The Science of Obesity and How to Reverse It | Live Webinar with Dr. Jason Fung

Hello and welcome to this collaboration between Dr. Jason Fong and the Epoch Times. People are joining us from many different places, from Dr. Jason Fong's YouTube channel, from Epoch Times YouTube channel, from NTD YouTube channel, from Epoch Times Twitter, you name it, and Epoch TV of course. Dr. Jason Fong, welcome. Hi, how are you? Jason Fong has a beautiful presentation for us on the science of obesity, but before we get started, a lot of you know Dr. Fong from his YouTube channel, but for our audience on Epoch Times, I just want to do a quick introduction. You guys know probably I interview a lot of people, a lot of doctors who solve real problems, and Dr. Jason Fong is one of them, but he's a little bit different. Not only does he solve the problem, he goes and figures out how do we redefine it on a fundamental level, on a level nobody even tried to understand the problem. In fact, Dr. Fong's research and methodology has redefined diabetes at its core, and today we hope to learn a little bit more about it, and it's a great pleasure to have you here with us, Dr. Fong. So please, the floor is all yours. Thanks so much. So what I'm going to talk about today is sort of how we developed this epidemic of obesity, which has contributed of course to the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, which then leads to lots of problems, including heart disease and kidney disease and blindness and amputations and so on. So the question which a lot of us don't really bother to ask is, why did we get fat? That is, what causes people to gain weight? And most of us don't think about this question because we think we already know the answer to this question. We think, well, you know, it's just a matter of calories in, calories out, and that's what I thought until very recently, and certainly it is what I was taught in medical school and certainly what most doctors, most dieticians, most health professionals still tell you. It's all about calories in, calories out, and what I'm going to show you is that most of what I learned is very likely wrong. So the paradox of obesity is that if you compare the sort of society, North American society in 2024 to the 1970s, you'll see that there's been a huge change. That is, the average person has gained a significant amount of weight, and that's really not a debate. There's plenty of statistics to back it up, and I grew up in the 1970s, and it's not a time where people really thought about diets. People didn't really think about exercising, and there really wasn't a whole lot of diet culture or calorie counting. There's no calorie labels on foods and so on, and yet everybody was a relatively normal weight. And so why is that? How is that, how can that possibly be true? So it's very instructive to go back and see what people thought about why we gain weight, because again, if you want to understand how to lose weight, you have to understand what the problem was in the first place that led to the weight gain, because if you don't understand the root of the problem, you can't attack it. So if we go back in time, we can look at what people used to think about weight gain. So this is Dr. William Oster, and he's sometimes called the father of modern medicine, because he wrote the very sort of influential and seminal textbook in 1907 called The Principles and Practice of Medicine. So he's a very, very influential figure, and this is what he wrote at the time. He wrote a monograph on obesity and its treatment, and what he said is that you should treat obesity with a diet full of beef, veal, mutton, and eggs. So certainly nothing about calories, and in fact, quite opposite to what we think about it, where we think about cutting out meat, and cutting out fat, and so on. He thought fatty foods were actually crucial for weight loss, because they made you full, and if you made you full, then you wouldn't eat more other foods. And it's echoed all through the literature, so this is the Reader's Digest in the 1920s, and what you can see is that there was an idea that there are certain foods which caused you to gain weight, and predominantly those foods are sugar, bread, cereals, and desserts, and there are certain foods which are very good for you, such as meat and green foods like vegetables, so meat and vegetables. If you look at a sort of standard textbook in the 1950s, same sort of things. So that there are certain foods that you really should avoid, and these would be things like, you know, bread, and cereal, and potatoes, sweets, that kind of thing, and those are really talking about avoiding refined carbohydrates, and sugary foods, and desserts. And there are foods that you can really eat as much as you like, because those are foods that don't make you gain weight, and again, that's meat, and fish, and birds, chicken, turkey, that kind of thing, vegetables, eggs, fruits, and cheese. So again, eating natural, unprocessed, whole foods, and avoiding the refined