I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but after reading a few of Dr. Fungs books, and watching a ton of videos to learn about how fasting works, how our metabolism works, and how to ACTUALLY achieve weight loss, my perspective on what we are told to do all our lives and what the average person does has changed drastically.
It’s mind blowing to me that so many of the medical and dietary “experts” tell you advice that is straight up bad for you. “Eat several small meals per day”. “Deep calorie restriction is the best way to lose weight”. “Eat less, move more”.
When the reality is so much different than that. It’s no wonder that calorie deprivation never works when it just slowly ratchets down your metabolism.
This has led to me cringing when I see people trying to cut weight the “old fashioned” way. For example, I’m in 2 seperate diet bets on the app, and the stuff that fills my feed makes me feel terrible for people. People starving themselves, eating like rabbits, and cardio for hours, and a ton of them STILL not making their goals. Meanwhile I’m lifting for 30 minutes 3 times a week, doing a 20:4 and fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with one extended fast thrown in at the start of the month, with plans to do one 5 day per month. This means that I’ve been able to eat good food, and eat it to my fill, and still lose weight at a rapid pace. (Down about 30 since Christmas).
This has unfortunately led to me being “that guy” among my friends and family and trying to tell everyone about what I’ve learned. The reactions vary from some interested ones, some that wish I would shut up, and 1 or 2 that think I’m killing myself by skipping a meal. On the positive side, I’ve gotten my wife, my Dad and his wife, and my brother on the fasting train.
I’ll take those as big wins, and keep trying to educate people in a hopefully not annoying way haha.
I’m a nurse, people bring in snacks/food in the break room all the time for us. I can understand that stress-eating would be common in our practice but I never realized just how common. It becomes routine, almost automatic behavior when you go into the breakroom and snacks are on the table.
It feels like I’ve taken a type of red pill of nutrition. And whenever it’s brought up, “Yeah I don’t really consume grains/bread/pasta/flour/… I’m looked at like I’m crazy.. Yet there they are. Stuffing their faces and getting fatter.. thinking, “why can’t I lose the weight” and overfocusing on calories.
Eat less, move more is technically accurate, while still being condescending and dismissive. In short, it’s the asshole’s answer to the struggles of weight loss.
The rest of it… Yeah, you’re spot on. It’s pretty much all garbage. The food pyramid has been shown to be destructively wrong decades ago, yet my kids still have it in their homework. FDA still recommends drinking fruit juice with your meals, even though the fruit juices they use as examples have borderline lethal amounts of sugar in them. I’ll keep my more intense thoughts about these things to myself, but it’s clear that these folks do not work for you or your best interests.
In this world of information being an income stream, the fact that so many folks are overweight and looking for answers is just too easy to not exploit. And exploit, they do. There is WAY more bad information out there than good, and having to sift through it alone is nightmarish. Everything is a paid pill (that has literally never worked for anyone ever, yet they’re still allowed to be sold) or some plan that you have to pay for that turns out to be a coin flip. It’s heartbreakingly exhausting, and just leads these poor fools in circles.
Dr. Fung is also selling books and such, but at the very least he seems like a genuine person who actually has the best interest of the reader in mind. There is a lot of good information in there that I feel helps people get a more realistic idea of what they can do to help themselves, and I’ll applaud that. If nothing else, it seems like it has you on a much better track moving forward than other methods or ideals you may have looked into in the past.
Good luck on your journey, friend. Happy to see someone so excited to explore what their body is capable of without judgement or fear.
I think the general advice is like that so it can apply to everyone. Being an individual who is smart you can deviate slightly because you read books and acquire specialist knowledge that even a lot of doctors and health service workers do not have!
It’s still smart to have the general advice there, because if the general advice was to fast for 36 hours every week or to only eat one meal a day, well that would be an entire culture shift & who knows how well that would go. You’d probably get people fasting all week without water and dying, with the medical professionals who recommended fasting to the entire populous being culpable for the blame.
You probably know from the reaction most people have to fasting that it’s kind of hopeless to try and convince everyone. It’s best to just make the changes in your own life if you want to and allow everyone to have their own opinion on food that allows them to feel in control. You can live your life with the knowledge that fasting is healthy and causes some cool bodily cell stuff to happen like autophagy, sharing that if anyone is curious and actually asks you with the intention to listen :)
I completely agree. I’ve always practiced the conventional wisdom of what eating well and being active looked like. Then, in the last few years, I started to gain some weight and my blood work was starting to show signs of metabolic disease. My doctor kind of dismissed it as “genetics”, his nurse told me to eat more fruits and veggies. So essentially, do more of the same thing you’ve always been doing and you’ll get different results. It was utterly defeating. And for the first time, I was experiencing the judgment and bias that medical professionals have against people who they blame for their own health issues (and damn, I’m sorry to those who’ve always experienced it).
Discovering that fasting was NOT going to sink my metabolism was a huge eye opener. Now I feel like we’ve been lied to all these years and I’m learning a whole new way of being. But for the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful, like I now have a whole new set of tools to use. I’ve never minded putting in the work, but it’s hard when you don’t get results or you actually get the opposite results.
I’ve been doing different types of intermittent and extended fasting for about 7 months. My main goal is to reduce my insulin resistance and stave off diabetes. I’m still trying to find MY rhythm, but my insulin resistance is getting better, and that’s what I care the most about.
Congrats on your success and good luck going forward!