The Best Treatment For Weight Loss and Preventing Disease w/ Dr. Jason Fung EP 1361

Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, researcher and New York Times best-selling author currently practicing in Toronto, Canada. His books, including The Obesity Code, The Complete Guide to Fasting, The Diabetes Code and The Cancer Code have challenged conventional thinking about these diseases, and introduced dietary strategies to manage them. He is the co-founder of The Fasting Method, which provides the education, tools and community needed to successfully implement intermittent fasting. In this episode you will learn,The deeper reasons why people eat too much. How dopamine from food affects your body and brain. The major factors surrounding Obesity in children. The top 5 foods to help burn fat faster. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1361Check out Jason’s prior episode here! The Science of Intermittent Fasting (Foods To Live Longer & Reverse Type 2 Diabetes): https://link.chtbl.com/1031-podHow To Prevent Cancer With Your Food: https://link.chtbl.com/1030-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?

  Watch your calories, watch your calories, watch your calories. And I think it's a disastrous sort of idea because the thing about calories is that...

• 0:09Lewis 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.

• 0:32Lewis Howes?

  In your opinion, what is the best way to stay consistent in maintaining weight loss and preventing disease?

• 0:44Jason Fung?

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that it gets to some of the, you know, environmental aspects of weight. Because the way we look at it is that, you know, a lot of people think that it's just about knowledge, right? It's just about knowing what you're supposed to do, right? And the thing is that that's probably, that's just the beginning. It's not the end, right? It's like saying, don't eat cookies. That's good advice. Doesn't mean I'm not going to eat cookies, right? Because there's all different reasons why people do it. And so, so, so just knowing something, just knowing, oh, I could fast. Well, yes, you could, but will you, right? That's, that's the real key. And you have to realize that there's actually a lot of other things that go into it.

• 1:28Jason Fung?

  And one of them is the environment. So the environment that you find yourself in plays a huge role into how well you're going to do in this. And that's important because you can change your environment, right? So, you know, I think, think about two situations, right? In 1970s, you're in the meeting at your office and you're bored, but there's nothing to do. So you sit there and listen. You don't eat because what are you going to do? Get up and walk out and get yourself a cookie? Everybody would be like, what the hell are you doing, right? And compare that to the 2020s where you have a meeting, 10:30, somebody orders bagels and cream cheese, right? And they stick them in front of you at the meeting. So you're not actually hungry, but you're bored.

• 2:12Jason Fung?

  Boss is going on and on, so you eat that bagel, right? So it's, it's, it's a completely, it's not that you didn't know that the cookies, the bagels, the whatever was good for you. Nobody thought that, but...

• 2:29Jason Fung?

  The environment's so different because one of them is so like you're not moving from your seat. Because you know, your whole company's there, your boss is there. The other one, oh, I'm just gonna eat that way. I'm, you know, I'm gonna pass the time, right? So the environment plays like a huge role. Uh, same thing, you know, nineteen seventies, it's coffee, you take a coffee, right? You go to, you know, the, the, the little thingy, there's coffee, there's nothing else. So that's all you got. Coffee. Twenty twenty, you didn't go down, you go to the, you know, local coffee store. There's more than coffee there. Everybody knows that, right?

• 3:07Lewis Howes?

  And all the coffee has, you know, fifty grams of sugar and whipped cream.

• 3:11Jason Fung?

  Exactly.

• 3:12Lewis Howes?

  There's Rice Krispie treats.

• 3:15Jason Fung?

  Exactly. You got the caramel this and mocha this and those all have sugar. And then you got your doughnut and your muffins and things. So it's not just coffee. So what was the difference between the two? It certainly wasn't the knowledge and it certainly wasn't the willpower. The difference was the environment is very conducive on one side to weight loss by forcing you to not eat. And the, on the other side, it's just very easy to, right? And this sort of um, environment means that you can change it. So if you're an office manager, you can say, guess what? We're not having any food at meetings anymore. It's not allowed. It's not allowed to eat at your desk. If you wanna work, you work. If you wanna eat, you go into the cafeteria, right?

• 3:57Jason Fung?

  There's no candy on the bowl, like no, no candy in the office. That's just not what we do because it's not fair to people trying to lose weight. Those are easy rules. But now all of a sudden, you've tilted your odds of success much higher because if you're spending eight hours in the office, you actually have no thing and, and no more of these office birthday parties with cake, right? That everybody feels obligated to go and have a little bit of cake that you didn't really didn't want in the first place, right? And again, it's the same thing, right? You say, okay, we'll celebrate, but we're just gonna have fruit or whatever it is, right? Whatever you wanna do. Once you, once you understand that it's the environment that's more important than, you know, purely the knowledge, then you can make those changes.

• 4:38Jason Fung?

  Or you can get yourself a curing machine and say, okay, we're gonna make the coffees here so that you don't have to go down there, right? And so, so there's all different things you can do. The other thing you have to think about is the sort of deeper reasons why people are eating. So if you think about things like emotional eating, right? There's lots of different reasons why people eat. And hunger is really just one of them. You eat because you're bored, you eat because you're stressed, you eat because, you know, you're sad, for example. So this is a very interesting thing. If you look at refined carbohydrates and sugar. What we know is that you eat, you know, sugar.

• 5:20Jason Fung?

  Some people, the dopamine in their brain lights up like a Christmas tree, right? What it means is that they're being flooded with these sort of feel-good chemicals. So if you're all of a sudden sad, you broke up with somebody or whatever it is, you're a little sad at work. You're looking for a little happiness, well, you get yourself some sugar because you know that it's gonna make you feel better. That's what comfort foods are, right? Comfort foods are like, you know, sweets, like, you know, cookies, chocolates, ice cream. You know, or starchy foods like mac and cheese and stuff, right? Nobody's like getting themselves a piece of salmon, right? That's not comfort food. It's like, it's delicious, but it's not comfort food.

• 6:05Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:05Jason Fung?

  So the point is that if you just say, oh, just don't eat. Well, you're not understanding why people are eating, right? So maybe the environment is not right for them. Maybe they're eating because they're emotional, like they're sad, they're depressed, they're, you know, bored, whatever. Then you can fix that. It's like, oh, if you're bored, let's figure out what you want to do. Or if you're sad, let's figure out something that you can do instead. Um, or whatever it is, right? And so that's, that's, that's, you know, that's, that's a couple of things that you really have to think about. And then the third thing you really have to think about is habits. Because habits are huge. And I think this is, you know, people have started to realize how huge habits really are.

• 6:50Jason Fung?

  Because um, if you have something that's not fun. Then as long as you make it into a habit, then you'll still do it. And you don't have to think about it because once it's a habit. It doesn't require willpower. So if you think about brushing your teeth, for example. We all brush our teeth twice a day. Nobody thinks it's fun. Nobody really wants to brush your teeth. You do it because it's a habit. You you feel incomplete if you don't, right? You get up and you don't brush your teeth. You feel a little weird, right? So you go and brush your teeth because that's just what you do. But that's the key, right? You make your habits and then the habits make you because then you derive all the benefits of brushing your teeth. That is less cavities late on.

• 7:33Jason Fung?

  But you did it because you created that habit deliberately, right? So if time restricted eating, intermittent fasting goes along with those things, right? If you create that habit. That, hey, you don't eat breakfast or, hey, you're gonna stop eating after dinner. After a while, you're the one that's gonna derive the benefits of that because you've. Yes, the first two weeks. Of trying to create that habit, maybe it's a little hard, right? But after a while, you do that for the rest of your life. You think about the nineteen seventies again, because again, there's a time where there's not a lot of starvation, but there is not a lot of obesity either, right?

• 8:13Lewis Howes?

  What was the obesity uh metric at in the seventies compared to where is it now?

• 8:18Jason Fung?

  I think it was probably like um. Fifteen percent sort of thing compared to like sixty seventy percent now.

• 8:27Lewis Howes?

  Wait, sixty seventy percent obesity now? Is that an American?

• 8:30Jason Fung?

  Overweight and obesity. Yeah, overweight and obesity, right?

• 8:33Lewis Howes?

  So what is overweight? What is overweight and obese mean?

• 8:35Jason Fung?

  Uh, so we use a uh body mass index, which is um basically it's a a height versus weight sort of calculation. Twenty to twenty five is considered normal. Now twenty five is twenty five to thirty is considered overweight. But that that actually catches a lot of people who are just on the muscular side. So it's actually not a great metric, but those are the definitions. And then you go over thirty is obese. And then they've had to add a couple of. They've had to add a few like over forty is like morbidly obese and stuff because people were going up and up and up on that scale. So.

• 9:10Lewis Howes?

  So that's so over thirty percent body fat is considered obese currently.

• 9:15Jason Fung?

  Um, it's no, it's a body mass index, which is uh like weight over heights. Uh sort of thing, right? So the higher it is, the higher the the the more your weight, uh but you have to divide it by your height so that you know, you're comparing apples to apple.

• 9:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 9:29Jason Fung?

  But anyway, it's it's it's not a great metric, but it is a standard sort of metric that we use.

• 9:35Lewis Howes?

  But based in the seventies on the same metric, there was only fifteen percent.

• 9:38Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Lewis Howes?

  Uh overweight or obese, whereas now it's sixty percent overweight.

• 9:42Jason Fung?

  Sixty, yeah, it's it's a lot higher. And then then, yeah, it's it's it's sad and it's it's it's especially stark in child because of course.

• 9:52Lewis Howes?

