How My Opinion of Fasting Changed After Talking to Dr. Jason Fung

I’ve been teaching fasting for years, but this conversation with Dr. Jason Fung made me rethink a few things. Dr. Fung joins me to share how his thinking has evolved since publishing The Obesity Code, including what newer research suggests about longer fasts and why modified fasting may be more useful than many people realize. We talk about whether a strict water-only fast is always necessary, how fasting aids such as bone broth, avocado, or olives may help someone continue longer, and why using a little support during a fast is not automatically “cheating.” Dr. Fung also breaks down the three types of hunger and explains why food noise is not always a sign that your body needs fuel. Sometimes hunger is physical. Sometimes it is emotional. And sometimes it is simply a pattern your brain has learned from your environment. This conversation reminded me that fasting does not have to be rigid to be effective. The goal is not to win at fasting. The goal is to use it in a way that supports your metabolic health and still works in your real life. In this episode you'll learn: How Dr. Fung’s thinking has evolved since writing The Obesity CodeWhy the calorie-focused model of weight loss leaves out hormonesWhat the body decides to do with the calories you eatThe difference between water-only fasting and modified fastingWhy modified fasting may be easier to sustainWhether eating during a fasting window automatically eliminates the benefitsDr. Fung’s perspective on GLP-1 medicationsHow to approach the first meal after a fastDr. Fung’s three foundational rules for metabolic health_ Resources Mentioned: Bone Broth - Use code MINDY10 for 10% off https://drinkaeira.com/Organic Olive Oil https://www.freshpressedoliveoiltrk.com/98BZMH/293Z4R/?uid=573_ More on Dr. Jason Fung Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, researcher, and bestselling author known for his work on fasting, insulin resistance, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic health. He is the author of The Obesity Code, The Complete Guide to Fasting, The Diabetes Code, The Cancer Code, and The Hunger Code. He is also a co-founder of The Fasting Method, an online community that provides education, coaching, and support on fasting and metabolic health. The Hunger Code https://www.doctorjasonfung.com/the-hunger-codeWebsite: doctorjasonfung.com https://www.doctorjasonfung.com/YouTube: @drjasonfung https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoyL4iGArWn5Hu0V_sAhK2wInstagram: @drjasonfung https://www.instagram.com/drjasonfung/For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep359 https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep359 _ Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

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

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  I want to tell you about something that genuinely moves me. And that's watching what happens when women come together around real health science. There's something powerful that shifts when a woman realizes she's not broken. She's just been given the wrong information. And when she is surrounded by other women who are waking up to that same truth. Wow, it's magic. The healing accelerates. The consistency becomes easier. The loneliness of the health journey just literally dissolves. And that's what I have been watching over and over again, happen inside my Reset Academy, month after month.

• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

  Women who come in frustrated and depleted. They start to find their rhythm. They start to reclaim their energy. And the most beautiful part is they start rebuilding trust with their bodies. Inside my academy, you get monthly trainings, live coaching calls, and an incredible community of women who are all doing this work right alongside you. And I show up every single month with new content, new tools, new ways to explain things. Because your body is always changing and your health education should grow with it. So come join me over there. All you've got to do is find us on resetacademy.drmindypelz.com.

• 1:24Mindy Pelz?

  That's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. I can't wait to see you there.

• 1:34Mindy Pelz?

  Hey, Dr. Mindy here. And welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

• 1:58Mindy Pelz?

  10 years ago, I was in my clinic, teaching my patients how to use their lifestyle to heal themselves. Every patient that walked through my doors was given a customized lifestyle plan that would help them thrive with their own health journey. Nutrition was a huge part of that plan. And at that point in my career, my teachings were anchored in eat less, move more, and you will drop weight. Although effective for many, I watched some women do everything right and still not improve. Weight wouldn't budge. Exhaustion didn't improve.

• 2:37Mindy Pelz?

  Autoimmune conditions persisted and frustration ensued. I felt like I was missing a tool that would help these women. I know this wasn't a willpower challenge. These women were insanely disciplined, yet nothing I gave them would give them a lasting result. Then, a book landed on my desk that changed the entire trajectory of my career. It walked through the actual science, the real trials, the ones nobody was talking about. And it made one thing undeniable. Weight, metabolic health, it wasn't a calorie in, calorie out problem.

• 3:22Mindy Pelz?

  It was a hormonal problem. And the hormone to fix was insulin. That book was The Obesity Code. And the man who wrote it is a doctor I have crossed paths with at conferences for years. I've admired him from a distance. I've quoted him more times than I can count. And somehow, in all that time, we have never sat down together, just one-on-one, for a real in-depth conversation about fasting and metabolic health. Here's what's remarkable about that. Between the two of us, we've probably talked fasting with more women and men than almost anyone else doing this work.

• 4:07Mindy Pelz?

  And yet, neither of us had ever asked the other, in real time, how have you changed your mind about fasting? What did the last 10 years of research and working with patients actually show you that the first 10 years didn't? So today, that conversation finally happens. Because here's the thing about a field like fasting. It moves. What we knew 10 years ago about insulin, about longer fasts, about what actually happens inside a body on day three of not eating, has really evolved. And the people still repeating the old talking points.

• 4:50Mindy Pelz?

  The ones who told you eating every three hours was mandatory. The ones who called fasting dangerous. They have not caught up with the new fasting rules. This is why today, I bring you Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Fung is a nephrologist, one of the most respected voices in the world on fasting and metabolic health, and the author of The Obesity Code, The Complete Guide to Fasting, and now, The Hunger Code. His books have shaped how millions of people think about food, insulin, and their own bodies. Alongside his colleague, Megan Ramos, who I've actually interviewed here on this podcast,

• 5:35Mindy Pelz?

  he built The Fasting Method, a program that has helped an enormous number of people reverse conditions, using the tool of fasting, conditions that doctors told them were permanent. In this conversation, Jason and I get into what's changed in the science over the last decade? Why a modified fast might get you 80% of the benefit for half the suffering? Why women's bodies handle fasting differently than men? And why so much of what we were taught about hunger and discipline was simply wrong? This is a conversation 10 years in the making.

• 6:19Mindy Pelz?

  I am over the moon excited to bring you Dr. Jason Fung. Let's dive in. Okay, Dr. Jason Fung. I cannot believe we have never had a conversation live together.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  That's been too long, that's for sure.

• 6:37Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I've seen you at a few conferences, but to actually come together and talk about fasting is just really incredible. And I feel really honored to be here with you. So thank you for joining me.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Likewise, thanks for having me.

