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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jason Fung
Read between
September 9 - December 14, 2020
Both the ketogenic diet (a low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat diet) and intermittent fasting are excellent methods of reducing high insulin levels.
We simply aren’t meant to be eating as much or as often as we do in modern culture, and getting into ketosis by consuming real, whole foods on a diet that is low-carb, moderate-protein, and high-fat, with adequate calories, will allow you to spontaneously fast for twelve to twenty-four hours.
Instead, they eat more out of habit, comfort, and boredom than anything else.
Nobody makes money when you fast. Not Big Food. Not Big Pharma. Nobody wants you to find out the ancient secret of weight loss.
Lowering insulin also rids the body of excess salt and water because insulin is well known to cause salt and water retention in the kidneys.
Electrolytes are certain minerals in the blood. They include sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus.
Partly this is because the body is still being fueled—it’s just getting energy from burning fat rather than burning food.
The most potent natural stimulus to growth hormone secretion is fasting.
But both populations traditionally did not suffer metabolic diseases. These only appeared with the increasing Westernization of their diets.
The basics of good nutrition can be summarized in these simple rules. Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Avoid sugar. Avoid refined grains. Eat a diet high in natural fats. Balance feeding with fasting.
There is nothing new, except what has been forgotten.
often called times of “cleansing,” “detoxification,” or “purification.”
Hinduism embraces fasting in the belief that our sins lessen as the body suffers.
The ancient Greeks believed that medical treatments could be observed from nature, and since humans, like most animals, naturally avoid eating when they become sick, they believed fasting to be a natural remedy for illness.
After a large meal, blood is shunted to your digestive system to cope with the huge influx of food, leaving less blood to go to the brain.
Paleolithic times, we needed all our mental faculties and keen senses to find food. When food was scarce, our alertness and mental focus naturally increased.
“The best of all medicines is resting and fasting.”
“A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.”
most of human history, large amounts of food were not readily accessible all throughout the day.
We can test this notion by looking at the basal metabolic rate (BMR), which measures the amount of energy that our body burns in order to function normally—to keep the lungs breathing, brain functioning, heart pumping, kidneys, liver, and digestive system all working, and so on.
To burn muscle for energy would be like storing firewood and then, as soon as cold weather hits, chopping up your sofa and throwing it into the fire.
So, when we fast, we “eat” our own fat. This is natural. This is normal. This is the way we were designed. Otherwise, famine cycles in Paleolithic times would have eventually left us as a ball of 100 percent fat!
They usually attribute this to achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but the truth is much more down-to-earth and scientific than that: it’s the ketones! Ketones are a “superfood” for the brain.
The longest fast recorded lasted 382 days, and a simple multivitamin prevented any vitamin deficiencies.
Type 2 diabetes is a terrible disease. It is by far the leading cause of blindness, amputation, and kidney failure in North America.
To burn fat, two things must happen: you must burn through most of your stored glycogen, and insulin levels must drop low enough to release the fat stores.
But of the three macronutrients—carbohydrates, fat, and protein—carbohydrates stimulate the production of insulin the most.
Insulin is the main driver of obesity and diabetes.
Fasting is simply the most efficient and effective way to lower insulin levels.
even if you’re eating fewer calories, you’re not getting the beneficial hormonal changes of fasting.
Adrenaline and growth hormone increase to maintain energy and muscle mass.
Blood sugar and insulin levels go down as the body changes from burning sugar to burning fat.
These higher insulin levels inexorably lead to obesity.
Fasting, on the other hand, introduces prolonged periods of low insulin levels, which breaks the cycle of high insulin and insulin resistance.
To prevent the body from adapting to the new weight-loss strategy and maintain weight loss requires an intermittent strategy, not a constant one.
This is a crucial distinction. Restricting some foods all the time differs from restricting all foods some of the time. This is the difference between failure and success.
These are substances the body produces during fat-burning; they’re what fuels the brain when glucose is scarce. A ketogenic diet helps shift the body from burning glucose to burning fat, which results in the creation of ketones.
We can manufacture enough glucose to power the entire body simply from body fat.
This is a normal situation. This is the way our body is designed to work.
The “eat less, move more” strategy for daily caloric reduction doesn’t provide these hormonal benefits. However, fasting does.
To paraphrase Seinfeld, everybody wants a show about something. This is a show about nothing.
However, cortisol is also one of the major drivers of obesity.
But studies of intermittent fasting show that cortisol levels are generally unaffected.
The longer that you have struggled with obesity, the more difficult you’ll find it to lose weight.
It’s clear from the report that diabetes is an unrelenting disaster.
Since 1980, the number of people afflicted with diabetes has quadrupled.
In response to frequent high blood sugar, the body produces excessive insulin, which leads to insulin resistance
Over the past thirty years, the rate of type 2 diabetes has increased significantly in both sexes, in every age group, in every racial and ethnic group, and at all education levels. It is attacking younger and younger patients: pediatric diabetes clinics, once the sole domain of type 1 diabetes, are now overrun with an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, often in obese adolescents.
Despite the explosion of medical advances and knowledge since the 1800s, ironically, diabetes is an even bigger problem today than it was then.
It is well known and well accepted that type 2 diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance.
