Science-Backed Strategies for Lasting Weight Loss

The Summit of Greatness is back! Buy your tickets today – summitofgreatness.com – Have you ever wondered what foods are actually good for you and what foods you should avoid? Today 4 experts come together to share science-backed strategies for achieving sustainable weight loss. Through their diverse perspectives, the experts discuss the complexities of nutrition, the influence of societal factors on our understanding of food, and the importance of a holistic approach to health that considers both the physical and mental aspects. Their collective insights provide valuable guidance for individuals seeking effective and lasting weight loss solutions. Dr. Sten Ekberg, shares information that helps to take away the nutrition guess work. Dr. Ekberg is a former decathlon athlete who competed in the 1992 Summer Olympics for Sweden and was a Swedish decathlete National Record holder. Sten won the Swedish Championship in both decathlon and heptathlon. Ekberg currently resides in the United States where he works as a chiropractor and nutritionist at his office Wellness For Life in Cumming, Georgia. Dr. Mark Hyman, M. D. is the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center, Director of the Cleveland Clinical Center for Functional Medicine, and the Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is a New York Times bestselling author with books like 10-Day Detox Diet and Eat Fat, Get Thin. His latest book Food: What The Heck Should I Eat? provides an explanation of the nutritional science around food and why the political, environmental, economic and social issues corrupt our understanding of food. Dr. Kyle Gillet is a dual-board Certified MD in Obesity Medicine and Family Medicine. His practice includes preventative medicine, aesthetics, sports medicine, hormone optimization, obstetrics and infertility, integrative medicine, and precision medicine including genomics. He believes that each human is a unique creation that requires attention to their body, mind, and soul to achieve optimal health. Dr. Jason Fung, MD, is a Toronto-based nephrologist and a world-leading expert in intermittent fasting and low-carb diets. He is also the bestselling author of The Diabetes Code, The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting, and the creator of the Intensive Dietary Management program as well as co-founder of The Fasting Method. In this episode you will learn,What foods you should avoid at all costs. How to adjust your diet to optimize your hormones. The connection between sleep and weight loss. The issue with counting calories and alternative weight loss gimmicks. The top 5 foods to eat for a healthier life. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1493For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960Listen to the full episodes:Dr. Sten Ekberg – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Mark Hyman – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Kyle Gillet – https://link.chtbl.com/1315-guestDr. Jason Fung – https://link.chtbl.com/1030-guest 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.

• 0:01Lewis Howes?

  Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection. I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Josprey Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero, and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

• 0:44Lewis Howes?

  So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com/summit2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there. So what type of physical activity should we be doing to lose the midsection weight?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Aerobic exercise. And aerobic means with air, which means that it's at an intensity low enough that we can breathe comfortably and supply the oxygen.

• 1:20Lewis 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.

• 1:44Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  So as soon as you start huffing and puffing, that's not a bad thing for short duration. But if you go and you do a 45-minute spin class every day, and you're just huffing and puffing, you're gonna make way, way, way too much cortisol.

• 2:16Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17Lewis Howes?

  So you might be hurting your chances of losing the weight.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:21Lewis Howes?

  If you're doing that intensive of a workout every day.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:24Lewis Howes?

  If you're doing a HIIT training two, three times a week for 45 minutes, is that okay? Do you feel like that's still intense?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  If it's 45 minutes, it's not HIIT.

• 2:34Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. HIIT, high intensity, means that it's so inten-- to me, my definition.

• 2:41Lewis Howes?

  It's like 10, 15 minutes.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  It's not-- well, maybe the total duration would be 10, 15 minutes. But if you do interval, high-intensity interval training is what HIIT is, then the intervals should be so intense, you can't even do them for more than 30 seconds. Like, they should be so intense, provided you're fit enough to do that, of course. But if you do 30 seconds, and then you do 30-second rest, and then 30 seconds, you should be able to bring your heart rate up to maximum in maybe four or five intervals. That is HIIT. Okay, now you're done.

• 3:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Right, you've created your--

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  Five minutes, yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Your positive hormones, your growth hormone to stimulate fat burning, your growth hormone to stimulate muscle building, to produce and to stimulate new brain synapses to enhance learning and focus. All the good stuff in the brain depends on hormones. And two of those hormones are human growth hormone and BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  And those two hormones are necessary to make new synapses. Alright, so your, your brain is constantly remodeling. And every time you learn something, whether you're twenty years old or eighty years old, you make new synapses. And the synapses you use, they get stronger, the ones that you don't use go away. But these two hormones, which some of the strongest ways to produce them is high intensity exercise and fasting.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Are pretty much required to build a brain and, and to learn.

• 4:36Lewis Howes?

  Really? So what type of high intensity exercise are you doing on a weekly basis?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  My favorite to really get the heart rate up is I go to my favorite mountain in, in, close to where I live, where there's a trail. And it's like four, four miles around. And I walk a little bit, I jog a little bit, I walk a little bit, jog a little bit, just kind of enjoying the, the movement. And my heart rate probably stays around a hundred to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty maybe. And then I, there's some hills. And then I do some sprints up the hills. So now I push it a little bit. And thirty second push and my heart rate's a hundred and sixty.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  And then I walk a little, jog a little, there's another hill. And I push it a little bit more and my heart rate hits a hundred and sixty-five, a hundred and seventy. And, and then my, I might do that in thirty seconds or it might take a minute to, to get to that heart rate. And then I'm done.

• 5:43Lewis Howes?

  You do a few hills?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:45Lewis Howes?

  What if you did twenty hills?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Then

• 5:48Lewis Howes?

  Too much, a ten to thirty second?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  That might be okay if you're twenty, twenty-five years old, you're an elite athlete and that's part of, of your event. But if you're forty-five, fifty, sixty, and you just try to stay as healthy as possible, I think that's too much.

• 6:07Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  And in any event, it's unnecessary. Because it's not about the quantity. Quantity is good for fitness, but not, not necessarily for health.

• 6:19Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So you only need a, you know, a few sprints every couple, is this every day or every few days?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  It's, I, I would say it's no more than twice a week.

• 6:30Lewis Howes?

  Twice a week.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  For the, for the average person now, and we, we have to, if, if you're watching this, you, you have to understand if you're in, in the elite athlete category, or in the fifty-year-old trying to stave off

• 6:45Lewis Howes?

  Living life.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Degenerative disease.

• 6:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Lewis Howes?

