Ep. 2 - Fasting & New Year's Resolutions | Dr. Jason Fung, The Obesity Code, Insulin Resistance, and Reversing Diabetes | Dry Fasting vs. Water Fasting, 16:8 Intermittent Fasting Eating Window, OMAD, Metabolic Damage | Fasting & Headaches

diet fat loss method simplify Jan 18, 2020

Method | Simplify | Start (Go!)

In this episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy review the method of how to integrate fasting into your day-to-day life. We discuss how to simplify the process and work on the formula that works for your individual situation. Ready, Set, GO!

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Hello, I'm Dr. Scott Watier. And I'm Tommy Welling. And you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast.

This podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health. Achieve ultimate wellness and live the life you truly deserve.

Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss and health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.

We started fasting for life because of how fasting has transformed our lives and we hope to share the tools that we have learned along the way.

Everybody, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name's Dr. Scott and I'm here with my friend and colleague Tommy Wellin. How you doing, sir?

Hey, I'm doing great, Scott. How are you? Awesome, man.

Wims excited to be on episode two. Can you believe it? I can't believe it. It's crazy. It's going fast. So hopefully you guys get some good value and some nuggets out of our last episode. Really? We want to just kind of continue the conversation from there. And's first, I want to clarify a couple of things that I said during the telling of my story of how I ended up losing 40 plus pounds in the last six months of the year and being able to maintain it and keep it off and regain my health. I meant I mentioned something about, you know, back in the day when I was a power lifter. And when I stopped exercising, you know, all the muscle mass that I put on turned to excess weight. That's really not how it happened. It's not like I just stopped exercising. Really, what happened was I stopped power lifting and completely changed my diet from the six chicken breasts plus, you know, twelve hard boiled eggs and all that stuff every single day. You know, my body just never really recovered from carrying all that excess weight. So, yes, I was still exercising. I just didn't turn into a couch potato. So I don't want people to get a misconception about that. But Tom, what was your total for 2019?

Yeah. Twenty nineteen. I was right at forty one pounds. So that was that that was basically from the beginning of the year to the end of the year and I was hoping to hit 50 in December but didn't end up happening.

But continuing that through through January. So that's OK. Part of what you guys will hear is a lot about. Real life and how to integrate this. We're taught. We're gonna talk life. And and what comes up and how to deal with that.

And the best thing about fasting is just how flexible it is, how it is so different from slight calorie restrictions, because if you mess up or you have some sort of unexpected event, something comes up. You just get right back on. No worries, no guilt, no anything like that. You didn't just destroy two or three weeks of progress of some small calorie deficits. Just jump right back on and get back to it was awesome.

And the simplification of this is really what made it so easy for me to just make the decision.

That day you told me you're like you had to stop eating. I was like, well, yeah, I guess that really simplifies my day. I don't have to, you know, think about breakfast tomorrow morning. You have to feed the kids, get them off to school. That's you know, don't worry about packing a bag if I'm going to be on the road all day. So Anglos need to look like. You don't grow. Don't even get me started. That's a whole nother conversation for another day. We talked about mindset and motivation. Laughs at the end of last episode. Really hope you guys, you know, put some thinking time towards that and found out, you know, we're we're three weeks into January. And tell me, have you done New Year's resolutions before? Yes. Yes, I have. And and were you as unsuccessful as me and, you know, 98 percent of the population?

Yeah. A lot of goals had to be repeated the next year or, you know, potentially just tossed out in general and it usually happened pretty early on in the year.

Yeah. And that research, you know, it depends on who you what articles you read and where you look. But a lot of studies that have been done say anywhere between the week of the 13th to the 17th over seventy five percent. And then by the beginning of February, it's over 90 percent. By beginning the March, it's almost 100 percent. So 98, 97 or 98 percent of people have given up. Yeah. You know, and then you just start the cycle over. So you're talking about that right off the bat today, you know, resonated with me. And, you know, we've been doing this and I know a lot about it. So it's it's crazy. Those little tidbits just keep keep coming up.

You know, and that's kind of where this kind of started for me last year. I was thinking about those things in January and then February and then having some frustrating time and then and finding fasting and then working to get it into my own life and. It was mind boggling because it was just so Frain from everything that I've done in the past. And so it it's really almost hard to describe. You just kind of have to jump in.