• 6:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so I was thinking last night, it's been about 10 years since you put out The Obesity Code. And the interesting thing I saw from The Obesity Code is we really shifted from understanding that weight loss wasn't a calorie in, calorie out issue. It was actually a hormonal issue. And you can change this major hormone called insulin by learning to intermittent fast. What in the last 10 years have you changed your mind on about intermittent fasting since writing that book?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  I would say that, you know, everything I wrote in The Obesity Code 10 years ago pretty much still stands. So in terms of that whole calorie sort of obsession, it was really a dead end. Like honestly, it was a huge dead end. And it wasn't just an opinion. I mean, we did tons of these trials. There was, you know, all kinds of, you know, there's the Women's Health Initiative. There was a couple other huge trials from the National Institutes of Health, all of which did this calorie restricted diet, complete failure, right? And it's because the idea is totally wrong. Like, it's about the sort of energy partitioning, right?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, the idea that you just eat a few less calories, then your body's going to burn the calories. So remember, body fat is just a store of calories, right? That's really what it is, not any more or less. The thing is that there is a controller of, you know, how it lets it out and how it lets it in, right? It's not just all willy-nilly, right? You put it in, it goes in, you don't have enough, it comes out. Like, it doesn't work like that. Nothing in the human body works like that. So there's like a gatekeeper, right? Or a manager of these body fat stores. So you have to, you know, open the door to let it in, and you have to open the door to let it out, right?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  So just because you eat a few fewer calories, so say you eat 500 calories less per day, right? And this is the standard advice that you and I both sort of grew up, taught in medical school, all this sort of stupid stuff. If you eat 500 fewer calories, what they say is that you're guaranteed to lose weight. You're completely, that is completely wrong. You are not guaranteed anything. Because think about it. If you take the body fat, like the energy balance equation, body fat, which is a store of calories, equals calories in minus calories out. That is always true, right? Now let's just rewrite that, right? So calories in equals body fat plus calories out, right? That's just rearranging the terms. So calories in equals body fat plus calories out.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  So for every calorie that you eat, your body can either store it as fat or can burn it for energy. But which one does it do, right? That's the actual important question. Because if it stores it, you get fat. If it burns it, you do not get fat, but you feel great. You have energy, you feel great, you have, you know, you're not cold. You know, you feel like you can do anything you want, right? So it's a huge difference between the two, right? You eat those 500 calories, do you store it as fat or do you burn it for energy, right? That is so important. That is the most important thing to know. Not how many calories you store, but what is your body doing with it?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  So you look at teenage boys, for example, and this is another great example of the hormonal, like why it's really so important to look at the hormones. Because you look at teenage boys and teenage girls, for example. And you say, okay, before puberty, boys and girls have sort of the same, you know, slightly different, but more or less the same body fat. But as they go through puberty, the girls store about fifty percent more body fat. Like, that's not willpower, that's not discipline, like, have you seen what teenage boys eat? They not only eat junk, but they eat a lot of junk, right? I mean, I have two boys, I've seen it, it's terrible, they're eating, you know, pizza and, you know, chips and all this stuff, and yet.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Their body is building muscle and losing fat, that's just what happens. Why? Well, it's the hormones, they have a lot of testosterone pumping around, and the girls have the estrogen. Which redistributes the fat to their breasts and their hips in the subcutaneous fat, right? So they have subcutaneous fat, which is why they actually don't have as much heart disease, because they don't have the visceral fat. And that's all under the influence of estrogen, right? Which gets to your flip side, which is the perimenopause, when the estrogen starts to fall, and you now redistribute it. But the point is that it was never about conscious decisions, it was never about willpower, it's never about discipline, it's about the changes in hormones, right? And that's where fasting really impacts, not so much testosterone, estrogen, which is, that's interesting, but it really points the primacy of the hormones.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  But insulin is about the foods, the type of foods that you eat, right? Because some foods are going to stimulate insulin and some foods are not. So getting back to about what I've changed, uh, you know, my mind about in terms of in in those ten years, so. A a couple of things, one, all the stuff about calorie stuff, I'm I'm more convinced than ever that that's, that was the wrong path. And it's crazy, but it I I people are starting to sort of shift around because it was, it was really a dumb idea. And those calorie bullies are still out there.

• 12:13Mindy Pelz?

  I was just gonna say, uh, uh, there are still some advocates for calorie in, calorie out, out there.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  It's so stupid, honestly, it's like, yes, because those teenage boys count their calories, do they, right? You know, like, you look at them, they're eating like three thousand five hundred calories of Burger King or something, and it's like, okay, well, how is that even good, right? And it's like, yet they're storing muscle, they're they're gaining muscle and losing body fat, come on, like, that's ridiculous. Um, but but what I've changed my mind about in terms of fasting is a couple of things, and this is partly because the research has changed a lot. One, fasting, I think, is actually more beneficial, you know, all the benefits that I talked about in the Complete Guide to Fasting. The obesity code is still there in terms of weight loss and stuff, but there's actually more evidence for. One, the power of sort of longer fasts.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  And this is really fascinating stuff, yeah, this is super, super interesting. Because there was a recent study, for example, where they looked at um, the changes with a seven day. Is a seven day water fast, which is actually quite strenuous, but they did a seven day water fast, and what was interesting is they measured. All these proteins, and there's a humongous change in the uh, the protein expression in the body. And mostly hugely beneficial in terms of heart disease and so on, like massive benefits. And a lot of them, interestingly, they point out in the study, don't actually happen until day three.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And like, wow, you really have to get to that level before you get it, so that was one thing that I found, uh, that I've changed my mind on, sort of. How important sometimes doing a longer fast is, and the other thing is that there's been a lot of data on these modified fasts. So the modified fast, I mean, so a classic fast is water only, but. Is there a way to modify it, and people have done this, so Michael Mosley uh, did the five to two diet, for example, which is five days of normal, two days of five hundred calories a day. There's also the fasting mimicking diet, which is sort of also a a um, so so again, the the name tells you, it's not a real fast, but it's five days.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand calories, and it's sort of uh, engineered, so insulin's levels stay relatively down. Protein levels are relatively low, that was one of the things they did specifically because of, you know, uh, they they didn't want too much stimulation of. Mtor and so on. But anyway, what was interesting about that is that they've done a ton of studies, and a lot of the benefits um, are, you know, they have benefits. Not just for weight loss diabetes, which you would expect, but things like inflammation, right, and cancer.

• 14:57Mindy Pelz?

  In a modified fast.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  In a modified fast, so it's a five days of sort of low calories, or sort of like eight hundred calories, so. Yes, you don't have to do water only, like, you can make it a little bit easier, as long as you're going longer, you're still going to do all those, get all those benefits. Sort of my my my thinking is that you sort of get like eighty percent of the benefits, but it's fifty percent easier, right? So then you're still talking about a huge uh, plus side, right, compared to water only fasting, so if you do water only fasting, sure, you could do that. But keep in mind that that is much more stressful than doing sort of this modified fast. But there are benefits, and because they've done the studies, right, so those studies were not available sort of years ago when we talked about it, so.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Um, some of these other things that that really uh, people, people um, want to impact in a positive way, things like inflammation. Can actually be impacted, and cancer is another one that's that's super, super interesting. And then dementia and stuff, can the risk of dementia be changed and stuff, so some of these things are really, you know, obviously, we're we're very. It's very preliminary, right, because before I wrote the obesity code, everybody thought fasting was such a terrible idea. You knew that you had to eat ten times a day, right, otherwise you'd die, right? I remember that stupid thing.

• 16:15Mindy Pelz?

  No, you changed the world's opinion, it was beautiful.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Because it was obvious, once you started to think about it. But remember a couple of years ago even, the American Heart Association had this big thing about how if you fasted for eight hours, your heart risk went up by ninety one percent. And that's the dumbest thing ever, right, like, how can you even believe that, that's such crap, right? Yeah. Uh, it was ridiculous, and I remember they're saying that even if you fasted for like, uh, so that was the sixteen eight. You'd increase your risk by ninety one percent, which was actually stupid, right? The the the study was all, was all like crap, right? But then even if you fasted for like, um, you know, twelve hours, which is like a normal eating pattern, your risk went up sixty six percent, it's like, come on, that's just ridiculous.

• 17:03Mindy Pelz?

  That, and I'm so happy you say that, because I had to field all those questions in my office specifically, where. Uh, doctors were very concerned when they heard my patients were fasting, and a lot of it was coming from that American Heart Association. Uh, declaration, um, so I'm really happy you pointed that out, I'm also intrigued by this modified fasting. Because I saw some research, maybe about five years ago, talking about a fasted snack. And that if you kept the calories low, you kept the protein low. The study was done on people, they compared people who fasted fifteen hours.

• 17:46Mindy Pelz?

  And then they stopped, and then the second group fasted fifteen hours but was given a fasted snack. And went two more hours to seventeen hours, and what they found was that if they could elongate the fast. Through a fasted snack, that actually the continual metabolic benefits, they continued, they continued to lose more weight. They continued to bring glucose and insulin down, just in two uh, extra hours, and they did it over a thirty day period. So I'm so happy that you're saying this, because I think a lot of people, the barrier to fasting. Is that they get hungry and they just have to white knuckle it, and they can't do that.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's that's, yeah, that's been our experience, and I mean, that's one of the things that we've always actually, we've always modified it slightly, so. In terms of uh, like when we did um, uh, even way back then with uh, the fasting method with uh, Megan Ramos, we actually. Uh, did it in with a a bunch of our patients, but what we did is we, we didn't tell them to do sort of water only, we often. You know, modified it, you know, teas, coffees, bone broth sort of thing, right, which we always recommended, but now. That's extended, so even if you have certain things like, you know, a a handful of olives or something like that. What it does is it makes it easier so that you can go longer, and then there's still a net benefit to that whole thing, right?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Uh, because it's like, you you you you take a little bit, but then you extend it a little bit further. So you're you're actually getting more benefit than if you didn't take it at all, right? So and we call those fasting aids, for example, so, uh, sometimes fasting training wheels is something else we called it, so. Uh, we did things like um, the um, I remember, people thought it was crazy, but it was called the avocado bacon diet, right? It was basically, you just ate bacon and avocado for a few days. Uh, you know, just enough that like, you're not supposed to overdo it, but again, you're keeping the protein on the lower side, the carbs on the lower side, so.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  You're still keeping the insulin down, but then because it's not a, it's not a full fast, like a classic water only fast, you can actually go much longer. Than if you did it, right, but then you still get the net uh, benefit, like the overall you're still gaining, so. It's it's super interesting, so there's all these different regimens now that you can certainly do without uh, you know, having to do this sort of, oh. White knuckle, long fast, sort of thing.