  So if you're more of a, you know, if you're an athlete, even in your forties and fifties, you could push it a little farther. If you're competing in stuff, or doing triathlons or marathons, or

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Lewis Howes?

  Just wanting to stay lean.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:02Lewis Howes?

  It's important to be doing that a little bit more.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there, there's no doubt, I mean, I, I talk a lot in my videos about moderation. Like you do these HIIT exercises, you, you do it twice a week, you keep it short. But obviously, that doesn't apply to someone who has a, a goal in an event. If you're going after fitness, there is no substitute for punishing yourself.

• 7:27Lewis Howes?

  Right. You gotta, you gotta do it.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because if you're gonna perform in, in an event, you need to do something similar to that event at that level of intensity.

• 7:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And duration.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  So fasting and high-intensity exercise, but it's not doing a, you know, CrossFit every day, five days a week?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:47Lewis Howes?

  Because that creates too much cortisol.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 7:50Lewis Howes?

  Especially if you're older, you know, past thirty or something, it's probably not as good to do that. Is something like that, you know, a 45 to 60 minute CrossFit type of training once a week, you think okay, or is it still creating too much cortisol?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  I think that's, I think once or twice a week for the average person, if you feel good, I think is fine. But again, I, when I have people come in to my clinic, those are people who have been to 20 different doctors. They have tried vegan and carnivore and low carb and, and yo-yo dieting and gluten free. They've, they've done all that. So the, these are people with, with challenges. And now if, if you're a little frail, now that's where you really have to be careful and get everything right. But yeah, if you're, if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, you're, you're feeling fine, then go for it.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Do, do one or two of those spin classes. And what I would caution though is pay attention. Notice how your body is reacting. How do you feel after the class? Are you exhausted? Are you, are you stiff in the morning? Do you have trouble getting out of bed? Do your joints hurt the, the next day? Then you're probably doing too much.

• 9:15Lewis Howes?

  Doing too much, yeah. And what about, you know, we talked about fasting a little bit here. What are the top three benefits of intermittent fasting or longer fasting, you know, 24 hour, 48 hour fasting that you've seen in your research?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So number one is lowering insulin.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Number, and, and with that lowering blood sugar, losing weight, et cetera. The other big thing is that you induce something called autophagy. But that's with, that's with longer fasting. Autophagy is, it's called self, autophagy stands for self eating.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And that's where, if you're putting food in your body, if you're putting especially protein in your body, there's plenty of resources. Your body knows, hey, there's some, there's some more coming, I can just use that to, to build tissue and to, to do the stuff I need. But if you stop putting it in, now it becomes a very, very scarce resource. So now, your body has to figure out, where else can I get this? And that's where autophagy, self-eating, comes in. So now, your body up-regulates its recycling mechanisms.

• 10:34Lewis Howes?

  How long does it take to fast before autophagy starts?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So, again, that's what everybody asks, and it's not a, a black or white, it's a continuous, it, it's a gradient. I would say that it barely starts around sixteen to eighteen hours. That's where you get like a trickle, but then it increases pretty fast, where there's a significant change between eighteen and twenty-four hours. And then, it, it sort of takes off from there. So forty-eight hours into it, it's, it's very significant.

• 11:14Lewis Howes?

  Forty-eight hours into it.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:16Lewis Howes?

  So the longer you can go, every, you know, extra few hours, it continues to self-eat.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:22Lewis Howes?

  The, the fat stored in your body more and more.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. So the self-eating now, part of what it eats is, is fat, obviously, because you're not adding any fuel. But the key with autophagy is protein. Because you need protein to, to build the tissue. Your, your cells have so much of a lifespan, they break down, and then you have to make new ones. And you need protein for that. So, when you don't add any, now you have to go look for some. And a lot of people will say, oh, well, that's where fasting is dangerous, because you're gonna eat up your muscles. The body is too smart for that, because you need your muscles to go on the next hunt.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  So we have all these mechanisms to spare muscles, and that's why growth hormone increases also exponentially, along with autophagy.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's basically telling the body, or one of the mechanisms that tell the body, don't use the muscle, go find something else. So now, it gets much better at recycling these broken cells. It gets much better at finding any kind of resource like virus and bacteria and parasites that may also be made out of protein.

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  Really? And, and kind of eating those things, the bad things first?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 12:49Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. What's the longest you've gone fasting?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  The longest I've done is five days, or four, four and a half.

• 12:58Lewis Howes?

  No food, water only?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Just water.

• 12:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've done three days.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:01Lewis Howes?

  And you see the benefits a lot after a day and a half. You really start to see and feel the benefits.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:07Lewis Howes?

  By day three, I went the to- right up to three and I was like, okay, I need, I was starting to get a little tired. And I think I pushed it because I worked out twice, which you're probably not supposed to do, but I did like a, an inclined walk for an hour and I, you know, which I don't recommend, but I was trying to be extra.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's probably too much.

• 13:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And this is where we come into this muscle sparing thing. That I'm all in favor of doing some exercise while you're fasting. Because, because you're going to increase your ketones, you're going to increase your, your growth hormone. But if you're not adding any protein and you do something intense enough to break down muscle, now your body has to sort of juggle the resources. Like it has to repair those muscles and where's the protein going to come from? So it might break down some other muscles to repair that.

• 14:05Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Okay, I haven't seen specific research on this or anything. It's just kind of common sense. What, what would the body do?

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  So I, I would exercise, but I would keep it to purely aerobic. I wouldn't even do HIIT, not even brief HIIT during those times.

• 14:24Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. What did you do for those four and a half, five days?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Uh, I probably not, didn't do much of anything.

• 14:31Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Probably just, yeah, maybe a little bit of walking, but basically just my, my everyday activities.

• 14:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Did you feel pretty sharp after two, three days? Or you start to feel a little slower towards the end?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I don't feel as great as people tell me they feel.

• 14:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've got so much energy.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I do okay. I don't feel any dramatic improvement in focus. But I do know that it happens because I get the testimonials. And I do know, especially for people who might have insulin resistance, when they fast, they're going to increase their ketones, which becomes the alternative brain fuel.

• 15:17Lewis Howes?

  Right. And it also kind of helps heal certain things. If you've been driving the insulin, it's allowing that to recover more, right?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. Your whole carbohydrate processing machine is recovering because you're not adding anything.

