0 (1s):
Coming up on the, get lean, eat clean podcast.
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If I could get the world to stop sacking, I think we would dramatic regardless of diet anything else. I, we would see a huge, huge reduction, and I know a lot of people think that's so silly, but I've seen it. I've seen it in tens of thousands of people, the power of just not sacking regardless of their diet and the total calories consumed in this or that. And the snacking that has more of a powerful impact. So really focusing on that, and that will enable you to do some base intermittent fasting 12, 14, 16 hours a day, and that over the long-term has profound health benefits too.
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Hello and welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. I'm Brian grin, and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it wants was five, 10, even 15 years ago. Each week. I'll give you an in-depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you long-term sustainable results. This week I interviewed Megan Ramos. She's a fasting expert and program director at the fasting method. We discussed her health journey from overcoming diabetes. How to counteract hyperinsulinemia along with the differences between calorie restriction and fasting keys, the not snacking differences between men and women when it comes to fasting.
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Also what breaks a fast. Lastly, we discussed for one tip to get your body back to what it once was. This was a great interview with Megan. She's very knowledgeable around fasting and what it takes to get started and to maintain it. And I know you'll enjoy this interview, so thanks so much for listening and enjoy the interview. All right, welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin, and I have a special guest from the fasting method. Megan Ramos. Welcome.
1 (2m 3s):
Hey Brian, thanks for having me on I'm happier, friendly, able to connect.
0 (2m 7s):
I know it took a little while, but we made it happen, right?
1 (2m 11s):
Yeah. My life's been crazy. We relocated from Toronto to San Francisco. I've got teammates that span. Most of them are in Toronto, but we've got Portugal and Zurich and I'm working all of the hours of the day right now. It's been tough to coordinate anything. Yeah.
0 (2m 32s):
All the time zones. It's like trying to schedule stuff. Right. I'm
1 (2m 35s):
Terrible. At times on math. I just said everybody needs to convert to me if you want me to. Exactly.
0 (2m 41s):
Exactly. Well, I'm glad we did finally connect maybe, you know, before we get into a little bit more about fasting and this and that, how, what was your path? How did your path into fasting or into the fasting method and working with Dr. Jason Fung and things like that? How did that, how did that occur?
1 (3m 1s):
Yeah, I've been merging with Jason's and Cyrus 15. I'll be 37 in a few months. So a long time when I was young, I had a really strong desire to get into preventative medicine and due to a family connection. I had a really great opportunity to get in on some interesting research at a young age. So I, this kidney clinic that Jason was a young nephrologist at really focused a lot on preventative medicine for kidney disease. And that really resonated with me. So I started doing research there. So that's how I started working with them. And I just fell in love, you know, with everything we were doing.
1 (3m 42s):
It wasn't, it wasn't really effective, but because of there's so much education, we really got to know the patients. We had lots of appointments with them. They were longer appointments. I got into some pretty heavy prospective research at the program, the clinic and stay stuck there throughout my education. And then in my mid twenties, I realized like, oh my gosh, like, everything we're doing is not helping. And it became so depressing. And I thought, okay, like, do you really want to go back to school and study medicine at this point? Or cut your losses. If you can't help people, maybe just go to law school, like the rest of your family.
1 (4m 25s):
And so I took a year off from school and trying to figure things out. And I thought, oh, also my family history is like terrible for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. My grandmother severe dementia at that point from diabetes. And I thought, okay, like Megan, you're young, you've already got these metabolic issues. Like I already had fatty liver. I was diagnosed when I was 12. I already had PCs when I was 14. Like get your health together. So I took a year, I'm gonna write my LSATs. I'm going to eat seven times a day. And when I'm really forced myself to eat all that fruit, I'm going to get a personal trainer and do all those things.
1 (5m 6s):
And the end result was being diagnosed with type two diabetes at 27 and gaining a ton of weight, doing all of those things around the same time, Jason was sort of going through his own transformation. Like, geez, all we're doing is giving these patients bad news. Cause if you're a diabetic and or if you have other controlled blood pressure from obesity and insulin resistance, I mean, it doesn't matter what you do. The kidneys are going to fail. The there's no way around it. So as a kidney specialist, like what can you do? Nothing other than to say, okay, you know, we'll just keep monitoring it.
1 (5m 48s):
Like it, it's terrible. It's a terrible position for a doctor who really just wants to help people to be in and be outta control. So he had looked low carb diets and you know, and you went back and sort of took a look at what had happened with the Atkins phenomenon. So there was sort of the original, lower carb, you know, fads, diet, we, what, what were the flaws? And you know, why, why isn't the whole world doing that? You know, right now, why didn't it always reverse type two diabetes? And he really got into focusing on insulin resistance and the mechanisms behind it and came interested in fasting.
