#285 Why Intermittent Fasting Works with Dr Jason Fung

Insulin resistance people have heard of ... It really impacts a huge number of conditions, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, which can cause then kidney disease, nerve problems, amputations, cancers related to insulin levels. So, there's just all of these chronic conditions that are really the main focus of today's medicine that are made worse by chronically elevated insulin levels.

If you take the same food at breakfast versus dinner, you're going to have a different insulin response to it. So, you're going to actually have a much higher insulin response at night time versus breakfast.

The failure rate of counting calories for weight loss— The failure rate is somewhere around 95-99%. And yet, we think that this is the scientifically proven way to do things. It's actually proven to fail; it's guaranteed. This is practically guaranteed to fail if you don't adjust the foods that you're eating.

The energy balance equation is always true, but people always misinterpret it to mean that eating fewer calories leads to body fat loss. It does not. In fact, almost every study we've done over the last, sort of, 50-60 years, says that when you simply reduce calories and don't change the composition of your calories, then what happens is that body fat goes down a little bit, but what happens is your metabolic rate goes down more.

You give somebody insulin, and I don't really care how much willpower you have, you gain weight. Why? Because you're literally telling your body to gain that weight.

Unprocessed carbohydrates tend to cause a lot lower spike in insulin than processed foods. So, you take cereals, like Cheerios and stuff, they're really, really high. You take a very refined product, like white bread, just very, very high. Then you look at something like boiled potatoes, and it's just extremely low.

Do you really think that our body is just so stupid that we would store calories as glucose and body fat, but the minute that you don't eat anything, you're going to burn muscle? Do you think that we survived as a species to become the dominant species on Earth because our body is so intrinsically stupid?

This idea that you should sort of eat all the time and it being healthy is probably one of the most damaging things that we've done to people. It's not natural. It's not what we used to do. We haven't done that for most of our history.

When you're eating, you're storing calories. When you're not eating, you're using calories. That's all it is.