• 15:35Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And one more thing about autophagy and fasting is for brain trauma. And this, I've hardly ever heard it spoken about, that the brain is kind of its own little world up there inside the cranium. We have the blood-brain barrier. And a lot of things that go on in the brain are different than the way they work in the body. So the reason, for example, that spinal cord injuries are so devastating is that the nervous system is really poor at repairing itself.

• 16:14Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Right? It's encased in bone for a reason. It's not supposed to get damaged. You're not supposed to crack your skull or break your spine. And that sense that the tissue is a little different, is sensitive. And it doesn't have the capacity to repair itself very well. But if you have a concussion, for example, you get some tissue-brain trauma, you get some inflammation. And about the only way that the brain can clean that up is through autophagy, the self-eating.

• 16:53Mark Hyman?

  Our government told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day, to eat a low-fat diet, and fats and oils were sparingly only at the top supposed to be eaten. And yet, that advice led to the worst obesity epidemic and diabetes epidemic in the history of mankind.

• 17:11Lewis Howes?

  That's like the food charts that we all saw in school, right?

• 17:14Mark Hyman?

  Completely opposite of what we should be doing. And so, the science has caught up with this bad advice, and the advice unfortunately was based on really shoddy science, on very weak evidence, on a few population studies, not really experimental studies. In fact, all the experimental studies that told us to eat low-fat diets, they actually didn't tell us that we should be doing that. They were actually contradicting the recommendations that were developed in 1980 by the UK and the USA. So, basically, if you looked at the actual randomized controlled trials, there weren't that many, but there was a few of them, they all said that eating low-fat wasn't beneficial.

• 17:52Lewis Howes?

  But these were outside of the US trials?

• 17:54Mark Hyman?

  No, trials all over, trials in the US. They just didn't look at that evidence. So, the guideline committees who were working on it, they sort of dismissed that evidence. And they had this theory, and they went with the theory, because it made sense, right? If you look at calories, for example, fat has nine calories per gram, carbs and protein have four calories per gram. So, you think, well, gee, if it has more calories per gram, if you eat less of it, you're going to lose more weight. Logical, but unfortunately, metabolism is not a math problem.

• 18:23Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 18:24Mark Hyman?

  You know?

• 18:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Mark Hyman?

  It's a metabolic problem. It's a hormonal problem. It's not energy balance, the whole idea of calories in, calories out. This is the biggest crock of you-know-what that's been pushed on the American public because there's a message implicit in that, which is, if you just told someone to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, if they don't do it, it's their fault, right? Just eat less, exercise more, and if you don't, you're a lazy glutton.

• 18:48Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:49Mark Hyman?

  Right? It's your fault you're fat. Okay. Right, but the truth is that it's not, it's not just about calorie balance. In fact, that's what the, uh, the global energy balance, quote, global energy balance network, which was actually funded by Coca-Cola. Hmm. And that they actually, actually funded university scientists to kind of be the front people for this nonsense that's all about calories in, calories out. Has been completely discredited. The New York Times wrote a big exposé of this, but what we've been taught is that all calories are the same. They're actually not. So food is not just energy, it's actually information. It gives instructions. What do you mean by that? Right, so this is like a big breakthrough in science, right?

• 19:31Mark Hyman?

  So food is not just calories, it's actually information. So the information in food communicates with your body every single minute. So every bite you take, it turns on or off genes that create health or disease that make you lose or gain weight. It turns on or off hormones that make you lose or gain weight or create health or disease. It's like a feedback for you. It's, it's direct instructions and it, and it works minute by minute. It's not something that takes a long time. It regulates inflammation, it regulates your hormones, as I said, it regulates your brain chemistry, it regulates even your gut microbiome, all the flora in your gut that we now know are linked to everything from weight gain, diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer, to autoimmune diseases, and so many other things. It's the gut health, right?

• 20:14Mark Hyman?

  Even depression and ADD and autism may be linked to changes in your gut flora. So we now know that when you eat food, it's not just about the energy in it. Cause if that was true, then you could just survive on soda all day and it wouldn't matter as long as you only eat 1,800 calories of soda. And I had this argument. Right, right, right. I had this argument with the vice chairman of Pepsi. We had dinner together. No way. Yeah, we had dinner. And the guy in between us, because I was in here, he was sitting here, the guy was like, was like being in the middle of like a war zone. And I said to him, how can you say that, how can you say that eating 1,800 calories of soda is the same as having 1,800 calories of broccoli or almonds? Right. He says, well, as long as you... Have that amount of calories, you're not gonna, it's not gonna be any different. I said, this is just not how the body works.

• 20:58Lewis Howes?

  You're not getting the nutritional value from that, right?

• 21:00Mark Hyman?

  Right. I mean, when you, well, it's not even nutritional, so just, just like, look at a thousand calories, let's say, uh, 750 calories of broccoli is, is 21 cups, 35 grams of fiber, half a teaspoon of sugar, and tons of phytonutrients, phytochemicals that upregulate uh, your genes that, that actually help you prevent cancer, that improve hormone metabolism, but so many things, right? Same calories from a big gulp, 750 calories, 46 teaspoons of sugar, right? High fructose corn syrup upregulates your liver to turn on a fat production factory that makes high triglycerides.

• 21:32Lewis Howes?

  Stores fat more, right?

• 21:33Mark Hyman?

  Stores fat, lowers triglycerides, I mean, raises triglycerides, lowers the good cholesterol, causes a fatty liver, raises hormones that, that make you, um, in women, make them grow hair on their face and have lost hair on their head. Men, they drop their testosterones, they have no sex drive and they lose their hair on their bodies. All this from the same calories, right?

• 21:54Lewis Howes?

  The number of calories.

• 21:55Mark Hyman?

  Calories are the same, but the information in the food is very different. So now we have this concept that is actually, uh, really about the hormonal, I call it hormonal hypothesis. I talk about in Eat Fat, Get Thin, which is how do you change your hormones so you're not hungry all the time? Cause what?

• 22:10Lewis Howes?

  That's the key.

• 22:10Mark Hyman?

  The typical advice, you eat low fat and you, your, your fat actually makes you satisfied, right? Cause if you, if you eat fat, you're not craving all the time, you're not hungry, and it actually is a brain actually food, because it actually stops the addiction center in the brain from turning on. So you never feel hungry or have any cravings. It also speeds up your metabolism, fat speeds up your metabolism, yeah.

• 22:33Lewis Howes?

  So it'll burn more fat at the same time, right?

• 22:35Mark Hyman?

  It releases fat from the fat cells.