1 (6m 30s):
Actually, if Fasten came up during a casual conversation, but then we actually had a lot of experience in the clinic with people fascinating when we thought about it, because we're the, from the most diversity in the world and we worked and the most diverse niche of that city. So there's always people fasting for religious periods or religious times. We have Hindus who had fast a couple of times a week and we'd, their medications would have to be adjusted for those fasting days. We had people participating in Ramadan, Ramadan's going on right now. And that's 30 days where you're on and you know, not eating, but like when the sun is up, you only eat after it sets them before rises.
1 (7m 11s):
And all these people we'd have to adjust their medication down because the sugars would be down. Their blood pressure went down, no one died from doing it. In fact, a lot of the times they got better during Ramadan. And then when they started eating again, that's when it all went down the toilet. So Jason, you know, said, well, you know, you could try low carb or, or fasting and low carb just, it was such a bust for me. Cause I mean, I'm, I'm an 84 baby. Like I grew up on Domino's delivery and happy meals. And I didn't learn how to do anything in the kitchen, other than microwave something or boil water for pasta.
1 (7m 50s):
So to, to cook food, real foods, it was terrifying. And I failed at that. So I thought, well, maybe it's just easier not to eat. And within six months I lost the weight or diversified BDS, the PSUs, the fatty liver disease. And I was just like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, we can help people. We can act like what I wanted to do my whole life since a kid was help people and like, wow, we can actually do that. So Jason and I started fasting patients at our clinic. And then he wrote a couple of books that became popular and we drew a lot of international attention. We had a two year wait list for the clinic, realized we had to migrate online and make it more scalable.
1 (8m 37s):
So we started doing online fasting, coaching, and health coaching. And then we created an online program where we could do more group coaching and classes and group education that way, which has been really great. So we're able to, we've served people and know over a dozen different countries, which is fantastic. We're able to get the knowledge out there on fasting. And it's just so cool. You know, earlier today I had a class, I lead these weekly group fasting challenges and we do a daily check-in and we had people off of all their blood pressure medications, you know, hit the, their high school weight and be off all our diabetic medications, getting that hemoglobin A1C a 4.8%.
1 (9m 27s):
You know, when it came from 13, like my days are filled hearing about all of these great stories. And so it's just so rewarding.
0 (9m 38s):
Yeah, no, I love that. And I know if you don't know my story, I actually learned about fasting through a client of mine who just was like pre-diabetic she tried everything. And then she got into fasting and started doing some extended fasts and it just had such an impact, profound impact on her life. I was like, wow, I gotta look into this. And this was probably, I don't know, five, six years ago. So that sort of led me down to learning about fasting for myself. And yeah, that's why I love talking about it. I love sharing it. And it's great that you guys have been able to spread it worldwide because you're not, I always say like the mainstream big food and big pharma or whatever, they're not going to spread it for one who, you know, no one really makes money when you fast.
0 (10m 23s):
Right. So, you know, will it go mainstream? I mean, I think it's got a lot of steam right now with organizations like yourself and just even podcasting alone has sort of spread it out there as much as possible.
1 (10m 37s):
It's been really wild. We started this, this August. I'll actually be my 10 year anniversary from my diabetes diagnosis and starting fasting. But we started in June, June 5th, 2012, I was actually coming home from a European trip, thinking that all of our superiors had shot our fasting program idea down to check my airport. When I was in our tech, my airport check my email. I was in Paris for the first time in three weeks. I'm realizing that the day after I got home, we were starting a Fastlane ticket. They had finally surrendered and I was like, great. I have to create a program on the airplane, home from Paris.
1 (11m 20s):
And so we launched, then everybody thought we were nuts. Like we would get it doctors coming in, yelling at us. What are you doing? But we would convert them as they saw, like you saw with your, your client that they get better. And now I remember I was actually in Orlando is that my mother-in-law's home in Orlando on January 1st, 2018. And it was new year's morning. She was watching, you know, good morning, America, good morning Orlando or whatever those shows are. And she's screamed Megan. And I thought she was dying or something. I come running and she's like, look, she's like, she flipped through like three different stations.
1 (12m 4s):
She said, they're all talking about how intermittent fasting is the dietary trend. There's that always makes me laugh, but it's a dietary trend of 2018. And she's like, look, look, your guys, you got so doing, you're doing the right thing.
0 (12m 19s):
Right. It's finally on like the today show or whatever, where they start talking about it. What would you say? What would you say the hormonal differences are between like, this is a question that comes up fasting and calorie restriction. What would you say the biggest differences are between the two?
1 (12m 37s):
Yeah, absolutely. Actually I was just giving a lesson on this today because theirs is totally different. When you get into the fasting state, you activate our sympathetic nervous system. It's our flight or fight nervous system, but there's, you know, dosage makes the poison with everything in life. So if you're an extremely it's threatening situation and you get like a wild, you know, activation of this sympathetic nervous system and you get chronically stuck there, when you get chronically stuck there, that's not good. Right. But having it mildly activated for periods of time, that builds up resilience and the system.