You know, I forget about that. I had started being really strict in January again and then come May. I was doing everything right and the scale started ticking up again. So I restricted more. And guess what? It stopped working. So just crazy to think back. It seemed so long ago. It's amazing. One person that I had been helping through this, as I know you've been helping the people on the side, too, is this woman that I've been coaching. She started in September and she just when she saw me in the clinic and she was like, where where are you? She's like, what are you doing? You look great. You know that, like, you know, you see someone and you've had this set, you've told me stories. This to you is like when you see someone that like like what happened?

You know, I had tilts. Yeah, yeah. They do the double-take. They stare. They just stare for a second because they're not sure what to say. Right. They don't really want to offend you. Right. Be like but you're missing. Part of you is missing. Yeah. Did you have a surgery? Are you ill? What did you do? So this woman just saw me and then I told her about the obesity code.

But Dr. Fong and you know how the book has forty five pages of notes and footnotes and research into and how I started diving into it. And she knew me and my family. And she's like, you know what? I'm just gonna start doing this. So I told her to, you know, just start start fasting. And I said, just eat, eat one meal a day, which is, you know, we'll talk about in a minute. The acronym for that is OMAP. But yeah, just just eat one meal a day. So she started doing it and now she's over 100, Farson. So she and she does, you know, one meal a day most days. Last time I checked, who is up over forty five pounds lost while she was off all of her medications. And last time she went to her gastroenterologist, they removed the diagnosis of diabetic from her chart.

Well. That's almost unheard of. In standard medical protocols, yes, because her doctor looked at her and said, what are you doing? And she told him and he was like, well, if it's working, just keep doing it. That was the response. So, yeah, you know, the. It's just it's just amazing. So. Well, one of the things you know, one of the things that we joke around about a lot is, you know, one of the first rules of fasting for life is I don't talk about fasting, because what do you typically hear, Tommy, when you when you tell people that you don't usually interact with or, you know, don't really know you well when you tell them what you're doing?

Well, you know, it's kind of like the doctor that you've described where they're not really sure what to say a little bit like. He said, well, if it's working, I guess keep doing it. But when you tell somebody, you know, just an acquaintance or a friend or family and they're not familiar with it, they usually just say, well, what do you mean you're starving yourself? You're not eating. You have to eat. And you on and on and on goes the precautionary tales.

Well, you had a really interesting way of framing it because nobody wants to be, you know, Aunt Sally or Cousin Ray or, you know, the person at the holiday party. That's like. I'm vegan now. And, you know, I read this book on Eat Right for your blood type. And, you know, I decided that vegan was right for me or, you know, I'm Kito now. So, you know, I'm doing this and I've lost a bunch of weight. And, you know, I carry around packets of cheese in my pocket like, you're right not to be that person. That's you. The whole life story, it's more of like, hey, yes, I've been doing this. You know, I'm you know, I'm getting my health back. Yeah, I have lost some weight. Thanks for noticing. But you have a really cool way of framing it. And every time you say to me, I'm like, I gotta remember that.

Well, you know, I think the eating window, I think when you frame it as well, I'm just I'm just eating during a shorter window, you know, because people get worried when they think you're not eating anything. But that's that's not how this goes. Of course, you can eat even if you're doing a longer fast, you're going to eat eventually. But when you describe it as an eating window, I only eat during this hour of the day or these few hours of the day or I eat one meal a day. I do that. Oh, mad that that makes sense that people have a lot less concern about it. They're they're more open to hearing, you know, the details. And they're they're a little bit more excited. But but overall, I just don't like having to justify what I'm doing. You know, you do that throughout the day. It starts to wear on you a little bit, especially when you're new to something like this. So if you're just getting started, we recommend follow the first rule of fasting for life. Don't talk about fasting, at least not to too many people all at the same time.