• 20:23Mindy Pelz?

  What would you, just so people can walk away from this interview with something to apply, what are the kind of things that are okay to eat in a fasting window that will keep you getting the benefits of fasting?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think the key with fasting is you want to keep your nutrient sensors down, right? So the main thing is probably insulin, but to a lesser extent, I would say protein. And that's why the fasting mimicking diet, which was developed by Dr. Walter Longo of the University of San Diego, and it's been around a long time as well. But both of those are so-called nutrient sensors. That is, it tells your body that your nutrients are coming in. So if you're eating carbohydrates, insulin goes up. If you're eating protein, the nutrient sensor mTOR goes up. And when your body knows that there's food coming in, it will switch to sort of store energy and sort of build protein, right?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  When you turn off those nutrient sensors, the body senses, hey, no nutrients are coming in. So you're going into this sort of quiescent, restful sort of state where you're sort of rebuilding, you know, sort of resting rather than building, right? So insulin and protein are sort of the key. So what you want to do is make sure that you're not, one, taking too much, but then you're trying to take relatively low carbohydrate stuff. And again, relatively low protein, obviously can't go zero carb, zero protein, otherwise it'd just be a pure fat, which is, you know, not that, not that pleasant or anything. But that's, that's the key. So we'll often do things like avocado, which is, you know, very nice. It's tasty.

• 21:58Mindy Pelz?

  Avocado is a great idea.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, avocados, sometimes a bit of nuts, although some are higher in protein, olives, that kind of thing. The other thing that's kind of nice about, and bone broth. So bone broth is one of the things we've used actually since day one. And what's nice about bone broth is that you can get the minerals that you need. So of course during fasting, sometimes of course you're taking very little sodium and so on, and some people don't feel so good because of that. So you could add salt to your water, but it's a little odd, although people do it and say it's good. But the bone broth is one thing that you could add plenty of salt, right? And other minerals. And because you're simmering the bones of the, you know, you're getting all this sort of calcium and phosphorus and magnesium from the bones, so you're getting all that. So you're getting a bit of protein, but you're not getting a lot, right?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And you're getting the fluid, you're getting, you're able to get the sodium. And that helps you maintain that fast, makes it much easier for you to sort of go longer without making it so difficult.

• 22:55Mindy Pelz?

  I know a lot of my audience is gonna hear this and they're like, but isn't that cheating if I do that? Like I have so many high achieving women that are like, I can do this. Do we see the same results? Or do you use the bone broth or the fasting aid as training wheels until you get metabolically flexible and can actually more comfortably go longer?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  I still use them. I still use all of those things because the point is not that, you know, you don't just take them for no reason, right? You're taking them but going longer. So therefore it's easier to go the, you know, three, four, or five days that you want to go because some of the benefits you see only with the extended fasting, right? So especially some of the inflammation and stuff. So it really resets your whole body, which is interesting. The other thing that I always think is really powerful is going past 24 hours. So some people do 24 hours, which is a one meal a day. But if you can actually go through the whole day, so get to like a 36 hour fast or something.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  What's interesting to me is that by the time you wake up the next morning, everything sort of resets, right? Your hunger is back down, like everything feels like just normal. You know, it's just that you hadn't eaten the next previous day, but you actually feel no different. In fact, you feel lighter, a little better. So the whole thing is very, very interesting to me because those fasting aids allow you to go, they do two things. One is allows you to go longer while preserving most of the benefits. But the other thing is it makes it easy enough that it doesn't became, become a real struggle to do, right? And that's, that's where you really have to make it so that, like if, if you hate it every time you have to do a fast, then very soon you're gonna stop.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Because there's no reason to, right? There's no reason to continue. So you have, like by making it easy enough that it's, it's not a huge impediment, you're going to be able to keep doing it longer, which is no small thing. It's actually, most of the battle is actually making it so that it's not difficult for you to do. So for sure, it's like, you know, I don't think of it as cheating at all. I think it's actually the smart thing to do is to get the fasting to a point where you can easily incorporate it into your life by using these sort of aids to incorporate it into your life without overdue hardship. So that when you have to do it, it's no big deal, right? And then you can do it over and over and over again.

• 25:28Mindy Pelz?

  Right. And then where do you see the longer fasts? And what would you consider a longer fast? Because Walter really brought the three day water fast to the surface, but I just heard you say five days. We're now seeing some protein changes at five days. If somebody really wants a full body reset, what are we talking when we look at these longer fasts? What would be the most beneficial?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I think that you're looking somewhere around five days if you're doing a modified fast. So that's what the fasting mimicking was, right? But if you're doing a water only, you could probably, you probably get it at like three days, right? So that's what this sort of study showed was that the seven day, the study that they published, I think it was in Nature or Nature Medicine, it was seven days water only, right? So a really strenuous one. And you saw some of the start at three days. So if you did a modified one, you'd probably get it by four or five days, which is super interesting. So it depends on sort of how strict you are. If you're a little less strict, maybe it takes a little bit longer. So you probably have to go five or seven days for this sort of full body reset.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  But if you're doing water only, you could probably push that up to sort of like three days. And, you know, to me, it's no different than like running, right? So you could either do sprints where you're really, really, really fast, but for a shorter period, or you do sort of like, you know, slower, long stuff, right? Same thing, right? You could do an intensive fast, water only for only three days, or you could do a modified for five days, but you're just less, you're not going as hard at it.

• 27:00Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah, agreed. Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And this one is a really important one, which is when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one of the most consistent findings I see and one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency that can show up as hormonal imbalance, mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues, even stubborn weight that won't budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know.

• 27:46Mindy Pelz?

  Taking an isolated D3 supplement isn't enough. This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D3. Your body actually needs D3 to be combined with very specific cofactors to actually absorb and utilize vitamin D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include these cofactors. That's why I personally love Cataplex D from Standard Process. It's a whole food supplement. It's vitamin D complex, not just an isolated nutrient. There's an incredible difference between checking a box and actually moving the needle on your health. And this one really moves the needle.

• 28:30Mindy Pelz?

  In fact, in my clinic, we used to test vitamin D and we could see with a product like Cataplex D, we could see on lab work, the vitamin D levels in people go up. So you can learn more and you can get yourself some vitamin D, you can test out Cataplex D at drmindypells.standardsprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 28:59Mindy Pelz?

  So, okay, and then let's, this is a really good segue into the biggest barrier to fasting, which is hunger. And what I've noticed with women specifically is hunger isn't always about the body needs food. And you have a new book out and you talk about three different types of hunger. So can you help us understand hunger? Because one of the things that's blowing me away right now is everybody's walking around with this sort of identity of, oh yeah, I have food noise. Like food noise has become this buzzword. And it's like, do we even know what food noise

• 29:38Mindy Pelz?

  is? We don't even have a good relationship to our own body's cues of when we should fuel and when we shouldn't.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the whole food noise idea is exactly what I'm talking about in The Hunger Code. So, you know, before we get to the three types of hunger, what I, you know, focused on in terms of hunger is sort of, we're trying to get to the real sort of deeper understanding of why we're eating, right? Because again, if you think about calories, right, it's, you know, people say, oh, you just have to restrict calories, right? But it actually doesn't work. So if you think about treatment of obesity, there's lots of different ways you can treat obesity. So a classic way is to wire somebody's jaw shut, right? And that was popular in the 40s and 50s, for example.

• 30:31Mindy Pelz?

  Oh my god, that's crazy.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just didn't work, actually.

• 30:34Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  So what happened, of course, is that if you wire somebody's jaw shut, you could restrict their calories, you physically restrict their calories, but the hunger just goes up and up. So then they find ways around it. They use a straw, they drink milkshakes and stuff.

• 30:47Mindy Pelz?

  My god.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Same thing happened with bariatric surgery. So again,

• 30:50Mindy Pelz?