• 22:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 22:38Mark Hyman?

  Right, so it, it, it makes you less hungry, it's, it makes you burn more fat and it, and it liberates the fat from the fat cells. So it's really a powerful, whereas if you eat sugar, the opposite happens. You get hungrier, cause you increase insulin, you draw, when you eat-

• 22:52Lewis Howes?

  I used to have so much sugar.

• 22:53Mark Hyman?

  It's terrible.

• 22:53Lewis Howes?

  I was addicted to it.

• 22:55Mark Hyman?

  All of us were. I mean, I was too. I was a vegetarian. I ate like tons of, of, you know, whole wheat bread and sugar and honey and everything. I mean, Grape Nuts and Ice Cream for Breakfast.

• 23:06Lewis Howes?

  That's my, that was my life, right? So when did you stop? When did the research become known? Or the, the facts or the data become?

• 23:13Mark Hyman?

  It's not even. It's honest.

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  Cause you're a doctor and you were eating sugar.

• 23:17Mark Hyman?

  It's not even.

• 23:18Lewis Howes?

  When did you start to realize? And when did this information about fat become?

• 23:21Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's been mounting for decades, right? So it's, it's building on a mountain of evidence. And in the book, I reviewed over a thousand studies or 500 quoted in the book that I referenced. They wouldn't let me put more because there was no room in the back of the book.

• 23:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:34Mark Hyman?

  And, and it's all well documented and, and the science of this is very powerful. One of my colleagues, David Ludwig, wrote a book called Always Hungry. He's the Harvard professor. He's done a lot of the research that this is based on where he, for example, he gave two groups of people, same calories. Okay, same calories, but changed the percents of fat and carbs.

• 23:53Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 23:54Mark Hyman?

  And it was a very well controlled study. And in the first group, you know, they had 60% carbs, 20% fat, 20% protein.

• 24:03Mark Hyman?

  The other group switched it 60% fat, 20% carbs, you know, 20% protein. So it's the opposite. And the group that had the high fat diet burned 300 calories more a day by doing nothing else.

• 24:18Lewis Howes?

  Really? Just by having more fat?

• 24:19Mark Hyman?

  By eating more fat, their metabolism sped up 300 calories. That's like running.

• 24:23Lewis Howes?

  Same amount of calories though.

• 24:24Mark Hyman?

  They ate, they ate the same calories in.

• 24:26Lewis Howes?

  But they burned 300 more.

• 24:27Mark Hyman?

  Right, because their metabolism sped up.

• 24:28Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 24:29Mark Hyman?

  Right, so in other words, like running an hour a day without getting off the couch.

• 24:33Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 24:33Mark Hyman?

  Right? That's powerful.

• 24:34Lewis Howes?

  Very powerful.

• 24:35Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and I know for me, you know, as, as I've seen myself and my patients, transformation's amazing. And their cholesterol gets better. It's, it's totally contradictory.

• 24:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Mark Hyman?

  Right? Fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol, right? Eating cholesterol is supposed to raise your cholesterol. But for the first time since the dietary guidelines came out in 1980, the US government in 2015 completely reversed their stance on fat. There's no more restriction. Like, uh, January, first week of January 2016.

• 25:03Lewis Howes?

  This year?

• 25:04Mark Hyman?

  This year.

• 25:05Lewis Howes?

  Like a few weeks ago?

• 25:05Mark Hyman?

  A few weeks ago.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  They just changed this.

• 25:07Mark Hyman?

  They changed this completely.

• 25:09Lewis Howes?

  The whole guide?

• 25:09Mark Hyman?

  Completely.

• 25:10Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 25:11Mark Hyman?

  First time, they said, forget about fat. You can eat as much as you want. No limit on fat. The government, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee established these recommendations. This is a scientific group that establishes guidelines for the government, helps them shape policy. And then the government makes the policy. Based around this research or this. Yeah, they said, you know, don't worry about fat, don't worry about cholesterol. Eggs are back, right? Eggs are back. You know, forget about the egg white omelets, just eat the whole egg. No way. Completely. And they said there's, it made, it made me laugh. They said, uh, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, quote nutrient of concern, like. Well, we got it wrong for thirty five years. No way. So it's like. It's totally different.

• 25:56Mark Hyman?

  And they, they also said that we should, for the first time, they said we should reduce sugar. Now, the, the, the policy advisors, who are the scientists, said we should limit sugar sweetened beverages. Cause they're proven to be linked to obesity and diabetes. But the government, because of the food lobby, changed the wording to say, no, we should be restricting added sugar. So we should eat less added sugars. Now, what's an added sugar? It doesn't say added sugar on the label. So how do you know? Because the food labeling from the FDA is also influenced by the food lobby. So it should say added sugar on the label, not just sugar. Right? So you don't know. Right. So this is designed to totally confuse people. But the truth is that this is a huge advance. And now we, we actually have come to realize that this is not true.

• 26:41Mark Hyman?

  So the science around, uh, fat and how your body burns fat and what makes you fat is all really clear now. And it's all based on this hormone idea of insulin, which is a fat stored hormone. So anything you eat that increases insulin, which is sugar, refined flour. I mean, white flour raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. So if you had two slices of white bread, it raises your blood sugar more than a tablespoon of table sugar. People are like, I don't need any whole wheat bread. It's just as bad. Unless the bread is so like dense that you can stand on it without it squishing, then you shouldn't eat it.

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  You shouldn't eat it.

• 27:15Mark Hyman?

  No, like the German rye bread.

• 27:16Lewis Howes?

  I love bread though.

• 27:17Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, everybody loves bread. The bread we eat isn't the bread we ate, right? So our ancestors ate very different bread.

• 27:23Lewis Howes?

  It's not the hard bread.

• 27:24Mark Hyman?

  It was very coarse and we only had the grain mills that started in the 1800s. Before that, we couldn't eat refined grain and now even whole wheat is super refined. It's just, you know.

• 27:34Lewis Howes?

  And are all grains bad as well, in your opinion?

• 27:36Mark Hyman?

  No, I don't think all grains are bad. You know, I joke, I say, you know, in the book, I talk about, you know, an induction plan, like basically a way to get quick start to change you from like just being storing fat to burning fat to eating fat to makes you thin. And that's a 21 day plan. And after that, I talk about how you transition to what I call a Pegan diet.

• 27:55Lewis Howes?

  Pegan?

• 27:56Mark Hyman?