Use us as your accountability. If you don't have anybody you know, find somebody in your close inner circle that, you know, maybe having some of the same issues that you're having in terms of your health and your weight. And, you know, maybe something as you sifters, you know, long term diabetes. But find someone that you know is willing to do it with you and keep it, you know, kind of keep it keep it amongst yourselves. Obviously, if you're gonna do anything in the realm of, you know, diabetes medications, make sure you talk to your health care provider and make sure you go in with a clear picture of what you want to achieve, which has long term health rather than just managing symptoms with meds. So the second rule of fasting, too, is don't talk about fasting. We'll just throw that out there. I always forget the number. It's three hundred and something days to kind of talk about the the thought process of why you're starving yourself. Right. You got to eat like we're programmed to think that way. I can never remember how many days it was the longest recorded fast. Like three hundred eighty something. Three. Three hundred and eighty. That's right. So it's almost 400 days. Three hundred eighty two days.

I just Googled it real quick. And this person lost two hundred and seventy plus pounds. He took a multivitamin. You drank water and took electrolytes during that entire period. It was doctor monitored. He wasn't out somewhere in a shack in the middle of the woods doing an item on his own. He was obviously obese, had a bunch of health issues, but he was able to do 300 any day. So he can do that than any one of us that live in today's world here in the United States can handle, you know, a few days at a time, which is, you know, an extended fast which to talk about in just a minute. So that should dispel the fear that you have to eat. Right. So when we look at our definition of fasting, there's something called a dry fast. And then our definition dry fast to me is something I won't ever do. I just. And outside of religious purposes, if that is something that you do, then please continue to do it. But for me personally, I am always going to do water fasts. And then if you want to kind of expand on what we do throughout the day for those, you know, those longer fasts, then we can figure out where.

Yeah, well, we talk fasting. We are always doing a fast. That includes water. It's going to include tea, coffee. You know, that's that's going to be pretty much it. If you have a little bit of of, you know, maybe a milk or something else like that that you have to add to your coffee or tea. I'm not going to worry about it too much. I try to go easy on that stuff. Right. As best black Blatty is best.

I remember when you first told me, I guess if you put we use this organic coconut milk creamer, it's like twenty five calories a tablespoon. I put like two tablespoons of my coffee. Like you just keep it if that's what you're used to. And I'm like. Wait, what? I don't understand what you mean. I can just keep it. The time. Oh, OK. You know. Yeah. Yeah. It's outside of your normal standard, like diet protocols. Like you have to be super strict and follow it.

You know, Roswarski looked at me like, shouldn't I be torturing myself? Yeah. Yeah. Should this be his order? Yeah.

Yeah. So lots of black coffee for me in the beginning. Some people subscribe to that. Some people don't. There's a lot of different ways too fast. You know, everybody's gonna have their own little take on it. This is something that's worked really well for us. Some of the things you may hear with fasting because you want to give you some some actionable stuff to take out of this episode in and put into your day to day almost immediately like we did once we figured out that this was something that was going to work for us, terms like intermittent fasting. We talked about water fasting, which is where you drink just water and then extended fasts. There's alternate day fasts. There's one meal a day, which is, oh, man, I alluded to that, a reference that earlier, which were you eat one meal a day and you just pick your favorite meal. And then every day, you know, when you're going to eat. So, Simon, can you give us some example? What did you do? What is your typical intermittent fast look like? Or are you more on the extended fast?

Yeah. I mean, since I still have some weight loss goals for myself, I really like the 36 to 48 hour window. The works well, I can usually do it a couple of times in a week. Doesn't mess up things like date night or like a weekend get together or something else like that. I just kind of rotate around around those days as necessary. So that makes it pretty easy. And then, you know, you have you have other things you can do. Windows to our windows for our windows just depends on. You know what your goals are. And you know, it's kind of trial and error. You want some of that. And seeing what what fits and what works well for you.