1 (13m 18s):
So it's okay. You do want to go through periods of like more lower grade stress and intermittently. It helps makes us, it helps us thrive. So when you're doing this intermittent fasting, you are getting this low activation of the sympathetic nervous system. And when that happens, do you produce these counterregulatory hormones? And you know, I, I say it's like activating the fasting state, turning it on, you know, being the difference here between calorie restriction, you get this activation and you get the production of noradrenaline, which helps you not just burn body fat, but maintain your resting metabolic rate.
1 (13m 58s):
You get those two men growth, hormone production, and you don't grow. You know, he don't become the Hulk when you're fasting, but it really helps you protect your lean mass, grow lean mass. We see women all the time, reverse the osteoporosis or improve it dramatically. Or people being able to, you know, gain lean mass, especially as they're getting older, when they want to not be losing it and need to be more proactive about it. So you get these great hormones that are produced. You get a little bit of cortisol production that helps supply your body, the glucose that it does need and low quantities during a fasting state and making you feel good. So we get this, these hormones is counterregulatory hormones.
1 (14m 41s):
You don't get activation of that. And the calorie restriction state, can we talk about calorie restriction know an unfortunate, this is an example I've used forever. And unfortunately I think us here in north America and throughout the world are experiencing it greater than ever. But right now, but say, say you owned your own business and you're struggling financially because of a tough time. And you had to reduce your, take home, pay by 30% in order to preserve your business. Right. You know, when you first start adjusting your budget, you're going to be over spending. You're not going to be used to that. So you're going to accumulate some debt, but over time you learn how to save.
1 (15m 21s):
You learn how to budget. So you might take more public transit. You might downsize, you might buy what's on sale at the grocery store versus, you know what you feel like buying. You might get a Netflix subscription instead of going and paying a hundred dollars for the family to see a movie. So you've made costs and you adapt your new budget. And when you're doing calorie restriction diets, that's exactly what happens. You know, you give yourself a new calorie budget every day. And at first you're overspending, but over time, your body adapts the new budget and it slows down spending cognitively, I mean your reproductive system and your cardiovascular respiratory system, and everything slows down a bit.
1 (16m 4s):
You don't see that weight loss and you have your body performing sub-optimally and then you get into a, more of a stressed out state, more likely to gain weight and revert to eating unhealthy foods. But with fasting, you know, because of this activation, these counterregulatory hormones or the sympathetic nervous system, like you're supplying your body with fuel because you're getting those counterregulatory hormones. And so when you actually there's been a ton of great randomized control trials produced since 2016, just showing this and showing the benefits of this, when you compare alternate daily fasting to calorie restriction fasting.
1 (16m 47s):
So the first RCT I think, came out in 2016, it looked at alternate daily fasters versus those who did a 400 calorie a day reduction without changing their diets. And on the alternate daily, fascinating, they just consume water zero, zero caloric intake, and they monitored them over the course of 32 weeks. And we saw with the resting metabolic rate that there was like no clinically significant reduction in RMR amongst the alternate daily fasting groups, but there was a clinically significant reduction in the calorie restriction group. So, you know, we do get these, our body does preserve our resting metabolic rate because of the activation of these counterregulatory hormones.
1 (17m 36s):
So it's being able to activate that hormone cascade that really separates fasting from calorie restriction diets,
0 (17m 44s):
Right? It's almost like a switch, you know, as opposed to just eating small meals throughout the day, you're always in that fed state and you're not able to sort of use, you know, your, your fat stores. Cause you need that insulin low to actually get into those fat stores. They use that for energy eventually, right?
1 (18m 1s):
Yeah. And there's something else too, that I think so many people don't think about. And I think it's also just because it keeps the science simple, perhaps, you know, we understand that there's a greater understanding, at least in the, amongst the lay population and the medical population that this hyperinsulinemia and this high levels of insulin is what drives insulin resistance. So if you have high too much insulin in the body, don't add more insulin to the body. So this is where low carb diets have really gained a lot of popularity. Like, so if you have a fire, you don't put gasoline on it. So if you have too much insulin in the body, well eat a diet.
1 (18m 45s):
That's low in carbohydrates, higher in healthy natural fats, because they're not going to be adding more fuel to the fire. But once you already have insulin resistance to the insulin resistance itself, perpetuates insulin to be secreted by the body. So the diet doesn't really address that. And then we're just surrounded by food. Like if we have it, it's 10 feet away from us at all times, we have apps that can deliver it to our front door and like 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the time of day. So we're chronically eating. And so what happens with this is that the chronic stimulus of insulin will, that also leads to insulin resistance.
