Have you had success because of The Obesity Code (book)?
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I read his book and found it compliments my ketogenic diet, even though his diet is more LCHF with fasting. I think it is a good read, written in simple terms for the layman diabetic... I think that is the key thing to remember for this book: it was written to improve the health of those with insulin resistance, or to help prevent insulin resistance through dietary means. It was NOT written for the slim, fit 25 year old who is working out 7+ hours per week. Nor was it written for the few metabolically healthy overweight individuals.
The book is essentially a diet for diabetics that can be used to improve or reverse their insulin resistance. It is a weight loss book only in that losing weight often helps diabetics and because many will start losing weight if they cut starchy and sugary carbs from their diet nevermind stop eating every couple of hours.
I really wonder where people got the idea that we should eat every couple of hours. We're not grazers...
I found his info on how fasting helps (reset) insulin resistance interesting if basic, and it led to me reearching more in that area. Fasting does appear to help most diabetics improve their insulin resistance. If I fast my BG numbers are always wonderful, and it lasts for a while too.
I have found that IF does not help my numbers though due to the dawn phenomenom. On the other hand, a fast of 2 or 3 days works wonders.
One area I wonder about is fasting with a higher carb diet. He doesn't really address that I found. Whenomeone first goes LCHF or fasts, protein is used to make glycogen at first. I imagine muscle wasting would occur if you aren't eating protein. Once the body starts using ketones and fat for glucose production it becomes a non-issue so fasting with a LCHF diet seems to spare muscles.
But fasting on a higher carb diet? I wonder if your muscles would experience more wasting because the body has to repeatedly adjust to no carbs (or calories).
Lol, no! You don't go catabolic in 16 or even 24 or 36 hours.
Not extremely so but yes, you do. It appears that after the first few days your use of protein for energy drops off. The first few days of fasting often take some adjusting. After that the body almost exclusvely uses the fuel it has stored - fat. Before you are fat adapted, you don't just just use fat.
This sort of hows what I mean:
Those who are fat adapted already are going into a fast on day 8 because they don't need to fat adapt.12 -
What is the source of the chart? You omitted it. Typically, people who do IF are doing 16/8, 18/6 or even 24 hours. Even based on your chart, they would refeed before they became catabolic.
If you are referencing straight fasting, I still don't believe your chart is accurate. Please support with peer reviewed studies or a meta-analysis. It is considered suspicious, at best, to post charts and data without attribution.
ETA: an interesting article with attributions regarding how muscle loss does or does not occur in a fasted state.5 -
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GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
I wondered how they could say "hours of starvation". After looking at the rest of the stuff I'm pretty sure they mean after any fuel from your last meal is used up or stored, not that you're starving the moment the fork is put down, so that adds another 8+ hours for digestion of your last meal.7 -
@AmyG1982 With 7 billion people in the world, someone somewhere has had success with any recommended way of eating.
At my workplace, I and another slim fellow count calories and hit macros. Another slim fellow counts fat and carbs and hits nutrients. We're all succeeding at weight management and know all about each other's methods, whether or not we care to substitute our own for theirs.
The best I can tell about Dr. Fung's theories, he seems to be focusing on people who already suffer from diabetes or metabolic syndrome. As such, his recommendations tend to be superfluous for healthy people, who do still constitute a majority in the population.11 -
GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
Ah, the perspective of an ER doc. As a young fellow I worked for a time at the American College of Emergency Physicians, which remains the HQ of a professional credentialing institution for that specialty. I was the Mail Clerk. I opened all the mail, determined who should receive it, and distributed it to the correct party most of the time. One of the functions of the organization was the composition and publication of the peer-reviewed Journal of Emergency Medicine. ER docs with stories to tell would send their monographs to ACEP, and I would read them before routing them to the Editor. Not all the stories were published, but a sample of the stories which were offered for publishing can adequately illustrate the typical sense of humor of ER Docs. First, there was the story of how a doc saved the life of an 8-year old child who sat on a swimming pool drain. The suction pulled 20 feet of his lower and upper intestine out of his body. Second, there was the story of how to treat Fractured Penis Syndrome. I'm still not clear on the cure but the various causes were related in excruciating detail. A third that was offered showed all the tools and methods used to extract intact an incandescent light bulb from a man's lower colon.0 -
Haven't read it, won't follow it, so by the guidelines set by the OP I have nothing to contribute.1
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A couple of links to studies that show no muscle loss due to fasting. One as long as 72 hours.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/5/1244.abstract
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19508406
Forgot to attach them in the previous post.0 -
JeromeBarry1 wrote: »@AmyG1982 With 7 billion people in the world, someone somewhere has had success with any recommended way of eating.
