Intermittent fasting versus eating six meals a day for best fat burning. Is fat
burning really just about having a calorie deficit or are there other
factors that matter, such as the types of food that we eat and how often we eat. Do
they actually influence our hunger and our behavior and our metabolism? Today we
went to sort all of that out so you understand all the basics. 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 that you don't
miss anything. So the government guidelines tell us to eat a diet of high
carb and low fat because fat has too many calories. So if we eat less fat, then
we eat fewer calories, and they say that's the key to losing weight and most
guidelines around the world have similar messages. Then why is it that obesity and
being overweight and insulin resistant has shot through the roof not just in
the US but all around the world. It's pretty much a majority in the Western
world who is overweight now and the rest of the world is is catching up pretty
quick. So either it's just that the planet has all of a sudden become
inhabited by a bunch of people who are too lazy to exercise, they have voracious
appetites, they eat too much, and they have no willpower to stop eating. It's
either that or there's something wrong with the guidelines or the food. So let's
talk about which one it might be. If we just look at the math it makes a lot of
sense that it would just be calories in calories out. And if you want to lose
weight then if you eat fewer calories and you maintain your calorie
expenditure you should lose weight right. And then the math would say that if you
let's say you burn 23 hundred calories and you eat 1,800 calories, then you have
a deficit, and it wouldn't matter what kind of food you ate or how often you
ate. So if you ate a thousand calories of butter or a thousand calories of potato
chips shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter if
you eat 300 calories six times a day or 1800 calories once a day or 900 calories
twice a day. Mathematically it should be the same. Then why is it so different in
people's experience. When people try the intermittent fasting,
why are they getting better results. The first thing we have to understand is
what insulin is and what it does. So every time you eat something, you put
food in your body; you put fuel in your body your blood sugar goes up. And
there's always an insulin response to that. If you eat fat there's a tiny tiny
insulin response if you eat protein it's a moderate and if you eat
carbohydrate it's a large insulin response and if you eat processed carbs
or sugar it's a huge response. Insulin is released in response to that blood sugar
and it helps open up the cells. It's like the key that opens the cell to let the
blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cell. That's the role. That's
what insulin is. That's what it does. That's the purpose. Now here's what
happens that if we have more glucose. If we have more fuel available than we can
burn in this moment, the excess blood sugar has to be stored and therefore
insulin promotes the conversion of glucose to fat because when we can't
burn all the glucose right in this moment and we can't store very much, we
have to convert we have to turn the rest of the glucose into fat. That's called
lipogenesis. And you can look that up in any physiology textbook medical
physiology. Insulin promotes, insulin drives lipogenesis - the formation of fat.
That's a fact that we just need to know about insulin. The second thing insulin
does is because it's so good at sort of guiding fuel into the cell, it also
prevents the exit of fuel from the cell. So when there's a lot of insulin
fuel tends to go into the cell and become fat, but it also becomes a whole
lot harder for the fat to leave the cell. And therefore insulin stops lipolysis -
the breakdown of fat. Okay so those are two things we absolutely have to
understand about insulin besides the fact that it takes glucose into the cell
it promotes the formation of fat and it stops the breakdown
the usage of fat. So you can store the fat but if there's a lot of insulin in
your body then you can't use it. So another way of saying that is
lipogenesis, the formation of fat, happens at the same time, it's part of
the same mechanism that promotes storing of fuel. And lipolysis is part of the
breakdown of fat is part of burning fuel so insulin promotes storing and it
prevents burning so we're going to look at that in terms of these in the context
of these graphs. So let's say that you're doing intermittent fasting that you've
cut back your carbs you eat fewer meals you skip breakfast and you've learned to
eat twice a day. What does that look like well the black here is your blood sugar
and once you have established a balance then your blood sugar is going to be
stable and then you eat and your blood sugar goes up and then insulin rises in
response to that blood sugar just like we said. And insulin is the red one. And a
little bit after thirty to sixty minutes after the meal we have an insulin peak.
