1031 The Science of Intermittent Fasting (Foods To Live Longer & Reverse Type 2 Diabetes) w/Jason Fung

A lot of people will say that type two diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive. It's actually a total lie. Type two diabetes is a completely reversible disease. I think that fasting is actually a part of natural life. So if you think about fasting, people think it's some, you know, strange thing that you do, but it's really not.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. This is episode number 1031 with Dr. Jason Fung. Deepak Chopra said, if we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want. instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with. And author Brian Wansink said, the best diet is the one you don't know you're on. My guest today is physician, author and researcher Dr. Jason Fung. And this is the second part of my interview with Jason. So if you haven't listened to part one, you can go do that@lewishouse.com/1030 to check it out right after this. In that first episode, we discussed the main causes of cancer, what they are. the foods to cut out to decrease your risk of cancer, what snacking does to our brain and our digestive system in a negative way, if it's possible to reverse cancer, we talked about supplements and vitamins if some of them are actually bad for us and so much more. So make sure to check that out. But in this episode, we talk about what causes type 2 diabetes and how it's possible to reverse it, the importance of intermittent fasting and how to do it even if you're an extreme athlete, how our mental health affects our physical health. The top five foods that Dr. Jason would choose to eat for the rest of his life. We talk about the three most important lessons for living a healthy life, the biggest myths around ketogenic diet and so many other diets, and so much more. Again, if you're inspired at any moment listening to this episode, please share it with a friend, lewishouse.com/1031. Share that out with a friend, text someone, post it on social media, and make sure to tag me as well when you're listening to this. And a quick reminder, Click that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now while you're listening to this podcast so you can be up to date for the greatness coming to your life every single week. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Jason Fung. What is the cause of type two diabetes? How does that develop in humans?

Yeah, type 2 diabetes is essentially too much sugar in the body. So it's not just in the blood, but it's in your whole body, right? So if you think about the body like a sugar bowl, so imagine your body is a sugar bowl, and over the years, you're sort of eating a lot of sugar. You're eating a lot more and not using it up. So the sugar sort of builds up, builds up, builds up. Eventually it gets to the point where it starts to overflow. That's basically what type 2 diabetes is. You've stored up so much sugar in your body that it overflows into the blood. As the blood sugar goes up, then you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Now, the point is that if you look at standard medication, so some of the newer ones are quite good, but the older medications like insulin and so on, what those drugs did was they have this full sugar bowl that's full. Every time you eat, the sugar would go into the bowl, flow out, it'd spill out into the blood, the blood sugar would go high. The solution to these old drugs was to take that sugar that's in the blood and simply cram it back into the body. You just shove it in. And of course, there would be reach a time where shoving it in didn't work and it's still overflow. So then you get a second medication and really shove it in.

Oh man, is that what insulin does?

That's what insulin does.

It pushes it back into the body.

Yeah, so your body has too much insulin. So remember insulin's job is to take that sugar that you've eaten and put it into the body. And the point is that you have had too much insulin over time because you've put in so much into that bowl that it's overflowed. The solution is not to put more in, right? It's just like if you have a suitcase, think about a suitcase, you put in a few shirts, it's fine. Then it gets full, you can't close it, right? So the solution is not to put more and more force to push it in. The solution is to get rid of all that stuff. Same as a sugar bowl. The solution is to get rid of all that sugar. So how do you do that? There's only two things you need to know, right? Don't put it in. and two, let your body burn it off. That's it. So that's how you do that. One, you can use a low carbohydrate diet and two, you can use intermittent fasting. Because when you don't eat, nothing's going in and you're going to start burning off the sugar. I mean, you can think about an analogy, for example. Suppose you have a car and you go to the gas station three times a day and fill up on gas. Now your gas tank is full and every time you go to pump the gas, it overflows and spills into your back seat. and is now making you sick. So what should you do? Well, I'll tell you what you wouldn't do. You wouldn't go back to that gas station three times a day. What you would do, of course, is drive that car around, drive it, drive it, drive it until the gas tank starts to go down. Same as the body. Every time you're just putting more sugar and putting more sugar in. So what should you do? Well, run that body without sugar for a while. And that's what intermittent fasting does. And that's why we were able to reverse. We wrote a case series about three patients who we did this. and we just reversed diabetes. Like, they had 20 years of diabetes and we still reversed it in them. It was insane how quickly they got better.

What does type 2 diabetes do to someone? How does it affect them? Yeah, the type 2 diabetes is one.

Of the worst diseases we have. Unfortunately, type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes is about 50% of the American population. Wow. Yeah.

50% of the American population has type 2 diabetes.

Or pre-diabetes. Pre-diabetes is the majority. So about 10%, 10-15% is type 2 diabetes. about 30-35% is pre-diabetes. So the point is that if you put all that sugar into your body, what happens is that you can cram it in, cram it in, but then all that sugar sort of goes all over the body and every single organ just starts to rot away. And this is the problem. This is the reason you get gangrene, you know, the foot goes black, the toe goes black. That's the reason why you get all kinds of infections that you don't normally normally get because there's sugar everywhere. The bacteria love that, right? So you get infections that you don't see in any other diseases. You get too much sugar, it rots away your kidneys, you get kidney disease, you get blindness because all the sugar damage to the eyes is the leading cause of non-traumatic blindness. Kidney disease is what I deal with a lot because the kidneys just start to sort of rot away. So you go on to dialysis, for example. You get heart attacks, you get strokes. So the whole gamut. And then you get cancer, of course, because of the too much insulin. is not only a nutrient sensor, it's a growth factor. So it tells your body to grow. So all of those things that are important in terms of killing people, which is heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer, is going to be made much worse with type 2 diabetes and that's why it's so important to really take care of yourself.

If someone is listening here, how would they know if they have type 2 diabetes or if they're pre-diabetic yeah, generally.

You have to get a blood test to do that. So you test something called the A1C. Most people who are overweight are at risk of that. And the point is, a lot of people will say that type 2 diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive. It's actually a total lie. Type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease. It's simply too much sugar. You need to Empty that sugar bowl. That's the whole idea. And that's how you reverse it. Taking medications is not going to reverse your disease because you're simply cramming more stuff into the body. So you can get a simple test. It's a routine test. And you can see if you are at risk of this. And the point is that if you do find out that you're either diabetic or type 2 or pre-diabetic, then you got to understand this is a reversible disease, but it's largely a dietary disease. so therefore the treatment must be dietary. You got to get to the exactly you got to get to that root cause. And it's not it doesn't mean you have to buy expensive food, right? You could simply fast, which is free and you could still reverse and get so much healthier.

