FastingforWeightLoss

Dr Jason Fung, nephrologist and best-selling author, shares his experiences utilising an individualised approach to fasting, to successfully treat thousands of overweight, metabolically ill and diabetic patients. Being a doctor who specialises in kidney disease gives him a unique insight into early indications of metabolic disease. Let's listen to Dr Jason Fung. Does Drinking Coffee during Fasting break the Autophagy phenomenon? Yeah, that's a tough question to answer, because there's no data to answer. It's because autophagy is a relatively newly described phenomenon. It hasn't been around for a long time. Well, we do know about it. That autophagy is one of the primary regulators, called the mechanistic target of rapamycin or mTOR. So, mTOR is a nutrient sensor which senses that nutrients are coming in. Insulin is also a nutrient sensor that tells the body that nutrients are coming in. They evolved separately. And in fact, mTOR seems to be a much more ancient sort of a pathway compared to insulin. If you look at unicellular organisms, the mTOR has been around a lot longer than insulin has. So, it seems to be very important. And when mTOR and Insulin are activated, they tell the body that the nutrients are coming in. Thus, they turn off autophagy. Autophagy comes from the Greek word for self-eating. It's a cellular cleansing process where you take these proteins that you don't need. And you break them up, either reuse the parts to make new proteins. Or you burn it for energy if you don't have enough energy coming in. In a state of sort of excessive nutrition that is in our some kind of modern state, we are more concerned about obesity than malnutrition. Autophagy may be one of the beneficial things that we don't get a lot of anymore. The mTOR seems to be very, very sensitive to protein and to specific amino acids, it’s very sensitive. But to how sensitive is coffee enough to do it? I have no idea. So, for those people who want to make sure that they get the autophagy, then you would have to do one of the classic fast, which is water-only fast. Dry fasting is a more extreme sort of version of water fast. But those things, if you want to get there at some point, they may help. They may find at what threshold you turn on the mTOR and turn off autophagy. But it seems to be very, very sensitive to it. And the reason is that it's the body which links the incoming nutrients to the growth of the cells. If you think about yeast, when there's no water and no sugar, it wrinkles up and stays dormant. It doesn't die. It just stays dormant. You don't want to be growing if the yeast were to continue growing in the state where there are no nutrients. If so, it's going to die eventually, and you don't want to do that. And so is the same for the cell in our body. You don't want to expend all your energy growing unless there's food coming in. You want to do the opposite, which is break down of these proteins and so on. That's why nutrient sensors are so crucial for growth pathways. Everybody gets the wrong idea of that growth is excellent. And I've always argued about this. For adults, growth is mostly not good. Because, if you look at obesity, it's a disease of too much growth. To be a simple, cancer is a disease of too much growth. Alzheimer's disease is a growth of too much of this. There's too much protein that's junking up the system. Type II diabetes, with the fatty liver and fatty pancreas, is a disease of excessive growth. Atherosclerosis is the hardening of the arteries. The narrowing of the arteries is not due to blockage by cholesterol. It's a disease of growth. You have white cells and foam-filled cells. And the stimulation of these smooth muscle cells results in narrowing of the artery. This narrowing of the artery is also a disease of too much growth. If you have a disease of too much growth, restricting nutrients can be beneficial. Two hundred years ago, people didn't have obesity and didn't have to worry about too much growth or too many nutrients. If you're on this side of the path, restricting nutrients is not a good thing. But these days, it may be a very beneficial thing. So that's the long answer. If you want autophagy, I would suggest avoiding coffee because you don't know how much it's going to take. Fasting for autophagy and fasting for weight loss can be two different goals? Yeah, absolutely. What we always say also is to keep your goals in mind. Because if you're trying to lose weight, you don't need autophagy. It's not necessary. You can follow a ketogenic diet, which still has plenty of protein in it, like moderate protein, adequate protein. And you can again lose weight with the ketogenic diet—no question about it. You're not going to get any autophagy because that protein that you're eating is going to turn off the autophagy. The flip side is that it's fasting for weight loss, which is a lot easier to measure because you have a kind of a yardstick. There's no yardstick that you can say, are you getting it's having even. For ketosis, there's a yardstick. You can do the breath test, the blood tests to know whether you're in ketosis or not. But you can't say the same for autophagy. Maybe we will get there one day. But there