carbohydrates is the way to lose weight. That was pretty standard, and in the 60s, again, you can look at the literature that's written at the time, so Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, which was a bible of child care at the time, said that, again, rich desserts, and starchy foods, cereals, breads, and potatoes, how much you eat, it determines how much weight babies gain. And in the 60s, the So again, if you were to ask your grandmother, your great-grandmother, again, they say that it's really about the sort of carbohydrate-containing food, and it's these fattening carbohydrates that really make you gain weight. So it's not calories. The certain calories, certain foods, don't make you gain weight, meat, and fish, and so on. Nobody gets fat eating broccoli. That's what they're saying, and it's true. Everybody knows it's true, of course, until the sort of calorie craze, where they're saying people said, well, calories are calories, so broccoli is as fattening as ice cream. Back then, they had a little bit more common sense, and they said, no, no, no, some foods make you fat, and some foods don't make you fat. The other change that happened from the 1960s, 70s, to the 2000s is how often we're eating. So in 1977, according to the NHANES survey, which is a large survey of Americans, people are eating about three times a day. By 2003, they're eating about five to six times a day, so much, much more common. So rather than taking just breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and nothing after dinner, people would eat breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, because they thought it was good for you. They said you should eat all the time, even to lose weight, as counterintuitive as that sounds. So if you look at modern eater patterns, what you see is that people are eating more often. So the lowest decile, the lowest 10% of people are eating three times a day, but the highest 10% are eating 10 times a day. They're eating late, and they're eating basically all the time, but they've pushed the law of their calories late. So in the 70s, people said, well, some foods make you fat, as refined carbohydrates. Some foods don't make you fat, meat and other unprocessed foods. And eating all the time also makes you fat. And so the solution is really eat more of those foods that don't make you fat. So meat and fish and so on. Eat less of the foods like the refined carbohydrates, and don't eat all the time. Don't snack all the time. Give your body a chance to use all those calories that you ate. And it turns out their success was pretty good, because when people followed that advice, almost everybody fairly effortlessly stayed in a relatively normal weight. So what changed? Well, there's a huge change in our eating patterns in the 1970s. And this was in response to this sort of great epidemic of coronary disease. If you look on the left, you'll see that in the 1900s to the 1950s, the amount of heart disease that we saw increased quite significantly. It increased probably two, threefold. And people didn't know why they're getting heart attacks. Turns out, when you look back, it was probably all the smoking. So if you look on the right, you see that how much smoking people did sort of peaked in the 1950s and 60s. And it sort of coincided with all this heart disease, which sort of makes sense. We know now, of course, smoking causes all kinds of heart disease. And back then, of course, in the 50s and 60s, it's back to companies that they didn't. So since people didn't know at the time, hey, what's causing all the heart disease, people started to blame the diet, which didn't make a lot of sense. Because if you look at this line of saturated fat, which was supposed to cause heart disease, you see that it didn't change. Even as heart disease was skyrocketing, people were not eating more saturated fat than before. But nevertheless, the sort of message had gotten out there that saturated fat caused heart disease. There was no evidence that it was true. In fact, every study since then has really defied that. So people talk about the French paradox. The French at the time were eating tons of animal food, butter and cream and foie gras. So they're eating, you know, 50, 60 percent more animal fat than saturated fat and yet had like a third of the heart disease. So this was called the French paradox. Of course, it wasn't a paradox. It was just that the fat wasn't really that bad for you. Then we figured out that the Mediterranean diet with all the avocados and olive oil and fatty fish was also not bad for you. So that was not really causing heart disease. In 2017, there is a very large study called the PURE study, which again looked at 18 countries and over one hundred and thirty five thousand people. And what they showed was that as you eat more and more of your energy from total fat and the same as for saturated fat, you get less and less heart disease, less and less mortality. So dietary fat wasn't really the problem here. It just was blamed for heart