Ep. 32 - Why carbs make you tired, Brain Fog, Low Energy | Keto Mojo Tracking Ketosis, Insulin, Sugar, Fat, Thanksgiving & Obesity | Endocrinology, Glucagon, Water Retention | Lose Fat with your Free Intermittent Fasting Plan

In this episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy discuss a study that they feel is relatable to many people. How eating carbohydrates directly affects how you feel post-meal within 2-3 hours. They also discuss the physiology of what takes place and how it relates to the feeling of brain fog, decreased energy, and sluggishness. By making better food choices and using a simple rule with carbohydrates, we can boost the effectiveness of the fasting window all the while allowing your body to continue to burn fat for weight loss. Ideal meal hack coming right up! Listen in and enjoy!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32666008

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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, and 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 on 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.

Everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Watier. I'm here, as always, with my great friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good evening to you, sir. Hey, how are you, Scott? Doing fantastic. I'm hungry. I know that's you. You've been fasting. You're on day five.

Your your energy, your vibrance is coming through the screen. It's I'm excited. Do this podcast and I'm with you because I have a feeling that you're going to carry it from a stimulatory brain standpoint. With the research that we have tonight, we're going to get a little nerdy, but we're going to always land the plane with some really cool insights and an action step for you guys to continue your fasting journey and continue regaining control. So, yeah, I'm excited to say the least. I think you could probably tell that by my rambling open and the tone and volume in my voice.

Yeah, I know you gave me a big setup there. No pressure. And you just you just crushed that intro right there. I just love that energy. I guess it's, you know, it's contagious right now.

Yep. Yep. So, yeah, no pressure. So let's let's dive right into it. You're your five day fast go and good. Going to seven. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. It's going great. Getting into day three of transition into full ketosis. I'm a measure my ketones this time and that's been, that's been really good, really interesting with the mojo. I'm enjoying that process and that's when I saw the full kind of push into two point six was my high that day. And before that point I was, I felt drained for about I had about six hours there that were were pretty rough, maybe eight even. And then and then after that, it's just like the floodgates open and, you know, you just kind of feel invincible after that.

I love that erasable feeling. Yeah. I'm still in the midst of the beginning of the eight week challenge. So tracking my food and tracking my numbers and got my DEXA scan done. So you're sounds a lot more fun tracking your ketones, which is a first, which I really am, which I really think is cool. But yeah, we're going to some cool data to go back and look at. Coming up, some new programs, metabolic program, diabetes reversal, doing continuing the coaching. So just having a lot of fun with that. People are getting results. So I got to practice what you preach to, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. Got to be ready.

Yep. Yep. So, all right. So I'm going to I'm going to read the topic for tonight and have you start the unpacking process. This is out of the Journal of Technology in twenty twenty. So this is a more recent study and it's part of a larger ancillary study within the Framingham State Food Study. So it's the effects of dietary carbohydrate content on circulating metabolic fuel availability in the postprandial state. Tommy.

Wow, that was a mouthful. So what that means is carbohydrate levels, how they affect the actual circulating fuel, so sugar, fat amino acids in the blood and how available they are in the postprandial state, that's that's the state after eating, which is always a relative term. So it's usually measured in early intermediate, late postprandial going from anywhere from 30 minutes to up to five or six hours after ingestion of a of a meal.

So the way this is, the way that title applies to the normal human like myself would be d ever feel like poop after you eat where you just hit a wall, you get tired. You've had lunch hour, hour and a half later, the head starts to Bob. You got the brain fog. Like you just feel like you want to lay down and take a nap, right.

Right. Yeah. The body's busy. You ate, you ate a lot and you probably ate a lot of carbohydrates.

Yeah, I don't typically feel this after a big bowl of salad or some, you know, or. Yeah. Just a piece of steak or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you know, eight ounces of chicken breast and some broccoli. I typically I don't feel very weighed down after that. So it was interesting to see the, you know, the postprandial say you said one hundred and eighty to three hundred minutes, which is the late state and then the early state which is that 30 minute to one hundred and eighty minute mark. And we're going to talk about insulin, which is the main factor here, where you get that insulin spike and then what your body does in terms of trying to get rid of the sugar and the fat that's in your bloodstream. Right. So the insulin and then what the glucagon does to clear out the liver. And it actually is opposite what my mind would think it would be, even knowing that insulin is the main contributor to this issue. Like, I still would have thought that there'd be more energy later because of the amount.

Yeah, yeah. Because you're you're bringing in so many carbohydrates, especially in the in the higher carbohydrate group. And, you know, intuitively we kind of think, OK, like, you know, if I just have a little bit of sugar or if I have this, you know, this this little food input that's going to bring my my energy levels up. But what we what we really know is that usually you have a short term spike in that energy and you kind of feel that jolt like if you've ever had a soda or like a sugary coffee or coffee is a little bit cheating because you've got the caffeine as well. But soda or maybe a piece of candy or like a small meal, especially like something a carbohydrate rich, and then you have that jolt of energy, but it comes crashing down a lot more dramatically than than than if you had eaten a piece of fruit or a more balanced meal. Right.