isn't anything currently. So, the only thing we mean is that you got to make sure. Otherwise, I can't tell you whether it's there or not. The nutrient sensors (mTOR and the insulin) sends different things. Protein is the main thing for mTOR. And for insulin sensor, it’s both protein and carbohydrates. But everybody thinks insulin is just about carbohydrates. That's wrong. If you look at the insulin response to animal protein, the response is very high. But it's less so for vegetarian protein. For example, if you eat tofu and beans, there's less insulin response. But your blood sugar is not affected because there are other compensatory hormones in it. For example, if you eat a steak, which has lots of animal protein, your insulin may go up quite a bit. But your blood sugar won't go up at all. So, they're (insulin and blood sugar) two separate things. And I think this is one of the things that is always confusing to people is saying, “Oh, I eat the steak and my blood sugar didn't go up at all. What's this whole insulin then?”. Your blood sugar level shouldn’t go up at all. It doesn't mean your insulin hasn't gone up at all. And that was one of the things that Joseph Kraft made a significant distinction that you have to understand that insulin is different from blood glucose. I mean, they're related, but there are distinct things. You have to be kind of zeroed down on your protein if you're after autophagy. Should autophagy be our main goal while fasting? The benefits of autophagy are still mostly theoretical. There seems to be a lot of future research, which is really good and exciting and so on. I have no idea if it is going to help you or not as opposed to say if you are fasting for your blood sugar and you want to get off of your insulin. We know that if you go from, a hundred units of insulin a day to zero, you're a lot healthier. And that's going to have a huge impact on you. You may or may not need fasting. You may not or may need autophagy for that. For example, you could do well with the ketogenic diet. So, it's crucial for us to sort of, as Megan says, to make that priority because I have no idea, I just posted an article about autophagy and cancer. And some people think that too much autophagy may worsen the cancer. And the reason for that is that the autophagy is a survival mechanism. And if you already have the cancer cells and then you start to stimulate autophagy, those cancer cells may be protected. It’s because these cells are breaking down proteins for energy and they're getting an energy source. So, there's a lot we don't know about it. Yes, it seems to be very interesting in terms of preventing cancer. But it may not be the best thing if you have cancer. Nobody knows too much about that. So, I wouldn't go crazy on this because I don't know if it helps or not. Is there a time over which you should fast to maximise autophagy? I can guess. But it’s again we don’t know. If you look at what happens during fasting, we know that you mostly use glycogen during the first 24 hours, roughly 24 hours. And then there is the period of gluconeogenesis. It is from 24 to 36 hours. So that's the period, where there is going to be the most sort of autophagy and so on. Because you’re breaking down the proteins at that point for gluconeogenesis. This is the sticking point with a lot of people in fasting. They say, “Oh, Hey, you're breaking down protein, you are going to burn your muscle in 24 to 36 hours period.”. It’s possible, but I don't think that the research on alternate daily fasting bears that out. However, I think that's a good thing. One you are taking down old protein. And then because of growth hormone increase, you’re going to rebuild new proteins. I think it’s not breaking down process. It’s a renewal process if you look only at the breakdown at 24 to 36 hours. And if you miss that burst of activity, you’re going to miss the whole picture. You are going to say, “Oh, Well, you know you're just breaking it down, but you don't miss”. You don't see the fact that it's balanced now keeping in mind that the body always works in this way. For example, if you look at your bones, they are not static. There are osteoclasts and osteoblasts. When you go through life, you have cells called osteoclasts which eat away at your bone, and you might say, “Oh, Wow. That’s terrible”. But actually, not bad. Because when osteoclasts eat away the bone, it stimulates the osteoblasts to produce new bone. If you only look at the one side of it, you would term these cells to be terrible. But the fact is it’s likely; you are going to have terrible brittle bones. That’s what happened with some of the drugs we use, like bisphosphonates. We started seeing brittle bones after like ten years. It was because the bones might have more calcium, but they're old and not renewed. The same thing happens in this 24 to 36-hour period of time. You are breaking down protein, and it need not be muscle; it can also be connective tissue. But this is a pure guess. Nobody knows. This is my guess as to the best place (24 to 36 hour) for the autophagy to maximise itself. If you are trying to maximise this for trying to break down skin or connective tissue or Alzheimer’s disease, where you may have