So I'm what I'm hearing you say is it's 100% possible to reverse type two diabetes and pre-diabetes through fasting and through eliminating sugar from the body.

Yeah, so sugar refined sugars especially. So sugar, which is fructose and high fructose corn syrup and that kind of thing. And then a lot of the refined carbohydrates are carbohydrates are actually chains of sugar. They're actually chains of glucose in the body. So they're they tend to raise blood sugar.

Is that like breads and bagels and.

Bread bagels, rice, potatoes. Yeah, all of those things.

So potatoes and rice are not good for you if you have type 2 diabetes.

If you have type 2 diabetes, it tends to, so we do this thing called the glycemic index, which is of certain foods, which one raises the blood glucose the most, and carbohydrates like rice and potatoes and bread tend to be the highest. I think sugar is probably much worse for you than any of those.

So.

Sugar sort of is number one enemy for me. Number two is eating all the time is probably really the other thing that's really bad. I mean, you get this advice sometimes. I think it's so dumb. Eat six times a day. It's like, one, nobody's ever done that before. Two, what happens when you eat six times a day? Well, if you eat a small portion of food and then deliberately stop, which is what they're telling you to do, so eat a small portion, not until you're full, but just a little bit, and then stop. What happens? Well, we know what happens because that's what an appetizer is. A small, tasty portion of food that makes you more hungry.

More hungry. I want to put more in my stomach.

So why would you want to do this six times a day? You're going to eat a little bit of food, then before you're full, actually stop while you're hungry and wanting more and do this six times a day. You're going to use your willpower. You're going to use all your willpower just to do this when that was completely, it's totally against it because everybody, there's this inertia. It's like my son. You can't get him into the bath once he's in. You can't get him out of the bath. Because once you're in, you're comfortable. Same thing. When you eat, eat, you should eat until you're full, hopefully of good food. That's the way that we are designed to eat. When you're not eating, you don't eat, right? You just let the existing conditions sort of run. You don't eat a little bit, make yourself hungry, then stop and do it over and over and over again. That's a recipe for failure, right? And then when people fail, what happens is people say, well, you know, these people had no willpower. It's like it has nothing to do with willpower. It all has to do with the habits that Put in if your habit is to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and nothing in between, like virtually everybody in the 70s. Well, hey, it's easy to stay slim. They were eating white bread. Like nobody ate whole wheat bread back then, right? I ate a sandwich for lunch at school every single day, as did everybody else in my class, right? Peanut butter and jam classic, right? So it was, it's not the, it's not the, the willpower. It's putting in those healthy habits. of not eating all the time, of not snacking all the time, of, you know, hopefully avoiding those foods. And there's so many things we do to sort of sabotage ourselves, right? I mean, if you're a, you know, if I was a business owner with a lot of people, the first thing I do, I mean, this probably applies pre-COVID, is, you know, to say there is no food in the office, right? Because there's no reason that you need to eat if you're working. If you were and say, there's no food in the office, there's no food in the conference rooms, when we have meetings, we won't have food, there might be coffee, but there's no cookies. And these are the ways we sabotage ourselves. Why do we need to do this? I always think, if I'm in a meeting and it's in the middle of the afternoon and I was hungry in 1970s, would I really get up, leave the meeting, go find myself a donut? and come back, people be like, what the hell is this guy doing? Right? But if I'm bored out of my mind in this meeting and there's a donut sitting in front of me, guess what? There it goes, right? Or in the movie theaters or in front of the TV or whatever, right? Or in the car or whatever. It's simply the habits that you put in. It's not a matter of willpower. It's identifying these behavioral changes that can sort of lead you to success and finding a community of people that is going to say, yes, we agree with you. There's no bowls of candy on, on the desk. This is a place of work. I don't want to sabotage weight loss efforts by putting out a bowl of candy. That's not acceptable because if somebody's losing weight, I don't think this person should be doing that.

Right.

You're tempting people every single time. Like, it may have been a good gesture in 1975, but it's not a good gesture now. Like, this is not this is where we work. This is not what we do. And these are the sort of things that you can now start. Once you understand OPC, you can start to identify, okay, these are behaviors. These are little things we never thought about that really are very simple, like, you know, very simple to do that could lead to a big change. And we have a website, we have a program that does that called thefastingmethod.com, and that's what we try to help people with, establish these patterns, find themselves a community where you can say, hey, I'm having problems with headaches during fasting. Has anybody else had this? And then people will chime in and say, yeah, there's this, there's this, right? And that's what your mom used to do for you. Like, but now, of course, nobody fasts, so nobody's able to help you. So you need to find the supportive community. And that's what we've tried to build and also the tools to ask questions.

Get the education, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Especially if you're the only one in your local community trying to fast, it's gonna be very hard when everyone else is eating around you and they don't get it. They're not in on the game. of what you're trying to do. So finding that support and accountability is going to be crucial. I'm curious your take on fruit. I've had many different doctors and scientists and researchers on Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Dr. Stephen Gundry, just recently, Dr. Peter Attia, who all kind of mention that fruit may not be the best thing for us in abundance and being very specific on when we eat fruit, how much with fruit we because of the sugar intake that it has. What's your research show about fruit in terms of in our diet? Is it more beneficial or is it more harmful in general?

I'm sort of, I agree with them because the fruit contains fructose, which is chemically sort of what you get in sugar as well. So when you eat carbohydrates like bread, It's mostly glucose. When you eat fruit, it's mostly fructose. Sugar, table sugar, is sort of half and half. That's where you get high fructose corn syrup as well. And the fructose is fructose no matter.

Where you get it from. So in, in- Whether it's from an.

