1031 The Science of Intermittent Fasting (Foods To Live Longer & Reverse Type 2 Diabetes) w/Jason Fung

“There’s so much suffering in the world that’s not necessary if people had the right understanding of our bodies.”This is the second part to Lewis' interview with Physician, author, and researcher, Dr. Jason Fung. He is known for writing groundbreaking science-based books about diabetes and obesity. He is also the co-founder of The Fasting Method, which is a program to help people lose weight and reverse Type 2 Diabetes naturally with fasting. Dr. Fung says, “The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands.”For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1031For Part 1 go to: www.lewishowes.com/1030Check out Jason’s website: www.thefastingmethod.comRead his new book: https://thefastingmethod.com/book/the-cancer-code/The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Fung?

  A lot of people will say that type 2 diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive. It's actually a total lie. Type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease. I think that fasting is actually a part of natural life. So if you think about fasting, people think it's some, you know, strange thing that you do, but it's really not.

• 0:19Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:42Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,031 with Dr. Jason Fung. Deepak Chopra said, "If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want, instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with." And author Brian Wansink said, "The best diet is the one you don't know you're on." My guest today is physician, author, and researcher, Dr. Jason Fung. And this is the second part of my interview with Jason. So if you haven't listened to part one, you can go do that at lewishouse.com/1030 to check it out right after this. In that first

• 1:23Lewis Howes?

  episode, we discussed the main causes of cancer, what they are, the foods to cut out to decrease your risk of cancer, what snacking does to our brain and our digestive system in a negative way. If it's possible to reverse cancer, we talked about supplements and vitamins, if some of them are actually bad for us, and so much more. So make sure to check that out. But in this episode, we talk about what causes type 2 diabetes and how it's possible to reverse it, the importance of intermittent fasting, and how to do it even if you're an extreme athlete, how our mental health affects our physical health, the top five foods that Dr. Jason would choose to eat for the rest of his life. We talk about the three most important lessons for living a healthy life, the biggest myths around ketogenic

• 2:08Lewis Howes?

  diet, and so many other Diets and so much more. Again, if you're inspired at any moment listening to this episode, please share it with a friend, lewishouse.com/1031. Share that with a friend, text someone, post it on social media and make sure to tag me as well when you're listening to this. And a quick reminder, click that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now while you're listening to this podcast so you can be up to date for the greatness coming to your life every single week. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Jason Fung.

• 2:48Lewis Howes?

  What is the cause of type 2 diabetes? How does that develop in humans?

• 2:53Jason Fung?

  Yeah, type 2 diabetes is essentially too much sugar in the body. So it's not just in the blood, but it's in your whole body. Right? So if you think about the body like a sugar bowl, so imagine your body is a sugar bowl and over the years, you're sort of eating a lot of sugar. You're eating a lot more and not using it up. So the sugar sort of builds up, builds up, builds up. Eventually it gets to the point where it starts to overflow. That's basically what type 2 diabetes is. You've stored up so much sugar in your body that it overflows into the blood. As the blood sugar goes up, then you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Now, the point is that if you look at standard medications, so some of the newer ones are quite good, but the older

• 3:34Jason Fung?

  medications like insulin and so on, what that, what those drugs did was you have this full sugar bowl that's full. Every time you eat the sugar would go into the bowl, flow out and spill out into the blood, the blood sugar will go high. The solution to these old drugs was to take that sugar that's in the blood and simply cram it back into the body, right? You just shove it in, shove it in. And of course, there would be right reach a time where shoving it in didn't work and it's still overflow. So then you get a second medication and really shove it in.

• 4:03Lewis Howes?

  Oh man, is that what insulin does?

• 4:05Jason Fung?

  That's what insulin does.

• 4:06Lewis Howes?

  It pushes it back into the body.

• 4:08Jason Fung?

  Yeah. So your body has too much insulin. So remember, insulin's job is to take that sugar that you've eaten and put it into the body. And the point is that you have had too much insulin over time because you've put in so much into that bowl that it's overflowed. The solution is not to put more in, right? It's just like if you have a suitcase, think about a suitcase, you put in a few shirts, it's fine, then it gets full, you can't close it, right? So the solution is not to put more and more force to push it in. The solution is to get rid of all that stuff. Same as the sugar bowl, the solution is to get rid of all that sugar. So how do you do that? There's only two things you need to know, right? Don't put it in. And two, let your body burn it off. That's it. So that's how you do that.

• 4:53Jason Fung?

  One, you can use a low carbohydrate diet and two, you can use intermittent fasting. Cause when you don't eat, nothing's going in and you're gonna start burning off the sugar. Um, I mean, you can think about an analogy, for example. Suppose you have a car and you go to the gas station three times a day and fill up on gas. Now your gas tank is full and every time you go to pump the gas, it overflows and spills into your backseat and is now making you sick. So what should you do? Well, I'll tell you what you wouldn't do. You wouldn't go back to that gas station three times a day. What you would do, of course, is drive that car around, drive it, drive it, drive it, until the gas tank starts to go down. Same as the body. Every time you're just putting more sugar in, putting more sugar in, so what should you do?

• 5:38Jason Fung?

  Well, run that body without sugar for a while. And that's what intermittent fasting does. And that's why we were able to reverse, we, we wrote a case series about three patients who we did this. Um, and we just reversed diabetes, like they had twenty years of diabetes and we still reversed it in them. It's insane how quickly they got better.

• 5:55Lewis Howes?

  What does type two diabetes do to someone? How does it affect them?

• 6:00Jason Fung?

  Yeah, the type two diabetes is one of the worst diseases we have. Unfortunately, type two diabetes and prediabetes is about fifty percent of the American population.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:09Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Lewis Howes?

  Fifty percent of the American population has type two diabetes?

• 6:12Jason Fung?

  Or prediabetes.

• 6:14Lewis Howes?

  Or prediabetes?

• 6:15Jason Fung?

  Prediabetes is the majority, so about ten percent, ten, fifteen percent is type two diabetes, about thirty, thirty-five percent is prediabetes. Um, so the point is that if you, uh, put all that sugar into your body, what happens is that you can cram it in, cram it in, but then all that sugar sort of goes all over the body and every single organ just starts to rot away. And this is the problem, this is the reason you get like gangrene, you know, the foot goes black, the toe goes black. That's the reason why you get all kinds of infections that you don't normally get because there's sugar everywhere. The bacteria love that, right? So you get infections that you don't see in any other diseases. You, you get, you know, too much sugar, it rots away your kidneys, you get kidney disease, you get blindness

• 6:58Jason Fung?

  because all the sugar damage to the eyes, so it's the leading cause of non-traumatic blindness. Um, you know, kidney disease is what I deal with a lot because the kidneys just start to sort of rot away. So you go on to dialysis, for example, you get heart attacks, you get strokes. So the whole gamut, and then you get cancer, of course, because of the too much insulin. Insulin is not only a nutrient sensor, it's a growth factor. So it tells your body to grow. So all of those things that are important in terms of killing people, which is heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer, is going to be made much worse with type 2 diabetes and, uh, you know, and that's why it's so important to really take care of yourself.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  If someone is listening here, how would they know if they have type 2 diabetes or if they're prediabetic?

