Hey, I love If and EF. I’m 100% sure that the right way. But I see quite a few people hate on it and specially on Dr. Jason Fung. It’s quite frustrating to people tell you you’re stupid for believing in the method that positively influences your life :(
I would recommend not talking about your diet with others, I have found people are generally not supportive or try to argue it’s unhealthy (they may support your weight loss but not the method). I love intermittent fasting and I have lost 80 lbs in the past 8 months and I have learned not to mention fasting. People have weird misconceptions about it.
I think Dr. Fung promoting fasting is exceptional. He is putting forward medical literature that is valid, ie published in British Medical Journal. He always has a way of explaining fasting that is understandable for physicians and non-medical personnel. I’ll never understand hate for this type of opinion. There may be arguments about low carb, keto that people don’t like. But from a fasting prospective, I think he and his team ie Megan Ramos are excellent.
I was just reading one of Dave Asprey’s books and he talked about how there’s a big social component to eating (duh). If you see someone eat, you want to eat. If you see someone not eating, you want to feed them, lol. It’s kind of like a tribal thing, that makes sure we share the food.
Also he mentioned that people can be insecure about their own situation, which can cause them to want to give you that lovely “advice.”
Some of my favorite pieces of advice:
(When I was on the warrior diet, eating very light things and then a big meal at night): Oh no, you have to eat every two hours to keep your metabolism going…said to me by my friend’s father, who, along with my friend, have struggled with their weight and binge eating for decades.
My friend’s mom: Have some cake! It’s good for you to have a bit of sugar. My test results are perfect! I just have high cholesterol.
Meanwhile, my uncle, who lives in Lebanon (the famous Mediterranean diet), and is somehow still alive after surviving lung cancer twice, has kidney failure, and has a double whiskey and a pack of Marlboro Reds for breakfast: You need to eat! / Me: I’m not hungry. / Him: Yes, I know, normally I would say not to eat if you’re not hungry, but you just took a bunch of Ibuprofen. (I ignored him and my stomach was not pleased.) Every time I go to Lebanon, I eat like a queen and somehow still lose weight, but there, you eat when you eat, and you don’t mess with snacks, because the food is so f-ing good that you wouldn’t dare spoil your appetite.
You don’t have to doubt something you have a good experience with and which has been a part of the natural human lifestyle since their beginning. No one can doubt that since it is used in so many cultures and religions. Food and diets are a highly controversial topic for a lot of people, especially if they make money of it. No one likes to be told that their way of eating is wrong especially when they were told their whole life to eat breakfast, or eat every few hours, or that fat or meat are unhealthy…If you personally see the results you were looking for and you feel good with it than it is not bad for you. People have a good gut feeling if they truly listen to their heart. This is also a mechanism deeply rooted in our human nature. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. No matter if it is about the way you want to eat or your feelings
Dogma. The diet subs in general make it very easy to consider diet strategies as picking teams. Once you pick a team then only your team is right and everything else is wrong. Obviously this isn’t true but human nature to simplify thinking married to the internet hive mind, creates validation for all sorts of stuff. Once you have a set of ideas that become central to the group identity and widely considered as correct, inertia will perpetuate these concepts indefinitely, which is dogma.
To the enlightened, at some point you realize many things can be true concurrently and even in harmony once you have studied it thoroughly enough. Also, it is fruitless to pick sides as everything is connected and needs to work in concert as it has evolved to do so to improve the odds of surviving long enough to procreate or propagate.
I think people hate on Intermittent Fasting because it ALMOST is assumed you can eat the same amount of calories and lose weight. When for weight loss the main benefits are really just hunger control and portion control, especially with OMAD.
Ugh I get what you mean, bringing up my IF routine usually gets people asking me if I ever eat and insinuating that I’m anorexic (which seems to be a massive disservice to those who are actually anorexic) I think a big misconception is that fasting and anorexia are the same thing, but I think people don’t realize the distinction is really a matter of having mental control.
Anorexia is a mental compulsion that causes a person to not eat, the person suffering with it doesn’t have control over it, they simply just can’t eat. A person who is fasting makes time to eat and can eat because they are hungry to eat. It’s not a mental compulsion, they have the mental control over it. They can eat when they please. Total opposites in my opinion.