disease when it was actually the smoking that was likely causing the heart disease. And because of that, we got the dietary gold for Americans in 1977. And this represented a massive change, a absolutely massive change in the dietary habits of Americans, because for the very first time in history, the government was going to tell people what they should and shouldn't eat. Prior to that, you ate what your mother told you to eat and she ate what her, you know, her parents told them to eat. After that, in 1977, there are specific guidelines for nutrition. And this was sort of drilled into all the health professionals, drilled into the school children. And what they said is that you should eat carbohydrates, eat lots of carbs. So fifty five to 60 percent of your calorie should be carbs and eat less fat. So the this sort of translated into the food pyramid, which was sort of came in the later in the 1980s. And this is what I learned as a child in school. And what you see is that at the top of the pyramid, the foods they should eat maybe once a month, right, is meat. Right. Once a week, maybe some an egg. Right. And these are the foods that in the 1970s people thought made you lean. And you shouldn't eat those. You shouldn't you shouldn't eat turkey more than once a week or so. And red meat maybe once a month. And the foods that you really should eat, which are down here at the bottom of the pyramid, you can see these pictures, the bread, the potatoes, the rice and seven to eleven servings of of these carbohydrates every single day. So remember, those are the foods that people thought up until that point, based on hard experience of the past hundred years, you should eat more of these foods that made you fat. So you had like crazy ideas like in the 1995. This is a pamphlet from the American Heart Association where they said not only should you snack, but you should choose snacks that are low in fat, such as pretzels and sugar, like just eat sugar. That's a great snack or syrup and jam and jelly, like pure sugar was like good for you is good for your heart because it's low in sugar. Of course, it was a terrible idea, but that was the state of the art in 1995. And as a result of this massive change in dietary habits, people ate more grains and ate more sugar because they were told to. The government said so. All the so-called scientists said so. All the doctors said so. The Heart Association said so. Eat more carbs, eat more bread, eat less meat and sugar is OK because it's And what happened? Well, you can see that obesity was rising very slowly until about the mid-1970s. Then you had the dietary guidelines when you suddenly threw out all the advice from your mother and decided you should eat the foods that the government told you to eat. And now there's a massive spike in obesity that has is going on to this day. And this is this is, you know, probably the result of what we're talking about. That is eating more carbs led to an obesity epidemic. But the official explanation is that you're eating too much fat and calories. Nothing about cutting down the carbs that, you know, 50 years ago, your grandmother would have So remember that we didn't choose to eat more carbs. We were told to eat more carbs. Right. It wasn't a sudden, you know, massive psychosis where people just started to believe that carbs were good and, you know, meat was bad. It was official teaching. It was official dogma. It was what all the health professionals were telling you. So if you believed it, it wasn't really your fault because that's what they were telling us. And the problem was that as the obesity epidemic went on, it became harder and harder to explain it because, you know, you couldn't say that carbs caused, you know, weight gain because carbs were good. So if carbs were good, they couldn't be bad also because they, you know, gave you obesity. So suddenly they had to switch. And instead of saying that it's those fattening carbohydrates, it's the sugar, they switched to the energy balance paradigm, which is that all calories are the same. You know, broccoli is as fattening as sugar as long as it's the same number of calories. Right. It completely ignores the fact that if you eat, you know, a pound of broccoli, you'll get, you know, a thousand calories of broccoli. You will be very full. If you drink a thousand calories of soda, you won't be full. It will cause no satiety whatsoever. You could eat another thousand calories of something else. So it completely ignores physiology and simply says that it's all about calories. And the sudden obesity was not due to the sudden drastic change to the low fat diet and eating refined carbs couldn't be both good and bad. So therefore, since fat was bad, fat had to therefore be caused the cause of obesity as well. Despite the fact that prior to that, there was really no evidence that eating more fat caused obesity. In fact, the opposite was true. So therefore, if fat accumulation became all about calories and calories out, which is the sort of religion of the last 50 