  Pegan, as opposed to paleo or vegan. It's sort of a joke, because one day I was sitting.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  In between?

• 28:01Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I was sitting on a panel with two friends of mine. One was a vegan cardiologist and the other was like a paleo doctor.

• 28:06Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 28:07Mark Hyman?

  And I was like, well, I don't know, I guess it must be a Pegan, because I'm in the middle here.

• 28:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay, what does a Pegan diet look like?

• 28:13Mark Hyman?

  So Pegan diet, you know, what's amazing, Louis, is that the principles of paleo vegan are often very similar. So both groups believe that we should be eating whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods.

• 28:27Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 28:28Mark Hyman?

  We should get rid of food additives, hormones.

• 28:30Lewis Howes?

  Fruits from the ground.

• 28:31Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, everything. No antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides, no GMO. We should be having no MSG, no artificial sweeteners, no high fructose corn syrup. Everybody agrees that that's true. We also agree that everybody should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables.

• 28:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 28:46Mark Hyman?

  Right? A little heavy on the plant foods.

• 28:47Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 28:48Mark Hyman?

  Basic principles. Both agree that we shouldn't have dairy, which is interesting, right? We'll talk about that.

• 28:53Lewis Howes?

  In paleo, no dairy as well, right?

• 28:54Mark Hyman?

  No dairy, right. No dairy.

• 28:55Lewis Howes?

  I guess there's some of them that say like some specific cheeses or something.

• 28:58Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you know, grass fed butter, you know, like there's some things, but you know, but it's, but the proteins in dairy are very inflammatory and the dairy, again, we eat isn't the dairy we ate. We've hybridized our cows, it's all fertilized by one bull.

• 29:10Lewis Howes?

  It's not organic dairy.

• 29:11Mark Hyman?

  And it's not organic, it's not raw, it's not how our ancestors ate it.

• 29:15Lewis Howes?

  Probably steroids and, yeah.

• 29:15Mark Hyman?

  Even organic cows, they pump, uh, milk them when they're pregnant and they're, they're full of hormones. So, and also, you know, it's, it's just not always tolerated well by many people.

• 29:23Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:24Mark Hyman?

  And then, um,

• 29:25Lewis Howes?

  What else did they both make a comment?

• 29:26Mark Hyman?

  Everybody agrees that we should be, uh, eating foods that, that, um, are phytonutrient rich, that are nutrient dense and, and we should be lots of nuts and seeds and lots of good oils like avocados and olive oil.

• 29:38Lewis Howes?

  What's, what's phytonutrient? What does that mean?

• 29:40Mark Hyman?

  Phytonutrient is a, is a chemical that's in plant foods. Phyto means plant. And it's not a vitamin or mineral. It's not a protein, fat or carb or fiber. It's something else. So for example, like broccoli has glucosinolates, which upregulates detoxification.

• 29:57Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 29:58Mark Hyman?

  Catechins are in green tea, which are powerful detoxifiers of metal, powerful antioxidants. Uh, tomatoes have lycopene, which is a powerful, uh, cancer preventer for prostate cancer.

• 30:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 30:10Mark Hyman?

  Uh, so, so, uh, anthocyanins, you can have black rice, which has anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants that are in black rice. It's emperor's rice. Love that. It's also very low glycemic.

• 30:21Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 30:22Mark Hyman?

  So I think the, the, the things that they, they disagree on are basically beans, grains and meat. Like where you get your protein from. Everything else is, everybody is the same.

• 30:32Lewis Howes?

  Paleo and vegan is the same except for meat, beans.

• 30:34Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and protein. I mean, uh, beans, beans, grains and protein.

• 30:38Lewis Howes?

  Beans, grains and protein. Okay.

• 30:39Mark Hyman?

  Right. And I mean, you know, like, uh, you know, meat.

• 30:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:42Mark Hyman?

  And so, you know, what I realized is that, you know, I, I think many people who, who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic, which affects a lot of people. They talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book? Which is, is a questionnaire. You can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant. Like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means that they eat a lot of starch, that they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans. It can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 31:18Mark Hyman?

  And non-gluten grains in particular, because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. Um, I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think, you know, meat is a big, is the big issue, right? So meat is the big issue. So should we be?

• 31:32Lewis Howes?

  We just, we were just at dinner the other night.

• 31:34Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 31:34Lewis Howes?

  We both had meat, right?

• 31:35Mark Hyman?

  We had fish.

• 31:36Lewis Howes?

  Uh, we had fish. Yeah.

• 31:37Mark Hyman?

  Black cod.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  Yes, that's great.

• 31:38Mark Hyman?

  Which was awesome.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  I had a mahi mahi. You had a black cod. Is that what it was?

• 31:41Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I had the black cod.

• 31:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I had the black cod. Guy next to me had meatballs. Yeah. Guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so, so the issues around meat also, I think are, everybody agrees, and fish, everybody agrees that if, if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised, it should be sustainably raised, it should be grass fed, it should be not harming the environment. The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and are real. Yeah. I mean, I have many Buddhist patients, I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot, who's a, you know, is a diabetic and he's never gonna eat an animal. You know, so I, I need to help him, help him understand how, he never need an egg, how to eat a high, higher fat protein diet, which is low glycemic. So we can do that. Okay.

• 32:24Mark Hyman?

  Right, so, um, more nuts and seeds, you know, less rice, more beans, you know, just, there's, there's strategies for, for doing that. Sure. And he did great, he lost thirty five pounds, reversed his diabetes, and now I have like tons of bun people, you know, praying for me.

• 32:39Mark Hyman?

  That's great. Yeah, and, uh, and then the, the, uh, the meat thing is tricky, cause, uh, you know, it's also, um, an environmental risk. If you're eating factory farmed animals, there's antibiotics in that, and there's runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers that damages our water supply and rivers and lakes, there's, uh, climate change that happens from the methane produced, it's more, more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. There's so, and there's high energy use, one fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption. Uh, you know, our water is, is being used up at incredible rates for, for feeding animals. There's, there's basically, uh, I think seventy percent of all water use, and there's basically only five percent of the world's surface is, is fresh water.

• 33:24Mark Hyman?

  Usable. Is fresh water, right, one percent is in Russia. Wow. And only four percent are the rest of us, and, and seventy percent of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. Sure. So I think, you know, if factory farming just should be not supported in any way, and we need to change that. And that means we need to, to change our patterns of consumption around meat, we need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having cond meat.