1 (19m 28s):
So you might be thinking, well, it's just a handful of nuts here. A handful of almonds there since she's here or whatever, whatever your, your real food choices, depending on your dietary restrictions, that constant stimulus that's problematic. So we talk about this door scenario, right? Everybody's working from home. So we're getting all these weird interruptions. And so imagine you're working away, you're trying to focus on a big project and you get a thousand people knocking at your front door. Like, you know that that's not good and you're going to be pushing your sofa against the door to protect yourself. It's annoying. It's scary. It's frustrating. So that's kind of like eating that big bowl of pasta, you know, unless like having the body flooded with insulin, because you're getting your front ons flooded with people trying to get in to your house, if you like in your house, to the cell and your door to the insulin receptor.
1 (20m 23s):
But what happens is like, imagine you had a visitor every 30 to 60 minutes from 6:00 AM till midnight knocking at your door. Like that ends up being a lot of visitors and being very disruptive and driving resistance towards you wanting to answer the door. So it's really about the meal timing, giving your body that chance to not be bombarded insulin at all hours of the day, and actually fasting for a period of time. But you're going to suppress your insulin levels so much other than what you need for physiological survival for that day, that will help break the cycle of insulin resistance. So this is why, what I see now is a greater acceptance for fasting, a greater acceptance for real food diets and lower carbohydrate diets, which is great.
1 (21m 13s):
But you know, just because of the convenience of food and how we're just sort of wired to eat these days, it's difficult for people not to snack. So we have so many people that will come, they'll say, you know, Megan, I've lost 50 about 80 pounds. Why can't I lose that last 40 pounds? Am I forever broken? Or, you know, I've come off of my diabetic meds. And my A1C is 6.8 is better than 8.8. Why can't it be 4.8? You know, why can't I get there? And it's not necessarily the foods. And it looks like many of them have even addressed food sensitivities like nuts and dairy, but they're not getting there. And soon as we cut out the snacking, it's not about eating less food.
1 (21m 57s):
You know, if you eat that food, but eat it with your meal, you know, donate your three o'clock snack at three, o'clock eat it with your lunch, read it with your dinner on your eating days. And this just doing that, it's not about eating less than necessarily. It's about eating less often. And then that last 30 pounds goes that A1C is now optimal and it meal timing. So people often forget that second pathway to insulin resistance and that's really important to address.
0 (22m 25s):
Yeah, no, I love that. So essentially, if someone has plateaued, they should just cut out snacking. That would be a good way, right? Yeah.
1 (22m 36s):
If I had my way, the whole world is soft sacking. I think if we just stopped snacking and went back to how three
0 (22m 42s):
Meals a day, even through the day, right? Yeah. Yeah. Which used to be the norm in the seventies, right?
1 (22m 51s):
Yeah. I remember telling my grandmother when I started fasting, my whole family thought I was not. So I thought my father was going to try to get power of attorney over my health. Cause he thought I developed an eating disorder. Luckily he got busy with work and forgot about me, but I remember just going to confide in my grandmother. And she said to me, Megan, I was never sick. And I was never fat, you know, till we started eating all the time. And she said, doom potato chips for, for holidays cookies for, for Christmas. And, but then they became a thing that was all of the time and just said, your father, when he lived with me, he wasn't allowed to eat before dinner. Cause he'd spoil his appetite. And if he want a date after dinner, that meant he didn't eat enough broccoli.
1 (23m 33s):
So, and then he moved out now he's so there's, it's just going back to these simple basics can make a huge change in our lives.
0 (23m 45s):
Yeah, no, it's comes all full circle, right? I'm sure you get this question. I know you've written some stuff on it. I I've gotten it over the last few months is the difference between men and women. And do you have a different protocol when you're, when you're working with a woman as opposed to a man?
1 (24m 5s):
Yeah, I actually, I just finished a manuscript on women and fasting. So it'll be out next year when it comes to women and men, you have to sort of take into a couple situations. So if we're working with a woman who's done child bearing, you know, maybe trying to look lose that baby weight that they never got to lose had gestational diabetes worried about perimenopause, tried to get the weight off before that time happens or even women going through menopause or post-menopause, you know, we really don't approach their fasting any different than men at any age do find that these women need to fast a bit longer than perhaps our male counterparts.
1 (24m 51s):
So often you'll get a man with mild to moderate insulin resistance. He's got, you knew that that fear a bit of a beer belly, that sympathy weight he gained when his wife was proud that he wants to lose and they do very well doing maybe more shorter intermittent, fast like 24 hours or even make great headway doing 16 or 18 hours if they're not diabetic or very diabetic, but women mostly, I mean, we're combating other issues at that age. You're combating a little progesterone or a commodity low estrogen levels. You know, also thyroid issues are a lot more prevalent in females and a lot of it is due to cellular inflammation or auto immune.