• 7:47Jason Fung?

  Yeah, generally you have to get a blood test to do that. You test something called the A1C. Uh, most people who are overweight are at risk of that. And, uh, the, the point is a lot of people will say that type 2 diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive. It's actually a total lie. Type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease. It's simply too much sugar. You need to empty that sugar bowl. That's the whole idea. And that's how you reverse it. Taking medications is not going to reverse your disease because you're simply cramming more stuff into the body. So you can get a simple test. It's a routine test and, uh, you can, you can see if you have are at risk of this. And the

• 8:29Jason Fung?

  point is that if you do find out that you're either diabetic or type 2 or prediabetic, then you got to understand this is a reversible disease, but it's largely a dietary disease. So therefore the treatment must be dietary. You got to get to the, exactly, you got to get to that root cause. And it's not, it doesn't mean you have to buy expensive food, right? You could simply fast, which is free, and you could still reverse and get so much healthier.

• 8:57Lewis Howes?

  So I'm, and what I'm hearing you say is it's 100% possible to reverse type 2 diabetes and prediabetes? Through fasting and through eliminating sugar from the body.

• 9:11Jason Fung?

  Yeah, so sugar, refined sugars especially, so sugar, which is fructose and high fructose corn syrup and that kind of thing. And then a lot of the refined carbohydrates are carbohydrates are actually chains of sugar. They're actually chains of glucose in the body. So they're, they tend to raise the blood sugar.

• 9:29Lewis Howes?

  Is that like breads and bagels?

• 9:31Jason Fung?

  Bread, bagels, rice, potatoes. Yeah, all of those things.

• 9:36Lewis Howes?

  So potatoes and rice are not good for you if you have type two diabetes?

• 9:41Jason Fung?

  If you have type two diabetes, it tends to, so we, we do this thing called the glycemic index, which is uh, of certain foods, which one raises the blood glucose the most and carbohydrates like rice and potatoes and bread tend to be the highest. I think sugar is probably much worse for you than any of those. So, um, but the, so, so sugar sort of is number one enemy for me. Number two is eating all the time is probably the the really the, the other thing that's really bad. I mean, you get this advice sometimes. I think it's so dumb. Uh, eat six times a day. It's like, one, nobody's ever done that before. Two, what happens when you eat six times a day? Well, if you eat a small portion of food and then deliberately stop, which is what they're telling you to do.

• 10:26Jason Fung?

  So eat a small portion, not until you're full, but just a little bit and then stop. What happens? Well, we know what happens because that's what an appetizer is. A small tasty portion of food that makes you more.

• 10:36Lewis Howes?

  More hungry. I want to put more in my stomach.

• 10:40Jason Fung?

  So why would you want to do this six times a day? You're gonna, you know, eat a little bit of food, then before you're full, actually stop while you're hungry and wanting more and do this six times a day. You're gonna use your willpower. You're gonna use all your willpower just to do this when that was completely. You know, it's totally against it because everybody, you know, there's this inertia, right? It's like my son, right? You can't get him into the bath once he's in. You can't get him out of the bath, right? Because once you're in, you're comfortable, right? Same thing, when you eat, you should eat until you're full, hopefully of good food. That's the way that we are designed to eat. When you're not eating, you don't eat, right? You just let the existing conditions sort of run.

• 11:22Jason Fung?

  You don't eat a little bit, make yourself hungry, then stop and do it over and over and over again. That's a, that's a recipe for failure, right? And then when people fail, what happens is people say, well, you know, these people had no willpower. It's like it has nothing to do with willpower. It all has to do with the habits that you put in. If your habit is to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and nothing in between, like virtually everybody in the seventies. Well, hey, it's easy to stay slim. They were eating white bread, like nobody ate whole wheat bread back then, right? I ate a sandwich for lunch at school every single day, as did everybody else in my class, right? Heanut butter and jam, classic, right? So it was, it's not, it's not the, the willpower.

• 12:04Jason Fung?

  It's putting in those healthy habits, not eating all the time, of not snacking all the time, of, you know, hopefully avoiding those, those foods. And there's so many things we do to sort of sabotage ourselves, right? I mean, if you're a, you know, if I was a business owner with a lot of people, the first thing I'd do, I mean, and this probably applies pre-COVID, is, you know, to say, there is no food in the office, right? Because there's no reason that you need to eat if you're working, right? If you were and, and say, there's no food in the office, there's no food in the conference rooms. When we have meetings, we won't have food, there might be coffee, but there's no cookies, right? And these are the ways we sabotage ourselves, right? Like, why do we need to do this?

• 12:48Jason Fung?

  Like, I always think, if I'm in a meeting, right? And it's in the middle of the afternoon, and I was hungry in nineteen seventies, would I really get up? Leave the meeting, go find myself a donut? And come back, people be like, what the hell is this guy doing, right? But if I'm bored out of my mind in this meeting and there's a donut sitting in front of me, guess what, there it goes, right? Or, or in the movie theaters or in front of the TV or whatever, right? It, or in the car or whatever. It's, it's simply the habits that you put in. It's not a matter of willpower. It's, it's identifying these behavioral changes that can sort of lead you to success. And finding a community of people that is going to say, yes, we agree with you.

• 13:31Jason Fung?

  There's no bowls of candy on, on the desk. This is a place of work. I don't want to sabotage weight loss efforts by putting out a bowl of candy. That's not acceptable because if somebody's losing weight, I don't think this person should be doing that. Right? You're tempting people every single time. Like it may have been a good gesture in nineteen seventy-five, but it's not a good gesture now. Like this is not, this is where we work. This is not what we do, right? And, and these are the sort of things that you can now, I start, once you understand obesity, you can start to identify, okay, these are behaviors. These are little things we never thought about that really are very simple. Like, you know, very simple to do that could lead to a big uh change. And we have a website, we have a program that does that called thefastingmethod.com.

• 14:15Jason Fung?

  And that's what we try to help people with, establish these patterns, find themselves a community where you can say, hey, I'm having problems with headaches during fasting. Has anybody else had this? And then people will chime in and say, yeah, there's this, there's this, right? And that's what your mom used to do for you, like, but now, of course, nobody fasts. So nobody's able to help you. So you need to find the supportive community and that's what we've tried to build and also the tools uh to ask questions, get the education, that kind of thing.

• 14:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, especially if you're the only one in your uh local community trying to fast. It's gonna be very hard when everyone else is eating around you and they don't get it. They're not in on the game of what you're trying to do. So finding that support and accountability is going to be crucial. I'm curious your take on fruit. I've had many different doctors and scientists and researchers on uh Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Dr. Stephen Gundry, uh just recently, Dr. Peter Attia, who all kind of mention that fruit may not be the best thing for us in abundance. Uh and being very specific on when we eat fruit, how much of fruit we eat because of the sugar intake that it has. What's your?

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  Research show about fruit in terms of in our diet. Is it more beneficial or is it more harmful in general?

• 15:36Jason Fung?

