Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 [00:00:00] I found a really interesting quote from 1962 that, one of the researchers said obesity is a disorder which, like venereal disease, is blamed upon the patient. And it really shouldn't because it's not a problem with individual willpower. Yeah. Very tough.
Speaker 2 [00:00:17] It's also an it's such an easy way out. Doctor Jason Fung, my whole family adores him. My uncles follow him quite almost to a tee. He is known globally as the doctor who invented intermittent fasting. He's a New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Obesity Code and the Diabetes Code. All right, so you know who's with us this morning to help us get moving? We have fitness expert Tracy Anderson, Tracy Anderson, Tracy Anderson. I'm so grateful to her. Doctor Fung, thank you so much for being here with me today virtually. And I just want to thank you for everything that you're doing, spending so much time contributing to really educating people and walking them through the things that you have found to be true. Body positivity is something that means a lot to me and people feeling okay wherever they're at. And one of the things that you said about this fight against health and obesity is that we all actually have a weight that is our weight where we are meant to be, which is unique to us, right where our body will tell us. How does one find that a lot.
Speaker 1 [00:01:36] Of the sort of unhealthy messaging, around obesity gets driven by this idea that, you know, weight gain is just sort of this lack of willpower or lack of character or something like that when it's actually not true. There's a lot of people sort of invested in that message. All of the scientific evidence, says that our body weights are actually quite tightly controlled. So clearly something has changed in our environment. And what is it that really raised this, how, this, this, this, you know, body set point, which is, which is the body weight that our bodies are comfortable at. I think it's important to understand that our body like our body weight. And, you know, if our body mass is relatively constant, that is muscle mass is relatively constant, then that the amount of body fat we carry is actually regulated quite tightly, by, you know, hormones. So if we're at a level that's higher than what we would like, then it's not simply a matter of, you know, taking a few less calories. It's about how do you adjust that down? And I use the analogy of a thermostat. So if you think about it, a lot of the the sort of blame game sort of around obesity, like, comes back to this sort of calories and calories of model where it's, believe that it's just willpower, right? It's simply a willpower issue if you, you know, exercise more or you had a bit more willpower than you can lose that way, it's it's not actually true. It's really all about physiology. The way I sort of use the analogy is like a thermostat in a room. So you have a room, you set the room temperature at whatever, you know, room temperature, and the thermostat will detect if it's too hot. It's going to turn on the air conditioning to cool it back down. If it's too cold, is going to turn on the heat. So you always maintain that normal body at room temperature. And that's what a thermostat does. Every system in our body does that. So whether it's our thyroid or our parathyroid or, you know, the lungs, the kidneys, whatever, every single system in our body is regulated, with a sort of thermostat. It's called a homeostatic mechanism. And body fat is no different, as people say. Stuff like, oh, you know, we're our bodies are geared to gain body fat. And, you know, now that food is easily available, we're going to gain weight. That's simply not true. In fact, it's very hard to get wild animals to gain weight. Why? Because they have a body fat thermostat. So if they have a lot of food, they simply won't eat it. Because if you're too fat, you can't catch animals, or you may get caught yourself so you won't survive. So it's vitally important that all animals, including humans, have this body fat within a certain percentage. So if that body fat goes high like we know it has, because we know that, you know, body mass has gone up over the last 50 years, then we have to say, what is it in our environment that has moved it up because it's not the individual's fault? I found a really interesting quote from, 1962 that, one of the researchers said obesity is a disorder which, like venereal disease, is blamed upon the patient. And it really shouldn't because it's not a problem with individual willpower. The thing is that if we have a situation where 6,070% of Americans are overweight and there are strict definitions of what is overweight, going back to the 60s, that the percentage of obesity in overweight has gone up quite a bit. So imagine you have a classroom of 100 people, 100 kids. If one fails, sure, that might be that child's fault. But what if 70 kids fail.
Speaker 2 [00:05:22] Right? Because you don't.
Speaker 1 [00:05:22] Shame somebody for having cancer. You don't shame somebody for having heart disease or whatever. But yeah, obesity you do shame them for and it's like, that's not fair.
Speaker 2 [00:05:31] And such an easy way out for people to just to bully someone else and say, what is your problem? Because I can't because it takes so much to like my whole mission. Is this like constant state of, you know, creating balance where there's imbalance in your body, in your life and all of these things.