That's when the blood sugar has been the highest and that's when insulin has been
mobilized to get that blood sugar out of the bloodstream and then insulin starts
falling again. So if we have six or eight hours between the meals there's going to
be enough time for that insulin to drop down especially if we're insulin
sensitive. So there's going to be a period where we are actually in fat
burning again. And then we eat our second meal and insulin rises, insulin takes the
fuel out of the bloodstream, insulin drops and we're back in fat burning. So
if you eat twice a day and your insulin stays high for a couple of hours each
time and you're in fat burning the rest of the time then the blue here would
represent when you're in storage mode. That would be this long and this long so
probably about four hours that your insulin is elevated and you're in
storage mode. The rest of the time your body backs off on the insulin and
you have access to burn the fuel. So let's look at a graph example of what it
might look like if you're doing intermittent fasting. So let's say that
you have started eating twice a day . So you start the day with fasting you don't
eat anything at first and the black line here represents your blood sugar and
your food intake so it's flat and stable then around a few hours into the day you
eat a meal and your blood sugar Rises that's the black line your insulin the
red line increases in tandem it increases in response to that it Peaks
shortly after the food it starts dropping and if you have long enough
between the meals then chances are then it'll drop pretty low before you eat
again and then insulin rises and it falls a couple hours later. So all in all
in terms of storage versus burning you will spend most of the morning in fat
burning and then you'll after each meal you spend a couple of hours in fat
storage and then you spend the rest of the evening in fat burning so all in all
you're probably about four hours four five six hours maybe in storage mode and
you're about 20 hours in fat burning mode so your body has a lot of
flexibility in retrieving the fuel when it needs it. When insulin backs off when
we get out of storage mode and into fat-burning mode we have a lot of time
to balance out the body. But then let's look at if we eat the same number of
calories so let's say here that we ate nine hundred calories twice a day for a
total of 1,800 calories then the math would say we can eat the same calories
six times a day if we eat 300 calories per meal it still comes out 1,800 and
then it would look like this we wake up we have a quick shower and then we
breakfast and then we have a morning snack and we have lunch and an afternoon
snack and dinner and an evening snack. So six times a day we raise our blood sugar
and the insulin stays low during the night but then it rises with the first
meal but because of the frequent meals it doesn't have time to go down before
there's some more fuel. there some more food in the bloodstream that provokes that
stimulates a new spike of insulin. So insulin kind of stays high it bobs here
on top and we are in fat storing mode for probably about 14 hours a day under
this model most people are going too fast during the night unless you just
eat very very late or you wake up in the middle of the night and got to have
something most people probably get about 10 hours of fasting but that means
you're more in a storage mode than you are in a burning mode. There's more time
for the body to store stuff than it is to burn, so even though you're eating
fewer calories your body tends to not lose as much weight so that's factor
number one that the frequent meals never lets the insulin go down so you spend
more time in that's a big deal but there's more to it
so now what happens because you don't have access because insulin is high and
it prevents, it stops lipolysis - you don't have access to your
energy stores it's gonna make you hungry. That's something that's rarely mentioned
that you can look this up in the physiology textbook they're not
typically going to mention this because that's more an experiential thing that
insulin makes you hungry. Frequent meals make you hungry. The more often you eat
the hungrier you get because you teach your body you make your body dependent
on the frequency because of the more often you eat the more insulin you have
the harder it is to get to the fat so you become dependent on frequent meals.
You get hungrier and you want to eat more frequently the more frequently you
eat so it's like a vicious cycle. And then one more thing happens that the
body is all about survival so right in the beginning you're eating 1,800
calories and let's say that you're burning 2300 now you have a 500 calorie
deficit so according to the math you will be losing one pound a week. So
initially you'll actually lose a little bit more because you lose water. You lose
about 3 pounds of water the first few days and then after that according to
the math and this holds true for a while you will lose probably a pound a week
for a while. Then what happens is because you're more in storage than burning mode
and because you're getting fed all the time but you're never getting fed quite
enough and now your body starts sensing that there's a famine there's all this
food here but I'm never getting quite enough so in order to preserve resources
because the body can't really see the fat stores that you have. They're sort of
invisible in in the presence of insulin so the perception is that there's not
enough food even though you're feeding the body six
times the perception becomes there's not enough food I'd better slow down the
metabolism I'll better save my energy for later. So now the body slows its
metabolism it saves up and it drops the metabolism for example hypothetically to
2050 so now even though you are eating the same number of calories now all of a
sudden you're only losing half a pound a week. And this is the experience of
virtually every person who have ever tried calorie restriction diets is they
notice the math does not hold true the math lies because the you're not a
machine you you're you're an organism with behavior that the organism wants to
survive so it's going to change the rules to make it longer to live longer.