1 (25m 36s):
And it's never really adequately addressed by the medical community. So the longer fasts for them result in greater reduction in inflammation and help with those issues that do generate more fat loss would be, if you can address the hypothyroidism, then you're going to have one less barrier towards fat loss. Now with women who are childbearing age and are still having monthly cycles, there are certain times of the month, whereas easier to fast than others. So women go through these cycles of estrogen predominance versus progesterone predominance. So the first 14 days of our cycle estrogens, the more dominant sex hormone and estrogen is actually an appetite suppressing hormone.
1 (26m 24s):
So women find during this time leading up to ovulation that, Hey, like fascinating is easy. They're going to think about food. You know, this is, this is great. The novelization happens and not relation like obviously your body wants to produce life. So you're going to be more hungry. You're going to be more ravenous. So this is a difficult. And then when you enter sort of that, post-operation, that luteal phase the last 14 days of your cycle, progesterone's an appetite driving hormone testosterone. Well, not like off the charts is more dominant as well, which is also an appetite driving hormone. So a lot of women of childbearing age, we don't really struggle at certain times of the month and they think that they're broken and it's like now, like, let's look at your cycles even if there are regular and let's try to identify some of these patterns.
1 (27m 17s):
And when it's easier, especially at the start of your cycle, you know, we make more headway doing more longer intermittent, fast or extended fast. And then towards your, your period, you know, the second half of your cycle, we are looking at more time, restricted eating shorter periods of intermittent fasting, spending that time, working on food quality. And then for women who are looking to conceive, you know, that week before the cycle, we tend to keep, you know, we, don't more M tour, you know, less fasting during that period of time. If the, if they're looking to have babies and that just sort of helps from a progesterone level as well, because that will help the, we don't want to interfere with the progesterone levels at that stage because it really helps ensure that the egg can properly be fertilized and then attach and grow a baby.
1 (28m 13s):
So we don't want one more, more M towards during that time out.
0 (28m 18s):
Right. So just so people know more mTOR that would be, would you put them a little bit more on a higher protein diet to stimulate that?
1 (28m 27s):
Yeah. Yeah. And even if it's a time for a little bit of real food carbs cycling, sometimes we'll do. And in certain cases as well. So when we do real, real food carb cycling for us, it's mostly root vegetables and it's still small, smaller portions. You're still making sure that you're, you're adding certain, you're having that say if it's a potato or a root vegetable, having it, you're making sure you're eating protein with it. And having been like, if you have potatoes put vinegar on them. So really making sure that you're just not, we talk about like you can eat carbs naked, or you can eat them dressed and not necessarily like you yourself, but that carbohydrates.
1 (29m 10s):
So making sure that you're just not going to, to have potatoes on their own. So some women we find definitely do need to have a little bit of carb cycling during that week, if they're predominantly doing a very low carbohydrate diet, not all women, but some, some women actually thrive better on especially more animal fats and animal proteins during that time.
0 (29m 33s):
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And in putting vinegar on a potato, I'm assuming that just blunts the insulin response, is that correct? Yeah.
1 (29m 40s):
Yeah. It just helps a bit mean you're still getting the same amount of sugar in your body at the end of the day, but you're just sort of blunting the,
0 (29m 47s):
Okay. And when you're doing fasting protocols, are you, what's what constitutes, I know this is probably a common question breaking a fast and what doesn't.
1 (30m 0s):
Yeah. So we're really, really focused on insulin resistance, the fasting method. So when we talk about what you can and can't have during a fast, we're really trying to focus in on what is going to have no next to no insulin response in the body. So we have things like water tea, I'm a green tea junkie to almost my detriment probably is that peak tea actually, you know, it is, I'll be honest and I'll let you know that they send it to me. Yeah,
0 (30m 37s):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
1 (30m 39s):
Especially now that I'm here, they, they sent me a nice welcome to California package, but yeah, so you have tea, green tea in general is, is great. Coffee, coffee, coffee, black coffee, black coffee can sometimes in some people be an appetite stimulant. I find some people are very, very sensitive to the caffeine and see a cortisol reaction, matcha tea, like these foods. So then in addition to water, tea and coffee, and then depending on people sometimes struggled to get an adequate electrolytes when they're fasting, especially when they're doing more longer intermittent or extended fast.
1 (31m 23s):
And at the start, you know, Jason and I, our team, we always talk about bone broth is one way to help because when brothas, you can salt, it it's appropriate to add salt to broth mopey. Most people don't think that's weird. Ferazi drinking salty water is kind of weird and society, but then, you know, the bone broth is really just a training wheel. And if people find that they need that sodium support, which almost always they do, what if they continue to do these longer fasts than like a sugar-free pickle juice, sh pickle brine, or sometimes people have all a brine during their fast. And that's really effective.