Speaker 1 [00:05:46] The whole problem is that it's it's blaming the victim, right? It's essentially saying that, oh, you deserve it. We're blaming you like, yes, you are the. Victim of obesity and we're going to blame you for it, right? Which is highly unfair, right? It's like blaming rape victims. Oh, you deserved it. They're what look like what? They're super, super awful. Yeah. We do the same thing in obesity. They're the victims. And yeah, we blame them all the time. And it's really a the medical, sort of establishment, but particularly this sort of gym bro science sort of exercise. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but they tend to be very vocal about, oh, it's all calories in, calories out as a medical society. So as doctors, as dietitians and so on, we want to absolve ourselves of the blame. You can blame yourself and say we're not understanding this disease. That's why it's getting out of control. What is it that's making everybody gain weight? That's the whole teacher's fault, right? In the classroom of 100 kids, 70 are failing. You say it's obviously the teacher's fault. Teacher's not going to say that. Teacher is going to say it's the kid's fault. Every single one of those kids, it's their own fault. They chose what to eat, so they're.
Speaker 2 [00:07:00] Out of.
Speaker 1 [00:07:00] Control. But the medical establishment prefers to blame the victim because it takes the blame away from themselves, from their lack of understanding of what this disease is. What is it in our environment that has really moved our body fat thermostat, our body set way higher and higher and higher. And there's a number of things that that, that are potentially, a problem. And we need to understand it. You know, there was a huge change in our diet starting in 1977. That was the publication of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. That was the first time that the government told people what to eat. And the there's a huge amount of unintended consequences. Carbs, the pyramid. Yeah. And that the bottom was 7 to 11 servings of bread. Right. So we're all loving the bread of the day because that was healthy for you. And it turns out right after that obesity started to climb, which is a sort of a from a dietary standpoint, a sort of earth shattering sort of paradigm shift. Right before that, you ate what your mother told you to eat. After that, you ate what the government told you.
Speaker 2 [00:08:11] And that's where the government hijacked the parents and instilled fear in the parents. Like you're not a good parent unless you're working off of this pyramid. You could be malnutrition in your child unless you're working off of this pyramid. And then everybody but Wonder Bread.
Speaker 1 [00:08:25] Yeah. Wonder bread and margarine. Right. And the thing was that because there was this demonization of fat, what happened was that they highly promoted the creation of ultra processed foods. Right? So if you look back, it wasn't discouraged before that people would eat food like, you see it like it grows as broccoli. It is. Broccoli grows. Yes. After that, they want it to process the hell out of this stuff to get the fat out. But now you started to get all these highly processed foods. You started to get chemicals. Turns out they're very profitable too, because if you eat regular food, like from a farmer, you can only make a certain amount of money. But once you processed that, your your margins go way up. So they really set off this boom in ultra processed foods. And there's all these chemicals. But the way that our bodies handle, processed foods are very different than they, they, they handle like, natural foods. Natural foods have a natural balance that we've sort of evolved with. So one of the things, for example, is that, if you look at the glycemic index of foods, you see that natural foods, they don't spike your sugars like way high and spike your insulin way high, whereas things like crackers and Cheerios and stuff, they will because again, it's not natural. You take the wheat and then what you do is you, you know, take out all the fat and the because it goes rancid, you take out all the protein. Yeah. And then you take out all the, you know, you grind it into a very fine dust so that you can absorb it very quickly. Then you use a lot of vegetable oils, which again, people forget that vegetable oils are not natural, like you're trying to take, oil from canola, for example, like nobody eats canola, right? It's not NEC and you gotta get the.
Speaker 2 [00:10:13] Word vegetable on it. So people think black people.
Speaker 1 [00:10:17] Think it's great, but there is nothing natural. Nothing in the natural world looks like canola oil.
Speaker 2 [00:10:23] Nothing is part of fasting, part of that actual reset relationship with your body so that you actually become more in tune with your primal nature of how do I get my body to crave actual, real nutrients again? Does it restore harmony against this evil system that has been imposed on us now my whole lifetime?
Speaker 1 [00:10:46] I think it does. And what it does is it does a couple of good things. First of all, just understand the first thing is really just giving your body a break from eating. Right? So when you eat, your body is going to store calories because you have food. You're taking in more food that you can use at that moment, right? Your body has the ability to store some of that energy when you don't eat or when you're fasting, which is anytime you're not eating, then your body is not taking in. Energy is going to use energy, right? So your body is really in one of two states. It's either in the fed state or it's in the fasted state. And there's a balance between the two. What happened over the last sort of 20, 25 years is that people started saying things like, oh, you should eat all the time. You should constantly graze, you should eat ten small.
Speaker 2 [00:11:33] Meals, all meals a day, right?
Speaker 1 [00:11:35] As soon as you get up.