  Right, I was thinking that.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Physically, yeah, that's basically the modern version of wiring somebody's jaw shut. And so you could cut somebody's stomach to the size of a walnut, so they physically couldn't take the calories. But the problem is you never dealt with the hunger. So again, calories goes down, hunger goes up, something has to give, right? Now compare that to a drug such as Ozempic or Munjaro, right, the popular weight loss drugs of today. And you notice right away that it doesn't restrict calories in any way. You can have whatever calories you feel like while you're taking Ozempic. But the key here is that you don't feel like it, right? And that's the difference. When you actually deal with the hunger, and in this case, it's

• 31:36Speaker 01

  through a pharmacologic mechanism, when you reduce the hunger, then the calories goes down, but notice that they go down in concert because the hunger was driving the calories. So when you drop the hunger, the calories goes down. So there are other ways to do it from a pharmacologic standpoint. In fact, people always forget that there's been lots and lots of weight loss drugs before Ozempic. There was, in the 60s, there was amphetamines, so speed was a classic weight loss drug. Fen-phen in the 80s was again, another classic weight loss drug. So it stimulated the sympathetic nervous system. So when sympathetic tone goes up, the hunger goes down. So that was how amphetamines worked, that's how fen-phen worked, that's how nicotine works. So people who smoke are thinner, they eat less, right?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  They have less hunger. But again, you notice that it's all about the hormones, it's not about the calories. And that's the thing about hunger, it's like, what is driving your hunger? So a lot of it is due to the hormones. And this is the physical hunger that you feel, that you feel that you have to eat, right?

• 32:38Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And that's called, this physical hunger is called homeostatic hunger, right? And so that is one of the reasons, if you go, if you drive insulin way up, then your body's going to scream for more food because you're pushing all those calories into storage, leaving no energy for the rest of your body. So then your body needs to go eat. But what's happening, of course, is that, remember, the number of calories isn't the problem, it's what your body does with the calories. And when you shuttle all those calories right into the storage, then you leave nothing for the rest of your body, your heart, your lung, your liver. So then you want to eat more because your body's like, hey, go get some more food, right?

• 33:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  And that's the problem, that's the hunger that develops. So that's called homeostatic hunger, that's the first type of hunger. The second type of hunger is really this sort of reward-seeking hunger, this pleasure. It's called hedonic hunger, which sounds a bit naughty, but it's really a sort of emotional hunger. And you have to recognize that eating is not just about getting nutrients, it also makes us feel good. Eating is pleasurable.

• 33:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, for sure. It's dopamine.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  That's why, it's dopamine. People eat, they feel good, they taste good, right? And that's the whole idea of comfort food, for example. So if you eat, because, you know, you're not eating, so say you break up with your boyfriend, girlfriend, right, you eat a tub of ice cream, not because you're trying to get full, it's because you're trying to give yourself that dopamine to counter the sort of, you know, either the sadness or the depression or the boredom that you're feeling, right? You're trying to give yourself this hit. And so you're eating for a completely different type of hunger. Your body doesn't need it, you're not physically hungry, but you have this hedonic hunger, right? And that, I think, drives a whole lot of the eating behaviors we see today. And that's not by accident,

• 34:24Speaker 01

  it's because ultra-processed foods are engineered to give us sort of this maximum dopamine, right? And there's been books written about how, you know, you want the right amount of salt and sugar and fat, and then you have the advertising, the convenience, the artificial flavors, artificial colors, the texturizers, the emulsifiers, all that, you know, chemicals is mixed into this, you know, engineered food that gives us this sort of maximum pleasure. It goes down, it gets absorbed very quickly to get these massive spikes in dopamine, and we know that. And that leads to, so ultra-processed food's a problem, which leads to food addictions, right? And food addictions is this completely underappreciated problem where people can't

• 35:08Speaker 01

  stop eating, even though they know this is bad for them, just like when somebody's addicted to alcohol, right? And people will tell you this all the time, right? Oh, I'm addicted to pizza, I'm addicted to sweets, I'm addicted to bread. You know, it's always some refined ultra-processed food because that's what gives you this maximum sort of superphysiologic stimulus where, you know, you're getting this massive hit of dopamine. And I think that is actually a big part of the problem today is that, hey, if you're getting these food addictions, you're getting these ultra-processed foods, you may be counting your calories, but you're eating all carbs, all ultra-processed carbs, you're craving these massive hits of dopamine, and all of a sudden, you can't understand why you need to keep eating, right?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And it's like, that's not the physical hunger, that's the hedonic hunger, right? And then the third type of hunger, which again is sort of not well-appreciated, but very important, is a sort of social hunger, which is conditioned hunger, which is that you can pair two things together and you can develop these sort of habits. So say you eat, every day you eat sort of three meals a day with dessert, right? That's just what you do every day. Well, once you condition it, if you don't get dessert or if you miss a meal, you're going to be hungry, right?

• 36:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And the classic experiment in this, and it comes from behavioral psychology, is Pavlov's dogs, right? So your dogs will get hungry at the sight of food and stuff, right? That's fine. But if you ring a bell and then give them food, you've paired the bell to the food. And so this, now when you ring a bell but don't give them food, they actually start to get hungry because they are expecting the food. So that's Pavlov's dogs, right? That's a classic experiment. But think about what we've done, we've paired food with everything.

• 36:56Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, everything.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  You cut into your car, you eat, you're sitting in front of your computer, you're eating, you're walking around, snacks, you go to the hospital even, there's a, you know, coffee shop, there's the mall, you're eating, you know, there's Food Network on TV, there's billboards with food, there's, you know, fast food places everywhere you go. So all of a sudden, you're walking around, and we're basically Pavlov's dogs. It's like ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. You get in your car, you're hungry, you go to the movies, you're hungry, you go to a sporting event, you're hungry. So you're creating all this conditioned hunger because everywhere around you reminds you that you have to eat or you want to eat. And that's the food noise that we talked about.

• 37:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And then we create a, then we create a drug to stop all that.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yes, it does work. But on the other hand, there's problems, there's side effects and other issues, because it's a drug, right? The better thing is to understand what is the root cause of the hunger, right? Is it homeostatic hunger, is it hedonic hunger, is it conditioned hunger, right? Because now you can actually deal with the problem. Because if you have a problem with hedonic hunger, with food addictions, then changing your social situation is not a problem, is not going to fix it because your issue was the hedonic hunger, right? So the whole thing is that, you know, people have, there's all kinds of experiments, all sorts of data on conditioned hunger. You can take

• 38:21Speaker 01

  You know, if you have a friend who becomes overweight or obese, your own risk of obesity goes up like over a hundred percent. Why? Because what they do influences what you do, and this is called social influence. Influencing, so conditioning, social influence, these are all really important. So if everybody around you is eating a certain way, you're gonna eat a certain way. That's life, right? You go to uh Florida where the portions are massive and everybody around you is eating these massive portions of ultra-processed foods, that's what you do, right? Then you go to like Japan where everybody's eating natural food, but very small quantities of it. So that's what you do, right?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  So you take a Japanese person in Japan and their risk of obesity is very low. You move that Japanese person to America and all of a sudden their risk of obesity just skyrocket. So same person, same willpower, same discipline, the problem wasn't that, the problem wasn't the calories and so on. The problem is the social situation, right? And you know, I always think it's such a strange thing. We we blame people. We blame people and people start to blame themselves for it, right? And and think about it this way, we have seventy percent of the American population being overweight or obese. So imagine you have a school with a hundred schoolchildren and one of them fails.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Well, that might be the kid's fault. They're playing video games instead of studying, right? But what if seventy kids fail? Is that the child's fault or is it the school's fault, right? And that's the whole idea. If everybody in America is failing, including all the immigrants, right? You take a person from Italy, an Italian in Italy, low risk of obesity, stick them in New York City. Risk goes up. Ja- Japanese person in Japan, low risk of obesity, stick them in San Francisco, their risk goes up. Well, what do you, what does it tell you about the problem? The problem wasn't the person, the problem was the environment. And until you recognize that, then you can't start saying, okay, we need to start changing things about ourselves.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Our, you know, the way we eat, the way we think about food and so on. One of the big things, of course, is fasting, making sure you have this adequate fasting window. Because if you say, okay, I'm gonna fast from this date, this time to this time, or you know, or once a month, I'm gonna do a five-day modified fast or something like that, that now gives you the basis to say, okay, well, I'm gonna ignore all this stuff happening because I know this is not my eating time. Then you can build it into a habit. Hey, I don't eat after dinner, right? So then now you can build it into a habit. Then when you build into a habit, hey, maybe your friends start to do that too, right? All of a sudden, it doesn't seem so weird anymore, right? So that's how you start it, right? And and when the whole society does it, it's not hard, right?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Like Japan, like Italy.

