Hello Health Champions. Today i want to talk about the best
foods to eat during intermittent fasting to get the most benefits with the least
amount of hunger and suffering. Coming right up!
Hey I'm Dr Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete
and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really
works make sure you subscribe and hit that
notification bell so you don't miss anything. There are so many benefits to
intermittent fasting and weight loss is probably the number
one reason people do it but in my mind there are much more
important reasons such as lowering blood sugar reversing diabetes
reducing inflammation reducing brain fog heart disease having less risk of
alzheimer's parkinson risk of cancer goes down and
we can also improve immune function and we can live
longer not only that but we can have more
health and more joy during those extra years so the list can
go on and on and on but whatever the reason
you're doing it whatever the benefit you're getting
it all comes down to two common mechanisms
and the first one is that during the time you're not
eating your insulin goes down insulin is released in response to food
so when you don't put food in the body insulin keeps dropping for the duration
if you do that consistently for weeks and months and years
now you will reduce even stubborn cases of
insulin resistance and you can reverse type 2 diabetes in virtually every case
the second mechanism by which this works is called
autophagy and what is that well during the time that you're fasting
you're not eating you're not putting resources you're not putting new
resources into the body the body has to get much better at
utilizing the resources that are already there so the body up
regulates the crew that goes around recycling it goes out
scavenging looking for resources and it gets really good
at figuring out what's good what we want to keep
and what's junk what do we need to get rid of and in that process
we actually improve our detoxification significantly and our immune system
also during fasting our growth hormone increases
and it can go up as much as 10 fold or more
and what that does it improves fat burning but because the body also gets
really good at determining what it needs to keep and
what it needs to lose protein is really precious and the body
wants the protein for muscles and enzymes and hormones
so when you don't put protein into the body
it makes sure that it uses the protein effectively and it burns fat for energy
a lot of people when they hear fasting they think of long-term fasting
they think days or weeks without food and that's
not a bad thing to do you could go three days five days a week
ten days and do that every two to three months a couple of
times a year because what that will do is it will create very high levels
of autophagy you can reverse a lot of disease conditions
with that the problem is that it's not sustainable
as a lifestyle it's not something you do all the time
and this video is about the best foods for
intermittent fasting so we're talking about
a lifestyle intermittent fasting is where you can eat
on a regular period and fast on a regular period so you might be eating
once a day maybe eat for four hours or six hours
maybe every day maybe every other day whatever gets you to your goals
and when we do it this way it's sustainable
we can do this all the time we can do this every week
year after year so the foods we're looking for
are the ones with the most nutrition that maximize our satiety our fullness
and set us up for success and reduce the suffering
during the fasting period and while intermittent fasting can never get the
massive levels of autophagy that long-term fasting will we can still
get some autophagy on a regular basis and
that's kind of the whole point that if we can do it all the time and we can
get just a little bit that's still very valuable some people
say that carbs are not a problem with intermittent fasting and they
keep eating pizza and pasta and bread and as long as they keep a fasting
period they're doing great well that could work
for some people and for others it will be a disaster but
here's why i think that low carb is way better
if you're trying to go from a high insulin level to a low insulin level
let's say from this point to this point it's going to take
a certain amount of time for that insulin to drop where you can reverse
insulin resistance and get into autophagy but how long it
takes depends on how high your insulin is when
you start if you eat every meal with high carb
you're going to jack up that insulin so you kind of have a backlog to
compensate for each time you go into fasting
when you eat things with refined carbs like
sugar and bread and pasta and starches you trigger a lot of insulin
when you eat protein you trigger some and when you
eat fat you hardly trigger any insulin at all
and protein is very sensitive depending on how
much of it you eat because if you eat a lot of it
the body says here's an abundance we can turn
some of this into fuel so the protein becomes glucose and triggers insulin
whereas if you eat smaller amounts of protein now the body is not going to
turn that into fuel and then it triggers much less
insulin but let's say that you eat a low carb diet now
every time that you start fasting you're going to start off
from a much lower insulin level it's like
you've got a head start you've given yourself a huge advantage
not only are you going to get to that low point
much much faster but because you get there faster
you're going to spend a longer time in autophagy
and you're going to reach a much deeper level of autophagy the other thing that
carbs do is they trigger hunger and cravings if you eat
mostly fat and protein and fiber whole foods
no processed, no sugar then your glucose levels and your insulin levels
are going to stay in a very narrow range if you start eating sugar and starch and
processed foods your blood sugar starts spiking
and whenever it's really high your body makes a lot of insulin
the insulin pushes the blood sugar down quickly
so now you have peaks and valleys and anytime it's low
then it's called reactive hypoglycemia and now you get lethargic you get tired
you get headaches and most importantly you get
massive hunger and cravings carbs create unstable blood sugar but not only that
some of these carbs have drug-like effects
like sugar wheat and refined carbs they actually stimulate opiate receptors
pleasure receptors in the brain so not only are you trying to go without food
for a while but you're trying to overcome an addiction
not an easy thing to do so one more reason that
going low carb will make it much much easier
and it will reduce hunger and cravings and make you suffer
