Dr Jason Fung intermittent fasting program to lose weight

?Megan:Hi guys, welcome to episode 11 of Questions and Answers with Megan Ramos. I'm here to answer your questions so if you have any that you would like to answer on one of these episodes, please email them in to questions@ One of our teammates will review them and add them to the queue and myself or one of the other educators is the IDM program will answer them during one of these episode segments. So today we have a few questions that we're gonna tackle. Commonly asked questions again. So the first question that we're gonna tackle today is, why do I regain all the weight that I lost after an extended fast? That is and isn't necessarily the case. It's not that you necessarily gain all of the fat that you lost during an extended fast, but you probably regained a lot of water. So if you're someone who fasted for five days for example, maybe lost about five pounds and then by Monday you were back up five pounds. That means that you were not hydrated well during your fast. Usually when people regain all of the weight that they've lost it means that they were not well hydrated. We do expect you to regain some of the weight that you've lost during the long fast 'cause it's next to impossible to make sure that you're fully hydrated all the time during a fast. Usually if someone wants to lose about five pounds during a five day fast, I would suspect that they would regain about one to one and a half pounds of water once they started eating again, which is probably okay. It's probably water that you had lost in excess that your body needs to replenish. But if you were to gain all five pounds back, that means that you got too dehydrated during your fast. So you need to look back at your fast and you need to think about your fluid. Did you drink enough water? Did you make sure that your water and your tea and coffee all balanced out? Tea is not too much of a dehydrator but coffee definitely is. So you should really try to be making sure that you're having two cups of water for every cup of coffee that you have and at least one cup of water for every cup of tea that you have. So I'm not much of a coffee drinker. Thanks to Peter K on Idea Community Facebook group, I've now started drinking one coffee a day, one cold brew coffee a day. But I always make sure I have a cup of water before I have my cup of cold brew and I have a glass of water after my cup of cold brew just to make sure that I'm staying adequately hydrated because that coffee is a dehydrator. Also, for every cup of tea I have one cup of water. So when I was going through my weight loss journey and I started having to do longer fasts in order to really hammer down my body weight set point to reach my goals, I would make myself drink a glass of water before I could have my cup of tea. So my cup of tea was like a reward to me. So I had to make sure I drank the water in order to get a cup of tea. I would alternate water, tea, water, tea, water, tea throughout the day just to make sure I was getting a good balance and making sure that I was getting my appropriate intake of salt. Most people do okay with about three to seven grams of sodium a day. That's grams of sodium. Not grams of salt. Salt is sodium chloride so you wanna make sure that you're getting in about three to seven grams of sodium a day, not just salt. I encourage people to start off at the lower end of that and then work their way up. Of course if you have any dietary restrictions when it comes to salt, make sure you check with your healthcare practitioner and exercise a lot of caution before consuming salt in your diet. So check with your doctor before you start experimenting with salt. Most people who fast 36 hours or less don't even need to worry about salt consumption. Just make sure you're drinking lots of water, tea and coffee. When you start fasting beyond 36 hours, it's good to then supplement with a cup or two of broth throughout the day or a pinch of salt here and there. Sodium's mostly really important during those prolonged periods of fasting, so going beyond a bit of two or three of fasting and for determining your right sodium intake, you should work with someone in the medical field, a healthcare practitioner, a doctor, a nurse practitioner, a nurse, just to make sure you're getting the right sodium levels. Most of the population can handle salt very well but less than about 20% of the population does have some negative side effects from taking too much sodium. So in terms of water retention and blood pressure, so you just need to exercise caution and of course patients that with stage five kidney disease, patients on dialysis, you need to really sort of watch your sodium intake and also with certain heart conditions so always check with your doctor and always check with your doctor, too, if you're gonna do a prolonged period of fasting to make sure that your medications are adjusted accordingly and that minerals and electrolytes are adjusted accordingly too. If you have done the extended fast and you have gotten the clear from your doctor that it's okay to take some sodium, you might just have to play around with that but keep in mind that water is really important so make sure that you're having at least two cups of water for every cup of coffee and that you're having a cup of water for every cup of tea that you have. Bone broth is also a hydrator as well. So you could use that in substitution of water. So you could have two cups of broth or one cup of coffee or one cup of broth or one cup of tea. Now you don't wanna be drinking an excessive amount of broth when you're fasting. Broth still has proteins in it and especially if you're trying to achieve autophagy, broth will stop autophagy from happening. So usually most people can consume about two or three cups of broth a day max. Those people consume sort of between one and two if they are drinking broth on a more consistent basis. So you could use those one or two cups of broth as a substitute for water during your fast. Make sure you're well hydrated. So make sure that you're well hydrated. If you get too dehydrated you'll stop losing weight all together when you're fasting 'cause it'll put so much stress on your body, your body will start producing stress hormones that will cause weight gain. So it's really important that you're very mindful about your hydration. Always make sure that you have doctor supervision when doing an extended fast. Talk to your doctor to make sure that you're getting the right electrolyte supplementation, that you're okay to consume salt when you are doing this fast. Just make sure you're getting in a good balance of water or broth compared to your tea or coffee during the fast. Once we get someone hydrating properly during a long fast, they'll only regain just one or two pounds after a prolonged