years, the solution is to simply eat less and move more, right? You either put less calories in or you, uh, you know, exercise more. The problem is that it's very circular logic. So if people are gaining weight, they say that, Hey, you're gaining weight because you're eating too many calories. But how do you know that it's too many calories, right? And you only know it's too many calories because people are gaining weight. So you see that this is circular logic is actually not proven. You can't say that, you know, this too many calories cause weight gain and you define the too many calories by the weight gain, right? So it's all both a cause and effect. It's classic circular logic. So it sounds like it makes sense, but actually is completely a fallacy. You have to say is the thousand calories too many. It was 1500 too many is 2020, but they can't say that of course, because if you look back in the 1900s, people are eating 3000 calories a day. In fact, a lot of the studies, uh, which they said were very, uh, semi starvation diets were 1500 calories, which is what we recommend today. So this whole idea, because it sounds logical, but it actually is a, is a, uh, logical fallacy, uh, sort of just took off because that's what it was. So because of this sort of, um, fault and logic, obesity then became sort of this gluttony and sloth problem because now medical authorities, instead of because they caused this whole change in diet said, well, it's not my fault is your fault. It's not a medical condition. It's some psychological character defect of low willpower. It's all either gluttony and sloth. It's the government's basic. We're saying, don't blame us blame yourself. So they said the cause was eating too many calories. And the solution is to eat fewer calories. I mean, I mean, I don't know how many times people have said this. You see this all the time. The problem with this answer, which is eat fewer calories is that it a hundred percent does not work. Every single study that's done has shown. It doesn't work. And we know it doesn't work. You can look at any standard textbooks. So I took two textbooks that were in the library at the time, uh, very standard sort of textbooks, Jocelyn's diabetes. And what they say is that if you reducing calories is the cornerstone of therapy for obesity. However, none of these approaches, both low calorie and very low calorie has any proven merit. That is you, all the studies basically don't support the fact that these are effective. Eating fewer calories simply doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. We have the studies to prove it. The handbook of obesity said the same thing. They said dietary therapy is important. Reducing energy intake, which is calories cut. Your calories is the basis of successful weight reduction programs. However, the result of these studies are known to be poor and not long lasting. So any standard medical textbook tells you cutting calories doesn't work. You get studies like this. So a very, very large study, almost 50,000 women. And if you look at baseline, they're eating, um, you know, 1,788 calories. They cut it down to 1445. In other words, they cut 361 calories every single day. And they did it by cutting their fat. So they ate less fat and they ate more carbs and they exercise more. So if you look at the metabolic equivalence, this baseline went from 10 to 11.4. So about 15% more exercise compared to previously. So they expected, if you just take the calories, according to what people tell you, they should lose 36 pounds per year. The actual weight loss, almost zero. This is, you know, in the first year they lost about two kilos or about four or five pounds, not 36. And over time they gained it. So the people who didn't change their diet was in the open circles, but people who followed this calorie restriction diet, you know, after about two years, there was barely any change. I mean, the difference is like less than a pound of difference. So, you know, a hundred, if you're 190 to 200 pounds at the beginning, you can eat your normal diet. And seven years later, you could eat a very stringent diet and be like 189 pounds. It's not really worth it. It doesn't work. Every single study we've shown we've done says it doesn't work. So the whole problem is that the way it's laid out, that is, you know, you're eating too much, which leads to obesity and you're eating too much because you're a glutton or a sloth, right? It's all behavioral problems. That's the way it's framed today is completely wrong. The solution to eat fewer calories stems from this approach, this caloric reduction approach, and the failure rate's like 99%. The problem too is that it leads to a lot of fat shaming and implicit bias. That is, you look at somebody and you say they're obese, it's not because they have a problem, medical problem, it's because they have some psychological character defect. So this leads to all kinds of the blaming and blaming patients and blaming victims and so on. And the other problem is that it just