• 41:20Mindy Pelz?

  So do you, so then what are your thoughts on these weight loss drugs? Because when they first came out, I asked so many people, what are you noticing? And they said, oh, I'm not hungry anymore. And I said, yeah, that's what happened to me when I started fasting. Like, I still struggle with getting hungry enough. Because one, once I became metabolically flexible and I could go long periods without food, hunger just didn't own me anymore. So what are we gonna do with all these people we put on GLP's that think that was the miracle? And how do we, where do we go to get them off these drugs?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that the GLP ones, they have their place, right? So they activate the GLP one system and that activates certain areas of your brain, which basically turn off hunger. But remember that this is not a normal level of GLP one. It's a super physiologic pharmacologic dose, right? So um it's a massive dose that you actually can't get just from food or anything else, right? It's it's it's a ginormous dose, and that's why you have side effects, right? And the thing about it is that if you use this GLP one system, this drug to sort of overwhelm your other hungers, right? So say your problem is hedonic hunger, but you've completely overwhelmed it with GLP ones, that will work. However, if you ever go off of it, then you're gonna have a problem.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Because you never took care of the actual problem, which is exactly what we see, of course. So, you know, when people go off of the GLP ones, they regain basically all the weight that they lost. So if you take it for two years, you got a two-year temporary decrease in your weight. And then you went back up because you never dealt with either the conditioned hunger or the hedonic hunger or whatever. So then people said, okay, well, that's fine, we'll just leave them on it forever. And this is the funny part. I don't get people sometimes, right? They they say, okay, well, leave them on forever. It's like a blood pressure pill, right? You take it forever. There's a huge difference between a GLP one and a uh taking a blood pressure pill, for example.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Because remember that if you take the Ozempic and stuff, you are reducing hunger. But eating is a pleasurable activity. So normally, we are going to derive a large amount of pleasure from eating. So, hey, we're going out to dinner. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, right? But if you're taking Ozempic, it's like, oh, my god, like, I can't even look at it. I'm getting nauseated, right? And this is not just for a couple of days. Every single day of your life, you've taken away this huge amount of pleasure, right? Oh, we're going out for our birthday. It's like, no, thanks. Oh, I'm still looking to thanks, forward to Thanksgiving. I'm not, right?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, Christmas. I can't eat anything, right? How much fun is it? So I've prescribed it because there's a lot of benefits from, you know, I'm a kidney specialist. There's a lot of uh proven kidney benefits from the weight loss and so on. People don't stay on it, and the studies all say the same thing. Like, you barely have like thirty percent of people on it at one year. I struggle to keep people on this drug, right? Imagine you take away, yeah, uh imagine you take away this huge amount of pleasurable activity that people are able to do, which is tied into all sorts of social activities, right? Let's, let's remember, what do you do when you get together with your friends? You go out for dinner. Hey, great time, right?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  What do you do when you uh, you know, get together for major holidays? Oh, you have your family and your friends over for dinner, right? It's like, come on, not only is it a massive part of sort of dopamine and reward, but it's a massive part of our social activity from which we also derive pleasure, right? So now it's like, okay, well, we're just gonna kill all that. And you know, how much can you take? So six months, sure, you can take it for six months. You know, people are telling you how good you look, but what about a year, two years? You've stopped losing weight, people have stopped telling you how good you look, but you're still not enjoying yourself. Is that fun? Not at all, not nearly at all. So people, you know, like, why do we assume people are stupid?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  I see these, I see these studies where, where, you know, you you see all the statistics. And there's another huge study from Kaiser Permanente looking at real world data. And they said, I think it was around sixty-six percent or seventy percent of people were off of these drugs by one year. That's it, one year. Right? And it's like, that's, that totally jives with my experience as a prescriber. So why do we seem that people are just too stupid to take this drug? I don't think they're stupid at all. I think that if I were to take the drug, I'd wind up off of it too. I couldn't take that. I couldn't take the loss of, you know, my social life, my, you know, reward system, all this pleasure from from eating. Fasting is different. Yes, you're gonna restrict yourself for a few days.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Say you do three days, right? Say you're extreme, you're three days, five days. Hey, the other twenty days, twenty-eight days of the month, I'm enjoying myself. I'm going out to dinner. I'm talking to people, huh, yeah, whatever. And for those three days, four days, hey, yeah, I won't do it, right? Because this is my cleansing period, or for those hours, for those sixteen hours, but for eight hours, hey, yeah. Right? So how is that even the same, right? So people treat this drug as some kind of miracle drug, not recognizing that, hey, not only are there side effects, it's all drugs have side effects, right? They talk about muscle loss, they talk about eye problems, right? It's not a terrible drug for, for side effects, but I think the loss of pleasure actually is, right?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I think that is a real thing. So rather than, you know, and and most of these editorials are all about, oh, how people won't stay on them and they're so stupid, right? That's not, they don't actually say that, but that's the sort of underlying tone. It's like, don't they know it's good for them? It's like, of course, they know it's good for them. Like, stop treating them like children. They're not children. They're adults. They make a rational decision that, hey, yeah, maybe it's good for me, but I can't live my life like that. And that's the real problem.

• 47:27Mindy Pelz?

  And I even heard recently that because it slows down food out of your stomach, that your blood sugar is never completely calming down. And they believe that it may be affecting autophagy because you're never fully switching over into a fasted state, even though you're not eating very much.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's certainly possible. I I haven't seen that study, but for sure it slows down. It it works on several levels. One, it slows down how quickly the food moves out of the stomach, but also activates certain regions of the brain for satiety. So it basically tells you you're super full. So, you know, imagine going to a buffet and be eating, you know, too much, right? And it's like, that's, you you don't wanna eat anymore, right? It's not, it's not pleasurable to you, right? You you if somebody said, have a pork chop, you'd be like, whoa, no way, right? But you ate that pork chop like, you know, half an hour previous with great gusto. So the whole, the whole thing is that, yeah, there's, there's other, because it's not a physiologic uh thing, there's gonna be other side effects that you're gonna notice.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I mean, we've been using it, you know, fairly heavily for like five or six years, right? So the main problem is that people just don't wanna take it anymore. Tons and tons of people. Yeah, especially the people that I deal with. You know, I deal with a lot of uh older people on other medications, right? So then when you start throwing in all that nausea and all the, and you're taking like three, four, or five other pills, it starts to become a real issue. So, you know, almost every day, somebody's like, well, I had to stop it, or I had to, you know, I had to go, go down on the dose, right? Right? And and then, but of course, when you're looking online, uh you know, all the stories are about some thirty-year-old

• 49:15Speaker 01

  who lost, you know, fifty pounds, like, you know, they could have lost weight with fasting too, right? You know that.

• 49:20Mindy Pelz?

  Right. That's exactly how, that's been my point. I listen to all these people. I'm like, y'all, you could get this for free with fasting. So I totally agree with you. Talk to me about visceral fat. You know, I I put out like six new videos a week on YouTube and the thing my audience really is struggling with is belly fat and visceral fat. And how do I get rid of that?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the visceral fat is the most important fat, really. So the the the whole thing about the fat is that it's not all the same. Subcutaneous fat is is fine. From a metabolic standpoint, it actually makes very little difference. It's the visceral fat that really sort of sort of kills you. And the good thing about fasting is that it really targets that visceral fat. Right? So when you're fasting, your body is basically, and if you think about where the the fat comes from, a lot of it comes from de novo lipogenesis. Right? So when you eat sort of, especially when you're eating too much glucose. So carbohydrates, you're eating too much glucose. Your body can store a certain amount of glucose, but then when you have excess,

• 50:29Speaker 01

  then it turns that glucose into fat. The fat is in the liver, but the fat is not supposed to be stored in the liver, right? So the the the liver actually tries to push out that fat through triglycerides, which is VLDL. And that's why your triglyceride levels go up when you eat too much glucose. Triglycerides go up. HDL goes down. So the other thing is that a lot of, because it's exporting it out, you get fatty. You get fat deposition around the organs. You get fat deposition in the pancreas, you get fatty pancreas. So you actually get all of those that visceral adiposity. But it's not necessarily because you ate the fat. It's because of this de novo lipogenesis, because it's getting pushed out from from the liver.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  That's why you see in metabolic syndrome, which is really a disease of too much insulin and too much glucose.