  Uh. Why, why is that? I see so many kids walking around now that loo- don't look healthy. They look extremely overweight and obese as five, eight, ten, twelve year olds. And when when I was a kid growing up in the eighties, early nineties, there was a lot of sugar available.

• 10:11Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Lewis Howes?

  We and I remember having a lot of sugar, but I also remember being outside constantly running around, playing sports and activities and being outside. It was less being inside on the phone and less on video games. It was more about playing. I- is that one of the main factors or what is the main factor of so much child obesity?

• 10:29Jason Fung?

  I think there's been a couple of major factors. I think one of the major factors was probably the increase. Uh so so it was the increase in sort of processed sugary foods. Um. So if you look at when the obesity epidemic really went got going, it was sort of in the late seventies, just as we got the uh food pyramid, right? That was the big change.

• 10:54Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So is that is that mar- is that marketing then? Is that just sharing marketing ideas and saying this is what you need to have in your in your meals and have more breads and more carbs and more cereals.

• 11:06Jason Fung?

  It was it was the US, uh US Department of Agriculture. So the USDA came out. So what what happened was that up before nineteen seventy seven, so it's first food pyramid. It was is the dietary guidelines for Americans was nineteen seventy seven. And before that, it was very uh much the government wouldn't tell you what to eat. Your mom told you what to eat, right? The government didn't get involved with that. And uh nineteen seventy seven was the first time that they decided, okay, we're gonna put out national guidelines. So the problem was they couldn't agree on a lot of stuff. Because there's this whole anti-fat movement that was going, right? And the reason for that was in the fifties. People were getting heart attacks. So, you know, fifty year olds, they'd get a heart attack.

• 11:50Jason Fung?

  And people didn't know why. They said, why are all these people getting heart attacks? And um so a couple of researchers uh said it's because they're eating more fat. And it wasn't actually true. That's the problem. Because if you look at the the diets of Americans, they hadn't changed much over the la- previous hundred years. So they're eating the same amount of fat, they're having more heart attacks. When you look back, it's actually pretty obvious what was going on. People were smoking like crazy, right? All the way from nineteen hundred through the world wars. People were just smoking, smoking, smoking. Of course, nobody knew it was that bad for you. And by the fifties and sixties, people were having the heart attacks.

• 12:32Jason Fung?

  And remember, the cigarette companies were saying, that's not us, right? Everybody smokes, your doctor smokes, right? So um you know, for remember, for years, they had just denied everything. So that was all, that all came out in the litigation, you know, years later. But people were smoking, that's why they're having heart attack. But at the time, this is sixty, nobody knew why they're having heart attacks. So there's this one group of people who said, it's because people are eating fat. Dietary fat causes heart disease. Eat fat, get heart disease. The problem was that if you look at the percentage fat in the American diet in the in the fifties, it was the same as it was in nineteen hundred. So that didn't make any sense at all. But it sort of made, it it seemed like it made sense.

• 13:15Jason Fung?

  So that's why there's this whole group of people that said, it's the fat. And so therefore, uh but there's a lot of debate. But nineteen seventy seven, the government says, we need to put something down. And the sort of uh anti-fat movement was like, well, it's the fat. So, once they said it's the fat, that was it, right? It was official government policy to go low fat. The problem is that, you know, if you eat less fat, then you're gonna eat more carbs. Because there's only three macronutrients. There's carbohydrates, there's fat, and there's protein. You can't increase protein that much because if you eat pure protein, it's it's a little bit gross. Right? So super lean meat and stuff. It's just not that good, right?

• 13:56Jason Fung?

  Um. So it is hard to eat just protein. So you wind up getting less fat uh in the diet. You have more carbs. Which is fine if you're eating broccoli, but not so fine if you're just eating a lot of white bread. But that's what happened, right? So the original food pyramid was all seven servings of bread and rice and potatoes, right? So then people started to gain weight because hey, it's it's a lot of carbs, right? So and refined carbs is the main problem. So uh as people started to gain weight, they uh you know, that was the sort of uh big turning point. Um. Because now everybody was teaching this in the schools, right?

• 14:38Jason Fung?

  And every the dietitian had to sort of toe the line and say eat less fat and eat more protein. And then the government really encouraged processed foods. They spent a lot of money telling food companies to process food so that you can get the fat out of that. Right? So you get these low-fat foods, right? But they're highly processed, so they took everything out and then they stuffed sugar in to make it taste better. So what happened was that everybody was eating refined carbs and sugar, right? So, you know, refined carbs and sugar is basically a cookie, right? That's what

• 15:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:15Jason Fung?

  Right? It's like cookies and donuts. That's refined sugar and carbs, right?

• 15:18Lewis Howes?

  There's no nutritional value.

• 15:20Jason Fung?

  Not nutritional and not good for your waistline. So people started gaining weight. And then the other thing that happens when you eat a lot of refined carbs is that it doesn't keep you full. So if you think about it, if you eat steak and eggs at breakfast, you don't really feel like eating something at ten thirty because it really keeps you full. You eat a couple of slices of white bread and jam and orange juice. By ten thirty, you're just ravenously hungry. And there's a good reason for that because there's certain things in the diet that make you full. Those are satiety hormones. So if you eat a lot of protein-containing foods, you you release a peptide YY, which is a hormone that tells you to stop. Same thing with fat. It releases cholecystokinin. It tells you to stop. So you eat a steak.

• 16:03Jason Fung?

  Those hormones start going up and then eventually you just can't. Push through. That's why they have those competitions, you know, eat a sixty ounce steak and we'll give you for free. They don't give out a lot of free steak because it's very hard to push past that. If you eat a lot of unrefined carbs with a lot of fiber, while it stretches your stomach, that tells you stop eating. So all hormones tell you to stop eating. Well, what happens when you eat that highly refined carbs plus sugar, which is the white bread and jam? But there's no protein, there's no fat, and there's no fiber. So you don't feel full. You can keep eating that stuff and you just won't get full.

• 16:45Jason Fung?

  Right? It's just like if you have a big buffet, you can, somebody says, here, have another pork chop. You go, right? It's like, I can't do that. But somebody says, here, drink some coke. You're like, okay. Why? It could have the same number of calories, but it has no satiety signaling. It's pure sugar. So that's the difference, right? So then people started eating all the time. So you had this, this, this huge change in the population where all of a sudden you're eating carbs, you're eating sugar, because we're all focused on the fat. And, and we're eating constantly because if you eat your white bread and jam at, you know, eight o'clock, ten thirty, you're looking for a low fat muffin. And so you're eating five, six times a day. So before, you know, when people used to say, don't snack.

• 17:29Jason Fung?

  Now everybody says, you need to snack because people are like saying, I have to eat six times a day. But I'm eating the right foods, the white bread and jam, the low fat white bread and jam, right? Therefore, eating six times a day must be good, but it never was. So that's sort of how that whole thing developed. And then, of course, we realized eventually that the low fat thing was just a scam. The whole thing was just wrong.

• 17:58Lewis Howes?

  Is that the government saying this? Is that some other?

• 18:02Jason Fung?

  Yeah, the government, like if you, if you look at the dietary guidelines, they get updated every, every five years. And they've completely taken out that stuff about fat. So before they said, oh, you should eat maximum this percentage of fat. So if you remember, um, so America was super low fat. And they were gaining weight like crazy. And the French didn't have that. They're eating their their their butter, full creams, you know, foie gras, you know, fatty fatty foods.

• 18:31Lewis Howes?

  Cheese is.

• 18:31Jason Fung?

  So cheese, yeah. So they're eating all this fat. So in the eighties.

• 18:35Lewis Howes?

  And they're skinny.

• 18:36Jason Fung?

  And they're skinny.

• 18:37Lewis Howes?

  But everyone was saying, well, they're skinny because they're smoking all day. But they weren't getting heart attacks. So there's something there.

• 18:45Jason Fung?

  Well, that was the whole French paradox, right? That was what we called it. Um, there's a whole debate about why aren't these French people uh, getting heart attacks because they're eating so much fat. They should be getting heart attacks, but they're getting like a third of the heart attacks that the Americans were. Uh, and and the answer was that all that fat, you know, the the the fat in their butter and cheese and stuff, it just wasn't that bad for them, right? And that's what eventually the study showed. Then you started to realize, we started to realize that, you know, stuff like nuts, which are very high in fat, was not bad. The Mediterranean diet with this olive oil was not bad. Salmon was not bad. Avocados weren't bad. So in the eighties, avocados were completely like, oh, my God, how can you eat that? Right? And it goes from that to a superfood, right?

• 19:32Jason Fung?

  So it's full of fat. Avocado is full of fat, right? And and and, you know, this whole low fat thing has sort of turned around. And then, you know, we realized that even stuff like butter, that's not that bad for you, right? Uh, so butters come back. We used to get people on margarine. But the whole thing is that by going to these sort of high, highly refined carbohydrates and and, you know, sugary foods, that's what sort of, I think, fed the obesity epidemic. On top of that, you're eating foods that basically didn't make you full at all. So therefore you're just eating more because there's nothing to stop you, right? So if you didn't stop, you're just gonna eat more and you're eating more often.

• 20:13Jason Fung?

  So it was this perfect sort of, you know, you're eating really fattening foods. You're eating more often than usual and you're eating more because there's nothing to tell you to stop. So it's like, okay, well, what's gonna happen? Well, you're gonna gain weight, right? So it's not, it was never about willpower. It's all about. This sort of thing that was set in motion by the government suddenly decreeing that we should eat processed fat-free foods. That was basically what the dietary guidelines in seventy-seven said.