Organic apple or banana, it's still fructose. It's still fructose. So if you drink a Coke and it has high fructose corn syrup, it's still fructose and it's some glucose, right? Which is no different than you'd get if you were to eat an apple with you know, some rice or something. It'd be like glucose and fructose. It's the same thing. On the other hand, there's all kinds of other things that happens with whole fruit that may mitigate some of that badness, right? And this is the whole point that I try to make is that there's a difference between added sugars and natural sugars. So if you eat an orange or an apple, yes, the fructose is the fructose, but there's a natural limit that you have. You can't just keep eating that, right? Because you can't eat like 10 apples at a time. You'll just feel full and you'll just not want to, right? That's just life. Whereas if you put sugar in like, you know, a Coca-Cola, like a big gulp or something, you can keep drinking that thing, like the whole thing, like lots of people do. Those giant things at the movie theaters, people do. They try and sort of mindlessly sip the sweet, sweet stuff. And the amount of sugar is probably equal to like 10 apples. But the apple had all this fiber, it had all this, you know, the pulp and all this other stuff that naturally put a break on how much you can get. So, yes, on the one hand, fructose is fructose, or I sort of agree with that. On the other hand, I sort of disagree in that I don't think that whole fruit is nearly as bad as added sugars because there's no limit on the amount of sugar you can add to something. Like, you can always make it sweeter, you can always make it sweeter, and you won't even, you won't. ever get that sort of break? So on on on stopping. So I think it's a real different there's a big difference. But I'm not a huge fan. If you're trying to lose weight. Yeah, I think you do need to limit your fruit. It's still fructose. It's not the best it's not the worst thing, but it's not the best thing for you either. But as a as a sort of treat or whatever, it's probably a whole lot better than a cookie, for example, which doesn't have those natural satiety hormones.

Curious, you're, I've asked this with a few different people in this space. If you are on a five food only diet for the rest of your life to help the quality of your life, the health of your body, your mind, and to help lengthen your life to the best of your ability, obviously, if you can only eat five foods, what would those be based on your scientific research and based on what those foods would do for the body?

Well, I think that's, I mean, meat is probably one of the most nutritious foods there is. And I know that there's a lot of sort of debate, sort of environmental debate. There's ethical debates about ethical raising of meat and so on. But the, you know, if you were to set all that aside and just say from a nutrition standpoint, one is delicious. and you know that because when you watch shows like naked and afraid, like, you ever see how excited they get when they get a fish or something? It's insane, right? They're like, oh, my God. Right? Fish. Or they'll be like a rat or something, and they'll be like, oh, right? It's like, you don't go like, whoa, cauliflower.

Right?

Right. Even though, I love cauliflower. Right. It's a great food, but you can see that it's, it's a natural. food for humans. Like we really get, that's part of the natural thing. So meat is, you know, meat and fish and chicken for sure would be up there. And, you know, scientifically, of course, they're much more complete sources of protein for us than natural because we're animals, so therefore we use animal proteins much better than we can use plant proteins. So that'd probably be a base if you, you know, if, you know, so you could actually survive just on meat. So, people like the Inuit, for example, subsisted largely on meat. However, if you set aside the ethical, you know, costs and so on, then you might want to, you know, eat some other foods. So there are some carbohydrate containing foods, which can be very good too. Something like beans, for example, people have eaten beans for years, like, you know, millennia, like subsisted on beans and so on. So that'd be a very, again, a vegetarian source, a very good protein and can actually be quite delicious. Like, you know, people eat it in all different kinds of ways. You know, for me, it's, it's one of these things that is, you know, one of these things that you can put on a plate that, that takes that sort of carbohydrate, but there's lots of fiber and all that kind of thing, you know, some other vegetables and fruits that I really enjoy, like something like avocado. It's like, I love, I think everybody loves avocado, honestly, so. And there's so many vitamins in there and so on, so. you know, that's, that's something. Those are probably the main things I could think of, like other, other vegetables that would be well up there. So any of the above ground vegetables, like, to me, I love cauliflower and broccoli. I mean, those are just foods that I could eat sort of easily. It's, it's one of these things. If you're trying to replace a carbohydrate side dish, like, if you're thinking about, okay, I have a bit of meat, and then, you know, in the past, you might say, oh, I'll have a lot potato or rice, you could easily put cauliflower or broccoli or something in there that just totally takes the place of one of those. Yeah. So those are some of the foods that I think are, you know, I'd probably, I could probably do pretty well with those things. I mean, beans, I would include tofu as well because I eat a lot of tofu being Chinese.

Okay. I like those. Those are good. What about athletes and fasting? I'm an athlete. I'll mix it up from being like a power sprinter type of athlete doing different basketball, weightlifting training, things like that to right now I'm also in marathon training because I'm committed to do my first marathon in the next six months. So I'm doing longer runs. How does fasting work with someone who is working out often? Can you do both? Do you need to limit your ability to exercise? and again, going back to would you lose muscle as an athlete if you're doing intermittent fasting or three to four day fastings?

Yeah, so that's a great question. You have to sort of differentiate between sort of the weekend athlete, the one who really isn't at that super high level of competition. For those people, you could probably do whatever fasting you want because remember the point is that you can leave it up to your body to find those sources of calories. So if you're One of these guys works out two or three times a week and so on, plays a little bit of ball on the weekend sort of thing. And that's most people. You could do whatever, you could fast and then do workouts. So that's perfectly acceptable because if you don't eat, your body will simply take those calories that it needs from your body fat. There is a period of adaptation from when your body, so remember there's two sources of fuel in the body. There's sugar, glucose, and there's fat. So your body, your muscles, so your legs and so on can use either glucose or it can use fat. In order to efficiently use fat, you have to train it to use fat, and that often takes weeks, like three, four, five weeks in order to get that. And you can do actually muscle biopsies of people who are undergoing this transition, and you can see that they start to gain the machinery that it needs to efficiently metabolize fat. So if you are eating a high-carb diet, as most of us did for most of the 90s and 2000s and so on, and then all of a sudden you say, I'm going to fast. Well, you have no more glucose. Muscles are going to be highly inefficient because they haven't been used to using fat. So some of the top end athletes have actually started to train themselves to use fat. So Chris Froome, for example, the Tour de France, ultra low carb. And there's Zach Bittner, who's one of these ultra marathoners, 100 mile races and stuff. He uses a very low fat, sorry, a low carb diet, trying, training his muscle, a lot of fat. So he's training his muscles to metabolize. so a lot of these Dave Scotts, a very sort of legendary triathlete who really talks about low carb, high fat nutrition. Tim Noakes, who writes a lot about that. And these are all exercise physiologists, so you could really do well with that. And fasting is really just the same. The problem with fasting, of course, in elite sort of high level athletes is that you actually need all those calories, right? So you really can't get by without eating because you're using it, you need it, right? And most people don't have enough body fat to sustain those sort of things, right? Because they're in that sort of less than 10% body fat, not the sort of 25% that you see in the general population. So what we do there, and we've worked with a number of elite athletes, is that you have to separate what you're trying to do. So in the on season, you really can't fast. It's not... You can't do it. It's hard to do. You need too much energy. and your body, you know, to perform at a high level, the carbohydrates often are slightly better than fat, unless you're in one of these ultra marathon sort of endurance events. And which means that will be a perfect.