  Uh, I'm sort of, I, I, I agree with them, uh, because the fruit contains fructose, which is chemically sort of the what you get in sugar as well. So when you eat carbohydrates like bread, it's mostly glucose. When you eat fruit, it's mostly fructose. Sugar, table sugar is sort of half and half. That's where you get high fructose corn syrup as well. Um, and the fructose is fructose, no matter where you get it from. So in, in

• 16:01Lewis Howes?

  Whether it's from an organic apple or banana, it's still fructose.

• 16:05Jason Fung?

  It's still fructose. So if you drink a Coke and it has high fructose corn syrup, it's still fructose and some glucose, right? Which is no different than you'd get if you were to eat an apple with, you know, some rice or something. It'd be like glucose and fructose. It's the same thing. On the other hand, the, there's, there's all kinds of other things that happens with whole fruit that may mitigate some of that badness, right? And this is the whole point that I try to make is that there's a difference between added sugars and natural sugars. So if you eat an orange or an apple, yes, the fructose is the fructose, but there's a natural limit that you have. You can't just keep eating that, right? Because you can't eat like 10 apples at a time.

• 16:49Jason Fung?

  You'll just feel full and you'll just not want to, right? That's just life. Whereas if you put sugar in, like, you know, a Coca-Cola, like a Big Gulf or something, you can keep drinking that thing, like the whole thing. Like lots of people do. Um, those giant things at the movie theaters, people do, they'd sign sort of mindlessly sip this sweet, sweet stuff. And the amount of sugar is probably equal to like 10 apples. But the, the, the apple had all this fiber, it had all this, you know, the pulp and all this other stuff that naturally put a break on how much you can get. So yes, on the one hand, fructose is fructose. So I sort of agree with that. On the other hand, I sort of disagree in that I don't think that whole fruit is nearly

• 17:32Jason Fung?

  as bad as added sugars because there's no limit on the amount of sugar you can add to something. Like you can always make it sweeter, you can always make it sweeter and you won't even, you won't ever get that sort of break so on, on, on stopping. So I think it's a real different, there's, there's a big difference, but I'm not a huge fan. If you're trying to lose weight, Yeah, I think you do need to limit your fruit. It's still fructose. It's not the, it's not the worst thing, but it's not the best thing for you either. Um, but as a, as a sort of treat or whatever, it's probably a whole lot better than a cookie, for example, which doesn't have those natural satiety hormones.

• 18:11Lewis Howes?

  Curious, you're, uh, I've asked this with a few different people in this space. If you're on a, uh, a five food only diet for the rest of your life to help the quality of your life, your, the, the health of your body, your minds, and to help lengthen your life to the best of your ability, obviously. Um, if you could only eat five foods, what would those be based on your scientific research and based on what those foods would do for the body?

• 18:43Jason Fung?

  Well, I think that's a, um, I mean, meat is probably one of the most nutritious foods there is. And I know that there's a lot of sort of debate, sort of environmental debate. There's ethical debates about ethical raising of meat and so on. But the, you know, if you're to set all that aside and just say from a nutrition standpoint, one is delicious. And you know that because when you watch shows like Naked and Afraid, like you ever see how excited they get when they get a fish or something? It's insane, right? They're like, oh my God.

• 19:20Jason Fung?

  Or it'll be like a rat or something and they'll be like, oh, right? It's like, you don't go like, whoa, cauliflower, right? Uh, even though cauliflower, I love cauliflower, right? It's, it's a great food, but you can see that it's, it's a natural food for humans. Like we really get, that's part of the natural thing. So meat is, is, uh, you know, meat and fish and chicken for sure would be up there. And, and you know, scientifically, of course, they're much more complete sources of protein for us than natural. Cause we're animals, so therefore we use animal proteins much better than we can use plant proteins. Um, so that'd probably be a base, uh, if you, you know, if, uh, you know, so you could actually survive just on meat. So people like the Inuit, for example, subsisted largely on meat.

• 20:05Jason Fung?

  However, if you set aside the ethical, you know, costs and so on, uh, then you might wanna, you know, eat some other foods. So there, there are some carbohydrate containing foods, which can be very good too. Something like beans, for example. People have eaten beans for year, like, you know, millennia, like subsisted on beans and so on. So that'd be a very, again, a vegetarian source of very good protein and can actually be quite delicious. Like, you know, people eat it in all different kinds of ways. Um, you know, for me, it's, it's one of these things that is, uh, you know, one of these things that you can put on a plate that, that, that takes that sort of carbohydrate. But there's lots of fiber and all that kind of

• 20:46Jason Fung?

  thing. You know, some other vegetables and fruits that I really enjoy, like something like avocado. It's like, I love avocado. I think everybody loves avocado, honestly. So, and there's so many vitamins in there and so on. So, um, you know, that's, that's something, tho- those are probably the main things I could think of. Like, other, other vegetables that would be well up there. So any of the above ground vegetables, like to me, I love cauliflower and broccoli. I mean, those are just foods that I could eat sort of, uh, easily. It's, it's one of these things, if you're trying to replace a carbohydrate side dish, like if you're thinking, okay, I have a bit of meat and then, you know, in the past, you might say, oh, I'll have a lot of potato or rice. You could easily put cauliflower or, or broccoli or something in there that just totally takes the place of one of those.

• 21:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Jason Fung?

  Um, so those are some of the foods that I, I think are, you know, I, I'd probably, I could probably do pretty well with those things. I mean, beans, I would include tofu as well, because I eat a lot of tofu being, being Chinese.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  Okay. I like those. Those are good. What about athletes and fasting? I'm an athlete. Uh, I'll, I'll mix it up from being like a, a power sprinter type of athlete doing different basketball, uh, um, weightlifting training, things like that to, right now, I'm also in marathon training because I'm committed to do my first marathon in the next six months. So I'm doing longer runs. How does fasting work with someone who is working out often? It, can you do both? Do you need to limit your ability to exercise? And again, going back to, would you lose muscle as an athlete if you're doing intermittent fasting or three to four day fastings?

• 22:25Jason Fung?

  Yeah, so that's a great question. You have to sort of differentiate between sort of the weekend athlete, the one who really isn't at that super high level of competition. For those people, you could probably do whatever fasting you want, because remember, the point is that you can leave it up to your body to find those sources of calories. So if you're one of these guys, works out two or three times a week and so on, plays a little bit of ball in the weekend sort of thing, and that's most people. You could do whatever, you could fast and then do workouts. So that's perfectly acceptable, because if you don't eat, your body will simply take those calories that it needs from your body fat. There is a period of adaptation from when your body, so remember,

• 23:07Jason Fung?

  there's two sources of fuel in the body. There's sugar, glucose, and there's fat. So your body, your muscles, so your legs and so on, can use either glucose or it can use fat. In order to efficiently use fat, you have to train it to use fat, and that often takes weeks, like three, four, or five weeks, in order to get that. And you can do actually muscle biopsies of people who are undergoing this transition, and you can see that they start to gain the machinery that it needs to efficiently metabolize fat. So if you are eating a high carb diet, as most of us did for most of the 90s and 2000s and so on, and then all of a sudden you say, I'm gonna fast, well, you have no more glucose. Muscles are gonna be highly inefficient, because they haven't been used to using fat.

• 23:52Jason Fung?