• 33:52Lewis Howes?

  Condiment.

• 33:52Mark Hyman?

  Condiment, as opposed to like a condiment?

• 33:54Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 33:55Mark Hyman?

  Like condiment, you know, it should be as a side dish or a dressing if you're gonna eat it.

• 33:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 33:59Mark Hyman?

  And I think, um.

• 34:00Lewis Howes?

  Not a full plate of steak, you mean?

• 34:02Mark Hyman?

  You know, I think there's, there's three issues with, with meat, right? There's environmental issues, there's moral issues, and there's health issues. So, we kind of talked about the moral, I think that's.

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Mark Hyman?

  People are entitled to their beliefs and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy. The environmental issues are real and I think everybody would agree, whether they're paleo vegan, that we need to stop harming the environment. And I think even if you're not paleo vegan, everybody really releases, believes that. In fact, the dietary advisory committee that was advising the government said, "We should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact." Right? Now, if you, if you, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably raised meat, you can't, it's not as, as abundant. You can't produce as much and so we all have to eat less of it.

• 34:46Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 34:46Mark Hyman?

  And it's more expensive, so, but that's okay. And I think that, that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in Eat Fat, Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Cause I was, I'm like, well, I don't know.

• 34:58Lewis Howes?

  You want to know for yourself, too.

• 34:59Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I'm like, I'm, I'm recommending to my patients, I'm, you know, a human too and I want to live a long time and I don't want to be doing something stupid.

• 35:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Mark Hyman?

  So, I wanted to find out, what, what does the science tell us about meat?

• 35:11Lewis Howes?

  So, you did all the research?

• 35:12Mark Hyman?

  So, I looked at all the research and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat.

• 35:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:16Mark Hyman?

  There's a lot of research in there and I addressed all these issues, you know, environmental, moral, and the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right?

• 35:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 35:26Mark Hyman?

  So, you want the paleo people like, "Meat's healthy, here's all the research." And the vegan like, "Meat's gonna kill you, here's all the research." So, it's like, and then you're at the average Joe, you're totally confused. And your average doctor, you're totally confused because we got no training in nutrition.

• 35:37Lewis Howes?

  And they haven't done the research themselves.

• 35:39Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 35:39Lewis Howes?

  So, they're going off of their opinion or their theory.

• 35:41Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, they're, they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science. They don't know because it's not what we learn, right? I mean, I, I just, I'm at Cleveland Clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school. They had this integrated in, which is so great.

• 35:55Lewis Howes?

  That's awesome.

• 35:56Mark Hyman?

  And I, I helped Team Ryan, who's a congressman from Ohio, introduce, Tim, he's great.

• 36:01Lewis Howes?

  Has he been on your show?

• 36:01Mark Hyman?

  He's been on here, yeah. He's great, you know, introduce a bill called the Enrich Act. Which was a bill that is funding fifteen million dollars to fund nutrition in medical schools. Nutrition education for doctors.

• 36:13Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. That's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food.

• 36:20Mark Hyman?

  Oh, my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease, and yet doctors know nothing about food.

• 36:26Lewis Howes?

  And they just medicate a lot of the times.

• 36:28Mark Hyman?

  I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I... Food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital, teaching three hundred black women how to cook in a cooking class. Like, that's what doctors should be doing, because that's how I'm gonna get people healthy.

• 36:42Lewis Howes?

  That's real medicine, right?

• 36:43Mark Hyman?

  That's real medicine.

• 36:44Lewis Howes?

  Now, just a quick side note. What is your involvement with... What is functional medicine, and what is your involvement at the Cleveland Clinic?

• 36:50Mark Hyman?

  Can I finish my meat?

• 36:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes, go ahead.

• 36:52Mark Hyman?

  I was still rolling on the meat. And then we'll talk about functional medicine, and then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  Perfect, perfect.

• 36:56Mark Hyman?

  Because people want to know. Like, they're like, "Well, what about meat?" They're, like, probably listening.

• 36:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 37:00Mark Hyman?

  So, the science...

• 37:01Lewis Howes?

  Eight thousand words.

• 37:02Mark Hyman?

  I'm not gonna give you eight thousand words. But I'll give you a few hundred.

• 37:05Lewis Howes?

  Perfect.

• 37:06Mark Hyman?

  So, the science of meat was fascinating. So, when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were... They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, followed them, and then they asked questions of them. "What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last, you know, month?" You know, and they basically do these food frequency questionnaires, and then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And they try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So, the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease, and more cancer, and more death. But what else was...

• 37:36Lewis Howes?

  They were smoking, they were drinking, they weren't sleeping, they were stressed out.

• 37:41Mark Hyman?

  So, if you look at the data, they ate eight hundred more calories a day. They almost eat no fruits and vegetables.

• 37:45Lewis Howes?

  Tons of sugar.

• 37:46Mark Hyman?

  They had tons of sugar in processed food, lots of fried foods, drank more, smoked more, didn't exercise, and didn't take any vitamins and minerals. Well, guess what?

• 37:53Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna get it.

• 37:54Mark Hyman?

  They weren't as healthy as the other people. So, most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few studies that were interesting, I found. One was a study of eleven thousand people who shopped at health food stores. And they found there were like a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. Like, so who are the people who are, you know, like, healthy meat eaters who only eat grass fed meat? Or who, because most of these studies were not on grass fed meat either. They were on factory farmed meat, right? So then again, how do you generalize that?

• 38:18Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 38:18Mark Hyman?

  But then there were these 11,000 people and they followed them for many years. And they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes. Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference.

• 38:33Lewis Howes?

  And you have a healthy lifestyle.

• 38:34Mark Hyman?

  Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  What is the main cause in your mind to, why it's so hard for people to get rid of that extra 20 or 30 pounds of belly back fat?

• 38:49Speaker 03

  So when you think about fat burning, there's two different phenomenon at play. One is thermodynamics, so there's more calories in than calories out. And then the other is lipolysis. So if you're going to restructure or recomp a building or your body, you have to remove blocks in some places and then put blocks in other places. So a lot of fat burners help with lipolysis. So they break fat molecules down and they increase, for example, mitochondrial beta oxidation, which is basically just you're metabolizing fats and then using them in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. The details don't really matter, but that's essentially the powerhouse of your cell.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  And you can do that all you want, but if you're still, you know, in at caloric maintenance or even excess surplus, then you're just going to take all those blocks and then put them right back into fat cells.