I really like Dr. Fung as well. However he sometimes comes across a bit pretentious and condescending. He will say things like … “You have to be a complete MORON to believe that XYZ is true” or “even my kids are smart enough to realize that blah-blah-blah” I think that he just rubs people the wrong way.
I think though we call it “intermittent fasting “ but rationally it should have been called general dieting.
By this I mean eating 3 meals plus snacking should be branded as something out of ordinary. Like drinking soda instead of water. And IF or OMAD should be the normal or general way people ate. The world would look different if that would have been the case.
I think people hate on zealots in this space.
Fung puts out a fair bit of misinformation / spins things to his own agenda. The outcome isn’t necessarily bad (fasting can be a great tool for weight loss), but a lot of his claims are just overblown or inaccurate.
Layne isn’t perfect but a reasonable response to some of Fungs stuff in here:
https://biolayne.com/articles/research/its-not-calories-its-hormones-a-response-to-dr-jason-fung/
I know. My mom is part of of some weight-loss mlm thing, and is constantly bagging on my fasting. It’s not even worth explaining because guess whose losing weight and guess who is just spending more and more money to lose nothing at all? (It’s my mom, she’s spending money and has lost nothing)
The Obesity Code changed my life and taught me how to actually lose weight after a lifetime of yo-yo dieting. I lost 45 pounds and have been a normal weight for 4 years now. I taught my mom and she’s lost 60 lbs and my husband has lost 70… so I don’t actually know why people hate him. It’s just utilizing IF, lower carb, moderate fat and a whole foods approach most of the time.
Because every person is different. What works for you, might not work for them. People don’t want to be preached to, especially about what they eat. If it works for you (as it does for me) great, but no need to yap at others about it.
The foods we eat and the way we eat them are incredibly social and any departures from the standard way of doing things (whatever that means for the person you’re talking to) is rife for criticism.
Vegans, paleos, anyone with an unusual diet deals with the same thing.
I didn’t realize there were a lot of people ‘hating’ on fasting and Dr. Fung. It seems fairly non-controversial. I also think there’s a lot of misunderstanding on what fasting is, and everyone loves to polarize things into fake opposites so they can argue.
When people ask me about my weight loss, I tell them ‘I learned how to put the fork down’. Generally, they just nod their head in surprise at such a simple idea. Those that want to talk more about it, they get the full story of IF and Keto - that typically goes well.
Read a lot, have discussions, and use what makes sense to you. There’s no need for people to be all in with one person or approach. There can be value is parts and pieces, too. I have never had a negative interaction when talking to others about IF. But if someone wanted to shit on it, I’d ignore it. :)
I just stopped talking about it. I lost 130 pounds doing OMAD but only wife knows that. I told a few people when I started and they would get very angry or worried.
Your diet is your business. People ask how you’re doing it? Just say watching what you eat.
I can’t speak about that doctor, but I can about why people react strongly to IF (and btw, I do IF).
Much of the language and approach to IF sounds VERY similar to language one hears when speaking with people who have severely disordered eating (e.g. anorexia). People are understandably skeptical of it because anorexia is such a damaging and harmful disorder.
Because people have been told their entire life that eating 3+meals a day is the norm. Any less than that is considered “unhealthy”.
Once you start arguing with them with proofs or not, they’ll just think you’re stupid for listening to these scams.
In other words 3+meals a days is “common sense”, anyone arguing against common sense is in fact stupid. lol
I spent 8 years doing stupid calorie restriction, constantly losing and regaining and getting hungrier each time I tried that weight loss advise.
Then I found Jason’s Obesity Code, stopped counting calories, fasted 3x a week and I’ve been normal weight without hunger for 4 years now, no regain.
I got down to 12 stone in 2018 and I weigh 12 stone now. Which just highlights how absurd CICO theory is. That theory says that you gain 1lb of fat for every 3500 calories you over eat , or lose 1lb for every 3500 calories you under eat.
