Intermittent Fasting’s Darkest Secret (My Response to Dr. Mike Hansen)

What is going on I have warriors. So there's a video that came out about four months ago by a gentleman named Dr. Mike Hanson. Now he talks about intermittent fasting, darkest secret without any further ado. Let's go ahead and get right into it. Now, one thing that he says regarding intermittent fasting is he talks about the basic elements of intermittent fasting. He talks about the fact that it helps you build insulin sensitivity by lowering your insulin resistance. It helps stave off stuff like type two diabetes in the process or pre-diabetes as well as ketone bodies that form through the process of beta hydroxybutyrate via the liver when you're doing intermittent fasting, which helps to burn fat. So he talks about all of the basic elements that come with intermittent fasting that assist you with weight loss. One thing he also touches on is the fact that your leptin decreases, or I'm sorry, your leptin increases and your ghrelin decreases both simultaneously. One telling you that you are no longer hungry. The other telling you that you do not have an appetite to eat, which is ghrelin. And this helps you over time. So if you're super hungry, when you first start doing intermittent fasting after for a certain amount of time period, maybe about two to three weeks, usually it takes about two to three weeks. He mentioned about four weeks, but two to three weeks for you to form a different biological habit where your body just adjusts to the new system and you no longer feel hungry, uh, when you're going through this process, that's when ghrelin will reduce and leptin will increase, but he mentions something very bizarre in his video, or he omits something very bizarre, or maybe, maybe let me frame this better. He puts it in a way where there's something that could be extrapolated from it that may not be correct. Um, for the most part, his video is an excellent video. It's very detailed and it explains the things that you can do, and especially with unprocessed food consumption versus processed food consumption and the benefits that come from that. But there's one interesting thing that he touches on, and I think it's incredibly misleading. One thing is that he makes it appear that calorie restriction is over here and intermittent fasting is over here. Meaning you can decide to do calorie restriction or you can decide to do intermittent fasting. Now, from what I can gather from his video, he doesn't appear to be a fan of calorie restriction. He feels that it's unsustainable. Granted, most people have been trying to lose weight for years and most people regain weight as with, within the American society in the United States, the majority of the problem when it comes to weight maintenance or weight management is not actually weight loss, it's weight regain. Weight regain is the biggest problem. Many people are able to lose weight, but not a lot of people are not able to maintain that weight loss. So he kind of almost kind of blames calorie restriction for that, for that issue, but in reality, that problem is still a problem to this day, even with the understanding of intermittent fasting, even with the understanding of the keto diet, even with the understanding of the Mediterranean diet, whatever diet you want to touch on, uh, that problem is still a problem. And, and, and, and if anything, that problem is continuing to grow there. It's not turning in the opposite direction. The obesity problem is continuing to actually grow. So it isn't so much that it is a calorie that calorie restriction is the culprit. It is the lifestyle change. That's the culprit. You have to find something that's sustainable for the rest of your life and be able to do that instead of doing a diet. That's just going to get you to a weight loss that you're looking for and then do some, and then just do whatever you want. And then there you go. You'll start to regain the weight. I caution people to, uh, when it comes to intermittent fasting and caloric restriction, I feel that you should make it very apparent that even though you are doing intermittent fasting, you are not, not doing caloric restriction because although you can pull up studies and I saw the study that he pulled up, the 2015 meta-analysis systematic review that I've read so many different times and have done videos on that study, uh, with, I believe it had over 40 publications, I'm sorry, over 40 study publications that they use to synthesize the data. The thing with that is if calorie restriction isn't applied, if there isn't a caloric deficit in the control group, in, in the intermittent fasting group, then there isn't going to be a significant weight loss difference or a significant weight loss, uh, change within that group. There has been many studies where the participants have been allowed to eat ad libitum, which means eat as much as you want. And then they end up losing weight versus the control group, which is a group that, uh, does caloric restriction. However, that does not mean that they are overeating. That does not mean that they are not eating within a caloric limit that allows them to be at a net negative energy balance and lose weight. What they're doing is because they're intermittent fasting, it's creating a easier system for them to be at a caloric deficit, even if they're not hyper focused on how much calories they're consuming. But given intermittent fasting and a caloric surplus, your body will have nothing to pull from because you are giving it an abundance of energy. So there's not going to be a additional body fat burning. There's not going to be additional weight reduction because your body doesn't have to do it. One thing that he mentioned was exercise, adding exercise to the fold for weight loss, and I 100% agree with that, but all of that stuff actually just keeps going in line to helping you create a good caloric restriction over time. For example, building muscle helps you, uh, partition calories internally so that your calories have to power muscle. Your calories have to be absorbed through muscle for muscle retention and muscle building. Right. Exercise, the, uh, epoch effect, the post exercise, um, activity, the post exercise, uh, energy burn that happens after a cardio session that takes sometimes up to 38 hours, that's lending to the energy output, which is increasing the possibility for a caloric deficit. So this is also something that happens with, um, Dr. on many occasions. And trust me, I like both of these guys. I've just met, I've just seen Dr. Mike Hanson for the first time. But my thing is I do not want people to be misled to believe that calorie restriction is not part of the equation. Calorie restriction is part of the equation. However, because of the way intermittent fasting is set up for many people, they don't have to actually pay attention to their calories sometimes until a certain point from, for others, sometimes never because they're in this caloric restriction by default, simply from the fact that they're not constantly grazing. There are people that if they didn't graze, they would always be at a caloric restriction or caloric maintenance, but because they've great, they grazed throughout the day and they eat little things here and there they're not in a And then intermittent fasting comes in. They apply that they don't eat outside of their eating window. They no longer have this continuous, never ending grazing period. And then they start to lose weight, but that doesn't happen for everybody. So I don't want people who are doing intermittent fasting, not seeing results, feeling disheartening, disheartened, and thinking that they don't need to count calories when in reality they do. Now I get what he's saying. Just doing calorie restriction alone is a little bit of a taxing thing because you're constantly focusing on the calorie intake and it's very difficult for you to sustain that considering the fact that you're, there's so many life events, so many different things that happen throughout your life. So it's tougher to just stick to doing that, but an intermittent fasting, there's not a thing that you have to kind of measure or anything like that. You just have to make sure that you're eating during a certain time period and you're not eating during a certain time period, but it is a slippery slope. If we continuously promote intermittent fasting in a way where it's adjacent to caloric restriction, when in reality it is attached to caloric restriction. Granted, intermittent fasting has its own benefits that are removed from caloric restriction. For example, calorie partitioning where you're burning more fat simply from the process of going into ketosis or using ketones for energy, that process requires fat cell or requires triglycerides or fatty acids from your fat cells to power that process of ketones. So therefore you are grabbing more fat cells or not fat cells, but more fatty acids than you would if you were just doing caloric restriction with the same amount of calorie deficit. So yes, there is a benefit there, but there isn't anything that will be burned if you are not in a caloric deficit. So hopefully this video kind of cleared that up. That video has a lot of views, so I wanted to make sure that if that video was seen and if you guys, any of my viewers have seen that video, hopefully this video clears that up. I don't want people to think that you do not need calories at all because you do. All the studies that we've seen, if the calories were over, if they were over in their calories, the intermittent fasting group did not lose more weight than the caloric restriction group. Now, if the calories were the same, if the calories are the same in the studies, you see stuff like intermittent fasting group losing more body fat and losing a similar amount of weight tends to lose a little bit more weight, but usually losing a similar amount of weight than with the caloric restriction group as a control group. So until the next time guys, peace out. Thank you. Hit that like hit that subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.