• 20:47Lewis Howes?

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• 21:28Lewis Howes?

  As a result, Masterworks even has a waitlist, but you can skip it by using promo code GREATNESS at masterworks.com. That's promo code GREATNESS at masterworks.com. See important Regulation A disclosures at masterworks.com/CD. I'm curious, Jason, what is the thing in ten years that we will say we got wrong in this decade? About nutrition, health and fitness, fasting, you know, obesity? What is the thing that we will get wrong? Because it sounds like every decade or two, there's something we, the government says, doctors say, nutritionists say, this is the way. And then up ten, twenty years later, that's not the way.

• 22:13Lewis Howes?

  What is the thing in this space right now that people are saying this is the way? The government is preaching this, doctors, institutions are saying this is it. And in ten, twenty years, you think we're going to discover? We jumped too quick to that conclusion, and the data is showing now that there's actually really negative effects to disbelief. Is there anything you think might come out?

• 22:36Jason Fung?

  I think that the, I mean, one of the things which is still very prevalent is this idea of sort of calories in, calories out. Um, sort of thing. I think it's actually one of the most destructive ideas in weight loss. I think it's uh because it's so um deceptively sort of simple. Um, if you look at most academic centers, so I I was just showing that the Ameri- like a lot of the guidelines. There's like, you know, watch your calories, watch your calories, watch your calories. And I think it's a disastrous sort of idea because the thing about calories is that calories is a measure of food energy.

• 23:18Jason Fung?

  Right? That's how much energy is released when you put a piece of food into a sort of measuring device called a bomb calorimeter. And it's like, okay, this cheesecake has two hundred calories because when you burn it, you get this amount of heat generated, right? That's how you measure that, right? And so people say stuff like, oh, you know, it's all about calories and calories out, right? That's something you hear all the time, or calories and calories. And it's it's it's really sort of um very simplistic. And it's actually not very helpful because you can have two foods, right? Think about two foods. You have one, which is um, you know, cookies, which is a hundred calories or two hundred calories.

• 24:00Jason Fung?

  And you have, say, salmon, which is two hundred calories, so equal amounts of calories. The minute you eat the cookies, you release the hormone insulin, okay? And the insulin is a hormone that tells your body what to do with those calories. So the insulin tells your body to store those calories. It moves it right into the fat stores, right? So the whole thing is that if all that energy moves directly into your fat store. So these highly refined carbohydrates, sugar goes way up, insulin goes way up. When insulin goes way up, it is literally the thing that is telling your body, put those calories into storage.

• 24:42Jason Fung?

  And you store the calories in your body fat. That's all it is. Body fat's just a store of calories. So imagine you take the two hundred calories of of cookies. Now, the two hundred calories of salmon doesn't doesn't doesn't raise insulin. So you take the two hundred calories and your body just burns it, right? It uses it. That's gonna make a huge difference in terms of obesity. Because in one case, you're just storing the whole damn thing. The other one, you're you're using it. You've got energy. You're generating body heat. You're feeling good. The other one. You took the two hundred calories, you shoved it all into body fat. Your body's like, oh, I have no energy to use. So you're feeling a little bit, oh, I have no energy, I'm a little tired. And I'm a little hungry, so let me go eat something. Right?

• 25:28Jason Fung?

  So so it wasn't the calories, it wasn't the number of calories. It was the the response to the calories. Which is related to the hormones that are released. So the strange part is that what we're saying is that food contains not just the food energy. But it also contains instructions as to what your body is supposed to do with those calories. And both of them are very, very important. Whereas the calories, people say, well, it's just a number of calories. Well. Once you get past that, you know. Once you put it in your mouth, you can measure the difference in hormones. Between the two foods, and you have to pretend that that's completely irrelevant.

• 26:09Jason Fung?

  Because if you're eating, if you're told to eat the the refined carbs and sugar, which is what what we're told. Then you're setting yourself up to a situation where insulin's gonna go way up. And that insulin is gonna tell your body to store fat. It's it's that's its job, right? That's literally its job. You told your body to do that with your choice of food. So I don't see why that is considered irrelevant. So not just the amount of calories, but you have to also look at the hormonal response. Because our body is is completely dependent on hormones to tell us what to do. The other thing that insulin does, of course.

• 26:52Jason Fung?

  It tells you that you you need to put energy into storage, right? It's only when energy, it's only when insulin falls that you can pull the energy back out. Right? So what we say technically is insulin inhibits lipolysis. That is, if insulin is high, you can't burn fat. Because your instructions are to store fat, right? You can either store fat or you can burn fat, right? But you can't do both at the same time. So if you want to burn fat, but you're keeping your insulin levels high with the choice of foods. Then, hey. It's not going to work because insulin's high. You're not going to be able to move the energy from the fat back out.

• 27:35Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are the the top five foods or food groups to support in burning fat faster?

• 27:42Jason Fung?

  I think you you really have to look at the sort of very low carbohydrate foods. Because of course, they're going to provide you the energy. So things like, you know, salmon, of course, and the fatty fish is very good. Eggs are very good. Avocados are, you know, very good. If you want to do carbs, then things like beans are very good because of all the fiber and stuff like they're unrefined. So then they have other things that that that will work. Um, but those very low carbohydrate foods, a lot of people find very useful. To encourage fat burning because. If you take salmon and eggs, for example, you're going to get that energy, the calories from that, which is energy.

• 28:25Jason Fung?

  But insulin's not going to go up. So your body's not going to say, okay, well, let's put it into storage. It's just going to burn it, right? You're going to stay in that sort of fat burning state. And you're going to be able to use those calories because that's that's what you've told your body. So you're allowing your body to still access the body fat for energy. And it's going to keep you full because again, it's got it's got it's going to release hormones like peptide YY, like polystychnine. That are keep you full as opposed to the white bread and jam, right? The problem is, you know, um.

• 28:59Jason Fung?

  People like to eat those refined carbs are cheap, right? So they taste good, they're cheap, they're donuts, right? So the, you know, and, and, and that, that sets up a situation and, and there's a lot of people who say, well, it's just calories, right? So you can eat ice cream for dinner, right? I mean, if you told your grandmother that, she'd say, you're stupid, right? Like, you can't eat ice cream for dinner, even if they're the same number of calories. Because again, one of them's going to go straight into your stores, which is body fat. Leave you hungry. The other one, you're going to feel full, you're going to feel good, you're going to have energy to do whatever you need to do, right? So you're, you know, your grandmother was totally right. You can't just say, oh, both are eight hundred calories.

• 29:41Jason Fung?

  So instead of eating my dinner, I'm going to have a ice cream sundae. Right? Because that is literally what people have been telling, telling people like it's all about the calories, right? It's like, no, that's like the worst advice you could give.

• 29:57Lewis Howes?

  It's about the quality of calories, it sounds like.

• 29:59Jason Fung?

  It's about the quality, it's about the choices, because, uh, you know, uh, what we're saying is that certain calories are more fattening than other calories. That's all, like, some foods are more fattening than other foods, and that doesn't seem to be that controversial, the statement. But by the time you get to the universities and stuff, people are like, oh, it's all calories, it's all calories. It's like, um, why don't you kind of live in the real world where people are actually trying to sway? Because that advice is horribly wrong.

• 30:31Lewis Howes?

  Now, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people talking about fasting. Like you said, you've been talking about this for years and it seems like more and more people are, are, are learning about the benefits, are practicing fasting in different various ways and are seeing results in their own health or with potential clients they work with, uh, teaching about fasting. I'm curious, how does fasting, uh, since I've talked to you last in the last year, I think it's been a year and a half now, how does fasting support weight loss in a healthy way? And is there any new research that's come out since we last talked?

• 31:06Jason Fung?

  Yeah, so there's, there's been a little bit of research and it's been uh sort of spits and starts, but fasting is very simple. When you don't eat, right, so any period of time you're not eating is fasting, that's just what it is. If you don't eat, your body needs to take the energy out of its body stores. That's all you're trying to do, right? And it's normal, it's natural, that's how we survive as a species. Because we had the ability to store calories for a time that we weren't eating. Otherwise, you'd die in your sleep like every single night, right? But you don't because you can store it. So body fat is a store of calories. Reason fasting so effective is because you're allowing the, you know, hormone insulin to fall.

• 31:48Jason Fung?

  So therefore now you're opening up the floodgates of energies. You're like, oh, your body might have a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand calories of energy sitting in its body fat stores, depending on how much weight you're trying to lose. But you can't get at it until you let insulin fall. So if you're nibbling all through the day and keeping your insulin high, you're eating, you know, the crackers because they're low fat. But you're not going to be able to access body fat because you've kept your insulin high. You've basically told your body, store energy, don't burn it. So once you start to release the, you know, let the insulin fall, then you can start to release energy. And that's all you're trying to do with the fasting. So i- i- it's a hugely um important thing to do

• 32:32Jason Fung?

  and has always been part of a sort of traditional way of eating. So if you think about the nineteen seventies again, you finish dinner at like six P M. You know, and you, you, you maybe ate breakfast at like eight A M, right? That's a fourteen hour period of fasting that people did every single day without even thinking about it. In other words, they have fourteen hours that they're dragging calories back out of their body.

• 32:59Jason Fung?

  That doesn't happen anymore because when you do studies of um you know how people eat now. Uh on average, they eat for um I think it was like uh six um fourteen hours and forty five minutes. So if you started eating at eight AM, you wouldn't finish until ten forty five PM on average. That's the average length of time that people are eating. In other words, you're the only time people are actually fasting is when they went to sleep, right? That's the only time.

