Hello Health Champions.
Intermittent Fasting is taking the world by storm because there's so many benefits to
it the only drawback is that you might get hungry so today when it talk about five tips
to control hunger during intermittent fasting coming right up hey I'm dr.
Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor in a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly
Master Health by understanding how the volume really works make sure you subscribe and hit
that notification Bell so you don't miss anything I want to go over five ways that you can control
your appetite when fasting and then at the end I'm going to throw in a little bonus to
tie it all together so make sure that you stay tuned intermittent fasting is simply
time-restricted eating so for example if you had one meal at noon and then one or two meals
until 4 then you would have a 4-Hour feeding window and a 20 hour fasting window other
ways of fasting would be a 16-8 which would be 16 hour fasting and 8 hours of feeding
doesn't really matter how you do it it's just that you allow a longer fasting period
to reduce insulin and some people would also go on fasting for several days if they have really
stubborn insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes or if they just want to make it happen faster
so however long you go fasting chances are you might get hungry so we're going to talk
about how to control that some of the benefits are weight loss insulin production and insulin
resistance and type 2 diabetes it can boost immunity it can boost autophagy. It can boost
mental Clarity and benefits go on and on you can even build a better brain you make more
human growth hormone and more brain derived neurotrophic Factor when your fasting and
those both those hormones are essential for making new brain tissue and new connections
and the only thing that could really sabotage all these benefits is that for some people
if they don't eat they get hungry first of all we want to understand hunger so most people
who have never missed a meal mind you they think that it's simply a linear function of
time that the longer you go without eating the hungry or you get and that is just not
how it works hunger is not linear it's not constant it varies and it varies according
to a hormone called ghrelin and the body produces ghrelin at certain times of the day that usually
are habitual so whenever your body has learned that it's time to eat such as breakfast lunch
and dinner is when it has learned to release some ghrelin to make you hungry at those times
but what most people don't realize is that if you release ghrelin and you don't eat it
will still go down and then if you increase it again and you don't eat it will go.
Again so what actually happens for most people over time is that ghrelin actually reduces
and they get less and less hungry when they don't eat but even knowing that about ghrelin
you still want to expect to get hungry it will happen and when it happens it's usually
because you're not fat adapted if you are fat adapted your body has access to Fat to
Fat stores for fuel and it doesn't sense any lack it just goes on with business if you get mood
swings and if you get low energy and you lose focus you get irritable when you miss a meal
that simply means you're not fat adapted that means your body does not have metabolic flexibility
it doesn't know where to get energy if you don't eat for a few hours that's not a normal
situation.
But if you stick with it you will become fat adapted and these things will go away hunger will
come and go it's not a constant it doesn't increase linearly so if you ignore it or if
you have something to drink then it will go away next thing to know about Hunger is that
it's just hunger right it doesn't mean that you're going to die it doesn't mean that you
have something to worry about there is a little bit of anxiety there's a little bit of fear
involved because there's a certain Survival tied to hunger that if we didn't know where
the next meal would come from then it would make sense for the body to create that urgency for the
body to go out and look for food but fasting is very different from starvation because
with starvation you don't know where the next meal is going to come from that's very fearful
but if you have the freezer full of food you know that there's plenty of food and now that
hunger it's just hunger it's just a body sensation you can choose to ignore it it's kind of like
muscle aches if you're working out if you're sitting in the sofa you don't expect to have
muscle aches if you working out with dumbbells until your muscles start burning now you expect
that pain and then that pain is normal that body sensation is normal but you don't worry
about it cuz you know why it's there same thing with Hunger it's just the body sensation
if you know that there is nothing to worry about your life's not in danger it's just
there because you're pursuing a goal then there's nothing to worry about and you'll
be okay and finally hunger it will get easier as your body becomes more fat adapted as your
body learns to use fuel then it gets easier and easier and easier now that you know that hunger is
nothing to worry about though there's still some things that you can do to make
the ride a little smoother and next thing is to add minerals because when you fast your
insulin goes down fasting is the most powerful way there is to reduce insulin levels and
Insulin holds on to sodium so when insulin goes down you're gonna lose sodium and the body
might even increase insulin in order to be able to hold onto sodium these minerals and
glucose and things like that are precious resources in the short-term and the body will do what
it needs to do to maintain a stable level so by increasing minerals by making sure that
you get enough sodium and potassium and magnesium and calcium then you can actually control
hunger you can be less hungry simply by making sure that your body has enough minerals fluids
go together with minerals because fasting reduces insulin insulin makes you lose some