  So some of the top end athletes have actually started to train themselves to use fat. So Chris Froome, for example, the Tour de France, ultra-low carb, and there's Zach Bittner, who's one of these ultra marathoners, 100-mile races and stuff, he uses a very low-fat, sorry, a low-carb diet, training his muscle, a lot of fat, so he's training his muscles to metabolize fat. So a lot of these, Dave Scott's, a very sort of legendary triathlete, who really talks about low-carb, high-fat nutrition, Tim Noakes, who writes a lot about that, and these are all exercise physiologists. So you could really do well with that, and fasting's really just the same. The problem with fasting, of course, in elite, sort

• 24:36Jason Fung?

  of high-level athletes, is that you actually need all those calories, right? So you really can't get by without eating, because you're using it, you need it, right? And most people don't have enough body fat to sustain those sort of things, right? Because they're in that sort of... Less than ten percent body fat, not the sort of twenty five percent that you see in the general population. So what we do there, and we've worked with a number of elite athletes, is that you have to separate what you're trying to do. So in the on season, you really can't fast.

• 25:07Lewis Howes?

  It's not, it's, it's hard to do.

• 25:09Jason Fung?

  You need too much energy. Um, and your body, you know, to perform at a high level, the carbohydrates often are slightly better than fat, unless you're in one of these ultra marathon sort of endurance events, in which case that will be a perfect.

• 25:24Lewis Howes?

  Cause they give you, the carbohydrates give you the sugar that your body needs for the energy in that moment, like.

• 25:28Jason Fung?

  It probably gives you extra boost. So if you're like sprinting, the, you know, metabolizing glucose is probably slightly better than fat, even if you train yourself to use fat. When you get to triathlon and ultra marathon and stuff, you probably don't see that, that difference as much, which is why you have somebody like Chris Froome, who's a, you know, he won the Tour de France a number of times and Dave Scott, who was a, you know, did all these triathlons, who, who talk about eating high fat meals and so on. So, uh, you know, Peter Bruckner, who's with the Australian Cricket National Team and, you know, Tim Noakes, who, who did all this research. And then, uh, but in the off season, you certainly could do this. And this is something that's, uh, it's called training in the fasted state, which is something that they're doing a lot of research on.

• 26:12Jason Fung?

  And this is sort of the off season. So we've worked with baseball players and soccer players and rugby players and stuff on this. And the point of this is that when you fast, what you do is you fast for twenty four hours, then you do your training and then you eat. So when you fast, your insulin goes down, but your growth hormone goes up and your noradrenaline goes up. So as you train, you actually can work harder than you have before and your growth hormone goes up. So when you eat and preferably a high protein diet, then you're going to rebuild. So this is especially important in the off season because you're, what you're trying to do is sort of rebuild all that sort of stuff, the wear and tear on your body.

• 26:50Lewis Howes?

  They're trying to clean out the, the autophagy, you're trying to get rid of that stuff and then build muscle or build, or get rid of inflammation, you know, heal your joints, all that stuff.

• 26:59Jason Fung?

  Exactly. And this is something that we'll do with people in sort of the off season. Um, and then.

• 27:06Lewis Howes?

  Process like a twenty four hour fast and then train or eat first after that?

• 27:11Jason Fung?

  No, you train and then you eat because if you train and then eat, your body will start to use some of that protein to rebuild. Your growth hormone is up, you've got the protein. And that pro- that period of time where you you eat afterwards, it doesn't have to be like, you know, you stop running and start showing. Like you have like about twelve hours in that window where your body is actually going to more efficiently use the protein. So this is something that, you know, we'll do with people in the off season to try and prevent injury and all this kind of stuff. The one other interesting thing is we worked with uh Georges Saint Pierre, who was this mixed martial artist. And he actually was very fascinating because he loved the fasting. So he'd do these long fasts and he. That shredded, guy's a machine.

• 27:56Jason Fung?

  And he said that, boy, when he used to fast. Every he said that when he used to go and fight, because he did this during competitions too, he'd say, when I went to fight or when I was training in the fighting. Like everything looked like it was in slow motion as hitting, you know, as, you know, he he felt unstoppable. So he would actually use it during his uh, you know, which we don't often do. But you're, you know, again, understanding the physiology of what's happening with that higher level of noradrenaline, you know, that increased concentration. Everything kind of gets like that hungry wolf, you get tunneled in, you get focused in to a higher degree. He said that, you know, oh, boy, he, you know, that was this sort of like secret, you know, weapon.

• 28:38Jason Fung?

  He could, he could, you know, he he could move and and do other stuff and it is crazy. But he, that was an example of it depends on your sport, something like baseball, for example. We've done it for people in the season because if you're a starting pitcher, you have like four days where you're doing nothing. So you could actually use that in your sport because even during the season. If you're a starting pitcher, well, you've got two or three days in the middle where you actually try to get this sort of rebuilding, regenerating. And then sort of break it in time for your for your start or whatever. So it depends a little bit on the sport and the situation.

• 29:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm curious about fasting and eating unhealthy while you fast, like intermittent fasting. Are you able to do a fourteen, sixteen hour window of fasting or eighteen hour window fasting? And then eat any junk food, fast food, candies, sugars you want and still get the same benefits? Or is it really the quality of foods also that you're eating in that four hour window? While you do intermittent fasting?

• 29:44Jason Fung?

  Yeah, it's both. So if you eat just junk and fast, you're gonna get, it's better than if you ate junk all the time. But it's not better than eating healthy and not fasting. And that's what one of the recent studies said. So one of the recent studies that was completed on fasting, they said, well, if you do this sort of eight hour window, uh, you don't lose any weight and maybe it might be bad. But the, one of the things and the way they did the study is they said that you eat whatever you want during that period of time. So it's like, you, we don't know what they ate, but if you eat, you know, chocolate donuts and stuff and french fries all day, you know, in that eight hour window, that's not good for you. So there are two sort of different levers. So one is the foods that you eat and one is the fasting.

• 30:26Jason Fung?

  And so if you're, you know, if, if you're doing both, you're gonna get the biggest bang for your buck. If you do one but not the other, it'll be okay, but you know, doing neither of course is the worst.

• 30:37Lewis Howes?

  Right. You're eating whatever you want and you're eating all day and fasting, you're screwed.

• 30:42Jason Fung?

  Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of people do.

• 30:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Jason Fung?

  Yeah, for a lot of diseases and, and you know, cancer is sort of one of those ultimate diseases that winds up being very, very, um, you know, once you get it, it's really hard to turn that back. And that's why it's so important to really stop it before it gets to that point. And, and, and, and that's the, the thing that we have to really look at is, you know, let's really talk about what it is that you have to do because it's not this sort of. You know predetermined event, right? It's not like, oh, I'm predetermined to have cancer when I am sixty five or whatever it is. Like, the genes are the same, you know, the lifestyle to some extent is, you know,

• 31:30Jason Fung?

  determined by where you are born and where you live, but there's so many things that we can do to raise or lower, like even to the extent that it's almost as powerful as stopping smoking, right? It's just such a powerful determinant of cancer and dwarfs every other thing in there, right? If you talk about pesticides and, you know, stuff, it's like one percent, we use this term called PAF or population attribution factor, which is like thirty five percent of cancer can be attributed to smoking and thirty percent is diet and pesticide might be one percent and radiation might be two percent, right? It's negligible compared to the diet. Why? Because we're exposing ourselves to

• 32:13Jason Fung?

  this diet day in, day out, day in, day out, as opposed to pesticide, which were or, or, you know, some sunscreen or something, which is not like every day, day after day.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  Right. Are there toxins stored in our fat? And if so, is that dangerous to fast if there's toxins in the fat?