Yet somehow despite not counting calories for 4 years I weight exactly the same which means I managed to match energy in to energy out with 100% accuracy without even counting. Simply amazing (impossible even) . Yet according to ‘calorie theory’ if I’d over eaten by just 50 calories a day that’s 73,000 excess calories over 4 years. Divide that by 3500 and I would be 20lbs heavier now. Just from being 50 calories out. Even counting I cannot get to that level of accuracy which shows how stupid I was to even believe CICO for those 8 years.
I learned a great deal about diabetes when I read the diabetes code. I think what Fung hast to say is right on the money. However, I am not interested in extended fasting. It’s probably great for my body and I would benefit from it, but I really don’t want to go without food for more than 24 hours multiple times a week. However, I love IF and I’m trying to get to a consistent OMAD. I’m losing weight and I feel great, and I can tell it’s helping in a way that no other “diet” ever has. And a lot of that is due to his research, even if I don’t follow his specific protocol.
Dr Fung is consistently misinterpreted and taken out of context. Most critics haven’t even read The Obesity Code. His stuff works. And it costs Zero.
I had never heard the terms Insulin Resistance until my 40s! But after I learned from Dr Fung, I was able to finally lose the 50 lbs that I’d been trying to lose for decades. What you eat matters. When you eat matters. It’s sad we tear down a man that has changed so many lives with zero motive.
Dr. Fung cherry-picks and doesn’t understand how metabolism science works. One source Two source
He’s a fat-shaming asshole who tried to get someone fired when they called him out for fat-shaming.
Some people who listen to his advice can adversely damage their health, because he doesn’t call out potential dangers from the outset. If he highlighted the importance of electrolytes and refeeding syndrome regularly, I would be less angry at him.
There’s a lot more, but I’m going to opine (and probably get downvoted because the zealots want to rely on anecdote instead of a preponderance of the actual scientific research):
Fasting is great. I adore intermittent fasting because - for me - I can get better control over my habits and not graze or binge when I have that control. I started IF because of Dr. Fung’s book, and I believed all of the stuff written in it. I mean, he’s a Dr. He knows better, right?
Well… there are many doctors who have a theory and run with it, or read a couple of papers but don’t know how to determine the papers’ strengths and weaknesses. Then they develop their theory, write some books, and build their business based on confirmation bias. Ok, that happens. Fine.
For me, once I started actually looking at my own body and trying to figure out what was wrong (long story I won’t get into here), I started to read the papers beyond the headlines, learn what makes a good study vs. a bad study, and discovered that much of the fasting hype is either a) wrong, b) inconclusive, c) dangerous, or d) not as dramatic as it’s made out to be.
The Tl;dr about fasting is that it’s really just CICO. I used to absolutely loathe CICO advocates because they, too, would reduce the mechanism of caloric intake to pure calories, not accounting for the source of those calories. Dr. Fung likes to make a big deal out of insulin resistance and “controlling insulin,” but insulin levels in healthy people don’t have that big of an effect on fat retention. In fact, the best weight loss and T2 diabetes drug on the market, semaglutide, raises insulin levels. The equation isn’t simply ⬆insulin=⬆body fat. In fact, I was convinced for years that I had insulin resistance from years of yoyo dieting. But my tests were all coming back as normal. Turns out, I did have metabolic resistance related to eating crappy processed foods, and my body needs much fewer calories than I thought. Eating a lot of fiber from whole foods, stripping out ultra-processed foods, and eating OMAD have really helped heal my resistance and I’m finally losing again, albeit slowly.
Anyway, IF is a great tool for health and weight loss, but it’s not a magic pill. Dr. Fung likes to make it out to be THE TRUTH and will literally attempt to destroy people who think otherwise.
Extended Fasting is dangerous without medical supervision.
Most people who are obese and/or overweight have other conditions if not multiple conditions (ie. High/low BP, Hypertension, Diabetes, High Cholesterol, fatty liver etc.) which need to be managed under the care of a physician.
I think the dislike for Dr Fung comes from his cherry picking of data and promotion of commercial items (for me at least). But using his Doctor title he absconds from his fiduciary responsibility to protect people’s health.
Overall I don’t “hate” or “love” Dr Fung. More indifference for me. He’s probably done more good than harm with the IF trend so for that I am thankful.