1 (32m 3s):
I'm, this'll be my first summer in California, but in Toronto, I mean, we are a hundred, 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, we got the east coast humidity in the winter or sorry in the summer. So I don't want to be drinking anything hot. And then you're also sweating. And when you have extreme changes in seasons, it can cause hydration issues. So I would just guzzle a pickle juice in July and August back home. And so that's, that's a common, fast and fluid that we recommend in our community as well. So when it comes to, you know, the fast we use certain things like training wheels, it's okay to have a little bit of fat just to help you transition.
1 (32m 46s):
It's okay to have the bone broth to help you transition. But those are things that you really want to look at as training wheels. It's, it's cool to be a toddler and have them, but you don't want to be showing up to your first day of middle school. You know, a training wheels. They're not going to be perceived as the cool kid on the block. So if you need them, use them, if you don't, then, then don't. And so once you start getting into those things that have more of an insulin impact, you, you want to avoid them. You want to cut
0 (33m 15s):
Them out, right. Because a lot of times, you know, you hear a lot with the coffee and adding fat MCT oil, things like that. Sometimes, you know, even though that does, it might not cause that much of an insulin response, it could sort of spur on some, some hunger which could sort of lead you down the wrong road.
1 (33m 34s):
Yeah. Well, and when you're fasting, especially for the, say for fat loss too, I mean, if you're having a Bulletproof coffee and I think a Bulletproof coffee, or they're trying to get an, an extra meal on an eating day and you look at it as a meal, that's okay. Or if you're using it as to transition, I got it. I came, I was someone that I ate 12 times a day, tried to fast. Like sometimes you need these bridging steps and I support that. But when you drink a Bulletproof coffee, I mean that on a fasting day, that's like four to six hours of you not being in a fast, like your body's feeling off of the fat, because there's so much fat in them, like a Bulletproof coffee, three, four tablespoons of fat. And you really want to be getting to a place where you're starting to fuel off of your own fat stores.
1 (34m 20s):
So that's, what's gonna, you know, empty your fats or help you lose the body fat, help you lower the insulin levels and really achieve sustainable weight loss and improve your metabolic health. So it's just counterproductive. I mean, again, it's a good as a training wheel, but that's all it should be just to help you get more acclimated to the situation being in the fastest.
0 (34m 42s):
Yeah. And when you work with someone, as far as looking at what they're eating, do you, what do you address there? And as some sort of like the big pillars, as far as when they're what they're eating and then do dress that first, or do you first address, well, let's just get you into a fasting mode and then we'll, then we'll touch on what you're eating.
1 (35m 3s):
That's a good question. The chicken or the egg, which comes first, because if you definitely like, if you're not eating a lot of sugar and processed and refined, John can all of that stuff, of course, fasting's going to be a lot easier for you to do Jason and I at our clinic in Toronto, it's really spawned like this whole beast that we've created. It's phenomenal. Our patients, we're not in a position to necessarily always eat very well. There is huge socioeconomic gaps and the people that came to see us, I mean, Toronto is, looks as expensive as New York city to live in.
1 (35m 45s):
And if you're in the city, you don't have a driver's license, you can't go to suburbs or to farmer's markets. I mean, cauliflowers 10 bucks ahead. So we'd have these people on disability with amputations in wheelchairs, they've lost their driver's license. Like it was what it was in terms of their diet passes. Cheap rice is cheap. Like that's, that's what it was. So we would have to get them to fast. And once they started fasting, like the first couple of weeks were, were tough, especially when they're feeding the way that they were. So we try to do as best as we could with their diets, but after once, if we could power them through those first two weeks, and fortunately this population had this deep, like, I mean, they're risking losing another foot.
1 (36m 38s):
They are losing their foot. Like they had huge motivation to get through those first couple of weeks. So then it became easier. And then over the time the cost savings help them buy better quality food, which was just so wonderful to hear them come in and say, Megan, I could afford to buy him. Like my first piece of stay. Like I haven't had a steak in like six years. So you don't necessarily have to have this picture perfect diet to start fasting. I went from saying, okay, Megan just don't eat like garbage once a week to donate like garbage once a month and maybe just quarterly. And now it's been like a really great place with my diet for the last four or five years.
1 (37m 20s):
And that's fantastic, but it's a process. The diet is often a process. So you need to learn how to fast around it. Now in terms of dietary pillars, I mean, we are not agnostic about diets and to be quite Frank, like I I've seen all diets across the real food spectrum. The whole spectrum saved people's lives. It very unique to, to individual's own physiology. And you've got to learn just to not put your patients in a box and to work with work with them. So we really, you know, real whole foods really prioritizing natural, healthy fats, seeing how the individual response and tail like tailoring their diet that way, but really local foods in the most primal sense possible, you know, that's where we strive for you.