excess protein in the brain, the following would be my guess. It would be most beneficial to do these 24 to 36 hours fast once in a while. And once in every month. And then once in every couple of months, to do an extended fast. The reason we do this is that we don’t know where the best sort of benefits lies. Therefore, I’m going to cover all my bases. Do an occasional long fast with some of these alternate daily fast, 24 to 36 hours, trying to focus on the protein breaking down period. And when you do these 24 to 36 hours fast, there’s no coffee, There’s no anything, but water and salt alone. That’s it for the autophagy. Few specific people come to us, and they say, “You know to our knowledge this is going to be the best protocol for you”. But nobody has proven this. Nobody has confirmed any of this. It’s up to you that you can or cannot do it. In a 2-day Fast, Will having Coffee with Cream on the First Day Impede the Burning of Glycogen? It doesn't really. The way that fat is metabolised is entirely different. The reason why both carbohydrates and protein stimulate insulin is that they both go to the liver for metabolism. If you think about it, you got proteins and carbs. When you absorb them, carbohydrates get broken down into glucose, and proteins get broken down into amino acids. They both get absorbed through the small intestine, into the portal vein which flows straight into the liver. At the liver, it decides what to do with them. Either you package them into glycogen or de novo lipogenesis, they package them into fat. Proteins get used up to the amino acids for new protein. And then any excess protein does get turned into fat. But fat doesn’t do that. Fat is entirely separate. Dietary fat, which is triglycerides, get absorbed through the lymphatic system and goes straight into the blood vessel and then to your adipocytes. So, fat primarily gets stored directly, and that's why there's no insulin. It's because you need insulin signalling for the liver to know what to do with it. So, the insulin goes up, and your body says, “Okay. Now we need to store some of this energy.” Fat is completely different. It goes straight into your fat cells which is why you can do this fat fast as it will have no insulin effect. You still get your glycogen down and then eventually you’ll get to your body fat. But if you’re increasing your body fat, stores at the same time, you’re working against yourself. It doesn’t make the insulin fall though. So, the question is, how can you ever lose weight if you're eating all this fat like on a ketogenic diet. The point is you're letting your insulin levels fall, and it's a battle between insulin and leptin. Because when your fat cells enlarge, you're not going to have any insulin effect at all diet of pure fat. For example, if you just drink olive oil, your fat cells will enlarge. At some point, as your fat cells expand, your brain stimulates leptin. This goes to your brain and tells you to stop eating. So that you can use up this fat because your body doesn’t want to be too fat. Stimulation of leptin is not a survival mechanism. You don’t want to be skinny and too fat either because you’re going to get eaten and killed. So, leptin is a sort of regulator of body fatness. Insulin, on the other hand, tells the body to store body fat. It’s kind of insulin versus leptin. If you drop your insulin, then you can let your leptin eventually become sensitive. Then your body will activate other mechanisms to stop eating. That’s how you can still eat a lot of dietary fat and lose weight because your body will tell you to activate these satiety mechanisms. They'll ask you to stop eating and so on. And that's one of the things we like to do when people are fasting. To allow the insulin level really drop low and then re-sensitise to the leptin, to eat your body fat. To make fasting easier for some people, can you give them the fat on the first day while burning glycogen and then on the 2nd-day switch to water and salt? Yeah, I think that's a perfectly reasonable strategy. The dietary fat, for example, the cream you take up in day one is not going to impede burning of glycogen. The fat is not going to hamper your insulin falling which is what we want. We want the insulin to fall and wanted to stay low for a reasonable period so that you break the insulin resistance. It will re-sensitise the leptin because it’s kind of head-to-head insulin vs leptin. You become obese when insulin wins. That’s the bottom line. You have to knock down the insulin as best as you can. We tried to give and increase leptin, and it didn't work. It wasn't strong enough to overcome insulin. We know from insulin that it’s the sugar from the fructose, which causes insulin resistance and fatty liver. And also, the frequency of meals are all those, which are pumping insulin all the time. If you're eating ten times a day, you will be injecting insulin in, all the time. And you’re going to knock down that leptin. When you’ve got the insulin taking over leptin, that’s when you become obese. Why doesn't if (say one keto meal a day) throw your body into a Starvation mode? (Although I’m certain I could gorge down enough Calories in one sitting to achieve my macros for the day, I