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health
You probably know someone who is overweight, or who has a metabolic disease. And all they say is that there's nothing that can be done to prevent it. Is there?
You probably know someone who is overweight, or who has a metabolic disease. And all they say is that there's nothing that can be done to prevent it. Is there?
Dr. Fung says otherwise! He claims that the reason we are sick and obese is because we are focusing on the wrong target.
With decades of experience, he talks about a very simple way to make your body burn fat and reverse metabolic diseases, and it's better than any medication you can take, including Ozempic
But who is this doctor who dares to go against the mainstream, or one dominated by the pharmaceutical industry?
Dr. Jason Fung is the New York Times best-selling author of many books, including The Obesity Code and The Diabetes Code. He completed medical school at the University of Toronto and specialized in nephrology at UCLA. He is the co-founder of The Fasting Method , a program to help people lose weight and reverse type 2 diabetes naturally with intermittent fasting.
Understanding the fat gain process according to Dr. fung
We often focus on calories and don't pay attention to insulin, but the main cause of obesity is essentially the problem of hyperinsulinemia, in fact a hormonal problem.
Calories vs. calorie expenditure
In fact, all of our body's systems work in coordination, nothing happens by accident. Our body responds to hormones, so if we're gaining body fat, it's because the hormones are signaling us to gain body fat.
When you eat, the hormone insulin will increase and therefore signal us to store calories, body fat is essentially a storage of calories.
In order to regulate the highly complex system with many interconnections, each part of our body needs to know what's going on with the rest, and that's where insulin comes in. Insulin is a hormone with many functions, but it essentially “tells” your body to store body fat, as a kind of messenger.
There's a misconception we all have about how much we eat in relation to calorie expenditure in order to lose weight. Most of us think that all we have to do is eat less and our bodies will use up what's stored! No, it's not that simple, your own body can go into a calorie-saving state.
What we've been hearing for years is the same advice and it hasn't helped anyone, look at the number of people who struggle. Essentially what they do is calorie counting.
Smart choices, calories that don't make you fat
If you eat cookies you'll stimulate more insulin, which means you'll store more of it as body fat. Now if you compare these same calories to eating an egg, for example, you don't stimulate as much insulin, which means you won't store as many calories in the form of fat.
The idea is simply to understand that some foods make you fatter than other foods, even if they have the same amount of calories.
How many people have you heard say “I got fat because I ate too much broccoli”?
Sugar and insulin
When you say sugar, you think of table sugar, such as fructose and sucrose, but sugar is a generic term, so if you eat carbohydrates, which is a sugar, you are in fact eating sugar. Eating bread and cookies, foods basically made from starches, is eating sugar
When your body has too much glucose, it stores some of it, but eventually it spreads in the blood, your blood glucose, blood sugar, rises and you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The business of hyperinsulinemia
Hyperinsulinemia is a condition in which there are excessive levels of insulin circulating in the blood in relation to the level of glucose
Obesity and type two diabetes, leads to other diseases like heart attacks and strokes and all these other things and, again, you can follow the medical literature and you'll see that hyperinsulinemia is a huge risk factor for all kinds of diseases, including cancer.
Satiety
Your body has natural satiety mechanisms, if you eat, for example, 100 calories of white bread and jam, it means you're eating a lot of sugar, a lot of refined carbohydrates, we know that the next minute it's going to spike your insulin, whereas if it was the egg it wouldn't spike.
With high insulin spikes, the messenger will tell your body to store all those calories, so those 100 calories will go straight into your fat stores because that's how your body stores calories, sending everything to its reserves
The problem is that now your body has nothing left to use as energy, that piece of white bread with jam didn't do the trick, a few hours later your body is as if you hadn't eaten because everything is stored, you can't use it, it will make you want to eat again.
Whereas, if you had eaten an egg, your body wouldn't store so many calories, and the food would serve your body, the insulin spike would be lower, you wouldn't feel hungry again so quickly.
By ignoring this kind of physiology of what happens with food and hormones, you'll be ravenously hungry all the time. Do you know why you're so hungry? It's because you haven't solved the problem of turning calories into energy - instead, you've stored it as a reserve.
Dr. fung's experience
The world's diabetes associations, doctors and nutritionists were taught that type 2 diabetes was a chronic and progressive disease.
Interestingly, everyone knew that if you lost weight, your diabetes would improve or disappear. What the authority was saying was a complete invention and very harmful to people.