1 (38m 14s):
Don't find keto bread in my house. You don't find that type of stuff very rarely. And w can you use those items that help you acclimate shirt, but we really try to strive for eating and more, regardless of it's for animals, there's more plants eating and more of that real food and that, or that primal state of the food. And that's really where we are our baseline fundamentals or our sprout from, you know, when it comes to giving nutritional advice.
0 (38m 47s):
Yeah. And something that gets underlooked overlooked with the garden fasting is the flexibility of doing it and then saving money. Like you never really hear people talk about that, but yeah, you make a good point that, you know, you cut a meal out and over time that that adds up
1 (39m 7s):
Huge savings. I actually went back through some, some older seats. My mother's a retired accountant. So I learned from like the age of two that you always save your receipts for everything. So I went through some old shoe boxes. I'm like what I spent on diet soda, what I spent on pretzels. Like just those two foods categories alone. Like the savings is wild. We actually, I had a mother she's a single mom. She was widowed her and her son super stressed, you know, working around the clock. And every time she fasted and didn't have a meal, she actually took a few dollars and put it in a jar.
1 (39m 48s):
And she was gonna use that to enable her and her son to actually go on vacations. Something that they could never afford to do, because she said, you know, all it's all business. Like there's no fun, no time for play. And she thought her kid was growing up to really resent her. So within a few months she had enough say for them to go to a nice resort in the Dominican. And so she just kept doing that. Right. She said, okay, I would have spent maybe $5 on this meal or, you know, the, she had, it was a few bucks. It wasn't ever anything, but whenever she fasts, that was her motivation to Fasten the skipper meal. And they went to all these great trips, like over the few years that she was in the clinic and it was like, so all of these benefits spill into your life and so many other ways that you wouldn't even think of.
1 (40m 37s):
And it's just really cool to hear all these stories for me.
0 (40m 41s):
Yeah. That's a great story because she's getting, trying to getting her health on the right track and she's saving money to sort of take her family to, you know, a nice place. That's great. That's a great story. A few more things. I mean, we could talk for hours on fasting. I could, at least I'm sure you could. What about, I know Dr. Jason Fung just came out with cancer code book. What are some maybe takeaways from that that could impact people maybe that have cancer or, you know, are going down that road?
1 (41m 14s):
Yeah. So cancer code, I know it's a serious labor of love for Jason and we definitely towards now our whole staff everything's online, but we started taking and a lot more cancer patients towards the end of our clinic. They're pre COVID days. And it's just so important to remember that so many of these cancers are metabolically driven and they are, they result from insulin and insulin causes growth in the body and growth as an adult is rarely a good thing. We don't want growth. And so when we're this muscle growth, you know, good bone density, brain cells, but we don't, we don't want growth is usually detrimental to us.
1 (42m 3s):
So insulin can cause that and cause causes growth and leads to cancer. So most of these cancers are we're struggling with a lot of them are metabolic related in nature. And having being diet is a profound effect. So, you know, Jason really goes into the counselor code about the impact of sugar and insulin, and really how it drives so many of these metabolic cancers. And if you can control that the positive impacts that you have. And one thing that always blew my mind was the pet scan. So a pet scan is where this is scan that you have to, you know, see where their cancer is, how aggressive it is.
1 (42m 47s):
And in order to visualize the cancer, they need to excite the cancer. So what they do to excite the cancer is to give you glucose, to fill it out with glucose, to get the cancer excited, to get it, you know, moving and groove in the body so they can visualize it. And then for, for the medical community, the mainstream medical community, to not acknowledge that there's a relationship between nutrition and especially sugar and cancer. It's just kind of mind blowing. Like this is how you assess it. Like, what do you mean? There's no relationship there. It's really kind of bizarre. So cancer code really sort of breaks down about this whole metabolic pathway to, to cancers and how we can really make a huge risk reduction, you know, and these metabolic cancers by addressing our sugar intake and our insulin levels.
1 (43m 41s):
And hyperinsulinemia in general through diet.
0 (43m 45s):
Wow. Yeah, that is, that is crazy. And I read his first book, oh God, what? Now I'm drawing a blank. What was his first book?
1 (43m 53s):
The basic code. I just got like 10 of what I mean. And, and, and
0 (43m 57s):
You live a book right? Life in the fast lane.
1 (43m 60s):
Yeah, we grow it's, it's different than the other books. Jason and I wrote it with our good friend Eve Mayer even was a hysterical Texan from Dallas, very successful, forced to be reckoned with. She is a digital marketing guru. She's built empires, but can never figure out how to lose weight and just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars had three different rounds of different types of bariatric surgeries, nothing. And a friend actually gave her a copy of the obesity code in such a fast. And she read it on an airplane and said that she was good at passing out of spite to prove that it was wrong.