• 51:20Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  You get the diabetes because they have too much glucose. Then you get the high triglycerides, you get the low HDL, then you get the abdominal fat, which is why you get the abdominal obesity. Right? So that's that's basically four out of five manifestations of the metabolic syndrome. All because of hyperinsulinemia. So that visceral fat is a huge problem, because that's what is linked to sort of heart attacks and strokes and so on. Not the fat that's underneath the skin, subcutaneous fat. And they've done lots of studies of this. So for example, if you do liposuction, so you can actually vacuum out the subcutaneous fat, but you don't vacuum out the the visceral fat.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Turns out there's zero metabolic benefit to vacuuming out that subcutaneous fat. It just doesn't help. Yeah, but the fasting and low carbohydrate diets in particular, because they deplete the the liver that glucose, it depletes that sort of de novo lipogenesis. Now you start to go in reverse, because your body needs to now push out those calories, right? So if it it stores the calories as glycogen in the liver, but if you use up the glycogen, especially on these longer fasts, then your body has to start burning fat. In the first place, it's going to start, it's going to pull it out is from the liver, because the fat is sitting right there in the liver. If the deplete the liver of the fat too, then you're going to get less of those triglycerides going out, less of the lower the VLDL, which means lower triglycerides, higher HDL,

• 52:46Speaker 01

  and then less of this abdominal obesity. So in fact, this is actually well known. Like if you have, when people used to do surgery, they used to put them on these really restrictive diets and, you know, so and fasting preoperatively, because they wanted to shrink that liver. Yeah, it is very interesting, because one study I saw, for example, they measured it with CT scans.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  And they did these sort of ultra low calorie, ultra low carbohydrate diets for like five days preoperatively. Because the thing is that when you got a giant liver, you can't work there very well. So the surgeons always want you to shrink that. So in order to do that, they they put them on these very low carb diets and stuff. And you could shrink like total body fat percentage went down like one percent, but liver fat went down like 28% or something like that. So what's telling you is that you're preferentially pulling out that fat from the viscera, which is exactly what you want to do, right? And fasting is a super good way to do that.

• 53:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And what about women that are going through menopause? Because I hear a lot from perimenopausal women. They're like, out of nowhere, all of a sudden I got all this belly fat. And there's a hormonal piece to that as well.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And this is where I think it's it's the, you know, the the classic sort of nail in the coffin for sort of calories in, calories out. Because if you think about it, if if it's about calories in, calories out, willpower, discipline, and all this sort of stuff, then how is it that every single woman in the world loses willpower at exactly the same time in their life? Right? What? They all just let it go, right? It's like, just listen to these women. They'll tell you exactly the same thing. I eat the same, I do the same exercise, but all this, I'm gaining belly fat. Right? All during perimenopause. It's not a coincidence, like, why don't you just listen to these women for one?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Right? Rather than telling you, oh, all about calories in, calories out. Like, don't be so stupid. It's obviously related to the hormones. So when your estrogen goes down, what happens? Well, estrogen is actually a bit of an appetite suppressant. You can actually measure this. And I think this is actually quite interesting, too. If you measure caloric intake through the menstrual cycle, it actually varies quite wildly. So as from from the beginning of the period to ovulation, estrogen is going up. And estrogen is an appetite suppressant. So as estrogen goes up, your appetite goes down. So in the first part of the cycle, leading up to ovulation, they're eating on average 1600 something calories a day. Then after that, estrogen falls, progesterone goes up, and progesterone is an appetite stimulant.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  So we know this because you can take an artificial stimulant called megestrol or Megace, which is, you know, artificial progesterone. It stimulates appetites using cancer patients, right? So after ovulation, the second half of cycle, they're they're they're eating about 2100 calories a day. So that's a swing of 500 calories. That's like a 30% increase in caloric intake, most of which is unconscious. And again, it's not because they don't know what's happening. It's because, you know, these hormones are driving their hunger. So what happens when estrogen is going down is that you're losing this sort of appetite suppression, right? So you're getting a bit more hungry. But the other main problem is that the estrogen redistributes the fat into those non-harmful subcutaneous areas.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  You're getting breasts, hips. You're getting subcutaneous fat, but now you're redistributing it back into the viscera, which is what the men have, right? And that's why women tend to be protected during

• 56:31Speaker 01

  during premenopause. Right? They're protected from heart disease, right? They have less heart disease. Because all the fat is not visceral fat, it's subcutaneous fat. Then, of course, as they're going to postmenopausal state, they're like the men, and it all redistributes into the visceral fat. So the risk of heart attacks actually goes up as well. So the whole point is that, you know, you you have to really be aware that this is what's happening, not that you necessarily take estrogen or not. That's a bit more controversial and, you know, I don't know the answer to that one. But the point is that this is what's happening, right? You have to know what's happening, so now you can deal with it. You can decide to do something about it. You can't just say, I'm going to do the same as I always did. Right?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  This is, you you can't, because the hormones are changing on you all the time. It's all about the hormones. Sometimes it's insulin, sometimes it's estrogen, sometimes it's testosterone. You actually see the same with testosterone, interestingly. If you treat somebody for prostate cancer with androgen deprivation therapy, take away their testosterone. It's very reliable what happens. They lose muscle and gain fat. It's it's quite interesting. It's, they did one study with androgen deprivation therapy. And I think like 70% of people wound up with abdominal obesity. It was a massive number.

• 57:53Mindy Pelz?

  That's crazy.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Because their testosterone essentially went to zero. I mean, there was a reason, right? So that's the prostate cancer and stuff. But it was crazy that so many people develop both abdominal obesity and also the abdominal obesity and metabolic syndrome.

• 58:12Mindy Pelz?

  At the same time, without one hormone?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, without the testosterone. So the same thing happens in in, I mean, this is sort of an extreme case. But again, points to the fact that you got to look at the hormones. Looking at the calories is is is ridiculous. It's the result, not the cause of the problem. Right? So the cause of the problem, for example, in perimenopause is the lack of estrogen, which leads you to some people to gain weight, because it's actually a very high risk time in a woman. It's one of the highest risk times of weight gain in a woman's life, actually. So and and the change was the the hormones. And that led to the weight gain, which is the same as saying that calories in was greater than calories out, right? But that calories in being greater than calories out was the result of the perimenopause, right?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  It didn't cause the weight gain. It was the result of the weight gain that came from the the lack of estrogen or the decrease of estrogen.

• 59:08Mindy Pelz?

  Well said. What are what are your thoughts on fasting for cancer? There's been a lot of, and I know you wrote a book on this. Where would we use a fasting to help with cancer?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  I think that that is really one of the

• 59:25Speaker 01

  great things that we can do, actually. Because if you think about How it works, right? Insulin is a growth hormone. So. If you have a condition where you have a lot of growth and insulin not great, like you look at breast cancer. Breast cells have, you know, not very many insulin receptors. Breast cancer cells have a huge amount. They have like six or eight times the amount of insulin receptors. So this breast cancer cell. Loves glucose because it has all this insulin, loves insulin. So it has six times, eight times the insulin receptor. So a little bit of insulin. That breast cancer is gonna suck it all up and let all this glucose into the cell so it can grow.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Right? So what's a good strategy? Well, how about lower insulin, right? It's like, that seems to make sense. How are you gonna do that? Well, fasting is good, right? We know we have all these obesity associated cancers, right? Pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, all of these obesity associated cancer. Well, obesity. Is a state of hyperinsulinemia. In obesity, there's too much insulin. And that may be feeding the cancer, right? Because you're giving the cancer glucose, because we know that cancers. Love glucose. So most of your body can run on glucose or can run on fat, right? So if you follow a ketogenic diet or if you're fasting. Your body, your heart, your lung, your liver. They will just burn triglycerides or fat.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Cancer cells don't like to do that. They can, but they don't like to. They're much less effective. So if you lock down your glucose by lowering insulin, then you're not feeding those cancer cells. And therefore, it's a very good strategy for cancer prevention. Adjunctive therapy, like I'm I'm never gonna say don't take your chemotherapy or whatever, right? I think I I think that's not a good idea. But you can do it and add this adjunctive treatment to sort of. Boost the effect. So fasting during chemotherapy and all these other things can be highly, highly effective.

• 1:01:23Mindy Pelz?