Speaker 2 [00:11:36] I remember my mom telling me once, like, my mom is like, I'm doing the bite diet. And I'm like, what's the bite? She's like, I just take little bites all day long of things. And I was like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 [00:11:46] If you go back to the 70s. So I grew up in the 70s and essentially you ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. There's no snacks in between. You wanted it after school snack. Your mom would say, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. You wanted an after dinner snack. Your mom would say, no, you should eat more at dinner. But the point being that you, after dinner was just a time that you did not eat right. So if, say you finished dinner at 6 p.m., you had breakfast at 8 a.m., you had a 14 hours of fasting every single day without even thinking about it. Right? And then if you're a bad boy and got sent to bed without dinner, as happened, very often back then, you're going 20 plus hours without eating and nobody died. Nothing bad happened. The point is that, you know, there was this idea that, yes, there's a balance between feeding and fasting. As long as you're not, malnourished or severely underweight, then you can go for a little bit of time because your body has the ability to store energy. Like that's what body fat is. It's for you to use when you are not eating. It's not there for looks. If you have any body fat, you have the ability to not eat for a little while. That's the whole point. You're using your body fat for what it was actually specifically created for. There's nothing unhealthy about it. Prior to the 1980s 1990s, people thought that fasting was actually a very inherently healthy process of just taking a break from eating right. You see it in the in the way people talk about it. It's a cleanse. It's a detox, you know, it's a purification. It's in the, you know, in every major religion. So people have been doing it in a healthy. But the connotation was always a healthy sense. Then in the 80s, 90s, in 2000, it became this super unhealthy thing, but based on no scientific evidence. People are crazy because it's like people are saying you should eat all the time in order to lose weight. And I'd be like, so how is that going to work exactly? So as you put food in your mouth, how are you going to lose weight?
Speaker 2 [00:13:45] But then there's people who are like, oh, but I can't eat low fat, low calorie foods. I can't just have lean proteins and vegetables because I need good fats to lose weight too. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 1 [00:13:59] There was a period of time where we thought that if you just didn't eat fat, you could cure heart disease. That was actually what they wrote in the 1983 and 1984. And this is at the highest levels of the American Medical Association. It turns out it was completely untrue. Somebody just made it up, thought it sounded good, and said, okay, let's run with it. But there's no evidence. So in the 80s and 90s, when I did medical school, we did the step one and step two diet, which was funny because it was if you had a heart attack, you ate a step one diet, which is less than 10% fat, which is very, very low. And if you had another heart attack, which they all did, did go to 7%, which is practically zero fat, it's super, super low. I mean, for reference, most people are around 20 or 30%, fat in their diets. And at the time people were like, oh, I wonder why we still have heart disease with these low fat diets. It's like it's because the fat didn't make any difference. So again, at the time, people were like, there's this so-called French paradox. I don't know if you remember that, but the French paradox was that French people were eating a ton of fat because they didn't listen to the Americans. They're like, I don't know, I'm going to eat the butter. I'm going to eat the cream. So they're eating these super high fat diets. And they had like a third of the heart disease that the Americans had who are eating all their white bread and jam. The US, with its dietary guidelines, was promoting this very high, high refined carb, high processed food diet. And it was sort of killing them, whereas the French were eating sort of natural high fat foods. They thought the whole low fat thing was like an abomination because natural foods have fat on them. Especially good tasting stuff like the French like to eat. They have a lot of fat in them that the the US was busy trying to take all the fat out and replacing it with chemicals and sugar. Turned out that was way unhealthier for you, right? Same with Margaret, right? The whole story of margarine is sort of tragic, right? It was this time when, people, scientists thought they could be. Smarter than Mother Nature, basically. Turns out the, margarine was full of trans fats. So instead of causing less heart disease, it was increasing heart disease where it killing people. There's an estimate that all that margin was killing like 100,000 people. Now it doesn't stand. It's like a mass murder, right? So it was the same as, like, breast milk, right? There's this whole move towards formula in the 70s. Yeah, cause my mom tells me this. She's like, if you were like, you only breastfed. If you're, like, poor and couldn't afford it because women felt so bad giving breast milk, it took a huge public education campaign, which most people don't remember, called breast is best. Yeah. Which was mind numbingly like obvious now. Yeah, but you had to convince people that breast milk was better than formula because we thought we were smart formula. Artificial stuff is better than natural stuff. Artificial butter's better than natural butter. And that was the whole processed food thing which basically has come around. And it doesn't.
Speaker 2 [00:16:56] The ass fasting you feel is the natural way of just going periods of time without eating.