sodium and with that sodium you also lose water so drinking plenty of fluids has two
purposes one is to make sure that you restore you rehydrate the fluids that you've lost
the second is that fluids often make you less hungry that very often your body just wants
something and if you just give it something then 10 minutes later you're not hungry anymore
and the best drink obviously is water next best would be herb tea next green tea and then
black tea and coffee and why are they in that order because more caffeine in some people
and depending on how much you have it's not typically a huge problem but it can be that
more caffeine can trigger stress which can trigger cortisol which will raise blood sugar
and Trigger insulin so it's not something most people have to worry too much about but
you also don't want to go ahead and just drink 10 12 cups of coffee because that probably will
backfire fasting tool number four is called Bulletproof Coffee and that's simply coffee
with butter and what it does it provides you some calories it provides you a little bit
of satiety but it does it with negligible insulin right so your insulin is dropping
because you're fasting and then along when you have your Bulletproof Coffee which is
pure fat then you get a tiny little blip and then it keeps dropping so it's negligible
however if you can you're better off not having the Bulletproof Coffee because fasting straight
through is always going to reduce insulin more but you use the Bulletproof Coffee as
a tool if it's the difference between making it through the fast or not right so use it
if you have to but if you don't feel you need to then just skip it and tip number five
is to combine intermittent fasting with a low-carb diet because carbs act as drugs
the brain has opioid receptors that can get stimulated by things like sugar and wheat primarily but also carbs in general that's
why they give a lot of that pleasurable effect but realize that it's a drug and it makes
you eat more carbs are also less satiating you can have a huge meal and pasta or rice
and still be hungry two or three hours later that's not going to happen if you eat protein
and fat and of course this results in carbs making you hungrier next good reason to have
a low-carb diet when your fasting is that carb increase insulin and that's the whole
point of doing the fastest to reduce insulin and when you increase insulin you prevent
fat burning so that negates the goal but worse than that it makes you hungry because if you
can't get to the fact if you can't burn the fat now you not as flexible don't have the
same metabolic flexibility because you just locked away some of the fuel another very
powerful way that insulin makes you hungry is it blocks leptin so anytime you eat your
body makes leptin which is the satiety hormone the leptin signals to the hypothalamus that
you've had enough to eat we've got enough fuel we got enough nutrients with full we're
done let's hold off for a while while carbs and Insulin will block that message the brain
doesn't sense that you've had enough to eat and you keep eating and of course you get
hungrier and one more way that low carb makes it easier is that the lower carbs to eat the
more ketones you make and ketones are another source of energy for the body especially the
brain and when the body and the brain has enough energy from those ketones then the ketones
act to reduce hunger now think of Keto and fasting as being related even though you're
eating some food when you're doing keto you're still eating in a way that you're allowing
the body to do fat burning to get fat adapted and when your're fasting obviously fat is the
primary fuel because that's your long-term storage and they both allow for you to become
fat adapted very quickly and that makes for a much easier transition so if you were to
allow yourself to go low carb or maybe keto for a week or two or three however long it
gets you to get comfortable with fat adaptation you will find that you almost want to start
skipping meals because your body is just found that metabolic flexibility so the transition
would be much much easier to do intermittent fasting on a low-carb diet than on a high
carb diet. It's different for different people some people can eat pizza and then go fast but
for other people it becomes a nightmare and here's the bonus I talked about meditation
why do I keep harping on meditation because we live in a culture where we like tangible
things we understand a pill we understand food they're their tangible we can touch them
but stress and meditation it's sort of abstract we have a hard time grasping how powerful
it can be but I'm here to tell you that sometimes the intangible can be more powerful than the
other stuff as far as controlling hunger and mood on so forth the thing that meditation
does it creates a relaxation response and when you're relaxed you're less anxious and
jittery and less prone to go looking for food and that's just one thing itself but it does so
much more that relaxation response activate your parasympathetic nervous system and with
that you reduce the stress you reduce the cortisol you reduce the insulin and you
reduce hunger and you do all of this at a physiological at a neurological level it's
like it's built into your body is like you flip a switch that's how powerful it is I'm
sure everyone watching can relate to how anytime that you're stressed you kind of get some
Cravings you feel an urge to eat something well during a fight flight response your body
is looking for resources to deal with some danger it wants to top off your fuel stores
so it says give me some sugar give me some fast fuel just in case and that's where we get these cravings
But if you can create more relaxation, more parasympathetic activity then stress goes down cortisol insulin and hunger it can
be very very powerfu. So put these ideas to the test and let me know how it works if you
enjoyed this video make sure you also check out that one thanks so much for watching I'll
see you in the next video