  What do you think of fasting and muscle loss? I get a lot of people who believe, oh, if I'm gonna fast, I'm gonna lose muscle. And the research I've seen is that ketones actually preserve muscle the more the more you get. What what do you say to the person who's fearful of that?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a big lie, actually. Uh, the whole thing is sort of ridiculous. Like, if you think about. Muscle gain or loss. Why do you gain muscle or why do you lose muscle? Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? You gain muscle when you exercise, when you use it, and you lose muscle when you don't use it. So if you put somebody on bedrest, they lose muscle very quickly. If you send an astronaut up into space where there's no gravity, they lose muscle very quickly. It doesn't matter. At all what you feed them. Because the problem was not the food. The problem was, are you using the muscle or are you not using the muscle? Because if you are using the muscle, you will be build muscle, right?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  And so fasting does not burn muscle. I mean, it's so ridiculous because you think about, um, you know, our ancestors. Who would have, you know, periods where there was not much to eat, so they're fasting, not, you know, necessarily because they wanted to, but there was no food, right? So i- it's like, why would your body store energy in the form of glucose and the form of fat? And when you need it. You use your protein. Like, that seems pretty stupid. Why would you think the human body is just so stupid, right? Like. Think about this, if you store firewood for the winter. But then when it gets cold, you chop up your sofa.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Like, that's pretty stupid of you, right? So if you have functional tissue, like muscle. But you have tons of fat sitting around. Why is your body so stupid that it's gonna burn the protein and leave the fat? So again, think about, you know, our ancestors, cavemen, cave women. If if you had fasting and feeding cycles where all you did was lose muscle, gain fat, you'd have little blobs of fat just running around the American prairies. Right? Because it's like, that's it, right? Like, why do you assume the bo- the human body is just so ridiculously dumb? Like, how did we get to this state, right? Of course, that doesn't happen, right? You gain muscle.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  A- and and the the flip side of the muscle loss with fasting, which I think is ridiculous, right? You know, so, uh, it does happen, but only in the extreme. Right? When you have no muscle, when you have no fat stores, right? So if you have zero fat, like, you know, four percent body fat, yes, you don't wanna be doing that. You can lose muscle. But for the most people, it doesn't happen. But again. The the flip side is that people think, oh, I wanna build muscle. I'm just gonna eat protein.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  You don't gain muscle by eating protein. You gain muscle by exercising, okay? I would love it if all I had to do is eat protein and gain muscle, right? I would love it, right? And that's what they're all selling you. You got these stupid things like Doritos protein and.

• 1:04:35Mindy Pelz?

  I'm like, you're gonna drink water with protein? You're gonna gain weight.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, don't be ridiculous. It's it's such a, it's such a snow job, right? They're just, they're just shoveling it in. It's like, oh, eat protein, build muscle. It's like, tell me how that works. Right? It's like, I'm gonna eat protein and my body will just magically build muscle. Why? Why would it do that? It's so stupid. It's such a sales job, right? And it's like, I see all these people trying to maximize protein. And that's not to say that protein is bad, right? It has a role in satiety and all this stuff. Yeah, satiety is a big one. So it's, I'm not, I'm not saying that protein is bad, but this whole. Sales job of, oh, I need to take protein powder to do, I'm like, come on, take some real food, first of all, like.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Forget the ultra processed stuff. That's garbage, right? Take the real food.

• 1:05:28Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. How important do you think the first meal is after you fast, the refeed?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you should try to, you know, you should focus on it. I mean, obviously, what we try to tell people is, you know, eat. Unprocessed foods, sort of minimally processed foods, try to avoid like high carbohydrate foods because. You don't wanna get your essential proteins and fats, right? So there's essential proteins, essential, sorry, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids. There's no essential carbohydrates. So you wanna make sure that when you're refeeding, that you're you're getting the stuff that your body really needs, right? Uh, so so but but again. The body will generally figure it out. As long as you're eating sort of real, like, unprocessed sort of natural food.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Your body is gonna figure out where, what's gonna come where, right? So that's, it is important to focus on it because, you know. You know, especially if you do sort of training, like exercise in the fasted state and stuff. You wanna make sure you're you're maximizing that window where you are going to build muscle, right? Because remember that when you fast, growth hormone actually goes up, so that when you actually start to refeed, you've got growth hormone to sort of help build.

• 1:06:39Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah, it's, I mean, that, we've been doing it a lot within my community on. How about we refeed with foods that are fiber filled, protein filled, good, healthy fats? And every time we do that, we see food noise go down, we see weight sustained or weight loss continued. It's like, so I, I feel like for a lot of people, they can't master eating. The whole eating window, but maybe if they master one meal, then the rest of the eating window becomes a lot easier.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's certain things that can make it easier. So one of the things that we, uh, did was, uh. Always tell people to drink, um, bone broth, which is actually, one, it's a very traditional food. It's a real food because you're taking. Sort of bones and simmering it down. Um, and then if you look at the macros of it, it's actually like twelve grams of protein and zero fat, right? So you're just basically giving your body what it needs, along with whatever salt and stuff you put into it. So you're getting all the minerals. You know, proteins, minerals from the, you know, you, when you boil bones, you're getting the collagen, you're getting all that stuff, the hyaluronic acid and stuff.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  In the normal proportion, right? One of the things we did actually to make it easier, because I used to, I used to make a lot of bone broth and. The bone broth is great, but it takes a long time.

• 1:08:01Mindy Pelz?

  It takes days. You gotta be patient.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  It's a multi-day process. It was actually quite, so I'd have to buy the bones, simmer it, and I actually usually simmer it for like. Eighteen hours or something like that. But then I actually didn't like the fat on it. So then I I'd let it cool, put it in the fridge. Skim it off, but you're talking about a two-day process. So we developed actually a much simpler way to do it, which I've actually, so I've actually completely replaced. I don't make bone broth anymore. But we we, there's the company called Era, which I helped develop this bone broth. So that's Era, A E I R A. It's basically powdered bone broth, right? So it's basically, but it only has one ingredient. So it's this ultra pure bone broth that we developed for the fasting community.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  And it takes all the pain out of bone broth, because the pain was that it took a long time. It wasn't difficult, but it's very time consuming. So if you want a bone broth, you couldn't just get it, right? But now you can't because it's just in a powder. Powder five minutes later and it's there. And there's only one ingredient, there's only chicken bone. So you add your own salt, add your own, if you wanna. Boil it with a bit of vegetables for flavor, whatever, you certainly can. If you wanna add something like miso, you certainly can. So then immediately, it's like. Available like within five minutes as opposed to, oh, two days later, I'll enjoy that bone broth, right? So it's a total game changer, in my opinion, for the fasting. And so we've used it when in our fasting community.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Um, uh, because a lot of bone broths, um, there's two, two sort of problems. One is that sometimes they add a lot of other stuff, right? So there's artificial stuff and fillers and stuff. And two, the other thing, when you get some of these bone broths that come in, you know, in a, in a bottle or something. They're quite expensive, actually. And I think it's because when you ship. Liquid all over the place, it's very, very expensive. So then, I I remember comparing a cup of bone broth when I bought it in the jar. Was about seven fifty for one cup compared to the Arab bone broth, which is about a dollar fifty or something like that, right? So a lot cheaper, convenient and available, right? But at the same time, it's just got one ingredient so that you don't have to worry about all the other

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  stuff and it's a real food, right? We're not adding anything else to it. So that's

• 1:10:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  That's something that in the last year or two that we've really incorporated and it's made a huge difference to to a lot of people. They're like, you know, and and as I said, I don't you I don't make the bone broth anymore. I actually just use this uh this stuff because it's like huh, why do I even bother like?

• 1:10:29Mindy Pelz?

  You got two days back to your schedule. So Willie and for those of you listening, we'll leave links and codes, discount codes for that product. I think it's a great addition to a fasting lifestyle.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:40Mindy Pelz?

  So I I love that you created that. Um, so the name of this podcast is Live Like a Girl. I recently changed it. I'm really trying to help women understand a unique lifestyle. Um, from all of your research and you the work you do, what do you think is the most important thing that a woman implements in her life to stay healthy?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Um, you know, in the Hunger Code, I sort of have three sort of uh golden rules of of uh weight loss, but for healthy living, really. And they're sort of what you might expect. Number one is cut out the ultra processed foods, right? And I think it's because the ultra processed foods plays enormous havoc on the hedonic hunger.

