Booklog 84/2022: Jason Fung: The Obesity Code

[jacey]

Excellently read by Brian Nishi.

I have long been a fan of Dr Jason Fung’s attitude to losing weight. Following his ideas is the only time I’ve lose weight and – most importantly – kept it off. So a few years ago I lost 2 stone (that’s 28 pounds) and I have not put it back on. It’s time to try again. So while I was starting my new eating regime, I listened to this book on Audible and it boosted my resolve.

Some years ago, a friend alerted me to a series of Youtube videos by Dr Jason Fung, a nephrologist from Canada. He discovered that in order to not only lose weight, but to keep it off, you need to reset your body's expectation of what the right weight is for you. If you start off at 15 stone, that's what your body thinks is normal, so any diet (calorie counting/Atkins/whatever) will always be successful at first. but the more you lose, the harder it gets - until you're eating 800 calories a day and gaining weight (certainly not losing it). So, you get fed up, stop dieting and wham, the weight piles back on and you even add a few extra pounds. Next time you try a diet, you're starting from 15st 7lbs and the cycle begins again. Do that a few times and you're 17 stone. Sound familiar? It's not nice. Doctors have known for 50 years that the eat-less-move-more diet doesn't work in the long term. The real cause of weight gain is insulin, so it's a hormonal thing, not an over-eating/low willpower thing. All foods cause insulin to spike, but processed carbs/sugar are the worst offenders. The insulin causes your body to store those carbs as fat. Surprisingly even foods with artificial sweeteners cause your insulin to spike, so the same thing happens. Intermittent fasting means that your insulin production goes dormant while you are between meals. The other benefit is that fasting resets your body's weight expectations, so you don't tend to regain the weight when the fasting ends. 

So this is me as an example. On day 1 I eat until 8.00 p.m. (so a main evening meal but no snack or supper afterwards). Then on Day 2, I fast with just cups of hot Bovril and maybe one cup of tea with a splash of milk. I drink plenty of water and fizzy water, I go all the way through Day 2, and on Day 3 I will start eating at lunchtime if I’m hungry. I have a normal evening meal (home cooked, no processed carbs, but not necessarily low carb). That means I've done a 36 hour fast (approx). then on Day 4 I fast as before. The first day is hard, but the second is easier and then it gets easier still. It’s not so much hunger, but the habit of eating that’s the problem. When I wake up in the morning, having fasted for the whole of the day before, I’m not particularly hungry. That sounds bonkers, but it’s true. Some people do 16/8. i.e., have an 8-hour period during the day when they eat and a 16 hour fast. (Overnight you sleep 8 hours of your fast away.) Some people do 20/4. Some people do extended fasts for days, or even weeks, but I’m not up for that. The whole point is not having anything to spike your insulin during the fast or between meals, so no snacking. 

Dr Fung developed this programme of intermittent fasting when he realised that a lot of patients coming to his clinic with kidney problems were type 2 diabetics and vastly overweight. When he encouraged them to lose weight with his intermittent fasting method, their diabetes improved dramatically – to the point where some of them were no longer classed as diabetic.

PLEASE NOTE; I’m not suggesting that if you are a type 2 diabetic who takes insulin, you should start fasting without talking to your doctor, but I’m not on insulin, and it’s worked for me. I’ve not only lost weight but my sugars are down.

 

 

 

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Comments

[watervole]

Interesting. Long suspected that artificial sweeteners did not help people lose weight, but I hadn't known what the mechanism was previously.

[jacey]

I've never liked artificial sweeteners because of the taste. Now I have a cast iron reason to avoid them. It was a bad day for me when I discovered that Lucozade had shifted to artificial sweeteners. I used to love it, and suddenly it had a cloying over-sweetness that I couldn't stand.

[jazzlet]

And what bleeding "traditional barley water" has artificial sweeteners? Yes Robinsons, I'm talking about you, I am still bitter about this although it happened decades ago.

[jacey]

I wouls much rather pay the sugar tax than drink stuff with artificial sweeteners. I don't understand why more people aren't up in arms about losing a favoured drink. Perhaps, like me, they just stop buying it.Marks and Sparks have just changed their fizzy orange to one with artificial sweeteners. They were almost the last hold-out. Their lemonade has probably gone the same way. I used to buy that for Pimms in summer.