At my workplace, I and another slim fellow count calories and hit macros. Another slim fellow counts fat and carbs and hits nutrients. We're all succeeding at weight management and know all about each other's methods, whether or not we care to substitute our own for theirs.
The best I can tell about Dr. Fung's theories, he seems to be focusing on people who already suffer from diabetes or metabolic syndrome. As such, his recommendations tend to be superfluous for healthy people, who do still constitute a majority in the population.
For now anyway. If current trends continue, I give it another four decades (if not less) before his approach would be well applied to the majority. Pretty sad, when you think about it.4 -
Current trends are unsustainable thank God. The earth simply can't support uncontained population growth, resource extraction and consumerism.5
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Current trends are unsustainable thank God. The earth simply can't support uncontained population growth, resource extraction and consumerism.
The trend is to get global population to 9 B and probably stabilize there. There's going to be a whole lot of resources extracted and consumed.0 -
I'm not looking for a debate on if the theories in this book are correct or not or if there are other ways to achieve weight loss so please don't start...
I'm curious, has anyone read The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss by Dr. Jason Fung and lost more weight after following his advice? Just curious if anyone who's struggled to lose the traditional calories in vs. calories out way has had more success following what he suggests?
After re-reading your original post a couple of comments. I read the book. I think he comes to some good conclusions from some bad reasoning. His big miss is that calories don't matter.
That said, many of his other recommendations can be fairly good for overall health and can help with weight loss when combined with a calorie deficit and, for me, help with controlling hunger and satiety. FTR, I don't follow these methods because of reading his book. It was just the way my eating habits evolved.
Intermittent Fasting - I do and like it. Helps control hunger for me and helps with insulin sensitivity. There is some T2D history in my family.
Complex carbs vs. simple carbs - Not bad for either health or satiety I follow the 80/20 rule loosely.
None of this is earth shattering. If you want to control hunger and be satisfied while in calorie deficit, try it. But calorie counting is still part of it.4 -
Is he using complex carbs in the correct sense, though? I take it he calls for the elimination of all starches including whole grains, legumes, tubers and the like? Simple carbs, are any okay like berries?4
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GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »Is he using complex carbs in the correct sense, though? I take it he calls for the elimination of all starches including whole grains, legumes, tubers and the like? Simple carbs, are any okay like berries?
He does recommend the elimination of processed grains. Another area of disagreement that I have with him. Some are ok. Honestly, I don't think he has an issue with whole grains because of the fiber but I don't recall exactly. He was generally ok with whole fruits and veggies cause fiber.2 -
stevencloser wrote: »GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
I wondered how they could say "hours of starvation". After looking at the rest of the stuff I'm pretty sure they mean after any fuel from your last meal is used up or stored, not that you're starving the moment the fork is put down, so that adds another 8+ hours for digestion of your last meal.
It would also seem to me that if your last meal is fat and you're using dietary fat for fuel that you'd still go through the catabolic phase getting to day 8 when your body switches to using body fat for fuel.
I'm not seeing how using diet for fuel to using body stores of fuel would vary depending on the source of the dietary fuel.2 -
GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
I wondered how they could say "hours of starvation". After looking at the rest of the stuff I'm pretty sure they mean after any fuel from your last meal is used up or stored, not that you're starving the moment the fork is put down, so that adds another 8+ hours for digestion of your last meal.