Yeah. The interesting thing for me was the people in the study. So this is something that we need to be clear about, too, from my own. Cognition, my own understanding of it is we're talking about people that have overweighed in this study, people that are overweight or obese. So BMI is over 30, right? Twenty five. Excuse me, overweight. Twenty five. Obese is 30. And then morbidly obese or super obese, whatever they call it, is over thirty five. So I feel like that keeps changing. Maybe it's just me. Yeah, right. And I could have ended that. That was a different category before. So when we're looking at these people, we're looking at people that have some insulin resistance. They're already so these people have, they have the extra, you know, probably some some cholesterol issues, some pretty fatty acid issues, some comorbidities with being overweight and obese, which is the heart, the diabetes, the cholesterol, all those different types of things. So we're really looking at the people that need to lose the weight the most. So when we're talking about more carbohydrates. It's crazy that you get this initial like spike, but then the body like goes into, like, crazy ninja storage mode, right?

Yeah. And it it's it's trying to make sure that we don't have too much fuel, too much sugar, too much fat floating around in the bloodstream because that can wreak havoc on everything. So so the body goes into this, clear it out. We got to get rid of it kind of mode.

Yeah. So it's almost so rather than you know you have all this extra excess energy, your body goes, well, we got to store it.

Right, yeah, so it's like, God, you well, you mentioned the glucagon before, that's that's doing the exact opposite of insulin. And so we know insulin is our is our fat storage. That's our energy storage. That is the hormone that's that's causing the issues that we're talking about. Well, glucagon is the opposite of that. That's the one that actually pushes that storage out, that allows the fat to be released, pushes sugar out and and allows us to clear out those energy stores. And so that's why we're looking at the difference in the ratio between those in the study.

So glucagon acts on the liver causes the glycogen to be released into the bloodstream. And in these in this study, the insulin Googong ratio was seven times higher in the high versus low carbohydrate diet. And what happened was in that in that postprandial window, the available energy, the.

The amount of energy that you had to use floating around in the bloodstream was like gone. So your body literally took this giant influx, right, and was like, OK, I'm just going to go like store this away with lock and key.

So stores fat, put the fat away, store it, fuel the the you know, don't release glycogen from the liver, shuttle the glucose into the muscle. Skeletal muscle cells. Right. Causes the kidneys to retain water like all of these things increase blood pressure. All of these things can happen. I don't know about you, but you know, the you know, we had we had a night recently where we had Mexican food, so rice and tortillas and all this kind of stuff, a couple of IPAs and like I laid down and I could literally, like, feel my heartbeat. Like it was like I'm like, am I my OK. Like, well, yeah, my blood pressure was elevated. So it was this crazy thing. And then there's the crash. Right. So, yeah, it's like Thanksgiving, a really interesting study that really just started my mind, like, OK, what's the application of this in real life. Well.

Making better food choices, right, especially if you're in the overweight or obese category with that body mass index over twenty five or thirty, but if you've got undiagnosed diabetes or metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance, we just can't seem to lose the weight. You really have to start making better food choices in terms of reducing those carbohydrates in those meals, especially if you're fasting because your body's going to go like like you said earlier, come into super store mode. So you're just going to pack all this storage away and be like, well, just kind of under the effects of of all the hard work and all those hours that you pushed your your eating window.

Yeah, you did. You can you can easily undo a nice 18, 24 hour fast, you know, with with overconsumption, with with too many carbohydrates. And you can feel bad too, because at that point you would have cleared nicely through a lot of your glycogen, most of it at that point. But you can easily replenish that with just an overly indulgent, high carbohydrate meal. And you're going to pay for it, too, and you're you're going to feel it. This is the whole reason why tryptophan at Thanksgiving, that that's that's not really the reason why you just feel terrible. It's because of all the insulin and that subsequent energy spike or energy crash that you have after that, because the body literally says, clear it all out, clear it all out, no more energy left in the blood. OK, we got rid of it. We swept it under the rug. And then you just have nothing else left to to kind of power you through. And that's at the worst possible time, because the more you ate and the more carbohydrates you ate, the higher the insulin and the worse that that response is. And like you said, it just locks it away. And it's really hard to get back at. We have to clear through all the glycogen to start burning it again.

Yeah, you have to clear through the glycogen then the short term stores that are stored in skeletal muscle. And then depending on your activity level, circadian rhythm, what time of day it is, your stress levels, how is your sleep? Right. So there's a bunch of different things that can also factor into it. I still can't believe I just read it again, but in the in the early postprandial. So in that 30 minutes, one hundred and eighty minute window post eating it, the energy available that was available declined the fastest in the high carb group. So it's, it's even worse than the story in the beginning. It's like your body just goes crazy like OK, got to get rid of it, got to get rid of it, got to get rid of it. And I remember at one point back in the day we had this joke, there was a couple of friends of ours that moved to Florida and we used to call it caterpiller blood because there was this documentary or study out there. And I don't remember the efficacy of it. But this is this is years ago. And it was like they they had a gentleman eat like a king of Pop Tarts, a diet soda and a banana or something for breakfast.