• 1:11:25Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  As well as the homeostatic hunger, but really from an emotional standpoint, like the dopamine spikes and troughs and stuff, it really wrecks you up, right? So the Doritos and all that stuff, that's just the the just messes you up completely as opposed to, hey, why don't you have some chicken or something instead, right? Or a hard boiled egg? So that's sort of number one to me is cutting out those ultra processed foods and and and I think that takes you a long way. Number two, of course, fasting, because

• 1:11:55Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Setting up those times that you don't eat are so important because it it creates these rules in your mind that, hey, I don't eat in this time, right? So you're getting rid of a lot of that conditioned hunger. So you're breaking those habits that you didn't know you had, right? Where you open up the fridge and you're just wondering what you should eat. And of course, it's it's gonna be something that's not too good for you, right? And third is creating the sort of social um environment, like the friends and the family members who are going to support you, because that is actually hugely important. So we actually also deal in the fasting method with a community because who your friends are influences who you are. Like, let's just be

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  real, right? So if all your friends are drinking beer, you're drinking beer, right? If all your friends are going for a hike, you're going for a hike. Let's be real. That's the way life works, right? If all of your friends are eating salads and stuff, you're eating salads. If all your friends are eating french fries, you're eating french fries because what they do influences what you do. So having those right friends, or if if they don't follow, you know, you, then you talk to them and you make an example and you be the leader to to say, okay, this is what we're gonna do, right? Let's let's not do, you know, get together for drinks. Let's

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  go for a hike. We can still chit chat and enjoy each other, but instead of drinking, you know, uh alcohol, we'll go into the woods and we'll have this nice thing, right? So the whole, the whole idea is that these are not crazy new rules that, you know, are just made up. These are, these are, these ideas have been around forever, right? Eat natural food. Don't eat all the time. Have the right social environment and your friends, right? That's probably what your mother told you anyway, right?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  You know, you know.

• 1:13:52Mindy Pelz?

  We know how well you listen to her.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Turns out she was right all along, right? So so those are really, really important, right? And those are the my sort of three golden rules in the Hunger Code. I actually have like, there's another, there's also like fifty weight loss tips, for example, but those are sort of less important, but there's a really practical sort of uh guide to sort of what you need to do, what you need to think about. You know, there's other things like food order, you know, what order you your foods, eating foods early versus late, walking after meals. There's all these other smaller things, resistant starch, right? If you, you know, uh, if you eat rice that's been cooled and reheated, it's actually quite different uh from a metabolic standpoint. So there's all

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  these other littler things, but the three main things would be those, right? Ultra processed foods, fasting and your community. And that's why we have a community at the fasting method. Same way where you have a community, right? Because your community determines who you are. That's that's that's great. So if you choose the right community, you will be able to listen. And that's why, you know, that's why we always emphasize these groups, group sessions, talking to each other, right? That's how you get better. That's how you you learn from each other, you support each other. You can do it yourself, but it's ten times harder.

• 1:15:07Mindy Pelz?

  So much easier with with the right people, so much easier. I, you know, I was uh went gluten free uh about thirty years ago and I just kept my mouth shut. I just knew it was better for me. And then my closest friends ended up going gluten free and all of a sudden my whole world changed. It was like they could invite me over for dinner and I knew what they knew what my requirements were, like it was a total game changer. So I think you are really spot on with this social impact of the our metabolic health is one that I do not think we talk enough about. So thank you for bringing that forward. I think it's really important.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's sort of the focus of the Hunger Code is trying to get us off of this idea that's all about the diet. If you think it's just about your diet, then you're sort of already lost, right?

• 1:15:57Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Haven't thought about the sort of emotional side of eating, right? That's the hedonic hunger and then you haven't thought about the social side of eating. And I remember talking to Terry, who works with us. She's a PhD in psychology at the Fasting Method. She's the head of our coaching. And Terry and I were talking on a podcast and she's like, what percentage do you think uh of our hunger is actually sort of, you know, hedonic and conditioned versus thing? And she's and I was like, probably like eighty-five percent.

• 1:16:27Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah, I believe it.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  It's like, okay, so then why don't we talk about it more? It's like, she talks about it a lot and but very other few other people do, right? It's like, oh, I have to lose weight. Go talk to the dietitian. It's like, okay, but the diet is not the only thing you have to think about.

• 1:16:43Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  What are your mindsets? What are your, you know, what are your friends? What are you, you know, what are your habits? All of those are sort of crucially important things, right? And it's like, okay, well, if you don't talk about it, then and you never identify it, then then then you never you never get the full benefit.

• 1:17:02Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. Well, Dr. Feng, one of the things I love about you is you make metabolic health so simple and it just makes sense. It's like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So I appreciate you writing all these books. I appreciate you continuing to go on interviews. And where can people, I I think I'm excited about your new book, but I want to encourage everybody to go get all your books. Where where where can you be found?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can follow me on uh social media, YouTube. I do a lot of uh YouTube videos. There's a lot about fasting, about diabetes uh on my YouTube channel. Uh, just be careful, there are a ton of deep fakes out there, like a lot.

• 1:17:43Mindy Pelz?

  I've seen a few of you. Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I I have to tell you that my mother actually

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  And she's like, what is the name of this? I can't remember, some kind of water or supplement. What is this thing that helps this and this and this? I'm like, oh, ma.

• 1:18:05Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, my god. That is too funny.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  They are. But anyway, so if you go to my YouTube channel, Jason Fung, or if you go to my um, you know, act.com or Instagram, you can find me there. You can also go to my website, Dr. Jason Fung, that's D O C T O R, Jason Fung dot com. And that has a link to all my books and everything. So uh you can also follow me on Substack. Um, so I have I have a lot of uh materials that I that I wrote posted there as well. You know, the stuff that's in the book and stuff like, uh, you know, the books are great. They're much more polished and stuff, but almost everything I write is in it's in, you know, if you wanted to find it, it's in the blogs, it's in the videos. Like, I'm not trying to keep it from anybody, right? It's it's the knowledge, I believe, is for sharing. It's just a matter of uh the books are sort of the easier

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  way to get it. But if you don't want to, you can simply find it on any of those, any of those channels. Um, thefastingmethod.com. I still, you know, I'm still, uh, you know, that's that's the community that that Megan Ramos and I do, and it's helped like a lot of people. It's actually quite stunning when I ask for a few uh success stories. I saw a few and I'm like, holy crap, like, these people do amazing, right?

• 1:19:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, we get the same, the success stories of like eighty year old women losing a hundred pounds. It's like, what? Getting off the, you know, many of their medications because their whole metabolic system changes just from learning to fast.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the other thing that I that was crazy is that these people look great. And then you look at the people who've lost a hundred pounds and have that Ozempic phase, and they look terrible, right? And it's like, they look horrible. And it's like, but when they're fasting, because it's natural, you're not getting that Ozempic phase, right? Nobody ever called it fasting phase, right? Because there's obvious, there was nothing, right? You couldn't tell, right? But with Ozempic phase, yeah, it doesn't happen all the time, but for sure it happens because it's like some people, you're like, holy crap, like you need to stop right now. You look horrible. Like, you look ten years older, right?

• 1:20:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, exactly. And you have a a look. They all look like

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  They have that look. Yeah, that Ozempic face. It's it's an Ozempic face, Ozempic butt is, you know, I've heard both. And then there's tons of examples online of celebrities who've done that. It's it's it's awful. Yeah. So, yeah.

• 1:20:21Mindy Pelz?

  Well, I love this conversation. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you're doing. Like, just keep leading the way. We know that we're all cheering you on and appreciate your wisdom. So.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. Yeah, all right. Good to talk to you, Mindy.

• 1:20:36Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.

• 1:20:59Mindy Pelz?

  Can I tell you something I wish someone had told me years ago? If you've ever tried to fast or follow any health program and it didn't work the way you expected, I need you to know that it's not a discipline problem and it's not a willpower problem. It is an information problem. Most fasting research was done on men. Most dietary advice was designed for men. And then it got handed to women as if our bodies work the same way. And they don't. You operate on a twenty-eight day hormonal cycle and the foods you eat, the length of your fast, even your workouts, all of it needs to be timed where you are in that cycle to actually get

• 1:21:44Mindy Pelz?

  results. That's exactly why I wrote Fast Like a Girl to teach you. It's a step-by-step guide to using fasting in a way that's actually built for your feminine body. This book has been out in the world for several years now, and it just hit the New York Times Bestseller List. That tells me something. People are still reading it. They are still getting incredible results. And I want to point out, this isn't just for women that are in their menstruating years. There is plenty in there for perimenopause and postmenopausal women, because even then, we have a new hormonal balance we need to time our fasts to. If you're finally ready to understand

• 1:22:29Mindy Pelz?

  your body at a new level, you can find Fast Like a Girl wherever books are sold or at drmindypelz.com/books.