1 (44m 43s):
Cause she's like, I've done everything. I spent a quarter of a million dollars. Like nothing, nothing. I've, I've gone to food, addiction, retreats, everything, nothing and well, she lost spot and, and Eve she's hilarious. She's like, I'm hot. You know, like I'm I I've been. So she emailed Jason and, and I, and she's like, listen, I'm coming to Toronto. Whether you guys like it or not. And I, I need to see you people. So we did, we had lunch with her. I met, I was a little bit like, who is this crazy crazy lady, but instantly fell in love with her. Her story was so, so deep.
1 (45m 24s):
And we realized that it really, like, we talk about all of this stuff, but there are, you know, emotional complexities that come along with it. And I remember having a talk with a colleague of mine or in Zurich, I don't have like a health conference. And he was like, what's, what's like, how do you even, you know, have a, like, what's your business? Like you just tell people not to eat. Like just don't eat, drink water, take some salt. You're fine. But there's a lot, you know, especially men and women, you know, we go through a lot over the years. So Eve story and journey, we just thought it was important, important to address that whole behavioral mindset side that goes with it.
1 (46m 7s):
So you've tell us her story and Jason and I go in and explain why, what she did, didn't work from a scientific perspective, why it did work, you know, what the practical tools were that she used to get her results. So, I mean, it's not this really deep medical dive, a scientific dive, like the, some of the other books, but I think it addresses something that's often neglected.
0 (46m 34s):
Yeah. That's great. I'll have to check that out. And my final question to you would be, and I ask all my guests, this would be is what would be, I think I know your answer, but maybe what would be your one tip for, you know, middle-aged man or woman to get their body back to what it once was like 10, 15 years ago.
1 (46m 54s):
Yeah. I, I, yeah, no snacking, I absolutely do not snack. I don't know if that's what you're going to guess, but if I could get the world to stop stacking, I think we would dramatic regardless of diet anything else. I, we would see a huge, huge reduction. And I know a lot of people think that's so silly, but I've seen it. I've seen it in tens of thousands of people, the power of just not sacking regardless of their diet and the total calories consumed in this or that. And the snacking that has more of a powerful impact.
1 (47m 34s):
So really focusing on that, and that will enable you to do some base intermittent fasting 12, 14, 16 hours a day. And that over the long-term has profound health benefits.
0 (47m 47s):
And, and just, just to piggyback off that, to avoid snacking, what would, what do you recommend, would you say, like replace it with something maybe like T you know, when you started to get those hunger cues and things like that, that to try to get out of that cycle,
1 (48m 2s):
Herbal teas, green teas are great decaffeinated coffee. If you can tolerate the caffeine and that just even minty water mint, such a great appetite suppressant, or adding a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar, the acidic acid is a great app, appetite suppressant and that. So finding these other things, you know, my, I have my few different teas that I drank throughout that my morning afternoon, my evening mint tea, and these become new rituals. And that also there are healthy rituals too. There are great benefits from, from consuming days. So those are, those types of habits are what we're really looking to improve upon when we talk about snacking.
1 (48m 50s):
So don't just try to tough it out there, but enjoy a nice,
0 (48m 54s):
Yeah. Sparkling water. I love to use that as well. I just say, take your mind somewhere else. Right? Stay busy. Maybe go for a walk. Yeah. Something just to take your mind. I always find the easiest way to fast is just to keep your mind busy by doing something else.
1 (49m 13s):
Yeah, absolutely. You can totally ride out those hungry waves by distraction because that's true. The hunger does come in waves. So I mean, if you're just flopped on the couch and inside of the kitchen, you're going to want to eat. But if you say, okay, I'm going to go up, I'm going to do some gardening. I'm going to walk the dogs. I'm going to organize a sock drawer, do some laundry. The other, that stuff will take your mind off of it. And the next thing you know, my hunger wave will be,
0 (49m 40s):
There we go. Yeah. I love that. Well, Megan, this was great. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it all. And yeah. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much. Thanks. Hey, get lean equally nation. Are you a man between the ages of 40 and 60 years old looking to lose inches around your waist have significantly more energy throughout the day and gain muscle all while minimizing the risk of injuries? Well, I'm looking for three to five people to work one-on-one with in my fat burner blueprint signature program, which I've developed by utilizing my 15 years experience in the health and fitness space.
0 (50m 22s):
This program is designed specifically for those committed, to making serious progress towards their health goals. Over the next six months, we will focus on sleep stress, nutrition, meal, timing, and building lean muscle. If this sounds like a fit for you, email me@brianatbriangrin.com with the subject line blueprint. That's brian@briangrin.com with the subject line blueprint. Thanks for listening to the get lean eat clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine. And I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member.
0 (51m 9s):
That's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