doesn't work, right? We know it. It's a perfect record of blemish by success. So there's another way to look at obesity. That is, it's not a problem with the number of calories, but it's a problem with what the body does with those calories. So here you have the hormonal obesity theory or the sometimes called carbohydrate insulin hypothesis, which is that you have calories coming in as food. This stimulates insulin, which is a hormone that functions as a nutrient sensor. It tells your body food's coming in. Your body has a decision to make at this point. You've got food energy coming in, you've got calories coming in, you can either burn it or you can store it. So if you burn it, that's used for energy, for basal metabolism, that's going to increase your metabolic rate. If you store it, it's going to increase body stores of calories, which is body fat and also sugar. And that's just insulin's job. It's not either a good thing or a bad thing. However, if you have a situation where the insulin levels are much higher than normal, what's going to happen is that you're going to push those calories more towards storage. You're basically telling your body to store body fat. If you're storing a lot of body fat, you're not going to have a lot of energy to burn. You're going to want to go out and eat more calories. So the whole problem is not that you had some kind of psychological problem which caused you to eat more calories. The problem was that you had a hormonal issue where your insulin levels were too high, driving everything into storage fat, leaving you with no energy to burn and therefore making you go out and eat more calories. So the fact that you're eating more is true, but it's a byproduct of this hormonal effect. Just like, for example, if you went out and got a lot of groceries at Costco, but you put it all in the fridge and they have nothing left to eat, what's going to happen? Well, all your food is in the fridge, you have nothing to eat for dinner, so you're going to have to go out and get more. Same thing, if your body stores all your energy, it cannot use it for metabolism. So we know that insulin causes weight gain. Since 1923, it was discovered in 1921, and in 1923, clinicians were already using it to get people to gain weight. People were gaining as much as six pounds a week on insulin. If you look at any studies, and every patient who takes insulin knows this, if you look at any studies such as this and this is the DCCT trial, you can see that the patients who are taking more insulin all gain weight. About 33-33% of them had major weight gain by the end of that trial, and that's because they're taking insulin. Remember, insulin is neither good or bad. Insulin tells your body to store calories, that is, increase body fat. Therefore, if you have too much insulin, you're going to store too much body fat. But it's not that you're eating too much, it's that your insulin is too high. And if you don't have insulin, you'll lose weight. Because again, this is untreated type 1 diabetes. And you see, these patients before the development of insulin, they used to lose weight, lose weight, lose weight until they die, because they couldn't store any of it. So imagine that your storage for calories is completely closed. Well, you can't gain any fat, because there's no insulin there. So we know insulin, too much insulin makes you gain weight, no insulin makes you lose weight, and therefore, the problem is the high levels of insulin. And what is going to cause high levels of insulin? Well, it comes down to the diet. So refined carbohydrates, we know, tend to cause your glucose to spike up. And when you spike up your glucose, your insulin's going to spike up as well. If you eat all the time, you're also going to spike up your insulin, because again, insulin is a nutrient sensor. When you eat, insulin goes up. If you eat six times a day, you'll spike your insulin six times a day. If you eat once a day, you'll spike your insulin once a day. So the whole idea with insulin is that it's not a change in, you know, our understanding of obesity, it's getting back to the fundamentals, that is, from fattening carbohydrates causing obesity to these fattening refined carbohydrates causing the increased insulin levels, which cause obesity. And that's really important, because in the 70s, people were eating less carbohydrates, eating less frequently. If you wanted to lose weight, you'd eat less bread, less desserts, and eat more meat, again, cutting down that insulin and eat less frequently. And that caused less obesity. In the 2000s, to lose weight, people were like, cut the fat, cut the calories, eat more carbohydrates. Don't eat, you know, twice a day, eat 10 times a day. And of course, this 2000s diet, which was the whole calories in, calories out, you know, eat more carbs, because carbs are lower, you know, caloric density. So eat more carbs, eat all the time, graze, led to a huge spike in obesity. And it simply didn't work. And all of us know that. Anybody who's tried a diet knows