Long-term, I think IF beats CR hands down. The studies are flawed that show not much benefit to IF, but if you do it consistently, and the right way, it’s the easiest way to lose weight and improve your health that I have ever seen.
I came from warrior and then leangains and then progressed into ADF OMAD on my own whim, and never heard of dr. fung until a few weeks ago.
He obviously simplifies and markets his own product, but I think the net result is positive for letting people think somewhat clearly and stop counting calories. He also probably helped popularize IF a lot.
I am an even bigger fan of the women running the associated podcast though. They are amaaaazing! I hope they return from holiday soon.
Had no idea people “hated” on Fung but I bought his book, the concepts seemed simple enough for me, and I’m almost a week into this fasting thing and I’ve experienced the changes that were predicted and things are going for the better. No ragrets
I’ve started back on doing it for 5 of 7 days a week. I’ve been trying to encourage my mom to join me and for whatever reason she gets super defensive about it. She wouldn’t with any other weight loss ideas, just IF for some reason. She claims she looked into it and it’s bad for women who are going through menopause. I haven’t seen that. I wish she would just try it for a couple days.
Intermittent fasting is life for me. I weigh less now at 25 than I did in 8th grade.
I’ve lost 75 pounds in 130 days. And I feel so good. I’ve seen doctors say intermittent fasting is the holy grail of weight loss and I’ve seen them say it’s garbage.
It goes crazy for me though and that’s all I care about. Let the results speak for themselves
People are are passionate about diets and other ring people who deviate from their own. It’s very bizarre but it seems too deeply ingrained for people to behave rationally about. Look at vegans. People just eating plant based diets and people are loosing their god damned shit about it.
So I used to work for Dr. Fung’s Fasting Method. Now I run my own fasting program. The public consensus towards fasting has changed considerably over the past 3-4 years. When I started seeing clients I would say that 75% of them said their GP was not on board with them starting the program. Now, I’d say 75% of them either sent them to us or are very much a fan and in support of fasting as a form of therapeutic weight loss and disease reversal.
Now I find most of the people who talk negatively about fasting are the calories in / calories out crowd that refuses to engage in the science and read for themselves. There’s a small group of bodybuilder/meatheads that talk smack about fasting too even though we’ve coached pro athletes in the NBA, MLB, NFL and UFC. Whatever.
It’s the same reason people hate on Dave Ramsey. When you make a name for yourself in a particular space people nitpick every word. IF works just like the baby steps work. That’s enough for me.
I don’t have to agree with everything Jason Fung says.
There isn’t just one way to eat…just like there isn’t just one body type. We can adhere or not not to his words… but before condemning, hating or even agreeing with a person, do some research… try them out.
It may not be for everyone, but for me, it suits me perfectly.
I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in 2020… and my “warrior” temperament meant that I read a lot, and I greatly reduced my carbohydrates… and intermittent fasting helped me helped a lot. I was around 13.7 mmol/L on average… now I am on average at 5.13 mmol/L.
I’ve lost weight, I feel full of energy… and I no longer feel like snacking all day/evening (even though I no longer like the junk food I used to love so much). My body thanks me!!!
I think people are so carb addicted that anything counter to eating every 2-3 hrs angers them to the core. I believe its partially if not wholly due to being in a chronic state of systemic inflammation… in essence they are actually mildly to heavily brain damaged.
People still believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that idea came from a commercial.
See examples of how it was created here:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfast-health-america-kellog-food-lifestyle
So its not hard to understand how people defend “knowledge” they held for large portions of their life.
I think it’s because some people believe in CICO more than IF, and that others feel the idea of “diabetes reversal” to be an aggrandisement of what is just “diabetes control”. Also there are studies showing that the purported benefits of fasting aren’t all really there.
Personally, I feel that it’s just different strokes for different folks. The reality is that if your goal is losing weight or just overall feeling healthier, you should consult a physician and see which of these methods work best with your schedule, habits, etc.
Theres MMA fighters like GSP who do IF because of health conditions like colitis and he’s said it makes him feel 100% better and more energetic (obviously with a physician monitoring him to make sure his body is internally reacting well to it too), so I think it’s important to look at the specific individual situation