Dr. Fung used to prescribe the standard treatment of medical associations, but saw no effective results, until he treated a friend with very severe diabetes along 10 years.
After realizing his mistake, he told his friend: “What you need to do is restrict your carbohydrates, your body has too much glucose because you're eating glucose”.
In addition, Fung recommended fasting, so that the body could burn off the glucose.
With these simple changes to his diet, within a month his friend stopped taking all his diabetes medication and his score dropped to 5.9, which actually classified him as non-diabetic,
It was after experiences like this that he wrote the Diabetes Code and how anyone could actually reverse type two diabetes, published in 2018. Only in 2021 did the American Diabetes Association finally say that it is a disease that can be reversed,
Tools to help you lose weight
1 Smart carbohydrate swaps
There's an interesting study on the South American diet where a lot of highly processed foods are eaten, and proportionally there's a lot of obesity. The interesting thing is that comparing the number of calories is not that different from people in Colorado, where they have a low obesity rate, the question is the quality of those calories, one was highly processed and the other was not, and that was the difference, not the calories, but the processing that influenced the hormonal response absolutely
You have to take into account how processed these carbohydrates are. Foods like oats, for example, whole oats with instant oats and you'll find that one of them has a much higher glycemic index, which measures how much glucose and insulin increase,
So when you process a food like oatmeal (blend it in a blender), you get a much higher glycemic index which will raise your insulin levels much more, which will raise insulin much more.
Processed foods are a kind of classic, because processed foods increase insulin in terms of absorption, compared to a whole grain that your body takes a little longer to digest, making glucose and insulin rise very slowly.
2 The order of the factors changes the result
What you eat first makes a difference to the amount of insulin response you have, a study has shown.
Participants were instructed to consume carbohydrate-rich foods only after non-carbohydrate nutrients, to exploit and combine the well-known positive effects of lipids and proteins on glucose tolerance, small pre-loads of protein or lipids are able to improve glucose tolerance. In the study, the load was 50 g of Parmesan cheese, a boiled egg and 300 ml of water, or 500 ml of water.(2)
3 Avoid processed foods
There are mechanisms in our body, hormonal mechanisms to prevent us from overeating, these mechanisms are the ones that most processing eliminates.
We've already talked about oats, now look at fruit, for example apples, you usually stop after eating one, but you know that if you were to drink apple juice, you could easily drink the juice of five apples. The juice is the part of the apple that isn't satiating, because you're not eating the pulp, you're not eating fiber, just the fructose, which is sugar
And make no mistake, diet soda is also processed. Even though it's sweetened, you'll drink it and be much hungrier if you didn't have it. This is because of the sweetness, the chemical compound will activate certain neural pathways with the sweetness that will make you hungrier.
4 Tool: Intermittent fasting
What is intermittent fasting?
It's simply a period that you use up your reserve, a time without eating, allowing your insulin levels to drop properly
When you eat all the time you're not allowing your insulin levels to drop, so it's only when you allow those insulin levels to drop that you signal your body to start taking those calories out of storage, that's really the only way to do it.
The funny thing is to see people saying that you should eat 10 times a day to lose weight. It turns out that physiologically you simply can't lose body fat when your insulin levels are high.
Fasting is probably the most efficient way to get there. Our ancestors knew this a long time ago, the problem with excess obesity is one that dates back to our time,
That's exactly what the diet was like in the 60s and 70s, you had dinner around 6, 7 maybe, and breakfast around 7, 8 in the morning, so you had a window of 14 hours of fasting, it wasn't called fasting, it was just a normal eating routine.
Fasting vs Ozempic for weight loss
The general idea of Ozempic is to stimulate GLP-1, which stands for glucagon-like peptide-1, a hormone produced by the intestine that has various effects on the body:
Increases insulin secretion
Decreases glucagon secretion
It signals to the brain that we are fed, reducing hunger and leading to a feeling of satiety
The problem is that if you don't learn good habits while taking it when you stop the weight comes back immediately, it's a very temporary solution
Many people don't continue using it because they get nauseous, vomiting, diarrhea, it's not that fun, it's difficult, you can do it for six months, but you can do it for years, let alone 20 years, that's not sustainable.
So changing habits and incorporating fasting, as we've said, is the best option.
Disclaimer: this content, including advice, provides generic information only. It in no way replaces a medical opinion.
Information based on the linked studies