don’t see it as a viable option) Yeah, that’s a good question. A lot of people ask this because they get confused with the insulin hypothesis and the calorie hypothesis. When people think that it’s all about cutting calories, they say “Well, 24 hours, a period, 2000 calories should be the same whether you take a single meal or you take it kind of constantly spaced out through the day”. But it’s not true. That's not how the body works. It is like you could have an average temperature at Death Valley, say 20 degrees. But you wouldn’t say that it’s comfortable there. You would face scorching hot during the day and cold at night. So, the average temperature doesn’t tell you anything. You got to realise that insulin is based on two things. It’s based on how high the insulin spike goes and how long it persists. If you have a high peak and then low for the other sort of 23 out of 24 hours, it's a lot different from a physiologic standpoint. It is different when compared to taking a little bit regularly throughout the day, just like the Death Valley. But the body works that way. If you look at hormones like growth hormone, it does the same thing. You get a big spike sort of four a.m., five a.m. and then it goes undetectable through most of the day. Parathyroid hormone and most of the hormones are actually like that. You get a single spike and suddenly becomes quiet. And that’s because you don’t want to stimulate it all the time as you develop resistance that way. For example, if you look at even drugs, you’re going to develop resistance to it when taken continuously. If you stimulate the nerve cell it all the time, you just develop resistance. The whole thing is the same. It is similar to the boy who cries wolf. If you cry wolf and you do it all the time, people just ignore you. If you cry wolf once, and then you don't cry wolf for like another year and then cried again, people will respond when you come back. So, it’s the same thing with the body. We’re not talking about it. It's because we're not trying to influence calories. Calories is a fairly useless concept, and everybody says “Well, are you saying that calories don’t count.?” I’m saying that it’s the entirely wrong way to think about it. What you’re trying to influence is, it’s insulin resistance, which indirectly affects your body set point. I believe body set-point is what controls your body weight. And it’s mostly dependent upon insulin resistance like there are other things like cortisol and so on. So, there’s a lot of things that matter. That’s the kind of answer. You eat 2000 calories at a single sitting once a day versus 2000 calories spaced throughout the day. There's a different response in terms of insulin and insulin resistance even though the calories are the same. And that's why the fasting is entirely different than the calories. The whole reason people get confused between calories is that they say “Well, does that mean I can eat, you know, as much as I want, as long as it has no carbs, I’ll just eat steak all day and lots of protein?” It’s No. The reason people get confused with the calories is that everything that you eat practically stimulates insulin unless you drink like pure fat which is nothing but bulletproof coffee. It is not something realistic, as nobody eats sticks of butter. You know the bulletproof coffee is an excellent example because that's a hack where people deliberately take something sort of unnatural to gain the benefits of it. Because it has a ton of calories and almost no insulin effect. The reason is that if you look at real foods, they contain a blend of carbohydrates, protein and fat. So, all foods will stimulate insulin. For example, all foods also contain calories, but they’re not the same. Calories don't count, but it's the calorie-containing foods, which also have varying degrees of insulin effect. That’s the bottom line. That’s why people get confused. It’s not like you can say “Well, Avocados are good so I can eat 50 avocados a day and I should lose weight”. You might or you might not because it’s still going to have that insulin effect. And if you're insulin resistant, then certain foods are going to be worse. It means practically; not all foods are equally fattening, which again is something intuitive. If you eat grilled salmon, it’s not as fattening as brownies. It’s not like that. But the calorie people insist that 600 calories of a doughnut are the same as steak and eggs of 600 calories. No, it’s completely different. It’s because the insulin effect of the two is different. And if you look at the genetic contributions to obesity, you see that different people respond differently. Some people are much prone to obesity. But it doesn’t explain how an entire population becomes obese. For example, the United States genetic pool hasn't changed a considerable amount. But in the sort of past 40 to 50 years, there's been a massive change in obesity. Genetics can’t explain that, but it can tell the difference between one person and the next. They will have different responses to insulin. Some will produce a lot and therefore have a real propensity to gain weight. And everybody knows that some eat whatever they want and they never gain weight. If people are stuck on