Yeah, the extended community thing over 24 hours, in my opinion, alternate day means you meet every other day. So dinner on Monday night and then not dinner again or lunch again until that following Wednesday. That's alternate day. Intermittent is typically more common. People are more familiar with this where you pick an eating window like you mentioned, where you fast from 8:00 p.m. until noon the following day and then you eat from noon to 8:00. A lot of people that are big into the workout world will do this also because they're still worried about, you know, recovery in protein muscle building. And that'll be a whole nother up so that we can talk about this research on both sides of that story. But intermittent fasting is you pick your window. So if you want to be more aggressive with your weight loss, take a smaller window, maybe do a one meal a day between six and eight at night. Have dinner with the family. Go to bed. Wake up. Have coffee. Don't eat again until that next dinner or that next window, which would be two hours if you want to start, you know, a little less aggressive if you don't have as much weight to lose or worried about long term health or disease process or those types of things, you can pick just as a standard intermittent fasting, which is, you know, that 16 hours of fasting in that eight hours of eating. And this does not mean that you can eat whatever you want during that window. Absolutely. Calories still matter. So we want to create a simplified way to get you into a caloric deficit. The best effect on your insulin resistance over time. So, you know, we want to go too deep into physiology. But when we talk about insulin and insulin resistance, people kind of get confused about insulin sensitivity versus insulin resistance.

Yeah. I mean, these are things that are building up over time. They're accumulative. They are they are working against you and your weight loss efforts and your overall health. And they are getting worse over time. And this is why everyone seems to have a harder time getting those pounds off like those holiday pounds over the years, like, oh, last year was a little bit easier. And the year before that was a little easier yet. Well, it's going to continue to go that way generally, because insulin resistance keeps going up year after year.

Right. There's an analogy of a merry go round. And once you start spinning it, you need to you need you know, you need to stop and get off of that. And we'll get into more of the details about insulin resistance and kind of the signs and symptoms of it. But a lot of the initial concerns with fasting people like, well, you know, I get headaches. My question to that is always, well, have you ever been hung over? And they say, yes. I said, well, you had headaches. I said, yes. And I said, did it stop you from doing it the next time? And they say, no. And I said, OK. You survived for dehydration or flying on airplanes or, you know, more physiological things like changes in blood pressure, stress. Typically, it's not the severe hypoglycemia or the bottoming out of your blood sugar that's causing those headaches. A lot of the foods that we eat, you know, certain things that have M.S. genome can cause headaches. There's a lot of things that trigger headaches. So when you start to remove those things from your day to day life, your body's kind of going like, well, what the heck? So headaches are OK. And if you, you know, get severe, debilitating migraines, that's a different story. But don't push the eating window. If you can just do 18 hours to 18 hours, you're going to see the changes. The scale is going to change. Your energy is going to increase less brain fog. You know, you're just going to feel better and see the results regardless or really, you know, this is more in the method category of trying to figure things out when it comes to fasting. So, you know, your mindset and your motivation, you know, where are you at, how ready you to do this? You know, what is your why behind it? But then in the method, like you had mentioned, you've got to kind of really play with a little bit and figure out what works for you.

Yeah, you do. And I think it's basically akin to the like when you when you start going to the gym and you go in there, workout hard, get really sore, well, go back. And the next time that you're a little less or than the last time and a little less the next time. So the body reacts the same way when you have those headaches, especially when they're there, they're basically involved with the the insulin and the diarists, you know, getting rid of some of that excess water as your insulin levels start to come down. But we'll talk about more of that another time.

So, Tom, you just dropped the word. Diary Sister Diaries. This means the water leaving your body. It is a normal process. The more water you drink in the beginning, you will feel that water leaving. Trust me, you will not live in the bathroom after doing this a day or two. It does go away. It does get better. I drink a gallon of water a day and I have plenty of time to still continue to live my life.

But yeah. But but that's why that's why I drive fast.

This is just we're not we're not fans of that. You know that. Right? People will do that for religious purposes. But, you know, outside of that, I think it's generally doing more harm than good if you're doing that for the long haul. So stay well hydrated. Drink lots of water, lots of fluids, coffee, tea, water.

So it's a quick funny story today. I don't know if you've heard this. I haven't. I don't think I've told you this yet. I just told my wife when she got home. Pick my parents up at the airport today. And then after this, we'll give you your action step. Tommy, if you want to wrap it up with the kind of an outline of what a plan for the next week would look like, you're really good at outlining that in explaining it. That's how you got me started on this process. I was just kind of planning out my week for me. So we'll wrap it up with that. But I went to the airport. It's picking my parents are coming in town to visit. And, you know, they get up super early to fly down here. And then I pick them up and, you know, you get you get to the airport and it's like rush, rush, rush hour. Buddy gets in the car and on the way home I go, you have you guys in and they're like, no, but we are hungry. You know, we have breakfast when we got to the airport. I was like at 4:30 in the morning. So I've been fasting since last night. Typical process, drinking my coffee, about 90 ounces of water already. And. You know, the airport's an hour, hour and half hour, hour and a half back, so we get back to the house and, you know, we've got some we, you know, pretty clean. My wife eats really clean. We clean as a whole. So we have know gluten free organic federalist breads and we have, you know, nitrate free meats.