period of fasting. Which again is to be expected 'cause you can't hydrate 100%. You are gonna also lose a lot of excess water as you burn through those glycogen [inaudible 00:07:25] within the first 24 to 72 hours of your fast. The second question on today's Q and A is what to do with that intense cravings after an extended fast? So sometimes people after an extended fast, they just feel really, really ravenous. I encourage these patients who feel ravenous after an extended fast to really eat fibrous vegetables covered in fat. You're not gonna gain weight from eating a whole head of cauliflower. It's just not gonna happen. So if you eat a whole head of cauliflower, if you need to eat that to satiate yourself or if you need to eat an entire bag of spinach in order to satiate yourself, absolutely do so. Make sure you're satiated and that you satiate yourself on the right stuff. You're only gonna run into difficulty if you try to satiate yourself on carbs. So something like pizza, pasta, potatoes. You wanna really try to avoid satiating yourself on those food items. Those food items are gonna trigger your hunger even more. So if you're really hungry after a prolonged fast, make sure to eat lots of non-starchy veg, make sure you add lots of fat. If you find that you're still hungry, reevaluate how much fat that you're taking and you'll probably find that you could be taking a little bit more fat. Your fat intake is pretty much limitless. The only limitating factor when it comes to fat is that you stop eating it once you feel satiated. So if you need to take more and more and more fat to feel satiated, take that much fat until you feel satiated. It shouldn't have any negative, hormonal, repercussions. Some people feel very ravenous after a prolonged period of fasting because of other emotional issues. It could be circumstances from their childhood. I've had patients who grew up during times of war and extreme famine and they have a little bit post traumatic stress because in their childhood they really suffered from malnourishment and food was literally a matter of life or death. I also work with some patients who grew up in not during times of war but in unfortunate circumstances in poverty and grew up on food stamps and food wasn't always available to them and they also suffered from malnourishment. So sometimes these people will try to do a long fast but then something about the long fast, it triggers these old memories they had that have a little bit of post traumatic stress from their youth and it becomes very difficult for them to stop eating and they can't stop eating beyond satiation. So sometimes less is more. I find a lot of these people initially try to fast for about five days. They like doing a five day fast with two day eatings so a five two diet and they just end up eating and eating beyond satiation and because they're eating beyond satiation, they start gaining weight. So they tend to gain back everything that they've lost during their fast so it never gets anywhere. So sometimes less is more. If you're someone who's struggling with overeating after an extended fast and you have struggled in your past with food not being available, food being scarce or malnourishment in your childhood, even those aren't factors now and you have a great life now and we're here because we're definitely not malnourished these days, those are still really significant issues from your past. So sometimes less is more. So actually scaling back your fast so it's not as daunting won't usually trigger these urgencies to over eat. So I found with a lot of these people scaling back to two 48 hour fasts a week or one 72 hour fast a week, if you're looking to be more aggressive with the fasting, usually prevents overeating. So that way people start to lose weight consistently on a week to week basis. The third question on today's Q and A is, can I get the same results with the fasting mimicking diet? This is something ... fasting mimicking diet is something that drives us a little bit crazy over at the IDM program. Fasting mimicking diet is essentially consuming low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet and sometimes not always consuming a low carbohydrate or a ketogenic diet depending on who you follow. Victor Longo's a founding father of the fasting mimicking diet and he's not an advocate of ketogenic diet at all but he's more of sort of a low carb, vegan, vegetarian driven guy. But the basis is that during a period of time for somewhere between five to seven days you would consume 40% less calories than you usually do on a regular basis. Periodically for five to seven days you would eat half as much that you normally would. Problems with this is that if you're not eating the right foods, you're gonna become ravenous. If you do it too long you might slow down your metabolic rate. If you already have a sluggish metabolic rate, you're not gonna get any weight loss from this. If you have a lot of insulin resistance, you're not really gonna treat that very much with this either. It's just calorie restriction in another form and yes, you are alternating taking high calories to low calories but you really need to make sure that when you're eating, that you're eating a lot and when you're doing this 40% calorie reduction that you're not doing it continuously. Most of the patients that I've worked with have a really bottomed up metabolic rate from chronic dieting in their lives. Reducing ... their metabolic rate's already so low, by reducing their calorie intake a little bit more, it just makes the metabolic rate even worse. You can actually ... it's better not to eat anything at all 'cause that ... the adrenaline produced from fasting will actually spike your metabolic rate. Whereas when you just further reduce your calories you're just sort of reducing your metabolic rate. So we don't really recommend a fasting mimicking diet. A fasting mimicking diet would probably be most beneficial to people who are looking for disease prevention and have a good metabolic rates and are in good health and don't have all that much insulin resistance. We often find that we need to fast our patients beyond 24 hours to get results in terms of the hyper insulinemia, insulin resistance and to really boost their metabolic rates from a low state to a higher state from crash dieting for decades. We find that you actually really have to go with nothing to get that adrenaline spike in order to boost the metabolic rate and to really force those hormonal changes in the body that reduce your insulin levels. So we're not big fans of the fasting mimicking diet for our metabolic patient population. If you're healthy, doing it periodically as long as you don't always do calorie restriction and you mix it up, there's no harm in that. ................
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