Because they give you the carbohydrates give you the sugar that your body needs for the energy in that moment.

Like it probably gives you extra boost. So if you're like sprinting the, you know, metabolizing glucose is probably slightly better than fat, even if you train yourself to use fat. when you get to triathlon and ultramarathon and stuff, you probably don't see that difference as much, which is why you have somebody like Chris Froome, who's a, you know, he won the Tour de France a number of times and Dave Scott, who was a, you know, did all these triathlons, who talk about eating high fat meals and so on. So, you know, Peter Bruckner, who's with the Australian Cricket National Team and, you know, Tim Noakes, who did all this research. And then, but in the off season, you certainly could do this. And this is something that's, this called training in the fasted state, which is something that they're doing a lot of research on. And this is sort of the off season. So we work with baseball players and soccer players and rugby players and stuff on this. And the point of this is that when you fast, what you do is you fast for 24 hours, then you do your training, and then you eat. So when you fast, your insulin goes down, but your growth hormone goes up and your noradrenaline goes up. So as you train, you actually can work harder than you have before. for and your growth hormone goes up. So when you eat and preferably a high protein diet, then you're going to rebuild. So this is especially important in the off season because you're, what you're trying to do is sort of rebuild all that sort of stuff, the wear and tear on your body.

You're trying to clean out the, the autophagy. You're trying to get rid of that stuff and then build muscle or build, get rid of inflammation, you know, heal.

Your joints, all that stuff. Exactly. And this is something that we'll do with people in sort of the season. Um, and then process it like a.

24 hour fast and then train or eat first after that.

No, you train and then you eat because if you train and then eat, your body will start to use some of that protein to rebuild your growth hormone is up. You've got the protein and that pro, that period of time where you, you eat afterwards, it doesn't have to be like, you know, you stop running and start showing like you have like about 12 hours in that window where your body's actually going to more efficiently use the protein. So this is something that, you know, we'll do with people in the off season to try and prevent injury and all this kind of stuff. The one other interesting thing is we worked with Georges St. Pierre, who was this mixed martial artist, and he actually was very fascinating because he loved the fasting. So he did these long fasts and he shredded. And he said that, boy, when he used to fast, every, he said that when he used to go and fight, because he did this during competitions, too. He'd say, when I went to fight or when I was training in the fighting, like, everything looked like it was in slow motion as hitting and, you know, as, you know, he felt unstoppable. So he would actually use it during his, you know, which we don't often do, but you're, you know, again, understanding the physiology of what's happening with that higher level of noradrenaline, you know, that increased concentration, everything kind of gets like that hungry wolf. You tunnelled in, you get focused in to a higher degree. He said that, you know, oh boy, he, you know, that was this sort of like secret, you know, weapon he could, he could, you know, he could move and do other stuff and it was crazy. But he, that was an example of it depends on your sport, something like baseball, for example. We've done it for people in the season because if you're a starting pitcher, you have like four days where you're doing nothing. So you could actually use that in your sport because even during the season, if you're a starting pitcher, well, you've got two or three days in the middle where you actually can try to get this sort of rebuilding, regenerating, and then sort of break it in time for your start or whatever. So it depends a little bit on the sport and the situation. Yeah.

I'm curious about fasting and eating unhealthy while you fast. like intermittent fasting. Are you able to do a 14-16 hour window of fasting or 18 hour window of fasting and then eat any junk food, fast food, candies, sugars you want and still get the same benefits? Or is it really the quality of foods also that you're eating in that four hour window while you do intermittent fasting?

Yeah, it's both. So if you eat just junk and fast, you're gonna get it's better than if you ate junk all the time, but it's not better than eating healthy and not fasting. And that's what one of the recent studies said. So one of the recent studies that was completed on fasting, they said, well, if you do this sort of eight hour window, you don't lose any weight and maybe it might be bad. But the one of the things and the way they did the study is they said that you eat whatever you want during that period of time. So it's like, we don't know what they ate, but if you eat, you know, chocolate donuts and stuff and french fries all day, you know, in that eight hour window, that's not good for you. So there are two sort so one is the foods that you eat and one is the fasting. And so if you're, you know, if, if you're doing both, you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. If you do one, but not the other, let me okay. But, you know, doing neither, of course, is the worst. Right.

If you're eating whatever you want and you're eating all day, you're screwed.

Yeah, exactly. Fertile for cancer.

Yeah. Yeah.

For a lot of diseases and, and, you know, cancer is sort of one of those ultimate diseases that winds up being very, very, you know, once you get it, it's really hard to turn that back. And that's why it's so important to really stop it before it gets to that point. And that's the thing that we have to really look at is, you know, let's really talk about what it is that you have to do, because it's not this sort of pre-determined event, right? It's not like, oh, I'm pre-determined to have cancer when I am 65 or whatever it is. Like the genes are the same, you know, the lifestyle to some extent is, you know, determined by where you are born and where you live. But there's so many things that we can do to raise or lower, like even to the extent that it's almost as powerful as stopping smoking, right? It's just such a powerful determinant of cancer. and dwarfs every other thing in there, right? If you talk about pesticides and stuff, it's like 1%... We use this term called PAF, or population attribution factor, which is like 35% of cancer can be attributed to smoking, and 30% is diet, and pesticide might be 1%, and radiation might be 2%, right? It's negligible compared to the diet. Why? We're exposing ourselves to this diet day in, day out, day in, day out, as opposed to pesticide, which were, or, you know, some, you know, sunscreen or something, which is not like every day, day after day.

Right. Are there toxins stored in our fat? And if so, is that dangerous to fast if there's toxins in the fat?