Speaker 1 [00:17:02] It's a natural way. There's actually a lot of things that happen when you fast that are very good, both from a psychological standpoint and a physical standpoint, from physically. What you're doing is you're forcing your body to use its own body fat. That's very good. So your body stores calories in one of two forms, either sugar or fat. If you have type two diabetes and you have too much sugar, then fasting can actually reverse that entire disease. If you have body fat, excess body fat, then you can use it by fasting. And again, it's completely natural, completely free, completely accessible. You don't need any special food. You don't need to pay anybody. You don't need to do anything. You can do it yourself for free at any time.
Speaker 2 [00:17:42] How do you grapple with what is emotional like? How do you listen to your body enough to say, okay, I know you're hungry right now, but that's really your emotional state talking. Your body is really okay versus actually my body actually needs to eat. Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:17:57] So you have to understand that hunger is always hormonally mediated. People think it's a signal that you must eat, but it's actually not. So if you think about hunger, it's really driven by hormones. And you can affect those hormones by things like fasting, for example. But one of the things that we know is that if you measure when people are most hungry, at least hungry, just on average, this is a natural circadian rhythm. People are most hungry at 8 p.m. and least hungry at 8 a.m.. So that's just when you take people and ask them, how hungry are you?
Speaker 2 [00:18:29] Do you eat at 8 p.m.?
Speaker 1 [00:18:30] No, that's kind of late for me. Like I say, people are at least hungry in 8 a.m. and it's because, the hormones tell you not to be hungry. It's actually the period of time where you've pretty well gone the longest without eating in your entire day, and yet you are least hungry. So it's not just a matter of that. It's a matter of your expectations as well. So you see that there's little spikes of hunger three times a day breakfast, lunch and dinner. Why? Because you've trained your body to do that. So one of the things that fasting does is it creates order in your day. You simply say, well, you have three meals, right? And don't eat after dinner and don't eat before breakfast. That period of time is your fasting time, and on average it's about 12 to 14 hours. If you want to lose weight, though, you can simply extend that to about 16 hours. And a lot of people do that. Some people do sort of one meal a day. Some people do multiple day fast as you as you say. I think that, you know, most people should have some period of fasting, but whether you want to do, you know, shorter periods more frequently or, you know, longer periods less frequently, this sort of up to you.
Speaker 2 [00:19:36] Sometimes I will go but fast, like through the morning, through my workout, and I won't even eat until noon. Right? And then other days I'm like, I need before I really try and and listen to myself. But somebody who doesn't have weight to lose, they don't have that extra fat on their body to turn to. If their body as their body is going through this fasting, do you still find fasting beneficial for people who are also not seeking to lose weight?
Speaker 1 [00:20:07] Yeah, there's a lot of actual benefits to fasting. I mean, first of all, fasting is not is actually something you're supposed to do every single day, right? There's a period of the day you should feed and period a day you should fast. And that's where you get the word breakfast, right? Break your fast. Where people where a lot of people got into trouble is this whole breakfast is the most important meal of the day thing, where if you didn't eat breakfast, you're going to have a heart attack tomorrow. So it turns out almost all those studies were where some were paid for by the breakfast companies. It doesn't make any sense that you must eat as soon as you get up. The minute you get out of bed, you have to start stuffing a muffin in your mouth, and that's healthier for you. Like, how is that healthy? Like, in what way is that healthy? But yeah, it's you know, that message gets propagated as opposed to, well, if you're not healthy. We have breakfast. You don't have to eat if you don't want to. Your body will figure it out. Same thing with, like. So if you or, you know, eat a big meal, say you have a wedding, right? And you have a big meal, you have a midnight buffet and the homework you. And then the next morning you're probably not hungry at all. But then somebody tells you breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You must eat, right? So there you would have gone, you know, probably right through lunch or maybe right through dinner because you you ate, like, way too much the night before. Your body's basically saying you don't need to eat. You're like, eat like double that night before, so just leave it a bit. Right? But instead we get this you can't skip a meal, you can't skip breakfast. And it's like crazy because it's like, of course you can restore it in a way. Now you can use it. What's the difference? And so then you eat when you really shouldn't have eaten, you should have listened to your body. And that's how you gain weight, because at the time that you're should have been burning off those calories from the night before, you know, the wedding, the all those desserts and stuff, you're putting more calories into your body.
Speaker 2 [00:21:57] Where can people go to learn more about your research, what you found, so they can improve their their health through your findings?
