hello health champions today i want to talk about
fasting or intermittent fasting versus eating less and we want to really
understand what happens in the body when you restrict
the period of time that you eat food during the day
such as an intermittent fasting versus if you restrict the calories or the
amount of food that you eat in each meal such as infrequent meals and calorie
restriction and we want to understand fully how
these two methods compare and differ in terms of insulin
resistance and diabetes and of course weight loss
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 let's first look at two
different statements the first one is in order to lose weight you have to eat
fewer calories than you burn the second statement is
in order to lose weight you simply have to eat
fewer calories than you burn and at first glance
to most people they look like the same thing but
the first one is totally true and the second one
is absolutely false but unfortunately most people don't see the true
difference between these two statements including doctors and dietitians and
policymakers and that is why there are billions of
people who have unsuccessful weight loss attempts the
prevailing official weight loss model is called
calories in calories out eat less exercise more and it says the
following that if you eat 1500 calories and you're
burning 2 000 calories if your basic metabolism is 2 000 calories
and you cut back to eating 1500 then you will have a shortage
or a deficit of 500 calories per day and if you keep that up for seven days
you'll have a deficit of 3500 calories per week
and you will lose one pound of fat per week
that's what the math says and therefore according to the math
if you weigh 200 pounds you are burning 2
000 calories and you eat 1500 calories then a year later you will weigh 148
pounds you lose one pound per week in a straight line that's what the model
says that's what the math says unfortunately
there's only one problem with this and that is
it doesn't work sound familiar it never worked it never will work and
if you're watching this video you probably know
that it didn't work for you either in reality
the results look more like this you cut back by 500 calories
you lose some weight initially you even might lose
faster than the predicted one pound per week because you're going to lose some
extra fluids in the beginning but pretty soon the weight loss slows
down eventually it plateaus and then
the body starts gaining and before long you're back to where you started
but the idea of calories in calories out is so
strongly ingrained in our culture that when they observe this then they say
well obviously you're not doing it right
because the model can't be wrong so if you're
not getting the straight line results then there's something wrong with you
you might be cheating you might be eating things
you're not confessing to you might be actually
eating more calories than you think you are you may not be measuring you may not
understand this properly or you might not be burning as many
calories as you think your exercise might be less than what you think it is
and science doesn't lie is an argument that
if the science if the math and the model predicts a straight line
weight loss then that's what should happen and if it doesn't happen
then there's something wrong with you because
of course math is math math can't lie and physics the law of thermodynamics
says that the energy of a system is constant
and the system predicts a straight line weight
loss so if science says one thing and we're
observing something different what are we missing
well it's not that math or physics is wrong
it's just that they're not the only science out there
and when we look at the calories in calories
out as the simple and only part of that argument then we're missing
a whole branch of science called biology because living
things like humans and tigers and bacteria
and any living organism it has behavior and it has goals guiding
that behavior and the strongest behavior and goal of all
is the survival instinct a math equation doesn't have behavior the law of
thermodynamics doesn't have survival instinct
they're kind of inert but living things have goals they want to survive
and to that effect they're going to vary their amount of hunger their metabolism
their hormones and these are going to change your behavior
so hormones like ghrelin for hunger and leptin for satiety
or insulin for storage or human growth hormone
to build tissue or burn fat these hormones will
override any kind of willpower in the long run that's why we can't
fight this we have to correct the hormonal balance if we want to have
success in the long run so now that we understand that there's
an additional science called biology let's look at how the math changes and
look at a concept called setpoint so in the beginning there's no difference we
still have a 500 calorie deficit on week one
and we're losing a pound or even more per week but then
as time goes on the body changes behavior based on perception it makes
different interpretations about your circumstances and your environment
so a few weeks into it you're eating the same amount
but now you're not burning the same amount
the body senses that there is a shortage we don't have the same availability
of fuel anymore so now even though you're eating the same your
deficit is down to 200 and your weight loss
has slowed to 0.4 pounds per week and if time goes on and the body gets
more and more concerned about its survival then it
might cut the consumption the metabolism the
burning down to 1300 so now you start gaining weight
you start putting on some weight even though you're eating the same amount of
calories that resulted in weight loss initially
so what is this thing called set point is there
a place in the body is there something we can measure show me the set point
no it's a concept and it's a concept based on the behavior of the
body so it is not something we can measure
there's no lab marker for it but we know based on
countless observations and you probably observed this yourself
that with the constant input the body changes the output the body's behavior
changes and we think we reason that
the body has a set point it tries to return
to this and it works both ways so for a lean person who is athletic and
not insulin resistant they could double
their calories and not really gain weight the body compensates by