Not really. I mean, some people talk about that, and if there is, It's a very minor point. I mean, so I know there's this whole theory that we get fat because our fat is trying to lock away these toxins and stuff, but there's really very little data to suggest that's true. If that's true, then of course being fat is better than not being fat. That is, the skinny people should also be being exposed to these sort of toxins as well. But it's not true. You can clearly see that the people who are fatter have more risk of all kinds of diseases, predominantly type 2 diabetes and cancer and heart disease.

You mentioned Paleo and ketogenic diet. What's the biggest myth about ketogenic diet right now? It seems like everyone's trying to do this or talking about it.

Yeah, I think the ketogenic diet is a perfectly reasonable diet from a scientific standpoint. That is, if you look at what it is, it's really high in fat, but not just fat. So if you, you know, as with anything, and I was sort of in on the beginning of this is that we talked a lot about natural fats, like not eating a lot of corn oil and refined vegetable oil and margarine.

Right.

It's eating natural fats like animal fats and coconut fat and that kind of thing. So natural fats not going crazy on protein and then really, really going very low on carbohydrates. and I think that that makes a lot of sense for weight loss, and that's why it's become such a popular diet. I think there's all these, there's this reaction to it that, oh, it's really, really unhealthy for you. I don't think there's anything inherently unhealthy for you about the keto diet. It's also not a super easy diet to follow. Anything that's really different from what you're used to is not easy to follow. That's not to say that you couldn't follow it, but it does tend to get a little difficult over time because people enjoy carbohydrates. So this is the thing is that it's, there's a, you know, when you're only talking about the foods then you have to be very, very strict on the foods as opposed to when you can say, okay, I can be leaning on the foods if I'm gonna up the fasting. Like, well, I'll dial this down, but I'll dial this up so that I can sort balance it, right? It gives you more flexibility to do it. But I think one of the big myths is that it's a super unhealthy diet, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. As it gets bigger, then you wind up attracting all these people that are trying to sell you keto bars and keto shakes. And it's like, that was sort of like the, remember the paleo movement, which was all about the caveman diet. Then you get these paleo bars. Like, yes, the caveman did not eat the paleo bars, right? It's like, that's not a thing. So the movement winds up getting a little bit diluted as opposed to the original sort of movement, which was a lot of natural fats. A lot of intermittent fasting was sort of built right in because there's talking about, well, you're going to eat until you're full and don't eat unless you're not, you know, unless you're really hungry. So there's a lot of intermittent fasting baked into keto originally. And like I said, some of it gets moved out. You wind up attracting all these other.

People who try and put their sort.

Of spin on it. Commercialize it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Commercialize it.

Utilize it.

What's your thought then on the Bulletproof or the Coffee with Ghee method where you fast, intermittent fast, but then you have coffee with a little bit of ghee or something like that? Is that something you feel like is useful while intermittent fasting or is it better to just do water only and black coffee or no coffee?

Yeah, I think that the classic is water only. Coffee, like black coffee and tea, like green tea, herbal tea, make very little difference. So even though they're not part of a classic fast, black coffee makes no difference. There's no calories, there's very little anything else, right? When you get to Bulletproof Coffee, it's actually very interesting because again, the main point of intermittent fasting is you're trying to reduce your insulin so you're getting into the sort of fat burning. When you take pure fat, so coffee with ghee or whatever like that, you're taking almost pure fat, which is interesting because it's actually not going to affect your insulin at all. So some people do very well on that because what you're trying to do, of course, is you take that bulletproof coffee and then you don't eat. Like, that's the point. You're not taking it and then eating, you know, a big muffin. Right. That's not the point of that exercise.

You're not dipping the donut in the coffee.

Exactly. so you're just trying to take it and then not eat. And if it allows you to not eat for a long enough period of time, because some people say, oh, yeah, I get this so full, then you're going to be net better. So remember, when you're taking almost pure fat, you're not having any instant effect. That fat actually goes almost straight into your fat stores, but it keeps you in that fat burning mode.

So it's adding some fat storage, but it's burning as well.

Exactly. So it depends on your net balance. That is, if the fat that you put in allows you to fast for a long enough period that you're going to balance it out, then you're net better. If you're going to take a bulletproof coffee at nine o'clock and then eat something at 10 o'clock, well, you didn't take, you didn't buy yourself enough time with that bulletproof coffee to offset that. It's the way that the body metabolizes fat. And it's strange because it's not usual for our body. Like, we don't usually just eat a stick of butter. Like, that's not meal. Right. So therefore, that's why this is sort of like a hack, because it's sort of this thing that people do, but it has to give you enough time to come up benefit. Right. It's like investing, right? You have to put in money to make money, and you hope that you don't just throw it away.

Right.

Same thing. You're taking in calories to try and fast for long enough to burn net more calories.

What it would be the ultimate way to do intermittent fasting in your mind. and is this something that we should do every day in the fasting or periods of time, seasons of life?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that fasting is actually a part of natural life. So if you think about fasting, people think it's some, you know, strange thing that you do, but it's really not. That's where the word breakfast comes in.

Right.

So the meal that breaks your fast, you have to fast to break your fast. So even baked into the English language, and it's actually not just the English language in French, petit déjeuner. Déjeuner is the word to fast, so it's to break your fast. So the point is that you're supposed to feed and fast. So you're supposed to be at 12 to 14 hours every single day. Yeah, maybe once in a while you'll have a midnight meal or whatever, but that's for, in general, you should be fasting every single day. Then I think then there's occasional longer fasts, and I think this is the point is to you know, every once in a while just to sort of cleanse the system, keep things kind of going. And that's the way we did it, right? If you look at any of the major religions, you know, some did it more than others. Greek Orthodox had all kinds of fasting periods. And, but, you know, and people would do it differently. Mormons would do it differently from Catholics would do it differently from Buddhists, for example. But they all had this idea of fasting. Buddhists, for example, well, eat after 12 noon, so they'll just fast until the next day. So sort of a four hour eating window every single day sort of thing. So that's that's the way they do it. But this occasional longer fast is, I think, beneficial to sort of activate this autophagy and get the benefits of a longer fast because you're getting different things happening at different stages. If you're getting 12 to 14 hours every day, you're getting a lot of the benefits. And then every once in a while you try and get the benefits to that longer fast, and you do it at pre-specified times of the year. And religion is what used to tie people into this whole cycle, or they do it because it was winter, right? You'd have a big meal at Thanksgiving after that, you know, there's not a lot of food coming in. So then, you know, you'd have longer periods of very little to eat.