Speaker 1 [00:22:05] Yeah. So you can go on to YouTube and just look under my name. I have lots of videos and they're all free and everything. I publish a blog as well. It's on Medium.com, but usually you can find a link. It's it's a paid site, but I always publisher a link on, like, Twitter. So if you follow me on Twitter, you'll be able to get that link so you can get it. And you can you can also find my books anywhere. The obesity code, which talks a lot about sort of the science of weight loss and weight gain, because I think people don't talk about it as much because they assume it's all just about calories, calories, calories. But it's not really. It's about what's driving those calories, really. What's causing the hunger? What's causing you to emotional eating. You're upset. You're depressed. Therefore you eat. Okay. Got it. So then somebody comes in and says, well, it's just about calories in, calories out. I was like, no, you can't fix that until you fix the depression, until you fix the loneliness, until you fix that, you can't fix the calories, right? It's right. It's crazy that people just it's about the calories. It's like they haven't looked deep, right?
Speaker 2 [00:23:10] No. People come to me and they're like, oh well, should I do more cardio to lose weight? Yes, exercise for many, many reasons, but but but not just to lose weight because that's arguably if you haven't fixed the whole picture, you could gain more weight by it, you know, because it makes you more hungry. I really love, all of the hard work that you're doing to really change the whole system. Free people from the food industry, the government, the pharmaceutical industry to, I think that it's very important to listen to yourself and know yourself and also bet on the fact that you know your own nature better than these things, right?
Speaker 1 [00:23:45] Absolutely. And, you know, getting back to, like, basics, eating natural foods, giving yourself a period of time to eat and a period of time to fast. Like these are like pretty simple things, but there's no money in it. So you don't hear anybody like talking about it because they say, oh, well, you should eat 60g of this and 30g of that. Hey, I've made it into a shake for you that you can buy for ten bucks, right? And it's like, okay, but that's all highly processed foods that don't look anything like they do in nature and doesn't teach you anything about why you are eating what you should be eating. It's completely, the wrong message. The message should be sort of get back to these simple things, right? Yeah, time to eat and a time to naughty.
Speaker 2 [00:24:32] Time to not eat and eat whole foods. So last question what is your diet like? I certainly know you don't eat processed foods.
Speaker 1 [00:24:39] No, sometimes I do. It's almost impossible to avoid them. Sometimes in a in a regular day you just try to, you know, switch so that you eat less processed foods. Right? The idea is to, you know, not be too strict on the foods, because you can also use the fasting as a lever to I don't want to be that guy who never eats cake. And you're at the wedding and they're like, have a piece of cake. You're like, no, I can't. It's like, yeah, sure, I'll have a piece of cake with you. I'm going to celebrate with you. But maybe I do a bit more fancy. Like maybe I go on vacation and I have all these foods that are. I clearly I know that are not so good for me. And then you go and you do a little bit more fasting later on to make it up, because that's what people have always thought. That's the natural way of things. No. If you look back at in history, it's like people get together for birthdays, for, celebrations and they, they eat. Right. So you don't always want to be the guy who won't eat everything, but you can increase your fasting. So, for example, if I go on vacation, I might do more fasting before or after to make up for it. And that's okay, because in the end it'll all balance out. So my diet is quite variable. I mean, I tend not to eat. I did it originally because it was easier for me. You know, I was in medical school. I was tired all the time, and I just wanted to sleep, so I just slept until I had to go, which left me no time for breakfast. And, you know, at the time, it was fine until, you know, later on, people kept saying, you have to eat. You have? Yeah. I'm like, why? So I tend to have like a 16 eight sort of diet naturally. And then sometimes especially after vacations or, you know, holidays or whatever, I'll do a longer fasts, maybe 3 to 5 days.
Speaker 2 [00:26:23] A full three day fast where you're only having water.
Speaker 1 [00:26:26] Yeah, tea and coffee I have, but nothing substantial. And I find it quite, quite nice.
Speaker 2 [00:26:32] Do you take supplements during that? A 3 or 5 day fast or. No. Your body's okay. It's got it.
Speaker 1 [00:26:37] It's got it. As long as you're eating good foods. And there's good data. And I did a whole, YouTube video on it and stuff, but.
Speaker 2 [00:26:44] Oh, great. We'll watch that. You're very generous with your educating everyone because. And that's what it's going to take. We need heroic educators like you who are willing to stop this tragic decline of our nature and our health. So thank you so much. I appreciate you talking with me today, and I appreciate everything that you do. It's nice to meet you virtually.
Speaker 1 [00:27:05] Thank you so much, Tracy. It's great being here.
