"FASTING Is The BEST WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT!" Dr Jason Fung & Lewis Howes

So if you look at hunger during fasting, so they've done again studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. The higher it is, the hungrier you are. It turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So you get hungry at, you know, 12 o'clock. It's lunchtime, you get hungry. So it's a learned response. The question is what happens if you don't eat? Does hunger keep going up and up and up? It doesn't. In fact, the ghrelin actually peaks and then it just falls. If you don't eat, it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline, which means that your level of hunger at 1230, one o'clock, you're hungry. No question about it. If you don't eat by three, four o'clock, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat. What happened? Well, your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat. You took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down. So that's really interesting. So if you know that it's a wave, right, you just have to let the sort of wave pass over you. I often tell people you will get hungry. Okay, don't don't pretend that you're not because you will. What you got to do is prepare for it and say, okay, well, if you get hungry, then you either there's several things. One, stay busy, you know, keep doing stuff. Don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're, you know, working on some kind of, you know, doing work at work or if you're doing some kind of, you know, home renovation or something. I get this all the time where I'm like painting, you know, the house or something like that. Right. And I'll just power right through because I just want to get it done. And I'm not hungry at all because I'm so busy. I'm so focused on doing the work that I just forgot about it. Right. You see this all the time. You know, people who go to the casino and people who play video games, they just get so engrossed. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink. By the time you finish, you know, a big cup of green tea, the hunger will have passed. You know that it's going to pass. And that's the point. You know, it's not going to get worse and worse and worse. And that's how you do it. What's even more interesting, actually, is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three, four or five days, the ghrelin peaks. And then after about two days, it starts going down. So by, you know, day two, day three, as you get to day four, day five, the hunger almost completely disappears. It's actually fascinating if you've never done it, because I've done a few of these four or five day fasts. It's interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger. There's a whole lot of, hey, that slice of pizza looks really good. I really want to eat it. But there's no actual physical hunger. So if I hadn't seen it, which is hard now, of course, with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff, I would have actually, you know, gone and right by and done it. But the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with. It's not impossible because, again, one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it like it'll work. Sure, if you don't eat, you'll lose weight. But nobody do it. Well, you know that literally millions of people throughout history have done this. Look at Ramadan. You look at Yom Kippur. You look at Lent. Like when people say, OK, we're going to fast together because our strength is in our togetherness. Right. You know, it's Good Friday. We're not going to eat for this amount of time. Well, that's that's how people did it. Right. They supported each other. There was no food around. Somebody's not frying up, you know, a steak while you're trying to bake cookies. Yeah, exactly. So that's how you do it. Right. You get yourself a supportive community. You know, you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time. And that's how you get through it. Right. And while you do that, of course, your body uses up the body fat. You're going to lose weight. It's going to use up the blood sugar, which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic. And it's insulin is going to fall, which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term, as well as those other conditions, obesity and type two diabetes, which puts you at such high risk. Of cancer in the first place, you're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body and it's completely free. Right. You don't have to spend money on it. Yes, exactly. And this is the part that's crazy. It's because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, which is the leading cause of blindness, of kidney disease, of amputations, the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery. It's less. It's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth. You can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better. It's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it. The people tell you, oh, you can't do it. You can't do it. It's like, that's not true. We all used to do it. Right. If you think about, you know, you know, a community of like, you know, on Yom Kippur, like millions of Jews around the world are doing or Ramadan, millions of Muslims are doing it or, you know, millions of Catholics are fasting during Good Friday. Like my priest used to tell me all the time during Lent, you know, fasting, like that's all he talked about practically. So it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of the diseases. And we don't have to charge anybody anything. We're not trying to sell anybody anything. We're just trying to tell you, yes, you can do it because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer, then let your body burn off that sugar. Let your body burn off that fat. A couple months ago, I did a four day fast where I just had water and a black coffee a day. And it felt incredible. First couple of days was challenging, but by day three, I was like, I'm in the zone and I felt good. I looked younger. I felt healthier. I was doing it for more of like seeing what I could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my kind of cleaning out my system. I just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds. It was burning a lot of excess fat, but I just felt better. I felt more confident. I