And if you keep this up what typically people find is there comes a time where
they plateau where their body simply adjusts to the fuel intake and even if
you eat 1,800 or 1500 or even 1200, your body just burns less and
less and less. It down regulates the metabolism to the point where you
plateau no matter how little you eat and unfortunately this is the experience of
millions and millions of people. If you've tried this you know how true that
is. So your weight loss curve typically looks like this you drop a lot of weight
in the beginning then it slows down and then it plateaus and then it starts
going up again even though you're eating less than ever. And then you say I can't
stand it anymore. I give up and you go back to eating your 2,000 calories or
2500 calories and now not only do you gain the weight back
but you probably end up weighing more than you did. And now all you
accomplished was you lowered your metabolism. So you can't lose weight
without reducing the insulin long-term. And if you have gained weight over time
you are most likely, 98 percent chance you are insulin resistant so there's no
way of losing that weight long-term unless you reduce the insulin resistance
and you can't do that if you keep your insulin high for 14 hours a day. And if
you're very insulin resistant you might have to even go from two meals a day to
one meal a day and the principles would hold the same that you're fasting during
during all the time that you're fasting you're in fat-burning you eat one meal
somewhere in the day your insulin spikes but you're only in fat storing for a
couple of hours and then a couple hours later your body gets into fat-burning so
you have 22 hours out of 24 where your body can lower the insulin level and
that is the only way that you're going to lose weight long term. So now if we do
the math again then 1800 calories ingested in to or one meal 2300 calories
burned a deficit of 500 calories because the deficit is necessary to lose weight
the question is what is the body going to do to compensate. And in this case
you're going to lose hypothetically the predicted one pound a week but you're
not going to reach a plateau because the insulin is lower you have access to the
body's fat stores. You're not in a state of deprivation. You're not like in in
this case your body perceives a shortage of food. That's not going to happen here
because there is no shortage when insulin is low because then you have
access to the fat stores and there's plenty of food whether you put it in
through your mouth or whether the body gets it from from the stores so now
you're going to find that the weight loss curve it is going to slow down
inevitably because people lose the most it's kind of in as a percentage of what
you weigh so the less you weigh the more weight
you lose the lower that percentage is. So it will drop down and it typically won't
plateau until you reach your normal weight your ideal weight. Because the
body is wise. It knows how much it's supposed to weigh if you allow it
balance. If you allow it a set of circumstances where it has the
flexibility to decide these things for themselves in the presence of insulin
and force feeding it doesn't have the option to decide. Whenever you eat so
much that the insulin has to rise the body is pushed it doesn't have the
choice to do one thing or the other. It has to get rid of that blood sugar it
has to get the blood sugar out of the bloodstream into the cell and and that's
the only way it's going to work. So if you want to burn fat the way to do it is
to reduce insulin and the two factors to reduce insulin is one to reduce
carbohydrates the second is to reduce the frequency. And that's why a calorie
is not a calorie is not a calorie. It makes all the difference if it
stimulates insulin more or less they're different calories. They're different calories
both in how they affect your behavior - your hunger - but also in how they affect
your body's survival instincts and the metabolism. So try this out for yourself
because if you have trouble losing weight it's not because you'll have a
voracious appetite and can't control yourself it's not because you're too
lazy to exercise and it's not because you don't have any willpower. It's
because you have insulin resistance. So how often you eat is not only important
it makes all the difference. If you enjoyed this video then I'm sure you're
going to love that one thank you so much for watching and I'll
see you next time