much less now let's talk about the only thing that makes this
a little tricky which is that satiety and insulin is very straightforward
if we want to get full we eat protein with fat like fatty meats we eat we add
fat to it we eat things with fiber and we get very full insulin is the same
three factors in a slightly different order
to get full we can eat tons of protein with to control
insulin we can eat protein but it needs to be moderate
however with autophagy it's very sensitive to protein even very small
amounts of protein will shut off autophagy because it's the lack of
protein that makes the body get really good at recycling those
resources a lot of research has been done around
fasting mimicking diet and they have found that
if you keep your protein under 18 grams per day then you still
maintain most of the benefits of fasting
so i know 18 grams is hardly anything and you can't do that for very
long but stay with me and we're going to come back to that and see how we can use
that to our advantage so protein becomes kind
of the balancing factor between these benefits on the one hand
satiety and insulin which is pretty simple and
if we also want to get some autophagy so animal foods like fatty fish
grass-fed meat and eggs they are the most
filling you can have these as a meal in themselves and they're very very
satisfying they're low to moderate in the insulin
response unless you eat a lot of it they're moderate to high
protein however so they're not going to be the best
for autophagy we can't have hardly any of these until we shut off the autophagy
fatty nuts are a little bit better like macadamia nuts and pecans are the best
ones especially raw they're quite filling not as much as
animal meats but pretty good they're low carb low protein they are
very high fat high fiber and they have a very low
insulin response so you can't eat tons of them
because the toffee is sensitive to both the amount of calories
and protein but you could have some of this and still
sort of stay in that autophagy zone other foods you can use
are leafy greens cabbage non-starchy vegetables like
cauliflower broccoli brussels sprouts etc
they're very low carb very low protein very low fat
they're hardly going to trigger any nutrient sensors
or insulin they're also high fiber and even though they provide a certain
volume through the fiber and they don't trigger
insulin you don't get very full it is hard for most people to eat enough
of just this to get full however if you combine it
with fat if you put some butter and olive oil on this then they can be
quite filling now let's look at the timing and see how we can
tweak the benefits a little bit let's say that you have dinner at 6 pm
one day and you eat a large meal with lots of protein and fat and fiber
you're really full you make it through the night you skip
breakfast but then you come around noon time and you start getting hungry
now you've gone 18 hours and you could push through but you're really feeling
sort of like i really want something to eat and
autophagy and these insulin resistance benefits of reversing
insulin resistance they kind of start kicking in really
after 12-14 hours so by 18 hours we're really just getting
going wouldn't it be great if we could get
another six hours out of it then we would like
triple the benefits out of this now if we had a
big meal of protein then we would shut down the process
cold the autophagy goes away insulin goes up
we broke in the fast however if we had something
small just enough to get us through and that little thing we had was
pure fat or at least very low in protein and very low in sugar now maybe we could
get those extra six hours and
we could maintain the benefits of autophagy
so if you can go the 24 hours and feel great
then do that but if you're not feeling so great and you really want something
then this is a trick that can help you get through
so what would you be using then well here's where we bring in our famous
bulletproof coffee and all that is it's black coffee or
black tea and you add some fat to it it could be
butter it could be mct oil could be coconut oil
and what that does it gives you some nutrients it gives you some
calories but it has zero carbs zero protein it's very high fat almost
zero insulin response so your body's nutrient sensors don't really
react much to it unless you exaggerate it so in the strictest sense
you definitely break your fast but from a practical standpoint you're
still getting most of the benefits of intermittent
fasting and if it helps you get from 18 hours to
24 hours you have dramatically increased the
benefits we also have different forms of fat like butter extra
virgin olive oil coconut oil lard etc they're quite filling zero carbs zero or
trace protein like in the case of butter
they're very high fat and almost a zero insulin response and
while these things are not something that you
would eat by themselves necessarily you could use them for your bulletproof
coffee and you can also put them on vegetables so if you had a salad for
example instead of the bulletproof coffee
then you're not eating enough protein or calories to really get out of that
fasting zone coconut cream is also great it's
very filling has all of these benefits that we talked about
and you can use it for your coffee you can use it as a creamer
coffee or tea and i often use it in smoothies
and you can also make some delicious hot chocolate with it
and then we get to nature's perfect food that seems to show up in
every list anyone ever does avocado because it is quite filling very low
carb very low protein moderate fat high fiber very low
insulin it meets virtually every one of these criteria and yet it has a lot of
properties of vegetables it's strictly speaking
it's a fruit but it sort of behaves like a vegetable
in many ways and i call it moderate fat compared to
other really fatty foods like nuts but for plant it is very high fat and
that's why it is more filling more satisfying in
itself than virtually any other plant i'm not
suggesting that this is the perfect list but i think it's a great list and it's a
good place to start and the reason i set it up like this is
that you if you understand the principles if you understand the
mechanisms and why these things are on the list then you can take these and
then you can expand it into similar foods and you can grow
your list and you can find out the things that work best for you
because what's really filling for one person
may not be perceived that way by another because
we're all very different if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn
more about how health really works i think that that next video will really
hit the spot for you thank you so much for watching i'll see
you next time