felt like, oh, I could do something challenging, which gave me more strength in my mind. It was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways. And I'm curious, what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that you've debunked? I mean, the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you. It's actually one of the healthiest things you can do as long as you're, again, not underweight and you're doing it safely, right? You're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing. But there's this whole recent scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy, which has been, you know, very, very topical. People have been going crazy on it because in 2016, one of the Nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers. And what it showed is that when you fast and you turn down these nutrient sensors, then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy. And autophagy is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them, right? It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff, that's bad for you, right? You're breaking down protein in the battery. It's good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you want to renovate, for example, say you want to renovate your bathroom, the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there, right? That avocado green tub has to go. Otherwise, you can't put in a new tub, right? It's just the way it is. That's just so your body works the same way. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the old junky, old protein. You got to break it down. You got to kill off those cells. You got to rip them off the body and let them, whatever. The stuff you don't need. Where they flush out your skin or whatever they do, right? Exactly. The skin proteins, the connective tissue, all of that goes. And it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need. What happens is that everything starts to go. And then the stuff you need, like if you're still exercising, your body's like, hey, I still need those muscles. I'm going to rebuild that. So that's the key that one of the things that activates during fasting is actually growth hormone. So if you fast for 24 hours, your growth hormone level is like four times what it is when you're eating. And it sounds very strange. Why would growth hormone goes up? Well, it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff. As soon as you start to eat it, you want to rebuild all of it. So the Nobel Prize in medicine, which is Dr. said this is the body's intracellular recycling system. So it's not let's flush out all our old stuff. It's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff. But if you think about it, that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation, right? Get rid of the old stuff, bring in new stuff. It's like renovating your body, right? So all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time. So this is this whole, you know, in people who are very interested in wellness, a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on. And you get this point where you're doing so you've done these longer fasts. It's like, wow, this is you just feel really good about yourself. You know, you're full of energy, right? And this is the thing that I thought very strange when I did my first sort of three or four day fast is like, I have a ton of energy. Like, I could feel like I could do anything. My friend who used to work, he's a doctor and he worked a lot of nights and stuff. He said it felt like my brain was like on fire. Like, I thought I could do anything and everything faster than I could and better than I could ever do it before. Interestingly, another friend of mine who's a cardiologist, he's a heart specialist, he says, you know, I used to he played piano for his whole life because there's always this piece that I couldn't play. And then as soon as I started fasting, I noticed that I could start to do it. Wow, that's incredible, right? And the doctors, when I talk to the doctors, they actually instantly see the logic of what I'm talking about because they know the physiology, what happens in the human body, because what I'm talking about, which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting, which is so you can't do it and it's dangerous and it's really bad for you, whereas the opposite is true, right? It's actually part of a natural cycle, right? It's feeding and fasting, feeding and fasting, right? You don't feed all the time. You don't fast all the time. We've gone so far into that one thing. So, yeah, I mean, this this whole point of autophagy is very, very interesting and very topical. If you look at studies of longevity, for example, in animals, the only thing that really makes people makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction. And so even almost 100 years ago, people were talking about it and saying, well, you can try and restrict your calories, but if you do that day after day after day, it's really hard. So fasting may be a better way to go, which is something they figured out sort of ages ago, because if you look back, that's how people thought of fasting, that people called it a cleanse, detoxification, you know, reawakening, spiritual purification, that kind of thing, right? There's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you, which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you, right? It's strange how things work, but without any sort of scientific evidence. And as we become as a nation more overweight, it becomes even more important. And that's just one of these sort of fascinating things. So, you know, it's not like something I just made up. It's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books, right? I'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people, hey, there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our health care. And you can do something like you don't need your doctor. You don't need your dietician. You can do something about it right now for no money, right? And there's the sciences all there, right? Imagine how much money you can save as a society if we got rid of this problem. And it's like, oh, my God, it's mind blowing. Well, I think that's part of the issue is the reason it's not popular, I guess, is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine. Businesses make a lot of money on selling