the calories-in calories-out mechanism, would it be better if they focus on increasing the rate at which calories go out? The total calories thing is a huge obstacle for people to overcome. And that's why they can't understand why 2000 calories at a single sitting, you know “Oh, I’m going to go into starvation mode because when I took the 1500 calories spread over eight meals a day, my metabolism got shot to hell. So, if I take 1500 calories in a single sitting, it’s not going to be”. It’s No. Because what you’re trying to do is to take the 1500 calories for that day and then take 500 calories from your stored fat. And burn that. Then you'll burn 2000, which is what we want. What we’re trying to do is open up the stores of fat for burning because those are all stores of energy. I mean that’s what fat is. It’s a store of food energy. You want to take the amount that you are and take about an amount of body fat. Then slop it in and burn the whole thing. But you can’t do that very easily when you’re eating all the time. It is why we focus a lot on meal frequency and intermittent fasting. Things like time-restricted eating, which is a nicer way to put it, don't freak people out when compared to fasting. But we focus on that a lot because people don’t talk about it. Because of the calories theory, they assume that 1500 calories throughout the day and 1500 calories at one sitting are the same. No, you have to get out of this. The thing is that there are people out there, who say, “Well, we’re all genetically programmed to eat and therefore now we live in a world of food all the time. We can’t help ourselves". It's a big NO. It's because your body has a very, very powerful mechanism to stop overeating. If you eat a buffet, you go to the all you can eat. And you’re sufficiently stuffed, and then somebody says, “Here take another pork chop”. You’d be like, “Blah, I want to throw up”. Your body has these mechanisms that stop you from eating, and there are multiple ones, and they overlap. For example, there are stretch receptors in the stomach that is if you have a lot of stuff in your stomach, then you can't put any more. For example, with bezoar, people who swallow their hair and stuff, their stomach gets filled with hair and nothing goes down. It’s like they're full. They can't eat because they're so full. Or they eat a little bit, and then they feel full. It is because of the stretch receptors in the stomach. There’s Peptide YY, which is very sensitive to protein. When you have a high protein meal, there are incretins which we also use therapeutically. Incretins are sensitive to protein. For example, if you inject yourself with incretins or incretin stimulating agents, then you become full. And when you go over that, you become super nauseated. It is one of the mechanisms why these incretin drugs like senetide or exenatide produce not only nausea but also cause weight loss. So, there are peptide yy, incretins, gastric stretch receptors, cholecystokinin, which is sensitive to fat. If you eat fat, cholecystokinin goes up and then ultimately there’s leptin. So, leptin is when your fat cells are too big. You can see that your body has all these mechanisms to prevent you from overeating. Because it knows that if you get too fat, you’re going to die and it doesn't want you to die. Why do we sometimes feel ravenously hungry even though we are absolutely full? I think that the reason for real food like carbohydrate-containing foods being difficult to overeat is that we’ve devised these sorts of satiety mechanisms to it. For example, if you take the white potato like a baked potato, its satiety index is exceptionally high. For the same amount of calories, the amount of satiety you produce from a potato is very high. There may be other mechanisms or maybe resistant starch and whatever. That’s why I say it’s not just about the carbohydrates; it’s all about the insulin which is not the same things as to say that it’s all about the carbs. It is because there are so many other factors that have to go into it. The thing is that when you start getting a lot of these processed foods, they begin evading all of these satiety mechanisms. You can take something like wheat and then process the hell out of it to get rid of all protein. It is going to get rid of the satiating fat. You’re left with pure glucose and then grind it into fine dust which is very quickly absorbed. You take tapioca starch versus tapioca root; people have been eating tapioca for a long time. People eat sweet potatoes in Okinawa and do well. But you can’t take these potato starch and flour, and pretend that it's the same thing. But it’s not. They’re processed. They’re in an unnatural form, so they’re not the same thing. Processing evades a lot of the satiety mechanisms. Is it deliberate? In some sense, it is intentional because you know companies want you to eat more of it. So, they make sugar. Adding sugar makes it much easier to evade these satiating mechanisms. Same thing you go to the buffet, and it’s like you can’t eat another pork chop but you could eat some ice cream. Or you could eat some candy, or you could eat some apple pie. It is because refined carbohydrates evade these sorts of satiety mechanisms.