• 33:32Lewis Howes?

  So you mean these people is eating considered consuming liquid drinks also that are non-water?

• 33:38Jason Fung?

  Yeah, that's calories. If there's calories, then then it's considered.

• 33:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:43Jason Fung?

  Energy, right? So what what what of course was happening was that in the past, people would be like, you know, if you wanted bedtime snack, your mom would say, no, you should eat more at dinner, right? There's nothing to eat, right? Now it's like, hey, eat anytime you want, right? There's food everywhere. You can buy food everywhere, you know, stores are everywhere. And that may have played a huge role in in that, right? So there have been a few small studies, a few studies of fasting that have come out in the literature. It's a it's it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some have shown really good success and then others have have not. Because again, they've sort of um done it a bit wrong. They sort of did, they mixed fasting.

• 34:25Jason Fung?

  So they'd say fast one day and then eat more the next day. It's like hmm. That's not really what you're supposed to do. Now I think it's like, why would you design a study like that? Like, if you're gonna fast one day, what I'm trying to do is say, you know, if you drop a meal, I want to take that your body to take the calories that you would have eaten in that meal. I want you to take that out of your body fat. That's what I want you to do. So you're pulling that energy back out. You're basically feeding yourself on body fat. Cause body fat is a store of food energy. It came from the food you ate in the past, right? You turned it into fat. Now you have to bring it back out.

• 35:09Jason Fung?

  If the next day you overeat, you're simply gonna fill up the fat again, right? So why would you do that? But there's a number of studies that alternated fasting with overeating. And I'm like thinking, that's crazy. And of course, they didn't show any benefits, like, okay, like, come into the real world, please. Like, I never tell people, when you're eating, eat extra. Like, why would you do that? And then there's another study uh uh that was took, it it was very prominent. And then New York Times said, oh, there's no benefits. But the problem was that um is the, you know, they they looked at fasting. And they they said, okay, we're gonna go, you know, increase the amount of fasting.

• 35:51Jason Fung?

  And the problem was they increased it by like fourteen percent or something like that. And the number, and they needed to show almost a forty percent increased um efficacy with the fasting to be positive. Which is a high bar, like increasing fasting by, you know, fifteen percent time wise, like, I think they went from like fourteen to sixteen hours. So there's a small increase in the fasting time, but they expected this huge massive increase in the effectiveness of weight loss. But it's like, again, welcome to the real world. You can't get a fifteen increase percent increase in your fasting time, which results in a forty percent decrease in weight above what the other people do, right?

• 36:31Jason Fung?

  It's like, if you increase fasting by fifteen percent, the best you should really hope for is a fifteen percent increase in your efficacy. But they showed was a twenty eight percent increase in the efficacy, but they needed forty. So they said, it doesn't work. What? Okay, well, that's not exactly the way I would interpret it. So there's been a few studies.

• 36:53Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious then, what um, I feel like a lot of people have tried it in the last year, you know, especially especially people on the who are consumers of this show, who watch on YouTube or listen on audio. They've heard me talk about fasting. They've heard me talk about my experiments of doing, you know, two day fast, one day fast, three day fast. Um, and bring on different experts talking about fasting and the benefits.

• 37:17Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious, from all the things that you've learned over fasting over the last, you know, many years and what you've seen people trying to come out and talk about lately. What are your three best strategies and or practices for fasting that people can practice for the next seven days? That is sustainable, maintainable, and doable, and it will also get added benefits.

• 37:43Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the in terms of fasting, um, one. Make it a habit, right? So habits are what makes it, you know, tough stuff, not so tough, right? So if you are, you know, make it a habit to sort of do a sixteen hour fast, right? Say my eating window is between this and this. Do it consistently so that it feels normal to you. And therefore, when you step outside that, you feel a little bit uncomfortable, just like that day you don't brush your teeth, right? It's like you feel a little bit like something's off here because that's the thing, right? So you do it consistently.

• 38:23Jason Fung?

  And I think that's one of the big, um, uh, you know, big things, uh, that happened in the seventies. That is, they had that fourteen hour period of fasting without thinking about it, right? So it's it's never onerous because they just did it, right? It's not like I have to not eat after dinner. That's just what I do, right? It's it's a huge shift in the way you think about things. Two is, uh, sort of staying busy so that you don't think about the food. And there's, you know, certain things that you can do and something that that are good and some of the things that aren't so good. So one of the things, of course, um, is trying to avoid the triggers.

• 39:05Jason Fung?

  So if you decide, okay, once a week, I'm gonna do a twenty four hour fast, I'm gonna just one meal that day, that's fine. But then you have to make sure that you schedule something into that period where you would be not eating. So, you know, if if you're doing something else, you're not gonna eat. For me, for example, for years, I would just schedule, uh, you know, I would do writing, I would write like my books. Or I'd do a podcast or something like that. So it's easy because if I'm, if it's twelve o'clock.

• 39:37Jason Fung?

  I need to go do this podcast. I'm not thinking about lunch because I'm doing this podcast or to the library or somewhere where it's quiet and I do some writing. I write my blog, right? And it's like, oh, okay. Well, now I'm not missing it anymore. Right? So put it on the schedule and make sure that you have something else that's going to sort of take your mind off. That makes it easier for yourself, right? And that's, you know, that's the key. And then the third thing I think is to really plan ahead of time. How you're going to deal with the hunger, right? Because if the hunger comes, you have to have a plan. Like you can't just show up.

• 40:13Lewis Howes?

  What's the best plan that you do or that you recommend for people? When they're like, they're hungry and they're just like, oh, I'm emotional. I'm having a challenging day or I'm sad or I've, and I'm so used to grabbing for the chips, the snacks, the cookies, the crunchies. What's the best practice to keep people's discipline at a high when they feel like all they want to do is munch?

• 40:34Jason Fung?

  Yeah, there's, there's two things. If, if you're in a place where you can do it. Um, do something active, especially outside, because of course then you're taking yourself away. So going out for a walk or a run is great because exercise like it does two things. First of all, you can schedule it. Second of all, when you're actually exercising, you'll almost never be hungry, right? Like think about the last time you played tennis or basketball or soccer. You're so fully into the game. You're not thinking, boy, I'm really hungry, like almost never like, like it almost, you know, you almost can't do it.

• 41:18Jason Fung?

  Right? Like you, you know, you've, you've, you've done plenty of stuff. You never think in the middle of a game, boy, I could really use a burger, right? You're thinking, how am I going to score? Right? Or whatever you're doing, right? So quitting a pickup game of whatever you like to play, right? Does, does, does wonders because you know, the hunger is going to go away. You're taking the time where you're are, you know, you're in the past, you would have taken something. So lunch hour, for example, you, you're taking that time. And three, when you make a plan to play a game of tennis with your friend. You're not gonna back out. You're not gonna just say, ah, forget it, I'm gonna go for a pizza. Because you're gonna let your friend down.

• 42:02Jason Fung?

  So that keeps you accountable to yourself. So it's like, okay, so once a week, and this is great when people are trying to say lose weight together. It's like, okay, let's figure out what we like to play. Is it, you know? Yoga, is it riding a bicycle, is it going for a hike, is it like whatever it is? Let's do it together and let's do it at a time so that we get through this period, right? And that's how we help each other, right? We help each other by doing these sorts of things. And of course, that's sort of the secret of uh how people fasted in the past. Like you think about groups of people. Now, there's all sorts of religious fasting traditions. So around Lent, for example, around Ramadan, Dhamma Pur, whatever it is, there's there's fasting.

• 42:47Jason Fung?

  Well, literally, millions of people are doing it. Why? Because they're doing it together. It's just a lot easier. If your family is not eating. You're a lot less likely to eat because it's just the norm. So, you know, doing things together in a supportive group, that's that's important, like it's it's the way we get things done. We're humans, we're we're social beings, right?

• 43:11Lewis Howes?

  Uh, earlier you talked about environment and willpower. Um, how does someone develop more willpower or discipline? When their environment continually um challenges them to stay disciplined? You know, maybe they don't have the ability to remove all the sugary foods or they're working in an office where they can't say, hey, can we get rid of this stuff? Uh, how does someone with a room full of distractions? Manage to stay disciplined and have willpower?

• 43:45Jason Fung?

  Yeah, that's a tough one because, you know, I I don't think, um, you know, a lot of people think obesity or weight gain is about lack of willpower. Um. But again, I don't think it is. I think it's the change in sort of the norms, that is, the eating norms and the environment, which is led and the processed food. Has led to that. So if you can't take yourself out of the environment, then you really have to look at alternative ways to. Uh, you know, again, you have to plan for it. So if you know that there's going to be something like, uh, you know, in the meeting, there's going to be food, right? And you don't want to eat because you don't want to gain weight, then you have to decide what are you going to do?

• 44:29Jason Fung?

  To sort of counteract that. Maybe you're going to get a tea, right? And then that's all you'll have. So at least you have something to sip on, put in your mouth because. Uh, you know, you need something in there. It's just like the way people used to, when they stopped smoking, they chew gum, right? Because you need something in there to take, take away the sort of thing. So it's, it's still takes willpower, but it takes a little less because you're still getting something, right? Um, or you have to decide, okay, well, how, you know, you have to decide what am I going to do to sort of uh minimize? And maybe I'll sit further away from where things are. Um, you know, if you're, sometimes you have these meetings where you're, you know, in an auditorium and the food's at the back, I'll sit at the front so that.