• 39:43Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So you need a caloric deficit, it sounds like, somewhere, at some point in order to remove. You need to be exercising more than you're consuming, you're burning, burning more calories than you're consuming.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 39:57Lewis Howes?

  Or consuming less than you normally would.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  There's many tools and ways to achieve this, of course.

• 40:03Lewis Howes?

  Sure. What ways?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  So the the OG way is just counting calories.

• 40:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  And even if you look at doctors and dietitians, we usually underestimate the amount of calories that we consume, I believe by at least 10%.

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  And we overestimate the amount of calories that we burn by about 10%.

• 40:24Lewis Howes?

  We think we're burning more.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 40:26Lewis Howes?

  Or not.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Even doctors and dietitians.

• 40:27Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:28Lewis Howes?

  And we think we're eating less, but there's always hidden calories in something, right? Or you maybe didn't weigh it perfectly, or it was a bigger size or something, right? Okay, so that's the original ways to count calories. Do you recommend that strategy?

• 40:41Speaker 03

  For some individuals, it's particularly helpful. Most of the time that I see a patient in in my clinic, and a lot of what I do is obesity medicine, I am board certified in obesity medicine, they have already done that. And many of the time, they say, it doesn't work, and I eat like a bird, and there is nothing, there's nothing quite as powerful to destroy a physician-patient relationship than to just tell the patient that they're lying, or that they don't know what they're talking about.

• 41:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  So it's not helpful to push that angle of vector. It's just a tool, and there's many tools in the toolbox. For some people, whether it's genetic, or epigenetic, or just their situation that they're in in life, or their mental health, or their hormone health, it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, almost like it's more difficult for someone in quick saying to get out. So you can teach a person how to dig, that's your lifestyle interventions, but you should also give them a shovel to help out.

• 41:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  It doesn't necessarily mean that you throw a shovel at them.

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  But that's where medications and supplements come in, to address, whether it's insulin resistance, or whether it's their mental health, or their hormone health, to help give them the tool to do it themselves.

• 41:57Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, okay. So the counting the calories works for some, doesn't work for everyone. What else would you suggest they do then? What have you seen has been really effective consistently for people you've worked with?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  When I write a prescription for this, I have several different areas or boxes that I can circle. And one of them is number of meals per day. One of them is macronutrients, for example, carbohydrates. One of them is timing of meals. One of them is eating speed. So there's a lot of strategies to develop good eating speed habits. For example, split your meal into three different portions. Consume one, wait 10 minutes. Consume the next one if you would like, wait 10 minutes. And then consume the last one if you would like.

• 42:44Lewis Howes?

  So don't just put it all in your mouth in 10 seconds. That's what I'm hearing you say, which is kind of my whole childhood. Just like eat as fast as you can, not know that you're full and just keep eating more, right?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  These are extremely powerful for pediatric patients for childhood obesity. I believe in the New England Journal of Medicine did a study. And it was called the turtle bite study. Where every five or 10 bites at some interval, they took one, the kids took one bite that was extremely slow. And it was helpful for recomposition of those kids.

• 43:17Lewis Howes?

  Really? You mean recomposition of their bodies?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  When you're in the field of pediatric obesity medicine, you're not really going, your end target's not weight loss.

• 43:28Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  It's usually weight gain, but a body recomposition.

• 43:33Lewis Howes?

  Huh, so less fat.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 43:35Lewis Howes?

  Weight gain, but more like you're growing as a child either way. But it's diversifying the weight gain, I guess, right?

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 43:43Lewis Howes?

  Directing it in another place. Interesting. Okay, so we have meals per day, timing of meals, eating speed. I think you said one or two others.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Timing of meals, that would kind of incorporate intermittent fasting, which is not, it's more of a health tool rather than a weight loss tool.

• 43:59Lewis Howes?

  Meals per day, eating speed, timing.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  I'm sure there are other tools. Those are the ones that I remember off the top of my head.

• 44:04Lewis Howes?

  If you were just saying, hey, listen, I don't want to count calories. You know, I'm probably not going to do the intermittent fasting thing. I'm not gonna eat slower or like split it up in three things. That seems like too much work for me. But I will eat one less meal a day, right? Or only a certain amount of meals and then I'll essentially be intermittent fasting in that process. But if I looked at it as okay, what would my meals per day look like? If I wanted to consume a little less calories, obviously I'm gonna feel hungry, but when can I do it where I'm not gonna wanna munch on extra calories? What would that be? Skip dinner? Is that, you know, what does that look like?

• 44:41Speaker 03

  I would say skip eating after dinner and don't even worry about taking away a meal. No eating after 7pm. That being said, if you do remove one meal, whether it's breakfast or lunch or dinner, it is not helpful at all for weight loss or body composition.

• 44:56Lewis Howes?

  To remove one meal is not helpful?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Correct. So in isolation, removing one meal is not helpful at all for weight loss.

• 45:03Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  It's truly an intervention for health reasons if you would benefit from that. Less mTOR signaling, less like growth signaling in cells in general, or more of a reprieve where your body's immune system has a chance to go throughout the rest of your cells and see if there is abnormal ones.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  For most individuals, unless they like doing that for mental clarity, whatever benefit, some people really like skipping breakfast. But many people, especially those that struggle with metabolic syndrome, have other pathologies. There are several new ones. There is sleep eating syndrome where you eat, you're sleeping, you wake up and then you eat and you don't even realize it.

• 45:43Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:43Speaker 03

  You see that there's, you know, a bag of chips and you literally don't even remember it, almost like sleepwalking.

• 45:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  And there's also night eating where you consume almost all of your calories between dinner and bedtime. Often these individuals also stay up late at night.

• 45:56Lewis Howes?

  Those are chips, snacks and other like kind of emptier calories, right?

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Correct. But they don't eat breakfast.

• 46:02Lewis Howes?

  Really? Ice cream cookies or whatever it might be, yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:06Lewis Howes?

  So that's, that's the time where you could really, if you just stop eating after dinner, you'll, you'll eat less calories. And that sounds like you're still at kind of like the even maintenance. You're not a caloric deficit, correct? Unless you eat less in each meal.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Correct. And obviously it's possible to be in a deficit. And do that as well. But that's your biggest bang for the buck is not eating anything after dinner. Because society values family dinners and also social dinners with colleagues and whatnot. It would be very difficult to tell everybody to stop eating dinner. But if you wanted to design the perfect, like in a lab, Truman Show style, whatever you want to call it. Not eating after about 3pm would be even more beneficial.