more food, not selling less food. And therefore, people want to make more money. And so they have to market their products. They have to market their medicines. They have to market their foods to try to sell more of it, not to say, oh, just have a few of these, just have a couple of cookies a day. No, they want to sell boxes of cookies, right? It's not like they got to make money. As in their mind, this is a business to be run and we need to sell more. More means more people need to eat sugar, refined sugar, breads, all these things, refined oils, refined meats, refined fats, all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat. The company's making them in order for them to survive financially. They need to sell more of these things to us, which is a challenge. It's a real problem because if you look at, say, you know, the doctors and the dietitians, you go to conferences, they're sponsored by Kellogg's and, you know, the breakfast makers and so on. And it's crazy. I was watching the show the other day, one of these, you know, TLC shows with like these very heavy women. Anyway, they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes. I'm thinking and they couldn't drink it as horrible stuff. They tasted really bad. So they spit it out. I'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water, let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body. Why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day? Except that somebody wants to sell it to you, right? You're being played here. You're drinking this horrible, horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out. They couldn't take it. It's like, oh, the whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money. It's a sad, sad sort of state of affairs that we get into. What would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then? If we had to recap that part of it, what would you say are the top five? Yeah, so it's free. That's a huge thing. Really, you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating. It only tells you the period of time that you're not eating. So whether you're a vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be, even if you want to eat fast food all day, it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food. It tells you that during this period of time, don't eat. You can add it to any diet, which is incredible because now we're pulling on a completely different lever. That is, if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general, there's two levers, right? We always think of what you're eating, right? Eat more vegetables. That's great. But what if you don't like vegetables, right? Well, that lever doesn't work, right? So here's a completely different lever. You're talking about, well, there's this other thing I can do to lose weight or get healthier, right? So you can add it to any diet. It's completely flexible. That is to say, you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want to. If it's Christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days, then you don't have to. If you decide to fast longer after Christmas, then sure, you can do that. That's completely up to you. It's not like you're locked in. You know, the fourth thing is that it's very simple. So if you look at a lot of diets, that is to say, say you're on a paleo diet, it's a great diet, right? But it's like, this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo, right? It's complex or keto or whatever you want to be. So it's very difficult for some people to understand. And I've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused and you always get the, is this keto or is this paleo or whatever, whereas fasting is very simple. You can drink water and tea and herbal tea, say, that's it. Everything else you can't eat, right? So it's very simple to explain to somebody. It makes it very easy for them to follow because it's very black and white. If you ate a peanut, that's not fasting, right? Yes, it's not a big deal, but at the same time, that's not fasting. And then the other thing is that it's powerful, right? Because if you follow any type of a diet, there's always a natural limit. So say here you want to lose weight. And so you say, I'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet. So you do a vegetarian diet and you lose a few pounds, but not as much as you want. Well, you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian. You're already vegetarian, right? So what else are you going to do? There's nowhere else you can go more keto or you can't go more paleo, whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting. And it's powerful because you're eating zero, which means that it is by definition for weight loss, the most powerful diet there is. Like, absolutely. You cannot lose more than that. If you put any calories in your body, no matter what diet you're on, you're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories. Exactly. So that's the whole thing. It is the most powerful diet. It's the most powerful diet. But it's like, OK, well, why would you not want it, right? If you have a lot of work to do, you want the best tool. That's it, right? This is the best tool. And somehow we said, don't ever use this, right? It's like, why? If you use it, you'll actually get all these other benefits. So it's just free. It's available. It's simple. You know, you can do it with any diet and it's powerful. And you actually don't have to stop. You can actually keep going, you know, do a seven day fast and take a little break to another seven day fast. And you can't go lower than zero. There's no way it is possible physiologically to go less than zero. So it is the most powerful diet. So there's so many benefits. And yet for years, I'll tell you, when I started using it with patients in about seven or eight, seven years ago, maybe it was like the stuff we saw was just incredible. People were like coming off their medications. They're reversing their type two diabetes. They're losing weight. It's like, you know, all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book. If you're looking for more greatness in your life, make sure to check out this video right here. And also check out our free PDF, the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life. Download it right here. About 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing. What?