• 45:11Jason Fung?

  It's going to be embarrassing for me to get out and, and, and get some food because it's going to look so bad, right? Uh, whereas if you're back, you just grab it and then go back to your seat, right? So, so there's, there's, there's ways, but it's really still about trying to figure out how you're going to mitigate. Those effects um of what you're, of what you're trying to do, because the temptations are always going to be there, right? And, and you have to realize the foods are made to be tempting, like nobody's trying to make their foods not, not appetizing, so.

• 45:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I, I feel like it's going to be a cha- I mean, I feel like there's so many emotions that tied towards the discipline of eating. With all the marketing messages, with all the stress that people have, it feels good to eat and consume. It, it takes away some of the pain. It, it takes away some of the emotional challenges that people face. And I, you know, I, I can empathize with parents. I'm not a parent, so I can't. Speak into how it might feel having kids who are who maybe are a handful or maybe you have a lot of emotional Uh and energy and it's hard to manage that. It's hard to manage your job and your relationships and

• 46:25Lewis Howes?

  And your own health. And so I know a lot of parents probably know what's good for their kids, but they maybe give in sometimes Because it's just easier to just give them candy and have some peace. So I understand, even though I'm not a parent, but I can see how that challenge could come up. What can parents do? Because it seems like parents have a massive Uh Control on what their kids eat, you know.

• 46:52Jason Fung?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:53Lewis Howes?

  Until a certain age.

• 46:55Jason Fung?

  Until a certain age. I think that parents, on the one hand, there's a lot of challenges there, but on the other hand, they're very motivated. So that's good because they want to do good for their kids, right? So and I think that's where a lot of um You know, a lot of parents have actually made those changes. They're trying to cut out sugary drinks, um Cut out some of the snacking because remember back in, you know, not that long ago, It was all about giving snacks. Um, so I had, you know, my kids are older now, but they used to play soccer um At night, you know, and and it was always like for for years. It was like, Oh, at halftime, we have to give them some juice and cookies.

• 47:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, some oranges, orange slices and something like that.

• 47:40Jason Fung?

  Um, why? That I was always thinking. I like thinking like I played soccer when I was a kid. I had so much fun and nobody chased me around trying to give me juice and cookies because I probably wouldn't.

• 47:53Lewis Howes?

  Water.

• 47:53Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Lewis Howes?

  You said water.

• 47:54Jason Fung?

  And and I probably would have just asked, I probably would have preferred to play truthfully, right? Because there's so much fun, right? Um, all these games are fun for kids and and and so so one is limiting the the drinks. So You know, you see water has come back in sort of a big way, sparkling water, still water, like you you you know, Fifteen, twenty years ago, it was all juices and pop. Now you see water fail. Everywhere. So that's good. Cutting down the sugar, cutting down the the refined food. So making sure they have good choices. And the other thing, of course, is that if you're, again, if you're in a situation where you know there's going to be stuff that's tempting.

• 48:35Jason Fung?

  It's to sort of spoil your appetite, right? Make sure you're eating something good before you go in where there's a lot of stuff that's bad, right? Because if you're full, you're going to be less tempted. Than eating other stuff. So if you're going into a place where there's just going to be tons of stuff, make sure you have a good. Dinner first or a good lunch first, so that when you're going in, you're not like, oh. Cookies, chips, right? And it's like. You know, so I think parents have already made some of those good changes. The thing about the snacks, which I thought was strange, um, was so. This always happens, actually. So my, my, when my kids used to go on these.

• 49:15Jason Fung?

  Uh, field trips and stuff, you know, you'd get this letter to the parent and it's like, we're going on a field trip to whatever museum. You know, they're going to take the bus, make sure you pack two snacks for them. I was like, like. Why are they not eating lunch? Or am I not feeding them dinner? Like, which one? There's no other reason that they need a snack. And the problem with this, and this was just a few years ago. Is that it sort of institutionalizes the fact. Right? That you should be eating all the time, right? But you shouldn't. Because there's no reason to. Why would you want somebody? Remember, when you eat. You're going to store energy, which is body fat.

• 49:59Jason Fung?

  There's no way around it, right? It's calories. Especially these refined snacks. Snacks are the worst, actually, because they tend to be refined carbs. Because like cookies, because they don't spoil, right? Nobody's pe- packing a piece of salmon for snack, right? It's like a cookie, right? Or a cracker or something, right? So in- institutionalizes the fact, two parents and two kids, that snacking is a good thing. And that you should eat two snacks in between sort of lunch and dinner. And it's healthy for you, but it's not. You really shouldn't, because that's the period of time that you should have been using the energy you you ate at lunch. Remember, like, if you wanted an after-school snack in the past, in the seventies, and I grew up in the seventies, your mom would say, no,

• 50:42Jason Fung?

  you're gonna ruin your dinner, right? Want a bedtime snack? No, you should eat more at dinner, right? And dinner, of course, was, you know, the fully cooked meal, home-cooked meal. It was the the proteins and the fats and the, you know, the the good stuff that you're cooking, you know, that you spent time cooking, not the packaged cookie that you put into the, you know, into the snack box. But yeah, it's it's it's trying to get back to those basics. And I feel like we don't, we're just, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to look back at what we did in the seventies. And you'll get your blueprint for what you're supposed to be doing. Free snacks, unprocessed foods, cut the sugar,

• 51:23Jason Fung?

  and make sure you have a period of time at night where you're gonna use this those calories that you took in during the day, right? Because if you don't give your body time to use those calories, how is it gonna use those calories, right? So in the seventies, from six o'clock onward, you're using calorie, right? Now, it's like eleven P M practically before you start using calories. Up until that point, you're taking in calories. So how is that gonna work? So realizing that this this this question of how often you eat, the frequency of eating, when you're eating, is almost as important as the foods that you are eating, right? And that was one of the big things I talked about in the obesity code, which people never really thought about,

• 52:09Jason Fung?

  was that there's two things in the di- in in in in weight weight, loss, weight gain, right? The foods that you're eating, which is the diet, and the period of time that you're not eating, which is your fasting period. And the fasting period doesn't tell you what to eat when you're eating, right? It just tells you how long you should go before the next meal. And that's really important because you can use it with any diet. And so those two things are really important. So not just the quality of the calories, but also this peer, that this idea that you have to really make sure you're paying attention to the fasting period. So that your hormones, your insulin can drop and you can start using those calories. And that's really, really,

• 52:51Jason Fung?

  you know, a underappreciated part of

• 52:57Jason Fung?

  sort of weight loss.

• 52:59Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. So what's the, you had like a formula in there that you said about two minutes ago, you, you said no snacking, you know, you said a few other things. Can you share that formula again?

• 53:09Jason Fung?

  Yeah, yeah. So one, you wanna cut down the sugar, because sugar is not good. And I think everybody agrees on that, right? Cut down the refined foods. So this actually applies mostly to carbohydrates, but refined other stuff is not good either. So refined fats, for example, are not good for you. So fat fats were pretty clearly bad. Refined meat, like bologna and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either. So you wanna eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you wanna eat no sugar, you wanna eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you wanna make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of fasting.

• 53:49Jason Fung?

  And that really just gets you back to nineteen seventy where people were still eating white bread, right? White bread. I know I grew up in that period. Nobody ate whole wheat bread. Nobody ate whole wheat pasta. It was white bread, it's white pasta, right? But you didn't eat all the time. That was the big difference, right? And it was the same everywhere you went, you know, and the Irish were eating potatoes. The Chinese were eating rice, the Japanese were eating rice, you know? Those are all carbs, refined carbs, right? Bread, rice, potatoes. Um, yeah, but they were doing okay because they weren't eating all the time. They had to give their bodies a break from eating. Right? Whereas now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat.

• 54:35Jason Fung?

  We've, we've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating. Like, why wouldn't you think that that's important?

• 54:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 54:43Jason Fung?

  Balance everything else in life, right? Why wouldn't you want to balance eating and not eating? Right? Don't you think that's like fundamentally important? Like, I think it is, but up until sort of I wrote the obesity code, people just thought fasting was really bad for you. Which is sort of odd, you know, because it's like. Up until then, they're everybody's like, oh, fasting's so bad for you, right? You're gonna do so bad. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for a long time.

• 55:09Lewis Howes?

  So I'm curious then, what effect? Does fasting have on reducing our chances of getting life-threatening diseases? And also? Which diseases are are most people at risk if they don't fast? And improve their their diet?

• 55:27Jason Fung?

  Uh, type two diabetes is probably the biggest one, and the reason is that it's a huge one. It's become an epidemic, so lots of people have it. If you look at prediabetes and diabetes, which is uh, sort of um, and and you do big surveys, it's actually about fifty percent of adult Americans, right? So it's very common. That have prediabetes and diabetes. And the problem with it is that it causes all kinds of other problems. It cause it increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancers, leading cause of blindness, leading cause of non-traumatic amputations, leading cause of kidney disease. All of those things. And, you know, in trying to understand type two diabetes.

• 56:12Jason Fung?

  Well, you just have to understand that it's basically your body has too much sugar. That's it. So if you have too much sugar, remember? Excuse me. Your body really has two sources of energy it can use. It can use sugar, which is mostly glucose. And it can use fat. And when your body stores energy. It stores it as sugar. Or stores it as fat. Makes sense, right? So if you have too much fat, then you have obesity. If you have too much sugar, you have type two diabetes.

• 56:46Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 56:47Jason Fung?

