations very healthy. And people used to say, well, people won't do it. It's like my job as a doctor is not to tell people what they will and won't do my job is to tell them how they should get healthy and i'll help them right so if fasting is a good solution which i believe it is then i'll help them whether they do it or not is up to them right but the point is that it's it's it's free it's simple it's been used for thousands of years it's available to everybody you don't need special equipment you don't need a special diet you don't need a special anything everybody in the world can do this at any time like literally like today tomorrow any time

they could do it it's not like you know I have this great drug for people. Yeah, but except it costs $500,000, right? That's crazy. No, fasting is not to do that. You're going to save time, you're going to save money, and you're going to get healthier. So what could be better than that? Like, it's a crazy situation where we have this huge healthcare issue. But the solution is completely free, which explains why there's so few people telling you to do it because who's gonna make money on it, right? But that's not my concern. My concern is telling people what they need to do to get healthy, right?

Brian Smith, What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to fasting, then? Dr. Andy Roark, I think the single biggest mistake is sort of overeating afterwards. So you fast for a period of time, they say, Oh, well, I deserve that ice cream. It's like, you could do it, but you're going to sort of get a lot less benefit, you're going to like, you got a great benefit from the fasting. Now, you know, you're, you're, you're losing some of that, because you're eating the foods that you didn't eat. And that, that really is a temptation for people to do. And I

think it's natural and we've all done it and, you know, but the point is that after you fast, you should really just eat as normally as possible. So if you eat, you know, a normal breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner, the next day is your fasting day. You don't eat breakfast. You don't eat lunch. You should eat a normal dinner. Don't try to eat all three meals crammed into one, right? That's not the point. Like the point is to drop those meals and let your body take the energy from your body fat. So you drop breakfast, your body normally gets 500 calories from there, you want to take it out of your body fat. Same thing for lunch, if at dinner, instead of taking 1000 calories, you decide to stick in 2000 calories, well, you've negated a lot of the benefits that you should have gotten, because that energy is

going to go in, right? So So the good thing is that it's hard to do that. So when when you restrict the time, and you don't tell people what to eat, or how much to eat, they actually naturally eat less. So it's actually an interesting thing, because this gets to the question of hunger. There's, you know, in terms of weight, weight loss, there's sort of two big issues that trip people up. One is metabolic rate two is hunger so hunger people think that hunger will just go up like this with fasting it's actually not true so you can actually measure the hunger hormone called ghrelin which is basically it goes up high and you get hungry so when you fast ghrelin is high so if you normally eat lunch you're hungry so ghrelin is high what happens

when you don't eat lunch you skip your lunch well a couple hours later your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline so you don't feel you don't feel hungry anymore no your hunger goes back to baseline level interesting so if you eat uh lunch at 12 you're hungry at 12 now you skip lunch you're hungry at 12 you're hungry at 1, you're hungry at 12, you're hungry at one by four, it's no different than if you ate or didn't eat. So people are like, what happened? Well, your body took the energy from your body fat stores, it took the 500 calories from body fat, you basically fed yourself off of that body fat. So why would you be hungry? The answer is you're not. And that's why it goes right back to baseline same thing happens at

dinner if you do multiple day fats it's actually even more interesting because ghrelin actually after day one to two it actually starts to go down and down and down so your hunger actually disappears i hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel

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