It would also seem to me that if your last meal is fat and you're using dietary fat for fuel that you'd still go through the catabolic phase getting to day 8 when your body switches to using body fat for fuel.
I'm not seeing how using diet for fuel to using body stores of fuel would vary depending on the source of the dietary fuel.
I agree. I remember reading something about this but I can't remember where. I seem to recall the catabolic phase at or after 72 hours. I could look it up if I didn't have an acre of lawn to cut and a wife that is giving the "are you gonna spend all day on that computer" look.
Maybe later.... 2 -
Discovered Dr Fung a couple of years ago. Yep, it works, absolutely, it can't fail because it explains how obesity works as a disease. That is its point of difference over the fairy stories that have been promulgated for decades, and continue to be, of course.
For example, having been off the wagon for a couple of years, both my wife and I were diagnosed with early onset type II diabetes. We used Dr Fung's "18/6" (only eating during a 6 hour period each day) for 3 weeks. All symptoms went away, lost about 3kgs at the same time. Measuring blood glucose every meal daily was part of this, so it's not guesswork.
BTW, I'm 71 years old and have been obese for as long as I can remember. Must have lost several times my body weight over the years trying to deal with it! Have always been told I'm "big-boned" which is the polite version of "you're a lazy, overindulgent loser". The truth is, I might be fat, but I'm not stupid.
Here are a couple of stories. Back in the late 90s I did a concentrated 13 month "starve and sweat" (walking and WeightWatchers) programme that resulted in a 25 kg loss. Eight months later 15 kg had returned. Four years ago I did it again (this time with MFP and hydrorobics) to lose 30 kg in 14 months, this time I got down to 88kg. But I noticed I felt cold, all the time. When I asked the GP about it, the idiot said, "Another 4 kg and you'll be healthy, that fat isn't keeping you warm any more!" It took 8 months for 20 kg to find its way back.
Now, as an engineer, I know from decades of study and half a century of experience, that if I don't understand the problem, or how something works I can neither design a solution nor come up with an effective repair. That's why "starve and sweat", doesn't work, it doesn't address the causal factors! Dr Fung indeed comes up with the explanation of how obesity "works" and Type II also, of course. He identifies the problem and its causal factors and comes up with explanations for why calorie counting alone never works in the long term, never could and can't. Best of all he describes obesity as the disease the medical profession continues to ignore, and that's the bell that rings with me. That, and condemnation of calorie counting as the best or only way to control obesity. For starters, nothing in human physiology can possibly be so simple!
In a nutshell, Dr Fung says that when you eat is at least as important as what you eat. It's as simple as that, but I've never heard it from a GP, nor seen it on conventional diabetes or weight loss programme websites.
The big problem with it is that it's counter to the commercial imperatives of the food manufacturers. It doesn't lead to expensive concoctions or to the replacement of nutritional ingredients with arguably toxic cheap-junk rubbish.
As for intermittent fasting, it's like stopping smoking. First, you have to believe in it. Second, you need to recognise that doing it on your own is very difficult. You need a support group to help you along the way. And since "the establishment" doesn't get IF at all..etc..etc..30 -
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https://myoleanfitness.com/evidence-caloric-restriction/
From page 1
eta: This is my opinion as well.4 -
I read his book as well. I believe if someone is healthy, and not Obese then it makes sense for the Calorie deficit method only. But if you are truly Obese and have been so for any length of time, then you really need to pay attention to more than just calorie in and calorie out, and burned. I am not talking about someone who is a bit overweight I am talking about Obese.
Because if one is Obese over time, the facts are we have damaged organs inside our bodies. So the way to correct this as much as possible is about more than just burning more calories than we consume. This is where paying attention to Carbs and what kind, proteins, sugar, sodium and all of the rest come into play. Me, personally I do not follow anything that Dr. Fung wrote. But each person, has to decide what they are going to follow, and be comfortable with. Yes I need to burn the calories got it. But also track Carbs, and 99% of the time that means no pasta, no bread, no starchy veges, and no grains for me. And I have test results that back up why this was a great decision for me personally. And others it would not potentially work, and I get that too.28
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