  But the situation, the solution is the same. So think about it, your body has too much energy, both situations. Obesity, you have too much energy stored away. And type two diabetes, you have too much sugar, which is also too much energy stored away, because both fat and sugar are sources of energy for the body. So if you think about trying to reverse type two diabetes, because again, this was, I wrote about this in the diabetes code. Um, and I said, it's a reversible disease because your body doesn't have too little energy. It has too much energy. So think about this situation. Think about your car. Suppose you go to the gas station three times a day, you fill up.

• 57:26Jason Fung?

  Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas, right? So it's spilling out, it's spilling out, it's spilling into your backseat and it's now making you sick. But what are you gonna do? Well, here's what you wouldn't do is keep going to that gas station three times a day, right? It's ridiculous. You have to do two things. One, stop putting gas in. And two, drive that car around so that you use the gas that's there. That's what you would do. Now think about.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  Burn the gas, burn the gas.

• 57:54Jason Fung?

  Exactly. Think about your body. Your body has too much energy. What are you gonna do? One, stop putting it in. Two, let it run without putting it in for a while. That's intermittent fasting. That's all you have to do. And think about the, the, this, this, this situation. You, you've got a disease state which is becoming an epidemic, which contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer. But you have a solution which is completely free. And has been used for thousands of years. Which is not anything more complicated than let your body run off of the fuel

• 58:37Jason Fung?

  that's already sitting on there. Is it fun? No, it's not fun.

• 58:43Jason Fung?

  Is it healthy? Yes, it is. And those situations, very healthy. And, and people used to say, well, people won't do it. It's like, my job as a doctor is not to tell people what they will and won't do. My job is to tell them how they should get healthy. And I'll help them. Right? So if fasting is a good solution, which I believe it is, then I'll help them. Whether they do it or not is up to them, right? But the point is that it's, it's, it's free. It's simple. It's been used for thousands of years. It's available to everybody. You don't need special equipment. You don't need a special diet. You don't need a special anything.

• 59:23Jason Fung?

  Everybody in the world can do this at any time, like literally like today, tomorrow, anytime, they could do it. It's not like, you know, I have this great drug for people. Yeah, but it's have to cost five hundred thousand dollars, right? That's crazy. No, fasting is not tuned to that. You're gonna save time, you're gonna save money, and you're gonna get healthier. So what could be better than that? Like, it's a crazy situation where we have this huge healthcare issue. But the solution is completely free, which explains why there's so few people telling you to do it because who's gonna make money on it, right? But that's not my concern. My concern is telling people what they need to do to get healthy, right?

• 1:00:08Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to fasting then?

• 1:00:12Jason Fung?

  I think the single biggest mistake is sort of overeating afterwards. So you fast for a period of time, then you say, oh, well, I deserve that ice cream. It's like, you you could do it, but you're going to sort of get a lot less benefit. You're gonna like, you got a great benefit from the fasting. Now, you know, you're you're you're losing some of that because you're eating the foods that you didn't eat. And that that really is a temptation for people to do. And I think it's natural and we've all done it and you know, but the point is that after you fast, you should really just eat as normally as possible. So if you eat, you know, a normal breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner, the next day is your fasting day. You don't eat breakfast, you don't eat lunch, you should eat a normal dinner. Don't try to eat

• 1:00:57Jason Fung?

  all three meals crammed into one, right? That's not the point. Like, the point is to drop those meals and let your body take the energy from your body fat. So you drop breakfast, your body normally gets five hundred calories from there. You want to take it out of your body fat. Same thing for lunch. If at dinner, instead of taking a thousand calories, you decide to stick in two thousand calories, well, you've negated a lot of the benefits that you should have gotten because that energy is gonna go in, right? So so the good thing is that it's hard to do that. So when when you restrict the times and you don't tell people what to eat or how much to eat, they actually naturally eat less. Um, so so it's actually an interesting thing because this gets to the question of hunger.

• 1:01:44Jason Fung?

  There's, you know, in terms of weight, weight loss, there's sort of two big issues. That trip people up. One is metabolic rate, and two is hunger. So hunger, people think that hunger will just go up like this, with fasting. It's actually not true. So you can actually measure the hunger hormone called ghrelin. Which is basically, it goes up high and you get hungry. So when you fast. Ghrelin is high. So if you normally eat lunch, you're hungry. So ghrelin is high. What happens when you don't eat lunch? You skip your lunch? Well, a couple hours later, your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline.

• 1:02:22Lewis Howes?

  So you don't feel, you don't feel hungry anymore?

• 1:02:25Jason Fung?

  No, your hunger goes back to baseline level. So if you eat lunch at twelve, you're hungry at twelve. Now you skip lunch, you're hungry at twelve. You're hungry at one. By four, it's no different than if you ate or didn't eat. So people are like, what happened? Well, your body took the energy. From your body fat stores. It took the five hundred calories from body fat. You basically fed yourself off of that body fat. So why would you be hungry? The answer is you're not. And that's why it goes right back to baseline. Same thing happens at dinner. If you do multiple day fats, it's actually even more interesting because ghrelin actually. After day one to two, it actually starts to go down and down and down. So your hunger actually disappears.

• 1:03:07Jason Fung?

  By like day three, day four. People just aren't hungry anymore because they're fueling themselves on the body fat. And I think it was a, I think it was actually sort of protective mechanism because if there is a prolonged period where you weren't eating. I think the body evolved so that you wouldn't be constantly distracted. So people on these long fasts do very well because they've gone into the stage of fat burning because they're fueling themselves purely on the fat. And their hunger is gone, so they're actually feeling pretty good. And they're losing weight.

• 1:03:40Lewis Howes?

  They feel productive, they have more energy.

• 1:03:42Jason Fung?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:44Lewis Howes?

  There comes a point where, there comes a point where I feel like. I did a three day fast. I think maybe I did three and a half days. And I remember thinking, okay, I'm kind of feeling a little bit tired. Like I could use some food now. And maybe it's just because I haven't, you know, pushed it beyond that before. So it's just every day I have to learn how to manage it, but.

• 1:04:01Jason Fung?

  It's, it's, it takes a bit of getting used to because most of us are not used to it. And that's, that's more, that's probably the biggest obstacle. Um, because we're in a culture where the norm is not sort of fourteen hours fast and the norm is like eat until you go to sleep and eat as soon as you wake up, right? And that was one of those big destructive myths, which was that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Which is fine. If you like breakfast, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the problem was when people took that to mean that if you weren't hungry in the morning and you didn't really like breakfast because you weren't a breakfast person. You should still eat like Fruit Loops. Right? Because you had breakfast. Okay, now that's not the point.

• 1:04:47Jason Fung?

  Eating sugar and, you know, refined carbs is not a good strategy. You're better off not eating. But then remember this whole thing where, oh, you have to eat breakfast, have to eat breakfast, have to eat breakfast. Like, no, you don't. Your body knows what to do. If you're, what do you think it's been doing all through the night? It's been taking the energy from your body. So if you don't eat, it will continue to take energy from your stores, your blood sugar or your body fat, one or the other, unless your body fat is so low that it's going to get tripped up. So that was the thing. And then people used to say, you know, eat ten times a day to keep your metabolism stoked, right? Which was another complete sort of

• 1:05:27Jason Fung?

  myth. That was the other thing. So hunger is one of the big things that trips people up and weight loss. And fasting provides you a way to sort of get around that. The other one is the metabolic rate, which is the number of calories you burn. And people think it's all about exercise. But in fact, exercise for most people that I deal with are, which are older people. It tends to be a very small part of the number of calories they eat in a day because, you know, when you exercise, it's just your skeletal muscles. As opposed to the, uh, you know, your heart and your liver and your lungs and your brain. They all need energy as well. And the point is that when you you can do these studies where you measure the metabolic rate of somebody who is fasting. So you take them on day zero, then you give them nothing to eat for four days.

• 1:06:11Jason Fung?

  Then you measure how many calories they're burning after four days of zero food. And they wind up burning ten percent more calories per day after the fasting. Really? And it's like, yeah. And the reason is that when insulin goes down, other hormones go up. So in fact, you have a release of uh noradrenaline and you activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is in fact your fight or flight response. So when you're fasting, your body is not shutting down. Your body is actually powering itself up, but fueling itself on your body fat, which is perfect. Because everybody thinks you need to eat to get energy.

• 1:06:56Jason Fung?

  But when you're fasting, you actually have more energy because your hormonal state is primed for that. You think about the lion who just ate, just sort of dopey, just wants to sleep. Or you think about the hungry wolf. Hungry wolf is not falling down. Hungry wolf is zoned in. Sharp. Exactly. It's sharp and it's because of the sympathetic nervous system. Because they're zoned in and they've got energy to burn because they're fueling themselves. A human is the same. So when you fast, in fact, you're actually increasing the sympathetic tone, which means that you have more energy, not less energy. That's why your body is burning ten percent more calories. You can also measure the VO two, which is the amount of oxygen that it's using. So it's sort of the same thing and it's up ten percent after a four day fast.

• 1:07:41Jason Fung?

  Four day fast. Yeah, this was a four day fast. So it happens, you know, for shorter periods. You you also see this increase in in in tone. So it's like people think you're going into starvation mode. It's the exact opposite. You're actually activating your body. So these were some of the myths that, you know, people used to have about fasting. And it's like, no, this is people, you can do this. It's actually, there's a ton of good stuff that happens. When you're fasting, if you're in this sort of category where you have type two diabetes, where you have an excess of energy, or you have obesity, which is an excess of energy, you got to use it. Everybody thinks it's about exercise, but in fact, it's it's sort of a my my, it's a minor effect unless you do a lot of it.

