Hello Health Champions. Today I want to talk about why intermittent fasting
burns fat faster. 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. Now anything that's successful and gets popular but that's a little bit
off the beaten path is gonna get a lot of controversy around it so we're going to
talk about five reasons why fat is burned faster when you fast the first
way that fasting helps burn fat is that it's very effective at depleting hepatic
glycogen hepatic just means liver and glycogen is a storage form of excess
carbohydrate the body can't store a whole lot of carbohydrate but it can
store some and it stores it in the muscles which is fuel for the muscles
but the the glycogen can't get from the muscles to the rest of the body
however the liver is a reserve of carbohydrate for the rest of the body
now I want to clear something up about fuel the body has three types of fuels
available carbohydrates fat and protein and it does burn them preferentially in
this order but it's not like a lot of people have said or been told that you
will only burn carbs first that you will not burn any fat until one hundred
percent of the carbs are gone that's just not how it works there's
always a mix of fuels that are being burned protein is being spared as much
as possible you really just burn protein if none of these are available or if you
have eaten excess protein if there's more protein by far available then some
of that's going to be used for fuel but carbs and fat are used in a different
proportion depending on how much is available if a
lot of carbs are available it'll burn mostly carbs and then there's a very low
incentive to burn fat so as you burn through the carbs as your glycogen
stores go down now the incentive to burn fat increases and it generally takes 12
to 24 hours to deplete the hepatic glycogen or to reduce it significantly
to where fat burning kicks in a lot of people only get about eight hours of
fasting the people who eat a late meal and then breakfast the first thing in
the morning they might only get eight hours of fasting or even less if they
sleep five or six hours and during that time you probably get into a little bit
of fat burning but very very little fat is being burned however if you can
increase that fasting period if you skip the breakfast and you have your first
meal at lunch let's say and then you have your last meal at 8 now you have a
16 hour fasting window and now you're giving your body a much much better
opportunity to burn fat and if you can stretch that even a couple of more hours
now that's two more hours where your body gets better and better where you're
shifting more and more toward fat burning and obviously they're longer you
can stretch that the more fat you burn the second way that fasting burns fat is
by reducing insulin whenever we eat something insulin is released and
insulin is a storage hormone so when insulin is high we really can't burn
much fat at all therefore lowering insulin increases fat burning and
fasting is the most powerful way to reduce insulin so by lowering insulin
fasting allows us to become fat burning and even more important long term is fat
adapted we can teach the body through longer periods of fasting longer than
eight hours at least we teach the body to use
fat as the primary fuel and as you probably know if you watched a few
videos sugar and carbs will increase insulin the most so we can start
reducing insulin by eating low carbs that'll keep insulin and glycogen
lower but if you think about it fasting is zero carbs during the time that
you're fasting you're introducing zero carbs to the body so that's the fastest
most powerful way to reduce insulin the third mechanism by which fasting
increases fat burning is that it up regulates fat burning hormones when you
fast you increase human growth hormone and while there's a lot of things such
as high-intensity interval training that can raise human growth hormone
tremendously fasting is the most powerful and the longer fast like three
to five days can increase it up to twelve hundred and fifty percent however
you don't have to go quite that long to get significant benefits even with a 16
18 20 hour fast you're still getting dramatically higher level of growth
hormone than if you're eating six meals a day a tremendous additional benefit is
that it's muscle sparing and that's another myth that you hear a lot is that
fasting would waste muscles and no it does not
unless you're just completely starving if your body has no resources then of
course eventually you're going to waste some muscle as well but fasting produces
growth hormone for the purpose of sparing the muscle and burning the fat
so that's another mechanism that allows that selective using of fat another
hormone is nor-epinephrine or nor-adrenaline and even though that is a
stress hormone we have to keep in mind that some stress is beneficial that when
we do things like exercise and cold showers and fasting those are
physiologically beneficial by stressing the body just a
little bit we give it a reason to do something better
the fourth mechanism is that fasting allows a longer period of fat burning so
once we are fat burning the more time we stay in that state then it's obvious
we're gonna burn more fat okay, you knew that but think of it this way also that
even if you eat low carb I mean if you eat high carb it's more so but even low
carb a meal is an interruption in fat burning when you don't put any fuel in
the only fuel available is on the body but as soon as you put fuel in now the
body has a choice it can burn the fuel on the body or the stuff that you just
put in and obviously it's going to reduce the burning of the fat on the
body so think about it this way if you have a calorie restriction diet you're
eating 3 meals a day plus snacks but you're eating really really low calorie
foods like hundred calorie snacks and 200 calorie meals low fat rice cakes and
things like that the blue line represents blood sugar insulin and
glycogen because all three of those go together and they interfere with fat
burning so let's say that you had a meal the night before and then you go to bed
and now you're in fat storing mode because your body has to store away it
has to process through the meal that you had but then sometime during the night
you cross over and you're done with the storing and you get into fat burning but
then you wake up and you have breakfast so now you get into fat storing again
and if you're eating really low calories then the food isn't gonna last that long
so you probably dip into just a little bit of fat burning but you're eating
high carb low fat so you have to eat frequently and you're hungry and you're
just eating is tiny tiny bites of things so you're burning a little bit of fat
but you're interrupting that fat burning throughout the day so here's
a meal and a snack and a meal and a snack and a meal and a snack and maybe
between you get a little bit of fat burning but most of the time you spend
in storing and because you're reducing calories but you're not really burning a
whole lot of fat that is what reduces your metabolism you're constantly