• 32:34Jason Fung?

  Not really. I mean, some people talk about that and if there is, it's, it's a very minor point. I mean, so I know there's this whole theory that we get fat because, you know, our fat is trying to lock away these toxins and stuff, but there's really very little data to suggest that's true. If that's true, then of course being fat is better than not being fat. That is, the skinny people should also be being exposed to these sort of toxins as well, but it's not true. You can clearly see that the people who are fatter have more risk of all kinds of diseases, predominantly type two diabetes and cancer and heart disease.

• 33:13Lewis Howes?

  What's, you, you mentioned paleo and ketogenic diet. What's the biggest myth about ketogenic diet right now? It seems like everyone's trying to do this or talking about it.

• 33:22Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I think the ketogenic diet is a perfectly reasonable diet from a scientific standpoint. That is, if you look at what it is, it's really high in fat, but not just fat. So if you, you know, as with anything, and I was sort of in on the beginning of this is that we talked a lot about natural fats, like not eating a lot of corn oil and refined vegetable oil and margarine, right? It's eating natural fats, like animal fats and coconut fat and that kind of thing. So natural fats, not going crazy on protein and then really, really going very low on carbohydrates. And I think that that makes a lot of sense for weight loss and that's why it's, it's become such a popular diet.

• 34:06Jason Fung?

  And I think there's all these, there's this reaction to it that, oh, it's really, really unhealthy for you. And I don't think there's anything inherently unhealthy for you about the keto diet. It's also not a super easy diet to follow. Um, anything that's really different from what you're used to is not easy to follow. That's not to say that you couldn't follow it, but it, it, it does, um, it does tend to get a little difficult, uh, over time because, yeah, people enjoy carbohydrates. So, um, and this is the thing is, is that it's, it's, there's a, you know, when you're only talking about the foods and you have to be very, very strict on the foods as opposed to when you can say, okay, I can be leaning on the foods if I'm, if I'm gonna up the

• 34:49Jason Fung?

  fasting, like, well, I'll dial this down, but I'll dial this up so that I can sort of balance it, right? It gives you more flexibility to do it. But I think one of the big myths is that it's a super unhealthy diet, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. As, as it gets bigger, then you wind up attracting all these people that are trying to sell you keto bars and keto shakes. And it's like, that was sort of like the, remember the paleo movement, which was all about the caveman diet? Then you get these paleo bars. Like, yes, the cavemen did not eat no bars, right? It's like, that's not a thing. So the movement winds up getting a little bit diluted as opposed to the original sort of movement, which was a lot of natural fats.

• 35:32Jason Fung?

  A lot of intermittent fasting was sort of built right in because there's talking about, well, you're gonna eat until you're full and don't eat unless you're not. You know, unless you're really hungry. So there's a lot of intermittent fasting baked into keto originally. And like I said, some of it gets moved out. You you wind up attracting all these other people who try and put their sort of spin on it.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  Commercialize it. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:52Jason Fung?

  Yeah, yeah, commercialize it.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  What about, what what's your thought then on the bulletproof or the coffee with ghee? Method, uh, you know, where you fast intermittent fast, but then you have coffee with a little bit of ghee or something like that. Is that something you feel like is useful while intermittent fasting? Or is it better to just do water only and black coffee or no coffee?

• 36:16Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I think that the classic is water only. Uh, coffee, like black coffee and tea, like green tea, herbal tea, make very little difference. So even though they're not part of a classic fast, black coffee makes no difference. There's no calories. There's very little anything else, right? When you get to bulletproof coffee, it's actually very interesting because again, the the main point of intermittent fasting is you're trying to reduce your insulin. So you're getting into the sort of fat burning. When you take pure fat, so coffee with ghee or whatever like that, you're taking almost pure fat, which is interesting because it's actually not going to affect your insulin at all. So some people do very well on that because what you try to do, of course,

• 36:59Jason Fung?

  is you take that bulletproof coffee, um, and then you don't eat. Like, that's the point. You're not taking it and then eating, you know, a big muffin, right? That's not the point of that, uh, exercise.

• 37:10Lewis Howes?

  You're not dipping the donut in the coffee.

• 37:14Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So you're just trying to take it and then not eat. And if it allows you to not eat for a long enough period of time, because some people say, oh, yeah, I get this so full, then you're going to be net better. So remember, when you're taking almost pure fat, you're not having any insulin effect. That fat actually goes almost straight into your fat stores, but it keeps you in that fat burning mode. So it's.

• 37:35Lewis Howes?

  So it's adding some fat storage, but it's burning as well.

• 37:39Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So it depends on your net balance. That is if the fat that you put in allows you to fast for a long enough period that you're gonna balance it out, then you're net better. If you're gonna take a bulletproof coffee at nine o'clock and then eat something at ten o'clock, well, you you didn't take you didn't buy yourself enough time with that bulletproof coffee to offset that. It's the way that the body metabolizes fat. And it's it's it's strange because it's not usual for a body, like, we don't usually just eat a stick of butter. Like, that's not a meal, right? So therefore, that's why this is sort of like a hack, because it's sort of this thing that people do, but it has to give you enough time to come up

• 38:22Jason Fung?

  benefit, right? It's like investing, right? You have to put in money to make money and you hope that you don't just throw it away, right? Same thing, you're taking in calories to try and fast for long enough to burn net more calories.

• 38:34Lewis Howes?

  What would be the ultimate way to do intermittent fasting in your mind? And is this something that we should do every day, intermittent fasting, or periods of time, seasons of life?

• 38:45Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I that's a great question. I think that fasting is actually a part of natural life. So if you think about fasting, people think it's some, you know, strange thing that you do, but it's really not. That's where the word breakfast comes in, right? So the meal that breaks your fast, you have to fast to break your fast. So even baked into the English language, and it's actually not just the English language, in French, it's petit déjeuner. J'ene is the word to fast, so it's to break your fast. So the point is that you're supposed to feed and fast, so you're supposed to be at twelve to fourteen hours every single day. Yeah, maybe once in a while you'll have a midnight meal or whatever, but that's for, in general, you should be fasting every single day.

• 39:27Jason Fung?

  Then I think then there's occasional longer fast. And I think this is the point is to, you know, every once in a while, just to sort of cleanse the system, keep things kind of going. And that's the way we did it, right? If you look at any of the major religions, you know, some did it more than others, Greek Orthodox had all kinds of fasting periods and, but, you know, and people would do it differently. Mormons would do it differently from Catholics would do it differently from Buddhists, for example. But they all had this idea of fasting. Buddhists, for example, won't eat after twelve noon. So they'll just fast until the next day. So sort of a four-hour eating window every single day, sort of thing. So that's, that's the way they do it. But this occasional longer fast is, I think,

• 40:12Jason Fung?

  beneficial to sort of activate the autophagy and get the benefits of a longer fast because you're getting different things happening at different stages. If you're getting 12 to 14 hours every day, you're getting a lot of the benefits. And then every once in a while, you try and get the benefits of that longer fast. And you do it at pre-specified times of the year. And religion is what used to tie people into this whole cycle. Or they'd do it because it was winter, right? You'd have a big meal at Thanksgiving. After that, you know, there's not a lot of food coming in. So then, you know, you'd have longer periods of, of very little to eat.