And we make a lot of our our our our our food and our home. We do raw cheeses, you know, organic when we can. Based on, you know, all of that kind of, you know, that conversation about that stuff. So we had all this food. We went shopping and ate all this food. And I said, Mom, dad, you must be hungry. So I took out all the stuff from the fridge and they started making sandwiches. And my dad's old school. So they're making sandwiches and I'm watching put on the the replacement male, the big nose, and he loves it because he comes here often enough to eat it. And we're just talking and, you know, and my mom, which to me, she just looks up nonchalant. She's got tomato. And she goes, oh, you said you doing that that fasting thing today. And I was like, yes, mom. She's like, oh, my God. You know, I've lost 40 plus pounds and I'm gonna eat dinner with you guys tonight. Second. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So my dad keeps doing this thing and he says to me goes, yeah, you look great. And I was like, well, thank you, because last time they saw me was before Father's Day. It was when I started fasting. So, you know, I was 40 plus pounds heavier. And my dad goes, man, you look great, but. You know, me, on the other hand, I got my winter weight and I'm sorry, winter weight.

You've ever heard that journal Scary. It's been a while. Right.

So New England Northeast upbringing, winter way. So apparently this is something that happens during the winter. And I looked at him, I said, so when does the winter weight go away? And he goes.

Oh, like he kind of just like stopped in his tracks. He's like, when I start doing more, I was like, well, when do you start doing more? He's like, well, you know, when the weather gets nice, I was like, Man, that's crazy. So the weather man controls your weight gain and weight loss. And it was just like this moment of like, dang it. He got me because it's not winter weight. It's it's weight that stays with you for the rest of the year. And then every years you get a little bit older. The statistics show that that four to six, sometimes eight to 10 pounds you put on in the holidays, you never lose it. So for a sixth of it reside with you from the year previous to the following year or so. When he's here this week, you will be getting the breakdown, the fast start guy I'm on to. He doesn't want to do it on his phone, but I'm going to put him on the podcast so he can actually hear me telling the story about Harry. So it should be good. So just kind of a different perspective change there. So if you want to cool kind of give us a plan on what everybody should be doing for this week. Yeah. I want to hear what happens with your dad. How that how that goes while he's in town. One 100 percent. OK. I'll probably text me about it.

All right. So. So for next week, I want you guys to take a look and let's put some some method to the madness here. You know, take a look at your your week next week. Decide which meals are most important to you. If there's some particular occasions that come up next week or you decide. OK. Well, it's lunch every day or lunch is my my favorite meal the day or is it dinner with the family or. I usually don't think of breakfast as the best meal of the day. But everybody's arrangements are kind of different. But choose your favorite meal. Any special occasions and then choose an eating window, you know? Are you.

Are you OK with with a one hour or two hour or four hour window and then make a plan for next week and then stick to it.

I love how simple that just sounded. I mean, it's it's perfectly simple. So keep your calendar, plug in your meals and stop thinking.

Yeah, a lot of water. Yeah. Drink a lot of water. You have a plan. Go for it. That's it, man. That's awesome. All right, cool. And tell us how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Facebook pages rounding out. So we're getting that together, updating all the information, you know, putting more communication, opportunity for communication, messaging. We're just putting up posts. The challenge is still coming. We're rounding out the details on that. Like go to our Web site, deforesting for life.com. Get faster guides. Sign up to our newsletter to keep you in the loop on what we're doing and where we're taking this thing. And I'm just really blessed to have everybody on this journey with us. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be awesome. Love it. Great work. And we'll talk soon.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering where do I start? Head on over to be fasting for Life.com and sign up for our newsletter where you'll receive fasting tips and strategies to maximize results and fit fasting to your day to day life.

While you're there, download your free fast start guy to get started today. Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to leave us a five star view and we'll be back next week with another episode of Fasting for.

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