that. So essentially, the weight loss principles, which I go over in my book, The Obesity Code, it's very simple. You just, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just trying to get you back to our understanding in the 1970s, before we took this enormous detour into calories, it was our understanding of obesity was so calorie centric, that everything was about calories, as if you could eat ice cream for dinner, and still lose weight. And they'd say, wow, your ice cream is because, you know, it's only 500 calories or something. It's like, what is happening to your insulin? Right? And, you know, again, if you ask your grandmother, hey, I, you know, my doctor said I could eat ice cream for dinner and lose weight. She'd say you're insane. Right? You can't eat that. You need to eat real food, eat some meat, eat some vegetables. And she was probably right. Reduce your refined carbohydrates. So not all carbohydrates are bad. But refined carbohydrates, that is white bread, white rice, white potatoes, most processed foods are much worse in that they spike the insulin much higher than unrefined carbohydrates. Eat whole, unprocessed foods, so meats, fish, vegetables. And don't be afraid of the proteins and fats. We've moved way back from the 1990s, when everybody thought fat was causing heart disease, fat doesn't cause heart disease. And now we embrace healthy fats, but also butter and saturated fats and so on are not necessarily bad for us. Humans have been eating saturated fat, like animal fats and butter for thousands of years before, you know, you know, without any, any problems with obesity or heart disease. It wasn't until people started smoking that you really saw a lot of heart disease. And the other thing is don't eat all the time. And that's the concept I introduced in the obesity code, which is intermittent fasting, which people had sort of forgotten about. Obviously, I didn't come up with it and then around thousands of years, but in 2016, at the time I was writing it, there was a huge misunderstanding about intermittent fasting. And really, it's one of the very important principles. That is what is fasting, first of all, so fasting is just any time that you don't eat. Okay, so when you eat, insulin goes up, and you store calories. When you don't eat, which is fasting, your insulin goes down, and your body is going to now take those calories that you've stored and burn them. So it's nothing more or less than giving your body a break from eating so that it can naturally burn off those excess stores of calories, which is the sugar and the body fat. So if you have type two diabetes, and you have too much sugar, then fasting is going to allow you to naturally without medications, lower your sugars, lower your blood sugar, if you have too much body fat, which is obesity, then your body is going to burn that fat. And it's okay. That's why you have that fat in the first place. It's a store of calories. It's for you to use when you don't eat. So you're basically when you fast, you're using your body fat stores for exactly what it was designed for. And we can do that without any harmful problems. And that's that's the whole idea behind fasting is that it's simply a balance, right? It's a balance between eating, which is feeding, which is storing calories and fasting, which is not eating lower insulin, burning calories, you want to keep those in balance. If you think about how people used to eat in the 70s, they'd say breakfast at 8am, say dinner at 6pm and nothing after dinner, and a 14 hour period of fasting without and they did that without even thinking about it. And for them, it was enough to keep them in balance. Then you get to the 2000s, where people are saying eat all the time, like eat breakfast and have a snack, then have lunch and then have a snack, then have dinner. Then before you go to bed, have another snack. And as soon as you wake up, make sure you don't skip eating. It's like, okay, now you're eating 14, 15 hours of the day, instead of 10. You've essentially destroyed your fasting period. So when is your body supposed to use the calories that it stores? It simply cannot. So the understanding fasting is very simple. You have, you know, feeding, which is up here, just calories. So think of it like coal for coal burning fire plant, power plant, right? So if you eat, you're putting energy into your body, which is calories. In this case, it's like coal for a power plant. It's going to activate insulin because energy is coming in, insulin senses that and says, okay, insulin goes up. Now I can either store it as sugar, which is glycogen synthesis, you store it as sugar, or body fat, which is also called de novo lipogenesis. You store it such as in a warehouse, right? So you're going to store it, or you're going to burn some of it, right? And so insulin allows you to do that. But very importantly, when insulin is activated, you cannot take the energy that is stored and burn it. Okay? So insulin, and we've known this for 50 years inhibits lipolysis, which