pushing your insulin which is storing so now your body doesn't have the fuel and
it has to slow the metabolism to compensate for that low calorie input
and then you have your evening snack and then you go to bed and you repeat the
whole process now let's say that you try intermittent fasting but you're eating
the same types of food lots of bread and pasta and oatmeal and so forth so you're
starting off at the same point and you're crossing it at the about the same
place during the night you get into fat burning but when you wake up you don't
have breakfast first thing you go four more hours before lunch and that gives
you four more hours of fat burning so you get a longer period and you get a
little bit deeper into fat burning then you have one meal and then you get into
a little bit of fat-burning before you have your evening meal and then you
start over again so this is better than this because you're allowing longer
periods of reducing insulin so your body is going to have more access to the fat
store so you're not gonna get as hungry and the incentive to lower your
metabolism is not as strong as with the frequent meals but there's always a
better way so let's combine intermittent fasting with low carb so it's the same
two meals but because it's low carbs we're starting at a lower level of
glucose we're starting with lower glycogen and lower insulin so it's not
going to take us as long we're going to hit that fat burning zone much earlier
during the night and even if we eat at the same time at lunch or in the
afternoon we have spent more time in fat
burning and we get to a much deeper more profound level of fat burning on
low-carb then we eat but we're not raising the glucose and insulin and
glycogen as much so again we get quicker back to the fat burning we're always
closer to fat burning on a low-carb diet and then of course we have our meal and
we repeat it but all in all with low carb and intermittent fasting you spend
much more time in fat burning than either of these other examples the fifth
way it helps burn fat is that it helps you eat less alright how does it do that
it helps with improving insulin sensitivity when you're fasting insulin
goes down you become more insulin sensitive and that makes more fat
available for burning the calorie counting mafia is right you have to eat
fewer calories than you burn if you want to lose weight but they're wrong in that
calories are the thing to focus on you can't just eat fewer calories you have
to eat fewer calories in a way that doesn't make you hungry and that's what
fasting allows you to do when insulin is high it's a storage hormone it packs
away the fat and when insulin goes down that fat becomes available now we have
an additional fuel source we don't have to rely just on the calories we eat we
can add the calories that were just liberated by lowering insulin so now we
have more fuel available from the body our energy reserves just the available
energy reserves just increased and therefore we get less hungry another way
is that insulin is tied to leptin and leptin is a satiety hormone when you eat
you're supposed to get full and when you put food in your body
leptin is produced and leptin tells the brain that hey I had something to eat
I'm full but insulin blunts it blocks the message
of leptin so you eat and the leptin goes to tell the brain hey I'm full but now
that message doesn't reach the brain so you keep eating you're still hungry
so by improving insulin sensitivity we also improve leptin sensitivity we have
improved we restore the fullness signaling and you get less hungry is
intermittent fasting a good diet well I don't like to call anything a diet I
just want to look at how does it work for health and how does it work for
results and does it get results absolutely can it fit into your
lifestyle and is it sustainable absolutely what's the point of doing
something if it's not sustainable if you do something that creates a certain
results but you don't maintain it then it's just a matter of time before you're
back where you started or worse so it's absolutely sustainable is it easy yes
it's the easiest thing you can do because all you do is you do less of
something you're already doing so instead of eating six meals you go down
to three and then you go down to two and maybe go down to one it's about not
doing something you're already doing how much easier could it get then there are
different patterns so which one do you pick well I would suggest that you start
with something like a 16-8 and then you go to whatever length of fasting gets
you the results that you are looking for so if you get the results with 16 hours
of fasting an 8 hour feeding window great if you need to go a little further
then that's what you do and then once you've reached the goals then depending
on your schedule and your lifestyle based on your metabolism and your
genetics then you might go to OMAD and then you might backtrack or you might
stay on one meal a day a lot of people once they've lost the weight they
probably will go back to a 16-8 or 18-6 personally I do a combination of
these three occasionally I'll do a two day fast and I plan to start doing a
three day fast about once a quarter but for the most part I just stick to these
because it's super convenient I eat one large meal a day and sometimes a smaller
one and for me that lifestyle fits perfectly I love the fact that I'm not
organizing my life around food if I get one or two meals somewhere in the day
then I'm good I don't have to wake up first thing in the morning and get some
food I don't have to worry about when I'm out where am I gonna get lunch if I
get to it great if not I'll just eat later once your body gets used to it you
will wonder why you didn't do it sooner but wait there's some bonuses also and I
know you're saying that I just wanted to lose the weight that's all I care about
but if you do this through fasting then feeling good and getting healthy is just
the terrible price that you're gonna have to pay you will reduce diabetes you
will reduce the risk of dementia you will have a lesser tendency for high
blood pressure you will reduce osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis
you will improve mental clarity and mood fasting can help normalize your
microbiome so your gut flora the bacteria living in your gut there is a
balance there and the better that balance the healthier you are it can
have a lot of influence on your immune system and your metabolism your cravings
and so forth so fasting can help improve can normalize and balance that flora and
help move you toward insulin sensitivity fasting has tremendous benefits on your
immune system and it can slow or interfere or even reverse cancer fasting
is one of the easiest way to slow aging and most of all like we've said it is so
easy and sustainable which is a great thing
that you're going to live a lot longer if you enjoyed this video and you'd like
to learn more about how the body really works I think that you'd really like that
video too thank you so much for watching I'll see
you in the next video