• 40:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I mean, I've had both Dr. David Sinclair on and also Dr. Peter Attia, who've talked about if you want to live a longer life, you, you almost need to have fasting in your life. You, you need it to help with autophagy, to help with getting rid of these precancerous cells, to help with eliminating diseases, all these different things. The body needs less food or windows of time where it's eating a lot less food to help cultivate a longer living life. Now, obviously, there's certain things that might happen that aren't going to guarantee the length of our life. But what have you found in your research on this process to extend life?

• 41:31Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I totally agree with those guys. Those are smart guys. And I think that the, the point is that our body has sort of two ways that it can go. You can either go into sort of growth mode, or it can go into cell repair and maintenance mode. And the point is that you, you really, in order to maximize sort of longevity, you want to go more towards sort of maintenance mode. And the way you do that, of course, is by eating less. And fasting plays a big role in that because again, if you eat, then you're going to activate the nutrient sensors. The nutrient sensors are going to tell your body, you must grow because you grow when food is available, right? So you put yourself into growth mode when insulin is up, when mTOR is up, you're going to go into growth mode.

• 42:16Jason Fung?

  And it's great if you're young, you know, you're, you're a kid, you want to grow, that's fine. But think of it like a like a race car, right? You rev that engine, you're gonna go really fast. But you keep revving that engine, it's not gonna last for very long, right? So you need to put that engine into sort of storage for a little while if you wanna maximize the length of it. So they're diametrically opposed, that is growth versus longevity. So you need to push yourself into longevity. If that's your goal, then you need to eat less, right? And whether you do it by sort of chronic calorie restriction, which you could, but it's difficult. Um, because that's not the way we're sort of built. We're not built that way.

• 42:59Jason Fung?

  I I'm convinced that that's a very artificial way to do it, not that you couldn't do it. But when we're, you know, we're designed to eat until we're full and then stop. And if we don't get food, then the hunger just dissipates. So naturally, I think we're more built towards the intermittent fasting model. As opposed to every day eat a little bit less, which I think could work, but I think it just takes sort of willpower every single day.

• 43:25Lewis Howes?

  That's a lot of energy.

• 43:26Jason Fung?

  It's a lot of energy just to think about it. Um, as opposed to saying, well, I'm only gonna eat twice a day because that way I have time to do this. And I don't have to buy, you know, myself a lunch, which will save money. And it's gonna give me an extra hour of the day, that kind of thing. So I think that that's the point is that in the end, you've got this sort of sort of seesaw between growth versus longevity, sort of just like that, uh, you know, race car engine. You can either go fast or you can use it for a long time. You really can't do both, it's really hard to do both. So as you get older, you wanna push yourself into that longevity stage, which means eating less, which means doing more fasting. Ultimately.

• 44:09Lewis Howes?

  Can you build muscle while you're doing a lot of this fasting?

• 44:13Jason Fung?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I mean, you gotta understand that most of what we use for energy is not muscle. Cause that's only one organ system, that's skeletal muscle. So if you're riding a bicycle, that's your, you know, that's your muscles. There's all these other organ systems that we have no control over. So there's the liver, the kidney, the heart, the lungs, the brain, you know, generating body heat. And all these sort of automatic systems that also require energy. So when you don't eat, then your body starts to reduce energy. It will reduce, you know, all of those things. If you exercise, you will still keep building muscle and so on. That's totally different.

• 44:53Jason Fung?

  But if you start to, you know, use less energy, then you'll feel a bit colder and you're, you know, your, your liver may slow down a bit. Your heart may slow down a bit. But again, people think it's a bad thing, but it's probably a better thing. You don't wanna be, you don't wanna be revving that engine all that time. You actually wanna go down a little bit uh as you get older.

• 45:13Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting. You mentioned briefly the uh uh different societies that we found probably had very little or no cancer. I think you mentioned the Eskimos. Is that what you said before? Before they became westernized, I guess, or before um things started to shift. It's interesting. I just did. I've, I've done a lot of training with Wim Hof. I'm not sure if you've heard the name Wim Hof. Cause he's a, a guy who focuses on breathing, on mindset and on cold therapy exposure. Uh extreme amounts of cold therapy exposure. And he has done a test. I don't know if you've heard about this, where they injected, I believe it was E. coli into his body.

• 45:54Lewis Howes?

  And he rejected the disease from breathing and cold therapy. Where it actually didn't harm him. Um and he didn't contract the disease, I guess. Uh and he did this with a, a group of other subjects of just people who he did the method with where it was cold therapy, breathing. Uh where they're able to reject the infection. I'm curious in your mind about cold exposure, knowing that the Eskimos are in cold and they didn't have, uh maybe it was all they, all they did was eat meat and then cold. How much do you think cold therapy, cold exposure supports with eliminating cancer?

• 46:35Jason Fung?

  I don't know. I haven't really looked into that. I have to say, I don't think it's just the cold because the, uh anyway, uh of course, when they started to eat, like they're still in the cold, but when they started to eat all kinds of processed foods like sugar and bread and stuff, they wind up getting cancer. They also see it in Africans who live a traditional African diet. Again, they really have very little cancer. So it was. That was where they described these sort of diseases of civilization. So it didn't have to do just with the cold. On the other hand, I actually think there's a lot of interesting stuff, both with extreme cold and extreme heat, where people, you know, talk about the benefits of like saunas and all this sort of stuff, which I think is very interesting. I actually haven't looked into it a lot myself. I actually think that the extreme cold to

• 47:19Jason Fung?

  me seems like it, there may be something there. Um, you know, there's actually a few things that people talk about, like the browning of white fat and all this kind of stuff, which makes a lot of sense to me, but I, you know, seems i- i- you know, and, and there's a lot of people who do it, like in, in Scandinavia and Russian and stuff. There's all these people who do this sort of cold therapy and they swear by it. And it's like, I think that there probably is something there. I don't know how much it has to do with what I talk about, which is mostly like insulin and foods and fasting and so on. But I think that there's actually going, I, I think somebody should look into that. But again, with the, because nobody makes money on.

• 48:00Lewis Howes?

  Jumping in the ice is not a money making thing, yeah.

• 48:04Jason Fung?

  Yeah. And it's not, doesn't seem so comfortable to me. But, you know, on the other hand, I actually think that there probably is something there that is highly beneficial.

• 48:12Lewis Howes?