Dr. Jason Fung is a leading nephrologist who has successfully treated numerous patients with diabetes and obesity. He also has been using fasting as a major tool in his medical treatments and has thereby helped innumerable patients get rid of their metabolic diseases.Dr. Jason Fung’s recommendation for people with insulin resistance Once you understand that the problem with obesity is too much insulin. Insulin resistance actually plays a key role because if you have it then it will keep your insulin levels very high, which will keep you from losing weight. So the question is what you can do to lower those insulin levels? In terms of the foods there are actually two key components to weight loss and everybody always, kind of, ignores one. So it comes down to two things. Basically what you eat and when you eat because you can't ignore the question of frequency, right? So the question of what to eat is we more or less agree on that. So a lot of people, for example, understand that while eating a lot of white bread and white rice and sugar that it's not really all that good for you and tends to be very fattening. So, of course, you need to cut those down. Those are at the highly refined carbohydrates and sugars. If you follow a relatively low carbohydrate diet and try to avoid processed foods then most people will agree on that. Yes, there are different variations but, for the most part, people understand mostly the same things. We have kind of gotten away a lot from this from this kind of low fat hysteria, which kind of followed from the calorie kind of misunderstanding. So if you remember, everything was about calories back in the 80s, right? That was the old thinking. Therefore, fat was very high in calories and you shouldn't eat it. And so everything was low fat, low fat and low fat! Then we realised that there are a lot of healthy foods that are high in fat. So olive oil, avocados, nuts, the whole Mediterranean diet really! There is everything that was just swimming in olive oil, right? Well, how can it be? So they got something called healthy fats and the thing about it is that that term kind of didn't exist 20 years ago. All fat was bad! But now we realise that there's a lot of fat that is actually very good because it's not about the calories but it's about the fact that these are unprocessed foods and they're not high in carbohydrates. Carbohydrates refined, like bread and sugar, will stimulate insulin the most and therefore are much more fattening - calorie for calorie! That's why if you eat grilled salmon with olive oil compared to brownies, the brownies are much more fattening because they stimulated it much more. One key is to go to a low carb high fat diet. But not all fats are the same either, right? You are trying to want to stick to the healthy fats because they're kind of non processed. The other thing is the “when to eat”. The another thing, I think, that we've really gotten incorrect is that if you eat; almost all foods will stimulate insulin. Insulin tells our body, “Okay! So we are eating. Therefore, we want to store food energy. We don't want to burn stored energy.” That is what body fat is. It is stored food energy. It tells us we need to store it. So if you eat six times a day then you're gonna tell your body to “store fat! store fat! store fat!”. If from the minute you roll out of bed you start telling your body to store fat and all through that day you keep telling your body to store fat then what's gonna happen? Well, you're gonna gain weight because you just told your body to do so! Fasting in history The key is not to eat all the time. If you look at studies from 1977, the average number of meals per day in America was 3. By 2005, it has gone up to close to 6. Back in the 50s, they were eating white bread and Oreos, right? But they were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner. No snacks! Now we go breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. The thing is that we have never allowed our body the time in which we are not eating and in which we can actually pull some energy out instead of storing it. Right now, we keep eating all the time and we tell our bodies to store this food energy. We never are able to go the other way and pull it out. Well, that's what fasting does. It gives your body a chance to use the energy that you stored. Guess what? There is nothing wrong with it. Fasting - A math problem Fasting is actually part of natural human evolution. The very term itself breakfast means you break your fast, which means you have to be fasting in order to break it. It's a part of every single day. You need to balance those feeding periods and those fasting period if you're gonna lose weight. That’s the thing we have completely lost - that balance - instead of being, kind of, ten hours feeding and fourteen hours fasting or so in the 50s. Again, if you imagine that you eat breakfast at 8:00 and dinner at 6:00 that's about 10 hours of eating and 14 hours of fasting. During those 10 hours of eating you are storing energy and during those 14 hours you are pulling that stored energy. Oh, great! Perfect balance. Now, we go, the minute we wake up in the morning at 7:00. Somebody says, “Oh, you got to put bagels in your mouth or something.” You keep eating throughout the whole day until you go to bed. Well now you've got like 16 -18 hours of feeding and 6 hours of fasting. That's it! The only time you're not eating is when you're sleeping. All that time you're in an insulin dominant mode telling your body to store food energy. And guess what? That is what it does. So over the years, you just gain weight. We have to kind of move it back. Now, if you want to actually lose weight then you can extend those fasting periods. Instead of being 14 - 12 - 14 hours, you can extend it longer. You can extend it to kind of 18 hours - 20 hours - 24 hours, whatever you want. That's the idea. There are two things - what to eat and when to eat - and the reason that log tides fail is that they completely ignore this question of “when to eat” and they just concentrate on "what to eat”. That’s only 50% of the battle .