Yeah, I mean, I've had both Dr. David Sinclair on and also Dr. Peter Attia who've talked about if you want to live a longer life, you almost need to have fasting in your life. You need it to help with autophagy, to help with getting rid of these precancerous cells, to help with eliminating diseases, all these different things. The body needs less food or windows of time where it's eating a lot less food to help cultivate a longer living life. Now, obviously there's certain things that might happen that aren't going to guarantee the length of our life, But what have you found in your research on this process to extend life?

Yeah, I totally agree with those guys. Those are smart guys. And I think that the point is that our body has sort of two ways that it can go. You can either go into sort of growth mode or it can go into cell repair and maintenance mode. And the point is that you really, in order to maximize sort of longevity, you want to go more towards sort of maintenance mode. And the way you do that, of course, is by eating less. And fasting plays a big role in that because, again, if you eat, then you're going to activate the nutrient sensors. The nutrient sensors are going to tell your body you must grow because you grow when food is available. So you put yourself into growth mode when insulin is up, when mTOR is up, you're going to go into growth mode. It's great if you're young, you're a kid, you want to grow, that's fine. But think of it like a race car. You rev that engine, you're going to go really fast, but you keep revving that engine, it's not going to last for very long. You need to put that engine into storage for a little while if you want to maximize the length of it. They're diametrically opposed, that is growth versus longevity. You need to push yourself into longevity, if that's your goal, then you need to eat less. And whether you do it by sort of chronic calorie restriction, which you could, but it's difficult because that's not the way we're sort of built. We're not built that way. I'm convinced that that's a very artificial way to do it. Not that you couldn't do it, but when we're, you know, we're designed to eat until we're full and then stop. and if we don't get food, then the hunger just dissipates. So naturally, I think we're more built towards the intermittent fasting model as opposed to every day eat a little bit less, which I think could work, but I think it just takes sort of willpower every single day, which is a lot of energy. It's a lot of energy. Just to think about it, as opposed to saying, well, I'm only going to eat twice a day because that way I have time to do this and I don't have to buy myself a lunch, which will save me money, and it's going to give me an extra hour of the day, that kind of thing. So I think that that's the point is that in the end, you've got this sort of seesaw between growth versus longevity, just like that race car engine. You can either go fast or you can use it for a long time, but you really can't do both. It's really hard to do both. So as you get older, you want to push yourself into that longevity stage, which means eating less, which means doing more fasting, ultimately.

Can you build muscle while you're doing a lot of this fasting, or is it completely contradictory?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you gotta understand that most of what we use for energy is not muscle. That's only one organ system. That's skeletal muscle. So if you're riding a bicycle, that's your, you know, that's your muscles. There's all these other organ systems that we have no control over. So there's the liver, the kidney, the heart, the lungs, the brain, you know, generating body heat and all these sort of. automatic systems that also require energy. So when you don't eat and your body starts to reduce energy, it will reduce, you know, all of those things. If you exercise, you will still keep building muscle and so on. That's totally different. But if you start to, you know, use less energy, then you'll feel a bit colder and your, you know, your liver may slow down a bit, your heart may slow down a bit, but again, people think it's a bad thing, but it's probably a better thing. You don't want to be revving that engine all that time. You actually want to go down a little bit as you get older.

It's interesting. You mentioned briefly the different societies that we found probably had very little or no cancer. I think you mentioned the Eskimos, that what you said before they became westernized, I guess, or before things started to shift. It's interesting. I just did, I've done a lot of training with Wim Hof. I'm not sure if you've heard the name Wim Hof. He's a guy who focuses on breathing, on mindset, and on cold therapy exposure, extreme amounts of cold therapy exposure. And, he has done a test, I don't know if you've heard about this, where they injected, I believe it was E. Coli into his body, and he rejected the disease from breathing and cold therapy, where it actually didn't harm him and he didn't contract the disease, I guess. And he did this with a group of other subjects of just people who he did the method with, where it was cold therapy, breathing, where they're able to reject the infection. I'm curious in your mind about cold exposure, knowing that the Eskimos are in cold and they didn't have, maybe it was all they, all they did was eat meat and then cold. How much do you think cold therapy, cold exposure supports with eliminating cancer?

I don't know. I haven't really looked into that. I have to say, I don't think it's just the cold because the Inuit, of course, when they started to eat, like they're still in the cold, but when they started to eat all kinds of processed foods like sugar and bread and stuff. They wind up getting cancer. They also see it in Africans who live a traditional African diet. Again, they really have very little cancer. So it was, that was where they described these sort of diseases of civilization. So it didn't have to do just with the cold. On the other hand, I actually think there's a lot of interesting stuff, both with extreme cold and extreme heat, where people, you know, talk about the benefits of, like, saunas and all this sort of stuff, which I think is very interesting. I actually haven't looked into it a lot myself. I actually think that the extreme cold to me seems like it there may be something there. You know, there's actually a few things that people talk about, like the browning of white fat and all this kind of stuff, which makes a lot of sense to me, but I, you know, seems, you know, and there's a lot of people who do it, like in Scandinavia and Russian and stuff. There's all these people who do this sort of cold therapy and they swear by it. And it's like, I think that there probably is something there. I don't know how much it has to do with what I talk about, which is mostly like insulin and foods and fasting and so on. But I think that there's actually going, I think somebody should look into that. But again, with the, because nobody makes money on it.

Jumping in the ice, it's not a money making thing. Yeah.

And it's not, doesn't seem so comfortable to me. But, you know, on the other hand, I actually think that there probably is something there that is highly beneficial.

Maybe that's your, the next book down the line, the Cold Code. the cold therapy code to see what that does with cancer. This has been fascinating. I feel like I have so many more questions I want to ask you, but I also want to be respectful of your time with this interview. This, for me, I could ask more and more about this stuff because I feel like the body is, you know, it's our temple. It's the thing we need to take care of the most. And if we want to have a high quality of life, we need to take care of our body. And if we want to have a longer life, and be around for more memories with our friends and family, then we've got to also take care of these things. A few final questions for you. Before I ask these final questions, is there anything else that we should be aware of when it comes to the mindset around cancer? Have you found any research on healing the mind in order to heal the body physically? Or is it more been around nutrition mostly?