  Maybe that's your, uh, the next book down the line, The Cold Code. The Cold Therapy Code, see what that does with, with cancer. Um, this has been fascinating. I feel like I have so many more questions I want to ask you, but I also want to be respectful of your time with this interview. This, for me, I could ask more and more about this stuff because I feel like the body, uh, is, you know, it's our temple. It's the thing we need to take care of the most. And if we want to have a high quality of life, we need to take care of our body. And if we want to have a longer life and be around for more memories with our friends and family, then we've got to also take care of these things. Uh, a few final questions for you. Before I ask these final questions, is there anything

• 48:51Lewis Howes?

  else that we should be aware of when it comes to the mindset around cancer? Have you found any research on healing the mind in order to heal the body physically? Or is it more been around nutrition mostly?

• 49:06Jason Fung?

  Most of the data is around nutrition. I think that the way it interacts is that I think that there's actually like a lot of those things are super important. So when people talk about positive attitudes and gratitude and community and staying connected and all that sort of stuff. It sounds hokey, but it actually has a huge impact on life and quality of life and even longevity. But it's hard to study because how do you quantify if somebody is grateful, for example, or if they have a positive attitude? It's very hard to quantify that, so it tends not to get studied. But I think the way it interacts is that if you are one of these people who has a lot

• 49:51Jason Fung?

  of stress and very unhappy or isolated like a hermit compared to somebody who has tons of friends and goes out and, you know, has a great supportive church and all this sort of stuff. Where I think it makes a big difference is that you can measure sort of stress levels like and there are certain things that get activated during chronic stress like cortisol, which is a certain hormone. And I think that impacts the immune system. So the immune system, which under chronic stress winds up getting degraded, right? So if you produce, if you're under too much stress, your immune system really doesn't work as well. And the immune system plays a key role in fighting cancer.

• 50:33Jason Fung?

  So I think that there probably is some, I think there's a lot of truth to that, but the data is hard to find because then you get all these sort of, you know, very by the book sort of doctors who say, well, there's no proof that having a lot of friends makes you live longer. It's like, well, that's data or if you're grateful or keep a journal or whatever or meditate. It's like that's, it's, it's, it's not that there's not a real effect, I think. And they confuse the fact that it's very hard to study with the fact that it doesn't work. Like, I think it works. I think it's super important. I think that's actually more important than. Almost everything else, like being, you know, being grateful, being happy,

• 51:16Jason Fung?

  you know, being connected. I think that's actually has a bigger impact on life than most anything else. But it's so hard to to put it into a scale where you can say, okay, this is this and this is this. So I think it does play a role, but yeah, the data is going to be so hard to find. When I look at it, what actually astounds me is how far ahead a lot of the religions were. And it doesn't matter what religion you are, because the basics are the same, right? You go to, you you gather every week. So hey, that's staying connected. You pray. So that's like meditation. You give thanks, like you say grace, right? You give thanks to God or whatever. And and it doesn't even matter what God you believe in.

• 52:00Jason Fung?

  And they fast. It's like, oh, my God, like, those are the pillars right there. And it's not if you're Catholic or if you're Jewish or you're Muslim. It's all of them, the same thing, or Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever. And I always astounds when I look at that. So holy, they're way ahead of us. And why? Because these were things that just worked. They didn't care why it worked, right? So gathering every week to do something, right? And it doesn't matter if you're gathering to do this or do that. But you're gathering as a community, connecting, you're seeing the people that you're you're living with. You're giving thanks for the food that you're eating. You're giving thanks for having the friends and being here on this earth.

• 52:45Jason Fung?

  Uh, you know, all of this stuff, it just worked, so they kept it. But didn't work, of course, got, you know, got dropped long ago. And what worked stayed. And it's a core, all of these things, the the prayer, which is like meditation, the the connectiveness, which is the gathering together, the fasting, and the, uh, you know, the the gratitude, all of these things are sort of core part of sort of what makes us human. And that's why you see it in every single one of these things. And it's like, wow, I always think that is Crazy how far ahead they were and then we get to the 20th century, we live in our own McMansion

• 53:28Jason Fung?

  and you know, we stopped doing stuff together because we want our own space and and not realizing and not fasting anymore and not praying anymore and we don't realize that hey, you know what, these people might have known what they were doing, they might have developed this over thousands of years. And we just think we're just smarter than them when we're actually not, we're actually not, you know, not even smart enough to realize that that was the core of what, what good, good quality of life is.

• 53:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm so glad we've connected. I've got these couple of final questions I want to ask you that I ask everyone at the end of my show. Uh, before I ask them, I want to remind people about, uh, all the books you have. You've got a new book called The Cancer Code, a revolutionary new understanding of medical mystery that's out. Um, you've got a few other ones, The Obesity Code and also The Diabetes Code, which I, and also The Complete Guide to Fasting. So you've got also thefastingmethod.com which can help you with fasting if you need a support community, if you need tools, if you need resources. So go check out thefastingmethod.com, I believe that is correct.

• 54:38Jason Fung?

  Correct.

• 54:39Lewis Howes?

  And, uh, check you out on social media. You're Dr. Jason Fung on Instagram, Twitter, and Fung Style Fasting on Fa- uh, on Facebook. And thefastingmethod.com, this has been extremely insightful and eye opening for me and hopefully it's a lot of great tools for so many other people that listen to this and watch this. If you're watching uh, online, feel free to share this, feel free to like this up, leave a comment below of what's supported you the most over on YouTube. This question is at the end that I, I ask people called The Three Truths. So I'd love for you to imagine for a moment a hypothetical scenario, Jason, where it's your last day on earth. And it's you get to live as old as you want to live, but eventually you gotta turn off the lights.

• 55:23Lewis Howes?

  And you've created and accomplished and lived the exact way you want to live. You've written many books and done so many different things. Uh, but for whatever reason, all the content you've put out in the world has to go with you to the next place, wherever that place is. And so no one has access to this interview or any of your content anymore. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true from all of your lessons in life. Kind of these three lessons you'd share with the world, or I call the three truths. What would you say are those three things for you?

• 55:53Jason Fung?

  I think one of them is of course the importance of um intermittent fasting. Like it's, it's really just a part of the way you're supposed to live. That is, everything is a cycle, right? Yin and yang, it's all a cycle. Feeding and fasting is that same cycle. You can't do all of one or all of the other. We've gone so far, of course, towards feeding that, you know, you really have to turn back the dial a little bit on that side. So that's one of the sort of great things that I'd, I'd love to sort of leave with people. And I think that's what the obesity code was about was like, let's really think about what causes this disease. Um, you know, the second thing is very similar to, to that.

• 56:37Jason Fung?

  I, I'd love people to really understand that type two diabetes. Uh, and that one is near and dear to me, mostly because that's what I deal with a lot in my profession. As a kidney specialist, I see a lot of type two diabetes. So I'm always invested in it because my patients are suffering from it. And I always think it's a shame, like, boy, I wish that people would have told you that it's reversible. Like, you don't have to suffer this disease. You can do something about it if you want. If you don't want, that's fine too, but you know, it's a reversible disease. And that's one of the things I always think about when, you know, it's like, there's so much suffering in this world that really is not necessary. If people had the right understanding.

• 57:20Jason Fung?