• 46:54Lewis Howes?

  For weight loss.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  For health reasons.

• 46:57Lewis Howes?

  For health, not weight loss.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  I don't think it would have any effect with weight loss. Maybe it would, but that I know of it has not been studied.

• 47:05Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So it's truly because you could still consume all your calories in the morning and in the afternoon before 3 o'clock for the day. You could still consume a lot of calories is what you're saying. So you'd still have to cut the amount of calories in that timing window. And then you'd just be intermittent fasting longer, right? Which would help for health benefits and maybe would, I guess, help cleanse some of the dead cells and kind of like regenerate new cells, that type of thing. But not necessarily for weight loss, is what I'm hearing you say. But at the end of the day, it sounds like it's a caloric deficit.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's just a matter of helping provide individuals with the tools that will work best for them. So for some, they might need a shovel and for some, they might want and or need a backhoe.

• 47:51Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. What, it doesn't seem like you've ever been out of shape. Have you ever been overweight?

• 47:57Speaker 03

  When I had my first child, I was about 40 pounds overweight.

• 48:02Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I could hardly tell because I'm so.

• 48:04Lewis Howes?

  You're tall. Yeah, it's hard to see. So it's kind of like the fat's just a little bit everywhere, right?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:09Lewis Howes?

  So how did you burn that 40 pounds? What did you do?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  I eliminated all liquid calories.

• 48:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  I ate foods of low caloric density, but high nutrient density.

• 48:21Lewis Howes?

  Like what, these five types of food groups are?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of salmon. I love spinach. I had a lot of spinach that would kind of go under the fiber category. I love carrots, although carrots don't have a lot of dietary fiber. They're just kind of empty, insoluble fiber, if you will. Not totally, of course.

• 48:38Lewis Howes?

  But it's not, not many calories.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And a few months later, I was kind of back at my baseline.

• 48:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:46Lewis Howes?

  Forty pounds, just like that, a few months?

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:48Lewis Howes?

  Just by changing the way you ate?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  My biggest intervention was I eliminated all liquid calories and I did not have any more than two caloric beverages, whether it was, you know, like a coffee with a bunch of cream in it. I did learn to like black coffee during that time and I still do. But no more than two beverages with calories in them per month.

• 49:11Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, because like something like a bulletproof coffee, which is, you know, a lot of people talk about intermittent fasting with a bulletproof, that still has a lot of calories, doesn't it?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  I don't know the macronutrient profile on bulletproof offhand, but I believe it's mostly protein.

• 49:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  So if it's, the one exception to that for some individuals could be a protein shake. And you would probably want to consume this in the morning rather than the evening. That way you can have the benefit of some degree of appetite suppression.

• 49:40Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Some protein shakes like casein, which is an interesting one to talk about because it can also affect prolactin. And some people negatively, if their prolactin's too high, casein can increase it. But casein's also digested very slowly and it has a lot of amino acids in it that will activate mTOR. So during your eating window through the day, if you consume your casein at the beginning of the eating window, then it can be helpful to provide satiety and also help with anabolism. But if you consume it at the end of your day, then it's gonna essentially cut short your fasting period.

• 50:16Lewis Howes?

  So if you have a protein shake after eight o'clock, right? Say someone's working out consistently and they're doing a workout in the morning or the afternoon, they eat their dinner, but then they're still hungry and they say, well, let me just do a protein shake, right? It's 150, 200 calories, but it's 20 to 40 grams of protein. Are you saying having that because it got the calories, it's extending the eating window?

• 50:39Lewis Howes?

  So it's not allowing you to to burn off those calories more? What are you saying there?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  That would be more for health reasons. For example, let's take an intermittent faster that right before bed every night, they have a shake of 50 grams of casein. So that's essentially making their intermittent fasting for health reasons worthless.

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Because their mTOR is still very active for many hours at night. However, if you are looking at the satiety benefit of specifically protein, if your shake has just protein in it, then that's going to help provide some degree of satiety.

• 51:15Lewis Howes?

  Well, you're not hungry, is what you mean, yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yep. And there's obviously a lot of factors to this. One that has received a lot of press recently is called GLP-1. There's all these different drugs like semaglutide that are GLP-1 agonists. And if you look at carbs, carbs spike up GLP-1 very quickly. GLP-1 is produced in a lot of areas, but a lot of it is the gut and also the pancreas. And then fat will increase very, very slowly, but it will increase GLP-1 for a long time, and protein is somewhere in between.

• 51:52Lewis Howes?

  You had like a formula in there that you said about two minutes ago. You said no snacking, you said a few other things. Can you share that formula again?

• 52:00Jason Fung?

  Yeah, yeah. So one, you want to 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 trans fats were pretty clearly bad. Refined meat like bologna and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either. So you want to eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you want to eat no sugar, you want to eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you want to make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of fasting. And that really just gets you back to 1970 where people were still eating white bread, right?

• 52:45Jason Fung?

  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 give their bodies a break from eating, right? Where now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat. We've, we've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating.

• 53:30Jason Fung?

  Like, why wouldn't you think that that's important? Like, 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 everywhere saying, 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.

• 54:00Lewis 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?

• 54:17Jason 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 to 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.

• 54:59Jason Fung?

  And, you know, in trying to understand type two diabetes, 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.

• 55:13Jason Fung?

  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.

• 55:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 55:38Jason 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 into 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. Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas in, right?

• 56:20Jason Fung?

  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 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 your body.

• 56:43Lewis Howes?

  Burn the gas, burn the gas.

• 56:45Jason 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, 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 that's already sitting on there. Is it fun?

• 57:30Jason Fung?

  No, it's not fun.

• 57:33Jason 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.

• 58:13Jason 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 doing 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? And that's not my concern. My concern is telling people what they need to do to get healthy, right?

• 58:59Lewis Howes?

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

• 59:03Jason 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.

• 59:48Jason 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 going to 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 uh this gets to the question of hunger.

• 1:00:34Jason Fung?

  So 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, the fasting. It's actually not true. So you can actually measure uh 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 cou- a couple hours later, your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline. Hmm, so you don't feel hu- you don't feel hungry anymore? No, your hunger goes back to baseline level. Interesting.

• 1:01:18Jason Fung?

  So if you eat uh 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 fasts, 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.

• 1:01:57Lewis 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 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

• 1:02:41Lewis Howes?

  now it's time to go out there and do something great.