And then I think it might have been like a fast food meal for lunch. And they did his blood work. And it's like literally like on the on the the was that thing, the look at the slides, the microscope on the microscope, you could literally see like the coagulation taking place. So we always joke that when we would go out and indulge in a celebratory dinner or something, it's like, oh, I have caterpillar blood. I just don't feel good. Like you could just feel yourself slowing down. So take home message. Yeah. Molasses. That's another another good one. Right. So I'm really just visualizing it for me is like oh man, I know I'm going to feel bad after I eat.

Then we had a conversation with the coach and finally today, it's like you just got to make better decisions, right? Because, you know, once you start doing this, you know, you're going to feel a certain way. And like once you make that realization, it's like, OK, well, I don't want to feel that way anymore, OK? I just I don't I can't, you know, like tomorrow a really busy day for me. I can't feel like that or it's just going to make the day that much harder.

Right. And, you know, we we plan out these windows. We plan on our fasting schedule. And you don't you don't have to be working against against that. You can be working to to encourage that, to push that further by, you know, be moderate and smart with your carbohydrate choices and your your meal planning for for what you're going to be eating whenever you're not fasting. And that's what we're going to encourage you to do, is put a little bit of conscious effort behind that. Think about your meals the next time you break a fast and, you know, tilt it more on the on the moderate to to lower carbohydrate side and observe how you feel after that and through your next fast as well.

Yeah. If you're doing Ohman and you typically have a moderate to higher carb content meal that night, the next day you're going to wake up more hungry. And then if you're going into a longer, fast try to limit it as well because it always makes that first twenty. 48 hours that much harder because you have all of that short term stored energy that your body needs to burn through, so cravings and all that come back. So tell me if we want to wrap up with an action step, like one succinct thing, maybe a numerical checkpoint or maybe a percentage on carbohydrates, like what can we do here to make sure that there's an actionable thing other than thinking about the. The feeling you start, like you said, start thinking about and being aware of what you eat and then how you feel two to three hours later or what you eat going into or out of a fast.

Sure. Break down your next your next meal, especially one that's going to break a fast, you know, whether it's a man or a longer one and shoot for the lower carbohydrate group that experience the best results in this study, which was 20 percent of their meal. So that was versus 60 percent in the highest carbohydrate group. So shoot for that 20 percent point when you're looking at your calories and kind of putting together your next meal plan to break a fast and and know that you're going to be encouraging your results and you're going to be pushing your results even further than with just the fact that you're encouraging those results while you're eating and then going into your next fast as well. It's going to be this is this is really going to put some some acceleration behind your results.

So 20 percent if you don't know really what that means. Grabble, my fitness pal, grab a tracker app, put your food in and you'll be able to see the percentages. Yeah, but really. Yeah, I think I didn't realize that number was there in the study, but I'm glad you mentioned it because I mean that's where the results lie. So 20 percent carb and that's not super low either. You know, there's there's a lot of lower carb people out there.

But you can still, you know, if you're doing 60, 20, 20. Right. Or yeah.

If if you had a typical like let's say you had a relatively kind of a larger meal. But on an ad, you know, maybe it's about 40 to 50 percent of your normal calories, then maybe it's it's nine hundred calories. Let's keep the math simple. At a thousand calories, 20 percent would be two hundred calories. So that's 50 grams of carbohydrates right there on that meal. So so keep it around that range.

Wow. And that's actually a lot. Yeah. Now that you put it that way based on those numbers. Yeah. So that still gives people a lot of flexibility too. So that's awesome. I yeah. This is, this is fantastic. I love it. I love the fact that there's like a real life application like. Have you ever felt this way. Yes. Well now this is exactly what's happening. Right. So I appreciate it. Tommy, for everyone that is new to the podcast, check us out at the Fasting for Life Dotcom, Fasting for life dotcom. We have a free fast start guide is a six step PDF that you can download, put in your email, get zipped across the interweb to your inbox. And then accompanying that, which we want to see more people doing is there's a free 20 minute mini master class. So you get a log in to our website and you get a membership. It's free. You get to go in, you get to watch a small two to three, four minute video with each step showing you how to put intermittent fasting or one meal a day fasting into your life. The quicker you start, the quicker you feel better, the quicker you see that first win or result on the scale, the easier it gets. So if you haven't done that, go to the website. The Fasting for Life. LifeGem, download the Fast Start guide, drop us a rating or review share with a friend. We'd appreciate it. And if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to us via the Contact US form on the website. Or you can drop us a question on the iTunes Apple podcast review page and we will bring those together from time to time and do Q&A episodes. I think we've done three or four of those out of the out of the group episodes that we've done so far. So I said, Tommy, we good? No, I think you got it all. So thank you so much and we will talk soon. Thank you. Bye.

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