Dr. Jason Fung – Keys to Successful Fasting [How to Fast] Will fasting help a healthy person live longer? What are the keys to a successful fast? Jason Fung, nephrologist and best-selling author, shares his experiences on utilizing an individualized approach to fasting. This approach has been used successfully to treat thousands of overweight, metabolically ill, and diabetic patients. Being a doctor who specializes in kidney disease, gives him a unique insight into early indications of metabolic disease. Let's listen to Dr. Jason Fung. >> Dr. Jason Fung Fasting is just a matter of spreading knowledge and making it easy, right? It's not that people can't fast. It's that people tell them they shouldn't fast. If you look at Ramadan or something like that, people can fast if it's the norm or Lent or Orthodox. People can follow fasting if it’s a norm. It's just that the norm is so far off. We tell our kids, "Oh, hey, you got to have a snack". It’s like after school it is a snack. The other day I heard this saying, “Oh, your son is going on a trip, but don't worry. We're going to give them lots of snacks.” I'm like, (Laugh gently) "Why did you do that right now?" Do you send your kids to play soccer? I do. I did and they don't play anymore. And it's like somehow everybody thinks that---In between the halves of soccer, the parents were taking turns, bringing snacks. You don't need to give juice and cookies in between halves of soccer. Just let them play the game. The game is fun, right? It's the culture that says you must eat all the time. Skipping breakfast is a perfect example. As soon as you get up, you have to start putting muffins in your mouth. Otherwise, you're going to die. You're going to die of a heart attack. We offer this as a treatment to everyone. We don't say, "Ok, you've never heard of it". We'll still recommend it and like 50 percent right off the bat won't do any fast at all. Right. I had this discussion yesterday with a fellow. I told him, "Oh, he needs to fast. He was developing proteinuria and he is going into renal failure". And, I said, “Really, you need to fast”. And he says, "My endocrinologist says, I can't fast. No way". The thing is 50 percent of people won't fast for any period of time at all, not even like five hours. The idea is so ingrained that we have to eat, eat, eat, even to lose weight. If you take away the 50 percent who won't do it right off the bat, then you have people who will do it for short periods of time. And probably only about 20 percent might agree to like a longer fast mostly. And it's not the physical side that actually hinders. It's always the psychological side. The physical stuff is super easy to deal with. It's the psychological part that's really hard. It's like really hard when you're looking at somebody who's eating and you're trying to fast. You can do it once in a while. But if you do it sort of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and again breakfast, that's the hard part. And that's where we focus a lot of our attention working on the psychological, how to set your environment up for success and coming up with different strategies for success, and creating a supportive community that's going to help your success. That's the hard part. Think about religions like Ramadan, how do they all fast? People say, "Oh, I could never fast". But literally hundreds of millions of Muslims fast. It's because the environment is supportive. If all your friends and family are doing it, it's not fun, but it's not that difficult to actually do it. And that's the difference. And now we're recommending it for people who have no community. And that's what we're trying to create, a community of people who are accepting. If I wrote a couple of articles that I sent to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) or something to get peer-reviewed, first of all, the peer review would kill it. And second is you'd get no traction whatsoever. You're not doing anybody, any good, because by making it more out there, you make it more acceptable for people to talk about it and to accept it as a viable treatment.