is a fancy scientific way of saying insulin blocks fat burning, right? When insulin is high, energy is coming in, you want to store energy. So you cannot take the energy out of storage. Insulin prohibits that you cannot take sugar out of storage, you cannot take fat out of storage and burn it. It is only when the insulin goes down that you can now take the energy that is stored and take it out. Makes sense, right? So if you had coal coming in, you had two big shipments of coal, you don't want your power plant to burn the stuff that's in your storage plan. You want to use the stuff that's coming in. Makes sense. Body does the same thing. Don't use the stored sugar and stored fat if you have sugar and fat coming in, because you might as well use what's coming in. So fasting allows that hormonal change, allows that insulin fall so that you can actually start burning fat. So this is just to demonstrate the difference between calories and hormones. So we're going to take a situation where people are eating 2,000 calories and burning 2,000 calories, okay, and you have body fat stores, but you're eating all the time, eating constantly, eating really low-fat, high-carb foods. Now you want to lose weight, so you cut down the calories to 1,500, just like all the doctors like myself used to tell you. You cut it down to 1,500, so you're not in balance here. You've got 1,500 coming in, you've got 2,000 that you're trying to burn, and you can't get the energy out of the body fat stores. Why? Because insulin is high. You're eating all the time, you're eating foods that spike up your insulin. Insulin is high means you can't burn fat. Insulin inhibits lipolysis. Can't burn fat. So you've got 1,500 coming in, you're trying to burn 2,000, not a balanced situation, your metabolic rate now drops to 1,500. Has to. There's no option for your body because you kept your insulin levels too high. So let's look at the same number of calories, but you do the intermittent fasting and you allow your hormones to fall. So 2,000 calories coming in, 2,000 calories going out. Now you cut your calories to 1,500. You do that by dropping a meal, so you're fasting, you're allowing your insulin levels to fall. As you allow your insulin levels to fall, the energy then comes out of your body fat stores. You've got 1,500 coming in from food, you've got 500 calories coming from your body fat stores, and your metabolic rate stays the same. So same number of calories. It wasn't about the calories, it's about the way that you change the hormones with the intermittent fasting to allow your body to access its stores of body fat. Insulin inhibits fat burning. That's important. So if you don't allow your insulin to fall, you're not going to be able to do it. Your body will simply reduce its metabolic rate. There's a huge number of advantages with fasting. It's convenient. You can do it any time you want. You're not doing extra work, you're doing less work, right? You don't have to cook, you don't have to clean, you don't have to figure out where you're going to buy, you don't have to shop. It's free. So a lot of diets are great, but they can be very pricey. Simple. You can explain it within a few minutes. Don't eat from this period of time to this period of time. So make sure you go 16 hours without eating. Make sure you go 20 hours without eating. Why? So that your body can burn body fat. Flexible. You can do it sometimes and not other times. If you're going on holidays, then you don't have to fast. You can decide to eat. When you get back, you can decide to fast more to make up for it. And the other thing is it can be used with any diet. So the thing about some diets like Mediterranean, low carb, carnivore, vegan, whatever. What if it doesn't work? You're following a very good Mediterranean diet and you're not losing weight. Well, you can't get more Mediterranean than Mediterranean. So what do you do? You can't do anything. Fasting allows you to use any diet you want. There are certain diets that work better, low carbohydrate diets, for example, for those reasons we talked about. And the thing is that fasting is really not anything that's sort of crazy. It's really easy to understand. When you eat, you want to store calories. When you don't eat, that is when you fast, you're going to burn calories. And that's really all it comes down to. So the whole idea is that the weight gain, the way we thought about weight gain has been so focused on calories when really it shouldn't have been. It was a byproduct of this idea that fat causes heart disease when it's actually smoking that caused heart disease. And yet we're still suffering the consequences. We still hear the doctors, the dieticians telling us count your calories, count your calories, count calories when it didn't work. We know it doesn't work. Everybody knows it doesn't work. I covered this all in the Obesity Code. So if you're interested, you can have a look at that book and also the Complete Guide to Fasting. And also if you're interested in diabetes specifically, there's