• 1:08:23Jason Fung?

  So again, keeping in mind that I typically treat like sixty year olds, seventy year olds, they're not sort of running eight hours a day, sort of it.

• 1:08:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, what's, when is it a bad time or the worst time to fast?

• 1:08:37Jason Fung?

  Um, I don't think there's a bad time. Uh, sometimes people ask me, is it better to fast early or late? So, right, if you're gonna skip a meal, should you skip breakfast or should you skip dinner? That's a really interesting question because for the same sixteen hour fast or whatever, you're gonna have different effects. In fact, so it's better if you're trying to lose weight, it's actually better to drop dinner. The problem, and and there's a reason for that, because one, dinner tends to be bigger. And two, for the food that you eat at dinnertime, you're gonna get more insulin release, right? So if you eat the same meal at breakfast and at dinner, and you measure how much insulin is released, you get more insulin than it's at dinnertime.

• 1:09:19Jason Fung?

  So your body, I I'm not sure why. I think it's because your body, um, I think in the in the morning. Uh, so it's remember, it's a seesaw between insulin and these counter regulatory hormones like, you know, growth hormone and noradrenaline and so on. So it's sort of a seesaw, right? That's why they're count counter regulatory. So insulin goes up, these go down, insulin goes down, these go up. In the morning, these are already up, right? The counter regulatory hormones are already up. You get a burst, this part of the circadian rhythm, so you get a burst that like four AM. So that's why you don't need to eat breakfast because your body's actually already dragging glucose out of your system, it's pretty burning energy. It's already getting you ready for the day. So this is up. So therefore, when you eat, this is a little bit blunted.

• 1:10:04Jason Fung?

  Whereas during, you know, after that, during the day, these go down. So therefore, if you eat, your insulin just spikes up. So you're, but the the practical uh sort of effect of that is that if you eat the exact same meal at breakfast and at dinner, you get more insulin effect, which means if you have more insulin effect, there's more instructions to your body to store that energy. Which means that you're gonna give him a weight, right? So it's actually better to drop dinner. Problem is that it's a lot easier to drop breakfast.

• 1:10:34Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:10:35Jason Fung?

  You know, a lot of people aren't, aren't hungry at breakfast and nobody misses you at breakfast, right? If you don't eat breakfast, nobody cares. But a lot of people, that's their family, social meal, friends, family dinners. So it's a lot harder to drop dinner. Ho- as opposed to breakfast. So therefore you have to, you have to balance the two, which, which is more important, right? Uh, you know, should I drop this or that? It's like a long fast. It's hard to do, not because they're, they're so difficult, but because there's always something that comes up, like, you know, uh, oh, come out and let's have dinner, right?

• 1:11:14Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:11:14Jason Fung?

  And it's like, you don't wanna be, exactly. It's a social thing. So even though I could have skipped dinner. I won't because I wanna see my friend, right? It's like, I'm not gonna skip dinner just because. You know, you know, yes, I, you know, there's the meal, but there's, you know, the interaction. Yeah.

• 1:11:33Lewis Howes?

  What would you say is your biggest challenge then? You're, you know, an expert at this. You're a doctor. You've been studying this. You've been helping patients at this for many years. Where is your struggle when it comes to fasting, healthy eating, uh, preventing disease and weight loss?

• 1:11:51Jason Fung?

  I think the biggest struggle has been, um, this whole COVID thing has been a real disaster on the sort of weight gain, eating thing. Cause you know, again, it's, it's the idea that eating has a lot of components. So one of them is enjoyment, right? So it is delicious. So you enjoy it. That's why it's part of every human celebration, right?

• 1:12:20Jason Fung?

  When you take away everything that you enjoy doing, except for eating.

• 1:12:27Jason Fung?

  Yeah, it's like, well, you know, you can't travel and you can't go to the gym and you can't go to the park and you can't go. Here and you can't see your friends. You can't see your family. Remember there's that time. Oh, you shouldn't get together for Christmas. No, no Thanksgiving this year, right? It's like, um, yeah, that's a lot. And so I think what happened, uh, uh, the only thing you can do is get food from the grocery store and, you know, takeout. So then what do you do? You eat. That's all because not because you really wanted to, but because there's nothing else to do. And you have nothing to give you pleasure except eating. So it was a disaster because the diets just went. Terribly wrong. Mine did too. And everybody.

• 1:13:12Lewis Howes?

  And you're the expert.

• 1:13:14Jason Fung?

  I knew what was happening. I just couldn't stop it because it's like, what am I going to do? I have all day sitting here. And the only thing I can really do is eat, right? Yeah, sure. I can do jigsaw puzzles and stuff and I did that too. And I read some stuff, but. You know. The, the interaction was. It's, it's big, like the amount of. Like, cause. There is a, there was a huge, long period of time where I didn't, like, I didn't see my family, I think, for like a year and a half. Like immediate family, yes, but my brothers, my sisters, my nephews, my. It was a long, long time and I didn't see some of my friends for like a year and a half, two years. It was long.

• 1:13:59Jason Fung?

  Right? And so, and the stuff that. You know, I used to, I used to enjoy, it just shut down, right? It was, it was crazy. So.

• 1:14:09Lewis Howes?

  So even you with, with all the research and all the knowledge and all the. Expertise and all, and all the willpower and all the discipline. Even you struggled with it.

• 1:14:19Jason Fung?

  It was a struggle. It was a struggle for, yeah, for I think everybody and and the weight gain was like, I think my son gained like a lot of weight. And luckily, he, you know, then he went away and he's lost it all and stuff, right? But, you know, I remember some of his friends who were like skinny. They they gained like sixty pounds. These are high school kids, right? And they're like up sixty pounds and stuff. I was like, whoa, what happened to you? Luckily, they're young, right? And so they dropped it very quickly. So, you know, because again, once they found their other things, the hockey and the basketball and stuff. They then, yeah, then that's real life. But it it it took more of a toll. So a lot of my patients just just were a disaster.

• 1:15:01Jason Fung?

  Like, they're going along fine, going along fine. I was monitoring them. They're doing fine with their diets. And then Booth, every single one was like, the sugars were skyrocketing, their weight was skyrocketing. It was not a good time. Like, it's it's better now because a lot of the restrictions have lifted, but it was a good long year and a half at least. March twenty twenty till at least twenty twenty two in Canada was like, I think the Americans were were better in terms of opening stuff, but um, yeah, it was, it was, it was rough. So again, again, it's it's it's the same thing, right? It's it's it's it's easy to predict that because because um, you know,

• 1:15:42Jason Fung?

  if if every, if the only thing you can do is eat, then you eat. Like, I can't help it, right? And and you you know, the whole, I think a lot of people had a bit of dysthymia, which is sort of mild depression from the social isolation. Like, we know mental health problems again skyrocketed. But I think there's a huge number of people that were mildly depressed. Like, and I think I had a bit of that, and I think it I think it affected everybody truthfully. But you get to the point where you're like.

• 1:16:18Jason Fung?

  What I'm like, why wouldn't I eat? That's all I can do to feel good. And who am I seeing anyway?

• 1:16:26Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly. It doesn't matter.

• 1:16:28Jason Fung?

  The same three people, like, I'm not looking good for anything. It was a tough, uh, it was a tough, and, and I, I, I think it's, it almost, it's almost indecent for us not to acknowledge how bad it was, like, some of these mental health issues. You know, they, they wind up, you know, affecting other things like your diet, and therefore you get this, right? And then you say, oh, it's all about your food and willpower. It's like, no, no, there's, there's, there's so much to go in, and it's, it's, it's sort of feels wrong not to acknowledge the amount of uh, problems that were caused by this, right? And I'm not trying to say if it's right or if it's wrong, but there was a lot of problems, right? I mean, it's, it's,

• 1:17:14Jason Fung?

  it's, it was very unnatural. That's, that, that was the thing, right?

• 1:17:19Lewis Howes?

  Uh, I've got a couple of final questions for you, Jason. I appreciate your time and your, your advice and wisdom. Um, what advice would you have for someone who's watching or listening that, that maybe is overweight or obese? And feel like they've gone too far. It, it's too hard to come back. You know, I've gone too far. Uh, and they don't feel like they can take control of their weight again. What advice would you have for those individuals?

• 1:17:44Jason Fung?

  I think, one, you're never too far, because people have lost a lot of weight. And two, I think that it's important to sort of get some help, like, uh, you know, everybody thinks you have to do it yourself. You don't have to do it yourself. There's tons of people who will help you, so uh, you can get a coach, you can get a fasting coach, you can get somebody who's gonna like, you know, it's funny, because, uh, and, and, and the same thing with mental health, like, there's no shame in getting help for that, whether you need a coach, or you need, uh, you know, somebody to talk to, or whether, there's no shame in that, because you can get help, and you know, you think about something like, um,

• 1:18:26Jason Fung?

  You know, athletics, if you if you take an analogy, if you take, you know, the greatest player in the world, you know, Michael Jordan, he still has a coach.

• 1:18:36Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 1:18:36Jason Fung?

