Technically, a true fast is water and nothing else. It can take some time to acclimate to a new eating schedule, and Fung recommends keeping busy to keep the mind off food. While studies have shown that fasting is effective in helping people lose weight, many fasters fail because they’re hard to adhere to. If you had a test and 95% of it was on math and 5% on English, you’re not going to study both quite the same.” Tips for fasting The problem is we over-emphasize exercise. “If I had to guess, diet is 95% of the battle, and exercise is 5% of the battle. “There are a lot of health benefits, but they’re two totally separate issues,” he says. Knowing what he does about insulin’s effect on weight gain, he says exercise is a very inefficient way to slim down. It’s been done for so many thousands of years.”

Well, there’s no reason why people can’t do this. “I thought about it from a physiological standpoint and read the studies. “I have a bit of an advantage because I tell people to fast all the time-if you do surgery, a colonoscopy, blood work, you had to fast,” he says. There’s not much obesity.” This, he says, suggests it’s not the nutritional content that’s led to the modern rise in obesity, but rather the change in the frequency of eating. No one’s eating whole wheat pasta… But they’re fine. “They’re eating white bread, they’re eating white pasta.

People went from eating three meals a day to eating at all waking hours. One major change he’s seen to the North American diet over the decades is the rise of snacking. “We never talk about the timing of the meal,” Fung tells Quartz. The key, instead, lies largely in when one eats. After all, intermittent fasting purports to tout weight-loss benefits without forcing people to change what they eat (though Fung says people really should try to cut out sugar and processed foods) or adding exercise to their routines.

On certain Reddit communities, such as r/keto and r/intermittentfasting, Fung is regarded as a cult hero of sorts, often cited to provide scientific legitimacy for a diet that can seem outlandish to the unfamiliar.

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