Can you eat eggs when you have diabetes? Dr. Jason Fung explains the facts surrounding fat phobia. The lack of evidence that dietary fat is bad for health is an important and credible null result because so much effort was expended looking for proof that dietary fat is bad, by researchers who believed that it is. In the 1950s, it was imagined that cholesterol circulated and deposited on the arteries much like sludge in a pipe (hence the popular image of dietary fat clogging up the arteries). It was believed that eating saturated fats caused high cholesterol levels, and high cholesterol levels caused heart attacks. This series of conjectures became known as the diet-heart hypothesis. Diets high in saturated fats caused high blood cholesterol levels, which caused heart disease. The liver manufactures the overwhelming majority—80 percent—of the blood cholesterol, with only 20 percent coming from diet. Cholesterol is often portrayed as some harmful poisonous substance that must be eliminated, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Cholesterol is a key building block in the membranes that surround all the cells in our body. In fact, it’s so vital that every cell in the body except the brain has the ability to make it. If you reduce cholesterol in your diet, your body will simply make more.The Seven Countries Study had two major problems, although neither was very obvious at the time. First, it was a correlation study. As such, its findings could not prove causation. Correlation studies are dangerous because it is very easy to mistakenly draw causal conclusions. However, they are often the only source of long-term data available. It is always important to remember that they can only generate hypotheses to be tested in more rigorous trials. The heart benefit of the low-fat diet was not proven false until 2006 with the publication of the Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial and the Low-Fat Dietary Pattern and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease study, some thirty years after the low-fat approach became enshrined in nutritional lore. By that time, like a supertanker, the low-fat movement had gained so much momentum that it was impossible to turn it aside. The association of heart disease and saturated fat intake is not proof that saturated fat causes heart disease. Some recognized this fatal flaw immediately and argued against making dramatic dietary recommendations based on such flimsy evidence. The seemingly strong link between heart disease and saturated fat consumption was forged with quotation and repetition, not with scientifically sound evidence. There were many possible interpretations of the Seven Countries Study. Animal protein, saturated fats and sugar were all correlated to heart disease. Higher sucrose intake could just as easily have explained the correlation to heart disease, as Dr. Keys himself had acknowledged. It is also possible that higher intakes of animal protein, saturated fats and sugar are all merely markers of industrialization. Counties with higher levels of industrialization tended to eat more animal products (meat and dairy) and also tended to have higher rates of heart disease. Perhaps it was the processed foods. All of these hypotheses could have been generated from the same data. But what we got was the diet-heart hypothesis and the resulting low-fat crusade.

Can Type II Diabetes be Reversed without Medication? Dr Jason Fung explains in this video how fasting/intermittent fasting can be used as a tool to reverse type 2 diabetes Type II Diabetes has become a major chronic disease being prevalent all around the world. An estimated 473 million people have been found affected by this diabetes, with the numbers increasing every year. A national health survey of Australian states found a staggering one million people living with diabetes, as of 2017-18. One must be aware of how type II diabetes occurs not to just prevent ourselves from being affected by it but also to find a solution to reverse the state. Reason for this chronic condition: Generally, the food which we consume is ultimately broken down into glucose and supplied to all cells and organs of the body as this is an important energy source. Insulin is the hormone created by the pancreas which is responsible for controlling the glucose level in the blood. During excess glucose level, it converts glucose to glycogen and stores it for future use. When additional energy is required for the body, it undoes its former action, thus ensuring the organs receive enough energy for their functioning. Insufficient production of insulin or when the body resists the insulin function, it leads to the formation of type II diabetes. The Solution: Despite tremendous advancement in the medical world, a proper cure through medication has not been yet discovered. What seems to be difficult to achieve in the modern medicine world was achieved in a study during the second world war era by following a simple, inexpensive technique. It is nothing but fasting and a proper diet. The study by Dr. John McEachen and others at their fasting institute was astonishing as they found that most of the patients under study were able to reverse their state and recovered from type II diabetes. Further research made by others helped the world to understand how fasting helped in reversing the state. Benefits of fasting: The body starts developing resistance to the three main appetite suppression hormones when we are overnourished. Fasting helps to reset the hormone receptor thereby restoring the lost sensitivity of the body toward insulin. Excess Visceral fat leads to the development of inflammatory cytokines which is directly behind the reason type II diabetes occurs. It is only during prolonged fasting, the visceral fat gets reduced, and as a result production of adiponectin comes to normal, thereby reducing inflammation and the production of insulin. Since organ compression gets minimized due to the loss of visceral fat, the performance of the liver and pancreas improves significantly. Fasting and low-calorie diet – the new normal: Many researchers agree to a common point, fasting is an evolutionary process through which the body repair processes get stimulated thereby inducing self-healing to the body. Over time, due to a more improved lifestyle, we did not get a chance to induce this natural ability of our body. The latest study, the one done by Newcastle University found that a low-calorie diet had been effective in reversing the state. The time has now arrived to follow a proper diet and systematic fasting to reverse type II diabetes and live a normal life.