Most of data is around nutrition. I think that the way it interacts is that I think that there's actually a lot of those things are super important. So when people talk about positive attitudes and gratitude and community and staying connected and all that sort of stuff, it sounds hokey, but it actually has a huge impact on life and quality of life and even longevity. But it's hard to study because how do you quantify if somebody is great? hopeful, for example, or if they have a positive attitude. It's very hard to quantify that, so it tends not to get studied. But I think the where it interacts is that it, if you are one of these people who has a lot of stress and very unhappy or isolated, like a hermit compared to somebody who has tons of friends and goes out and, you know, has a great supportive church and all this sort of stuff, where I think makes a big difference is that you can measure sort of stress levels like and there are certain things that get activated during chronic stress like cortisol, which is certain hormone. And I think that impacts the immune system. So the immune system, which under chronic stress winds up getting degraded, right? So if you produce, if you're under too much stress, your immune system really doesn't work as well. And the immune system plays a key role in fighting cancer. So I think that there probably is some I think there's a lot of truth to that, but the data is hard to find because then you get all these sort of, you know, very by the book sort of doctors who say, well, there's no proof that having a lot of friends makes you live longer. It's like, well, that's data. Or if you're grateful or keep a journal or whatever, or meditate. It's like, that's, it's, it's, it's not that there's not a real effect, I think. And they confuse the fact that it's very hard to to study with the fact that it doesn't work. Like, I think it works. I think it's super important. I think that's actually more important than almost everything else. Like, being, you know, being grateful, being happy, you know, being connected. I think that's actually has a bigger impact on life than most anything else. But it's so hard to put it into a scale where you can say, okay, this is this and this is So I think it does play a role, but yeah, the data is going to be so hard to find. When I look at it, what actually astounds me is how far ahead a lot of the religions were. And it doesn't matter what religion you are because the basics are the same, right? You go to, you gather every week. So hey, that's staying connected. You pray. So that's like meditation. You give thanks, like you say grace, right? You give thanks to God or whatever. and it doesn't even matter what God you believe in. And they fast. It's like, oh my God, like those are the pillars right there. And it's not if you're Catholic or if you're Jewish or you're Muslim, it's all of them do the same thing or Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever. And always astounds when I look at that, so holy, they're way ahead of us. And why? Because these were things that just worked. They didn't care why it worked, right? So gathering every week to do something, right? And it doesn't matter if you're gathering to do this or do that, but you're gathering as a community, connecting, you're seeing the people that you're living with, you're giving thanks for the food that you're eating, you're giving thanks for having the friends and being here on this earth. You know, all of this stuff, it just worked, so they kept it. what didn't work, of course, got dropped long ago. And what worked stayed. And it's a core, all of these things, the prayer, which is like meditation, the connectiveness, which is the gathering together, the fasting, and the, you know, the gratitude, all of these things are sort of core part of sort of what makes us human. And that's why you see it in every single one of these things. And it's like, wow, so I always think that is crazy how far ahead they were. And then we get to the 20th century. We live in our own McMansion and, you know, we stopped doing stuff together because we want our own space and, and not realizing and not fasting anymore and not praying anymore. And we don't realize that, hey, you know what? These people might have known what they were doing. They might have developed this over thousands of years. and we just think we're just smarter than them when we're actually not, we're actually not, you know, not even smart enough to realize that that was the core of what good quality of life is. Yeah.

I'm so glad we've connected. I've got these couple final questions I want to ask you that I ask everyone at the end of my show. Before I ask them, I want to remind people about all the books you have. You've got a new book called the Cancer Code, a Revolutionary New Understanding of medical mystery that's out. You've got a few other ones, the Obesity Code and also the Diabetes Code and also the Complete Guide to Fasting. So, you've got also thefastingmethod.com which can help you with fasting if you need a support community, if you need tools, if you need resources. So, go check out thefastingmethod.com, I believe that is correct. and check you out on social media. You're Dr. Jason Fung on Instagram, Twitter and Fung style fasting on Facebook and thefastingmethod.com. this has been extremely insightful and eye-opening for me, and hopefully it's a lot of great tools for so many other people that listen to this and watch this. If you're watching online, feel free to share this. Feel free to like this up. Leave a comment below of what supported you the most over on YouTube. This question is at the end that I ask people called the Three Truths. So, I'd love for you to imagine for a moment a hypothetical scenario, Jason, where it's your last day on Earth. And, you get to live as old as you want to live, but eventually you got to turn off the lights. And, you've created and accomplished and lived the exact way you want to live. You've written many books and done so many different things. but for whatever reason, all the content you've put out in the world has to go with you to the next place, wherever that place is. And so no one has access to this interview or any of your content anymore. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true from all of your lessons in life, kind of these three lessons you'd share with the world, or I call the three truths. What would you say are those three things for you?