  Because they do stuff for you, they keep you accountable, they tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, because you don't always necessarily know. Well, if and and people have business coaches, so some of the greatest sort of CEOs, they have business coaches, like it's a huge industry. Um, so why wouldn't you take advantage of that, right? Nothing like if you don't know what you're doing, or you need somebody to keep you on track, or you need somebody to give you a decent program. If you want to get in shape, you go get yourself a personal trainer. It's not like you couldn't watch YouTube, uh, you know, you know how many

• 1:19:20Jason Fung?

  fitness routines are on YouTube, there's probably ten million of them, right? They're they're good and there's a lot of great programs out there. Not the same, because they're not there saying, I'm gonna meet you at the gym on Tuesday at nine AM. Now, all of a sudden, you can't not go, right? Because you're you've made an appointment, right? As opposed to you watch the YouTube and you decide, okay, well, I'm gonna go for a run, but then you're tired on Tuesday at nine AM, so you're like, I'm just gonna sleep on it, right? It's totally different, so all of these things is, uh, so if you need help, get yourself the help, because it exists.

• 1:20:00Jason Fung?

  Uh, for weight loss, for for all of that stuff, fasting, you know, we have the fasting method dot com, where you can get a coach. And whether you need group coaching and groups are very good too, because again, it gives you somebody to go through it with you. Um, so we do a lot of group coaching in there, but get yourself the help, because it's there's no shame in it. The best people, like the very, very hot people in the world, at whatever it is they do, have a coach.

• 1:20:28Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:20:29Jason Fung?

  So you should always make yourself available of that.

• 1:20:33Lewis Howes?

  I agree. I'm a big fan of coaches. I invest in them. I've got lots of them in different areas of my life, and I feel like it's hard to do anything alone. It's hard to get, it's hard to get good results or great results on your own at anything, let alone many things. Maybe you're an expert at one thing and you can do that, but then you need help with the finances, or the fitness, or the nutrition, or the, the mental health. It's like finding support makes you wise by looking for support and seeing that out. It doesn't make you not capable. It makes you wise.

• 1:21:06Jason Fung?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:21:09Lewis Howes?

  Dr. Fung, I appreciate you for, for being here. I want people to follow you over on social media, Dr. Jason Fung, thefastingmethod.com, also DrJasonFung.com. You've got some incredible books that I want people to get a hold of, The Obesity Code, The Complete Guide to Fasting, The Diabetes Code, The Cancer Code, all these different things. It's all linked up at your website, and people can find it there, or over on Amazon and things like that. How else can we be of service to you today?

• 1:21:40Jason Fung?

  I think just getting the word out is, is what I'm hoping for, right? The more people learn about it, and I talk a lot about the science of it, so that, you know, there's a lot of practical stuff too, but there's also a lot of sort of trying to understand the disease that you're facing, whether it's obesity, whether it's type 2 diabetes, trying to understand it, so you can come up with a sort of rational plan of how to deal with it. I think that's, you know, that's the best thing, right? If, if we can help people, you know, that's its own

• 1:22:20Jason Fung?

  reward, right? I mean, if people listen and get better, hey, I love it, love it. You know, and it's privilege, you know, sometimes I get these emails, and they say, oh, I listened to you on, you know, on the School of Greatness, and I started fasting, and, you know, I got off all my meds. I'm like, amazing.

• 1:22:43Jason Fung?

  It feels so good, right? It's like, wow, this guy really changed around his life and I didn't even know. And I didn't have to do anything different, but these guys were able to, you know, you know, they took that advice. So it's great. Like you just, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, positive vibes in the world, you know? It's like, it's amazing.

• 1:23:06Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful. Well, well, Jason, I want to acknowledge you for how you keep showing up in the world, how you keep learning and researching and serving your, your patients and also the people in the world that watch and listen you into this content. I know a lot of people from our previous interview got incredible benefits and results. Uh, if you guys haven't checked that out, make sure to check it out. We'll link it up below and everything and leave a comment if you did already start implementing some of the fasting principles that Jason has talked about, uh, and share your, your results below so that we can see. We'd love to see that. Uh, so I acknowledge you for continually showing up and serving people on living healthier lives. And I asked you these two questions before the last time,

• 1:23:48Lewis Howes?

  but I'm curious if they've changed. So this is called the three truths question. So imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away. You get to live as long as you want, but then it's your last day. Uh, and you've accomplished everything you want to accomplish. Live the full life, but for whatever reason, all of your work, your written material, your videos, your audio content has to go with you to another place. Um, so we don't have access to any of your information anymore. But if you could leave behind three lessons with the world or three truths, what would those be for you?

• 1:24:22Jason Fung?

  I think the first one would be, um, you know, in terms of fasting that there's, it's, it's about balance. It's about making sure that you balance the feeding and the fasting and there's nothing wrong with it. Cause that was one of the biggest things, I think, when I started writing, um, uh, the books was, you know, I, I, everybody thought it was such a bad thing. And that was one for one of the first people that said, let's look at the science of this whole thing. Cause it really, there really is a lot of good stuff here. Um, so, so I think that was one of the things that I really think, you know, if it could be preserved.

• 1:25:03Jason Fung?

  Actually, like that. Second one is the type two diabetes is a reversible disease. Um, and that too is one of the things that I fought really hard against, which was that up until twenty twenty one. Every major diabetes association said type two diabetes was a chronic and progressive disease. Which means eventually they would get problems like kidney disease and me as a kidney specialist would wind up seeing them, right? And, and it breaks my heart, right? If people know that it's a reversible disease, then you're gonna, you're gonna attack this problem differently than if it's a chronic and progressive disease, right? If it's chronic and progressive, you'd be like, well, I can't do anything about it. I'll just do whatever.

• 1:25:47Jason Fung?

  Whereas if you know it's a reversible disease, then you're gonna go, oh, I'm gonna do something about this, right? So that was one of the things and, and, and then, you know, I think that that's one of the from a, from a sort of health standpoint, I really think it can, it can make a huge difference. I mean, it's, it's such an important problem that you can really move the needle uh in terms of that. So, so those two, I would really like to, uh, you know, you know, I hope that it would be preserved. And then, you know, the third one, I mean, uh, you know, I, I, I kind of think I, I just wish this whole idea of, um,

• 1:26:27Jason Fung?

  you know, calories than calories out. I just find it so simplistic. I really, I hope that people try to go past that, uh, cause again, it's, it comes down to people who think that obesity is just a willpower problem.

• 1:26:45Jason Fung?

  It's such a wrong thing because you know, so many people suffer from this disease. And then they suffer the ridicule of others because they think that it's all about the personal failing. Right? Rather than an environment which allows this to happen. Teaching like, oh, you can't skip breakfast. So you you know, oh, you have to eat ten times a day like it's it's it's we who have failed them, not them who have failed us, right? And I always think that there's a lot of people out there who are always like, oh, you know, it's all about how it's all about counting. And then mostly people in academic centers and they they they they pretend they're very, very smart, but they're so disconnected with reality. Right. That it's like, and I always think like, think about it this way.

• 1:27:31Jason Fung?

  If you have sixty percent of Americans who are overweight and obese. Imagine you're you're a teacher, right? So you're a teacher. You have a hundred students, one of them fails. That's probably the student's fault. But what if sixty or seventy kids fail? Is it really the kids' fault? Or is it the teacher's fault? Because I think it's the teacher's fault. Sure. So therefore, it's not the kids' problem, it's the teacher's problem. In this situation, I don't think it's the general public's problem. I think it's the problem with the way that we we are approaching this disease. And because it affects so many people, um, you know, and every academic sort of.

• 1:28:13Jason Fung?

  Academic center is all focused on calories. It's like, there's more than that. There's this whole hormonal piece. There's the emotional side of things. There's the habit side of things. There's the environmental side of things like. Get off of this. Just eat less. It doesn't work. Like, how are you going to fix the problem if you don't even know what the problem is? You're so focused on this problem. And I think. That's where a lot of fat shaming comes in. And it's like, you you can't do that, right? It's it's it's just so wrong. And and there's a lot of doctors out there who are all into this sort of thing, right? So, uh, you know, I I I wish that part of things, and that's a that's a tough fight. I you know, there's a lot of people who push back against.

• 1:28:57Jason Fung?

  You know, a lot of people push back and say, all calories, all calories. You could eat ice cream for dinner, right? As long as it's the same calories. So there are a lot of people who push back on that. But that was one of the ones that I sort of feel. I hope that

• 1:29:10Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:29:11Jason Fung?

  That still stays.

• 1:29:13Lewis Howes?

  That's great. Um, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:29:19Jason Fung?

  I think it's, it's to be able to impact people in a positive way. And I, I suspect a lot of people say that, but it's true. You say it because it's true. Um, you know, it, it's, it gives you something that's just so, you know,

• 1:29:39Jason Fung?

  you, you just feel good, right? Like when you help somebody, they feel good, but I feel better, right? It's like, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to get, right? It's, it's, it's why people, you know, contribute to causes and stuff like that. You're part of something bigger than yourself. So even if you pass on, you know, you've contributed to this sort of greater good, right? And I think we need that sort of idea that there's, there's something out there that's greater than ourselves. And we've been able to help people with that, right? And it gives you more, um, enjoyment, if you will, than, than for instance, money or fame or anything else can, right?

• 1:30:24Jason Fung?

  It's a different type. And that's why you see a lot of people who make a lot of money. They, they give away a lot of money because it makes them feel good, right? Um, and, and it really is. And luckily for us, that's, that's, you know, that's, that's, that's greatness, right? It's, it's, uh, anybody can make money. You can make money by being a drug dealer, right? It doesn't make you feel good, right?

• 1:30:45Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Jason, thank you so much. I appreciate you for being here.

• 1:30:50Jason Fung?

  Thank you so much. It's great being here.

• 1:30:53Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review. You on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.