increasing the metabolism just like it does
by decreasing so we know the body changes
its behavior to stay around a certain weight and that's what we call the set
point so let's look a little deeper on this set point and
how it normally works in your favor that let's say you start at a set point
of 150 that's what your body believes it should weigh then you eat some food
your body releases some insulin to process that food and to
store some of that excess as fat so you gain a
few pounds as those fat cells fill up they start
releasing leptin which is the satiety hormones that
signals the brain that we have enough we've got some extra
fuel we have some reserves so you can reduce your appetite and stop
eating so leptin signals to reduce appetite
so we don't have to eat anymore and while we're not eating
now we can burn through those fat stores and as we burn through we return to our
original weight of 150 pounds so in this way it
helps us maintain a set point and then of course once we're back to
starting point now the leptin goes down so when leptin goes down we're not
as satisfied we're not as full and we signal ghrelin ghrelin is
released which is hunger and the hunger goes up so we can eat
again and we can repeat this over and over so
in this way the set point helps us but now let's
look at how that set point works against us when we disturb the balance
when we have frequent food and especially if we have
processed food high sugar high starch foods then they create excessive insulin
responses and we have frequent meals so now we
have chronic excess insulin which creates insulin
resistance and chronic fat stores so now we gain
weight but now here's the difference that these
fat stores they release leptin and that leptin is supposed to turn off
our hunger it's supposed to make us feel satiated
but in the presence of insulin when we become insulin resistant
due to high levels of insulin on an ongoing basis
the feedback mechanism doesn't work what is supposed to sense satiety gets
desensitized so even though you're gaining fat you're
still hungry you don't have that sense of
fullness you have corrupted the feedback mechanism
so you keep eating and you keep storing fat even though you already had plenty
of it so this is how we gain weight and it
might be a few pounds at first but over the course of
years and decades it just keeps going up and up and up and
the mechanism that's supposed to return us
to our set point has been distorted it has been corrupted and the reason
this feedback mechanism doesn't work anymore now is
because of insulin and leptin resistance so now
even though we keep adding to the fat stores even though we keep gaining
weight we're still hungry and we keep eating
now let's look at a little more detail on how exactly
intermittent fasting or time restricted eating compares
to frequent small meals because according to the calories in calories
out model it's all about calories so if you eat
300 and 300 and 300 five times a day that is 1500 calories
that should still work and in their minds according
to the math of calories and calories out it's exactly the same thing as eating
600 plus 900 calories in two meals closer together because
it's still 1500 calories then why is that
not the same thing because the insulin response is different
so if we eat five small meals then there is
five times per day that we trigger insulin and every time we trigger
insulin and there's only a short period till the next meal it doesn't
allow the insulin to drop very much and if we have a meal at six
and we have a late night snack at nine or ten
then we're basically still at midnight we're still in insulin resistance mode
and it's only after we've been sleeping for a while that it drops
a little bit during the morning hours with intermittent fasting
when we have a shorter feeding period we have the last meal at six o'clock
that leaves us enough time that by midnight we already have a few
hours where insulin has been dropping and then
during the early morning hours it keeps dropping
lower and lower and lower and then because we don't have breakfast
first thing it keeps dropping even lower so it's both the time frame
and how deep the insulin is how low the insulin is allowed to drop
if we compare them side by side it's even more obvious
that with the frequent meals the only time that we are allowing insulin to
drop where we're becoming more insulin
sensitive is for about six hours in the morning 25 of the day
we are becoming insulin sensitive for the rest
of the 75 of the day we are either neutral or
promoting insulin resistance with insulin levels being high
we're being in storage mode with intermittent fasting on the other hand
we are already a few hours into insulin sensitivity of lowering
insulin before midnight and then we have 16 hours in total before the first meal
so during all this time we are getting a continuous slow
lowering of insulin resistance and it's only
for about a third of the day eight hours that we're either neutral or promoting
so the proportion of time that we are in insulin sensitivity versus insulin
resistance promoting insulin resistance is very
very different and that is why intermittent fasting is
so much more powerful and this is why intermittent fasting
actually works because when we allow insulin to drop for a
longer period of time then we also lower insulin resistance
over time it might take weeks or months or even
years but that's the only way that we can lower insulin resistance
and now we're shifting the body's tendency
the whole metabolism shifts from a storing tendency
to a willingness to burn energy and with reducing insulin we also reduce
leptin resistance which of course will change our appetite we don't get as
hungry as a result of all that we lower the set point and an additional
bonus is that with longer fasting we increase
human growth hormone which is tissue building muscle sparing
and fat burning so if you truly understand this it has
very very little to do with calories you can't deprive yourself you can't starve
yourself and get long-term results and i hope
that you can see by now that it's all about the intelligence of the body
understanding what is going on that once we can restore balance and change
the set point the body sees the truth about what's
going on and it is willing to lose the weight if you
enjoyed this video i think you'll love that one next
thanks so much for watching i'll see you next time