I think one of them is, of course, the importance of intermittent fasting. Like, it's really just a part of the way you're supposed to live. That is, everything is a cycle, right? Ying and yang. It's all a cycle. Feeding and fasting is that same cycle. You can't do all of one or all of the other. We've gone so far, of course, towards feeding that, you know, you really have to turn back the dial a little bit on that side. So that's one of the sort of great things that I'd love to sort of leave with people. And I think that's what the obesity code was about, was like, let's really think about what causes this disease. You know, the second thing is very similar to that. I'd love people to really understand that type 2 diabetes. And that one is near and dear to me mostly because that's what I deal with a lot in my profession as a kidney specialist. I see a lot of type 2 diabetes. so I'm always invested in it because my patients are suffering from it. And I always think it's a shame. Like, boy, I wish that people would have told you that it's reversible. Like, you don't have to suffer this disease. You can do something about it if you want. If you don't want, that's fine, too. But, you know, it's a reversible disease. And that's one of the things I always think about when, you know, it's like there's so much suffering in this world that really is not necessary. if people had the right understanding. And then the third thing, I think, of course, is to always sort of stay real, which is that, you know, as you get out there, like, you know, you know, I mean, because you're in the public eye a lot, you get a lot of, you know, admirers, but you get a lot of haters as well. Right. So you always got to stay real. similar to like this whole idea of living a digital life or, you know, on social media life, you know how everybody's happy and smiling. That's not real life. And I always think like stay real, like just do real things. Like, you know, it's fine to be on social media and stuff, but that doesn't mean you don't see your friends and make sure you go out with, you know, to run or to play some ball or to whatever it is that you enjoy doing, you know, read. There are other things that you can do that you have to sort of stay in the real world, right? It's like being present. You have to be there, right? Because in the end, that's what you will always remember, right? It's not the Facebook friends that you had or whatever. And it goes the other way too, right? There's lots of Facebook friends and stuff, and they're great, but you also get those haters who are always like ragging on you and stuff. Oh, you're such a phony and you're just trying to sell out and all this stuff. And I always say, okay, one, I wind up just blocking those people because they're a pain to deal with. And I always think that you got to stay real. Like if somebody came up to me, and I get this a lot, some people say, oh, he's full of crap. That's, I can't believe he's a doctor kind of thing. And I'm always like, imagine going up to somebody and saying that to my face, right? You'd never do it. Never do it. I'd never talk to you again. So why would I want you to to talk to me, I just mute you right away, right? And that's part of staying real, right? Like, so stay doing real things. And it's so easy, especially now with COVID where we're all supposed to be going and doing virtual things. But, you know, it's like, you're not gonna remember that, like a virtual trip to, you know, the beach is not the same as going to the beach. I mean, you know, you gotta go to the beach, right? And I think that that's one thing that been thinking about, maybe more during this period of time when we're not allowed to do anything. But, you know, when it comes back around to it, it's like, remember, there are friends and, you know, there are friends and you can, you know, don't get down on the stuff you see online, either from old people ragging on you or the fact that people are always smiling in a beautiful place on Instagram, right? It's like, that's not real life either. So go out, do something real, talk to real people. it benefits you no matter what, right? It's always better to do that, even though it's easier to sit in front of a screen and play video games or watch somebody else's life and stuff, right?

Love that. That's a good three truths. I want to acknowledge you for a second, Jason, for you have amazing analogies. You turn the complex into something that's understandable and easier to break down, can seem very scary, very overwhelming, very hard to understand when you're dealing with sickness, disease, illnesses, viruses, obesity, cancer. These are scary subjects. And the fact that you're able to communicate effectively the hard data and research so that everyone can understand it is extremely powerful for us. So I acknowledge you for the decades of research and work and practice in mastering this and constantly trying to learn new ways to make it better for the rest of us. I acknowledge you for that and for being a nice doctor, for being a kind-hearted doctor. I appreciate that. Hopefully, when you're in LA, we can do this in person again sometime and get some more content out of this because I think this was really helpful for myself and I think for everyone listening and watching. My final question for you, Dr. Jason Fung, is what is your definition of greatness.

I think, you know, that greatness is really about being able to impact people in a positive way. Right. And I see so much of this again online because, of course, everybody's online nowadays. Right. Because that's all you can do. But, and, and I'm sure you've seen this as well. Right. It's like, because I think this is the core of what you want to do, is do something good for people. But there are people who get famous for putting other people down, right? And it's like, oh, God, like, I get it. You want to be famous for putting somebody down, whether it's people you think deserve to be or not, like, oh, you know, people rag on this guy or that guy. And it's like, yeah, but you're just trying to build yourself up, right? The greatness is not in tearing somebody down or saying that this guy is stupid or this theory is stupid, right? It's like, You know, when I talk about calories and stuff, sometimes I get frustrated and say, that's really stupid, right? But that's not what I'm trying to do, right? What I'm trying to do is not just tear something down because I don't really like to do that. I like to sort of say, this is a better way to look at it, right? Think about it this way because this is what's going to make you better, right? And to be able to impact somebody so that, you know, I won't even have I've seen them and they'll be able to lose weight or they'll be able to reverse their diabetes or they'll understand cancer better as a disease is a humongous privilege and it makes me feel great. I mean, that's why I do it, right? Because I like that feeling that I've been able to help somebody that I can impact, you know, hundreds or thousands of people and they are going to be better. And to me, that's greatness, right? To Be able to make something where people say, wow, he helped a lot of people, like, I'm, you know, or somebody even, you know, a few people who will say, wow, you know, I listened to him and I really turn my life around like that means a lot to me. Because that's what healing is. That's what being a doctor is. But you can only do that on a one on one basis, which is very limited as opposed to being able to say write a book where you can impact a lot of people. And I think that's what greatness is, is to be able to sort of sort of impact people and make the world so much better for you having been there, for me having basically obsessed about these sort of questions, you have no idea how much time I spent.

Looking at this stuff.

Like, I'm sort of obsessive about some stuff and it's like once I dig into it, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging. And it just takes a ton of time. Like, so you know, for me having obsessed about these sort of questions, just because I like to, I like to understand stuff, you know, I want people to say, well, I'm glad he obsessed about this so much and thought about this in a different way that somebody else did, because it does no good to say the same stuff. Like, if everybody tells you, you know, eat 500 less calories a day, what good is it for me to come out and be the millionth and first person to say, you should eat 500 less calories per day, right? Completely useless, like completely worthless. But if I come out and say, as I did sort of seven, eight years ago, consider intermittent fasting, I'm like, I don't think you have to do it, but you should consider it. Which nobody, practically nobody said it at the time. Then it's like, that's useful because it's a new piece of information. And that's what I try to do in the cancer code, the obesity code, the diabetes code, is to say, let's take this problem, let's look at it, differently so that we can understand it and by understanding it we can do something about it because that's great. That's really great.

My man, there you go, Dr. Jason Fung, thank you so much for your wisdom and thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, make sure to share it with your friend. Sharing is caring and make sure to check out part one if you haven't already to it, it will blow you away. LewisHowes.com/1030. Check that out right now and let me know what you think about both of these episodes. And as always, please leave us a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please do that. That'll really help us spread our message within the Apple Podcast ecosystem and let more people know about these episodes. So leave us a review, leave us a rating, and click that subscribe button. button if you enjoy this show. That will really help us spread the message to more people. And text the word podcast to 614-350-3960 if you want more inspirational messages from me every single week. And I want to close with a quote from playwright George Bernard Shaw, who said, Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you Great. Yes it will my friend. And if no one's told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy and you are. I'm so grateful for you and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.