  And then, uh, the third thing, I think of course, um, is to always sort of stay real. Um, which is that, you know, as you get out there, like, you, you know, you know, I mean, cause you're in the public eye a lot. You get a lot of. You know, admirers, but you get a lot of haters as well, right? So you always gotta stay real and similar to like this whole idea of living a digital life or you know, on social media life, you know how everybody's happy and smiling. That's not real life. Um, and I always think like, stay real, like, like just do real things.

• 58:02Jason Fung?

  Like, you know, it's fine to be on social media and stuff, but that doesn't mean you don't see your friends. And make sure you go out with, you know, to, to, to, to run or to play some ball or to whatever it is that you enjoy doing, you know, read. There are other things that you can do, but you have to sort of stay in the real world, right? It's like being present, you have to be there, right? Because in the end, that's what you will always remember, right? It's not the Facebook friends that you had or whatever. And, and, and, and it goes the other way too, right? There's lots of Facebook friends and stuff and they're great, but you also get those haters who are always like ragging on you and stuff. Oh, you're such a phony and you're just trying to sell out and all this stuff.

• 58:44Jason Fung?

  And I always think, okay, one, I wind up just blocking those people because they're a pain to deal with. And I always think that you gotta stay real. Like if somebody came up to me, and I get this a lot, some people say, oh, he's full of crap. That's, I can't believe he's a doctor's kind of thing. And I'm always like, uh, imagine going up to somebody and saying that to my face, right? You'd never do it. Never do it. And I'd never talk to you again, so why would I want you to talk to me? I just mute you right away, right? And that's part of staying real, right? Like, so stay doing real things and it's so easy, especially now with COVID, where we're all supposed to be going and doing virtual things. But, you know, it's like, you're not gonna remember that. Like a virtual trip to, you know, the beach is not the same as going to the beach.

• 59:27Jason Fung?

  I mean, you know, you gotta go to the beach, right? And I think that that's one thing that I've been thinking about. I think maybe more during this period of time when we're not allowed to do anything. But, you know, when it comes back around to it, it's like, remember, there are friends and, you know, there are friends and you can, you know, don't get down on the stuff you see online, either from old people ragging on you or the fact that people are always smiling in a beautiful place on Instagram, right? It's like, that's not real life either. So go out, do something real, talk to real people. It, it, it benefits you no matter, no matter what, right? It's, it's always better to do that, even though it's easier to sit in front of a screen and.

• 1:00:09Jason Fung?

  You know, play video games or watch somebody else's life and stuff, right?

• 1:00:13Lewis Howes?

  Love that. It was a good three truths. I want to acknowledge you for a second, Jason, for you have amazing analogies. You you turn the complex into something that's understandable and easier to break down, which can seem very scary, very overwhelming, very hard to understand. When you're dealing with sickness, disease, illnesses, viruses, obesity, cancer, these are scary subjects. And the fact that you're able to communicate effectively the hard data, the research, so that everyone can understand it is extremely powerful for us. I acknowledge you for the decades of research and work and practice in mastering this and constantly trying to learn new ways to make it better for the rest of us. I acknowledge you for that.

• 1:00:57Lewis Howes?

  And for for being a nice doctor, for being a kind-hearted doctor, I appreciate that. Hopefully, when you're in L.A., we can do this in person again sometime and get some more content out of this because I think this was really helpful for for myself and I think for everyone listening and watching. My final question for you, Dr. Jason Fung, is what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:01:18Jason Fung?

  I think, you know, that greatness is really about being able to impact people in a positive way, right? And I see so much of this again online because, of course, everybody's online nowadays, right? Because that's all you can do. But and and then I'm sure you've seen this as well, right? It's like, because I think this is the core of what you want to do, is do something good for people. But there are people who get famous for putting other people down, right? And it's like, oh, God, like, I get it. You want to be famous for putting somebody down. Whether it's people you think deserve to be or not, like, oh, you know, people rag on

• 1:02:00Jason Fung?

  this guy or that guy. And it's like, yeah, but you're just trying to build yourself up, right? The greatness is not in tearing somebody down or saying that this guy is stupid or this theory is stupid, right? It's like, you know, when I talk about calories and stuff, sometimes I get frustrated. I say, that's really stupid, right? But that's not what I'm trying to do, right? What I'm trying to do is Not just tear something down, because I don't really like to do that. I like to sort of say, this is a better way to look at it, right? Think about it this way, because this is what's gonna make you better. Right? And to be able to impact somebody so that, you know, I won't even have seen them and they'll be able to lose weight, or they'll be able to reverse their diabetes, or they'll understand cancer better as a disease,

• 1:02:46Jason Fung?

  is a humongous privilege and it makes me feel great. I mean, that's why I do it, right? Because I like that um feeling that I've been able to help somebody, that I can impact, you know, hundreds or thousands of people, and they are gonna be better. And to me, that's greatness, right? To to to to be able to make something where people will say, wow, he helped a lot of people. Like I'm, you know, or somebody even, you know, a few people who will say, wow, you know, I listened to him and I really turned my life around, like that means a lot to me. Because that's what healing is, that's what being a doctor is. But you can only do that on a one-on-one basis, which is very limited,

• 1:03:28Jason Fung?

  as opposed to being able to say, write a book where you can impact a lot of people. And I think that's what greatness is, is to be able to sort of sort of impact people and make the world so much better for you having been there. For you, for me, having basically obsessed about these sort of question, you have no idea how much time I spent looking at this stuff. Like I, I'm sort of obsessed about some stuff and it's like, once I dig into it, I were like, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging. And it just takes a ton of time, like, uh, so, you know, for me, having obsessed about these sort of questions, just because I like to, I like to understand stuff.

• 1:04:08Jason Fung?

  Um, you know, I want people to say, well, I'm glad he obsessed about this so much and thought about this in a different way that somebody else did, because it does no good to say the same stuff. Like, if everybody tells you. You know, eat 500 less calories a day. What good is it for me to come out and be the millionth and first person to say, "You should eat 500 less calories per day," right? Completely useless, like completely worthless. But if I come out and say, as I did sort of seven, eight years ago, "Consider intermittent fasting." Like, "I don't think you have to do it, but you should consider it." Which nobody, practically nobody, said at the time. Then, it's like, that's useful because it's a new piece of information. And that's what I try to do in the cancer code, the obesity code, diabetes code.

• 1:04:52Jason Fung?

  Is to say, "Let's take this problem, let's look at it differently so that we can understand it. And by understanding it, we can do something about it because that's great. That's really great.

• 1:05:04Lewis Howes?

  My man, there you go, Dr. Jason Fung. Thank you so much for your wisdom and thank you so much for being here.

• 1:05:11Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, make sure to share it with your friend. Sharing is caring. And make sure to check out part one. If you haven't already listened to it, it will blow you away. LewisHowes.com/1030. Check that out right now and let me know what you think about both of these episodes. And as always, please leave us a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please do that. That'll really help us spread our message within the Apple Podcast ecosystem and let more people know about these episodes. So leave us a review, leave us a rating and click that subscribe button if you enjoy this show. That will really help us spread the message to more people.

• 1:05:51Lewis Howes?

  And text the word PODCAST to 614-350-3960 if you want more inspirational messages from me every single week. And I want to close with a quote from playwright George Bernard Shaw, who said, "Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great." Yes, it will, my friend. And if no one's told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you are. I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.