also the Diabetes. Thanks very much. Thanks for coming. That was amazing. Just a quick question that as you were going through all of the, all of your points, is there a specific time where the insulin kind of subsides? Is it three hours, eight hours, nine hours? When does it come down? And then your body's like, oh, okay, I have now I can go into the fat storage. Is there a specific time? Yeah, so I go, I actually I, you can go on to my YouTube channel as well. I have a lecture called the five stages of intermittent fasting and answers that question. But basically, yes, there is. So after you eat, your insulin is going to go up and it's going to stay up for a couple of hours. Because remember, the food doesn't go in right away. The food gets held in your stomach, your stomach churns it up and then slowly releases that food over a period of a number of hours. So when you eat a big lunch, for example, all that food doesn't go right into your intestines and into your bloodstream. It gets slowly parceled out by the stomach. Refined foods, of course, get absorbed much quicker. So you get a big spike, you know, slower carbohydrates with fiber and all that is going to get released slower. But it's going to take about four to six hours for insulin levels to start to fall. And then once it starts to fall, then that's when you start to see that gradual switch from, you know, using the energy that you've taken in from the food to the energy that you've stored away. So you really want to make sure that you get, you know, a good period of fasting, mostly at night, of course, so that's going to be asleep. And that's why, you know, eating late is not a great idea, because that's one of the biggest ways you're going to cut your fasting period. Your fasting period is going to, you know, dictate how long your body has to sort of use the calories. So you want to get up to, again, the 70s, you're talking about 14 hours sort of every day without thinking about it, right? You can push that a little to 16 hours, if you want to try and get a bit of fat burning. 14 is fairly good for stabilization, but not great for weight loss. And then you can go higher, you can go 20 hours, 24 hours or more. What you do have to avoid is overeating once you stop fasting. And that's a particular problem in my YouTube video, I call it the number one problem of intermittent fasting. People think that, oh, I didn't eat for 16 hours, I can just gorge on whatever I want. No, you cannot. The point is that when you don't eat for 16 hours or 20 hours, I mean, I just did like a four day fast, the next meal was a normal meal. Why? Because during that fasting period, you want your body to essentially eat the calories from body fat, right? So if you then go and eat a massive meal, then you're going to undo a lot of the benefits that you just, you know, went so hard to do. And the thing is that yes, you can do it. But then a lot of people wind up with a lot of like, if you overeat after a fast, you often get stomach aches, which is a reminder that yes, you ate too much when you finish. So try to when you finish it, forget you ever did it. Just go back to your normal eating pattern as normal as you can. Yes, you'll probably eat a bit more. But you know, it's it's it's you're trying to let your body eat the body fat. I laughed Dr. Phung because I did intermittent fasting myself for quite a couple of months. And that's exactly what I did. I would just try to overcompensate with my breakfast and lunches. But it still worked for me, worked for me amazingly. But once I got over the idea of, oh, okay, you know, I just can eat normally and then just skip dinner. Once I got comfortable with that, once the hunger went away after about the third day, I didn't even feel hungry for the dinners. Yeah, just felt normal and actually felt great. Like I had more energy. So anyways, we have tons of questions. A lot of people want to really ask questions. And we want to jump into that. But can you please put the Dr. Phung's book back on? I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the top 10 books of the last decade when it comes to health. If you have not read it, make sure you read it. If you have not read a single book on health, this is the book to read. Definitely get the book. We also have an Amazon link in the description below. But now we're going to jump over to Epoch TV. We're going to pause our streams on Twitter, on YouTube, and we're going to continue our conversation on Epoch TV after a quick 30-second break. And thank you so much, Dr. Phung, again, for joining us and giving us all this insight. I have so many more questions because I did this. I know this works. I still do it. Even this last week, I was like, I need to lose a couple of pounds. So yeah, definitely works. And please, we'll see you guys over on Epoch TV. We'll have a link in the description and on YouTube, on Twitter. We have it everywhere there. So please come join us there. We have a lot more interesting information for you there. See you soon.