How To Optimize Intermittent Fasting With 5 Secret Tips | Ronan Oliveira

I want to give you my five secret tips on how to optimize your practice of intermittent fasting. My name is Ronan. I am the head of the health and fitness department at Mindvalley. And in previous videos I told you how to get started with intermittent fasting. Then how to avoid the five main mistakes that people usually do when they are in the beginning. Now it's time to take it to the next level. The five secret tips are being regular with your meal schedule, increasing the amount of protein, improving your sleep, having coffee and tea strategically, and riding the hunger wave. So let's go one by one. The first one is about your meal schedule. And for this I want to imagine that you are a manager of a warehouse and you have big containers that you load trucks with. Some of them are small and light, some of them are super big and heavy. And the trucks come in different times of the day. And if comes a truck that needs a big and heavy box, you need equipment to be set up, and you need a specific team with a specific type of skills that will get ready half an hour before the truck comes. And if it is a small box that goes into a different type of truck, you need a different type of team and a different type of equipment and all the documentation processes. So you start getting ready for work in the beginning of the morning, because you know that one truck arrives at 10am and one truck arrives at 12pm and so on, so forth. They have a very clear schedule, but let's say they wake up, it's a Tuesday, and then a big truck arrives three hours earlier than it was supposed to do. You don't have the equipment set up, you know the team that loads the truck is not even in the office. And then you freak out, you need to improvise and things are not going to be optimal. The body works in a similar way when it comes to digesting the food. You know, the process of digestion ideally does not start only when you eat food. There is a setting up of the equipment, that is a couple of enzymes and organs that get to the office before the food comes so that it can start setting things up. And so if the truck comes every day a different time, or the food comes every day at a different time, sometimes it comes when the body is not prepared and the digestion of that food is not going to be optimal process. So when you start to have a very clear and regular schedule, then now your teams and the enzymes and organs know when to show up at the office, you realize that not only digestion is Better, but your hunger levels also decrease because now you're regulating your circadian rhythm. And there is even a study by the University of Nottingham. What they did is that they got 11 women, and first they got them to for two weeks to have meals in regular time, and then for other two weeks to have meals all over the place in different times each day. And they found out that in the days that in the weeks that meals were irregular, one, they have higher levels of hunger before a meal, so that leads potentially to eating more. Second, they had less of a hormone called pyy. That is one of the hormones that make you feel satiated after you eat. So less of the hormone makes you less satiated, which makes it more likely for you to eat. And number three, they also had worse blood sugar control. With more blood sugar oscillation, there is more of this feeling of hunger. At least it comes sooner. So all the signals of the irregular meal is driving someone into the direction of consuming more calories, and it may undermine that goal of losing fat. For example, the second tip is about having more protein in all meals during your feeding window. And this is because protein out of all macronutrients. So you're talking about protein, carbohydrates and fat. Protein is the one that increases your level of satiation the most. And one of the reasons why is because protein is a combination of different amino acids. One of them is called phenylalanine, and it has a very specific role into improving or increasing your level of fullness after a meal. So when you eat and there is food that is coming into your digestive tract, there is a hormone that you release called cholecystokinin or ckk. Hey, I just messed up. I meant CCK and not ckk. Just blame it on my Portuguese accent. Alright, back to the video. Imagine this guy as a messenger, you know, he comes from the stomach, he goes up to the brain and he talks to the brain. Hey, we are having food now. We are okay, you know, it's about time for us to stop eating. But this CKK guy is not very convincing, let's say. And sometimes the brain, as the CEO that is busy with so many processes at the same time, doesn't hear this guy speaking, so he keeps on sending that signal for eating more. But phenylalanine, that amino acid from protein, it's like a corporate trainer, you know, he holds the CKK and trains the guy on how to be very convincing when he talks to the brain, to the CEO. So then CKK goes with a Lot of confidence, you know. And he goes to the brain and says, brain, we had enough. What are you doing? It's about time for us to stop eating. And the brain goes, ah, now I understood. And the whole signal of eating more stops sooner with a higher amount of protein. So increasing protein is one more strategy that helps you burn fat. With intermittent fasting, the third strategy is also about reducing hunger. But this comes through the avenue of sleep. Inadequate sleep is one of the easiest ways to make your brain crave food, to be super hungry. And this has an evolutionary perspective. Back in the day, 200,000 years ago, when our bodies were used by hunters and gatherers, the only reason why we would stay up late at night was either because we were hunting something or we were being hunted. And in either case, you want to eat more after that. If you are hunting something, the brain goes like, you know, you've been hunting for a long time and you're not being successful with this because it's been days and you are up too late. So I will increase your drive for food. So maybe you get a little more creative to find food, right? If you're being hunted, then you are sprinting, then you are rushing, then you need, after you survive, to replenish energy. So the brain also increases your drive for food because you're up until late running away from a tiger, and now you need to replenish your energy. And there's even research that shows the same thing. There is one study by the University of Colorado. They got two groups of guys and put them in a laboratory. For one group, they said, for this week, you're only going to sleep for five hours. We are going to wake you up after that. For the second group, they said, you can sleep as much as you want. And then for both groups, they put them in a place that they had any type of food of any quantity they wanted, and they could eat as much as they wanted whenever they felt like. The people who are sleep deprived, they knew that they would feel hungrier. So they were very conservative. Maybe they skipped their breakfast. They had a very light lunch. They, you know, took it easy in dinner. But then they always decided to have a little snack before going to bed. And when it's 11pm you have a snack, it's never broccoli. So this is when the monster came out. And then one little snack became as big as sometimes two meals in terms of calories. And this led them to gain two pounds of pure fat in only one week of experiment. There's another study by the University of Chicago that found that when people are sleep deprived, the brain activates a network called the endocannabinoid system that is responsible of getting more pleasure out of food. So when you are sleep deprived, not only the brain is hungrier, but it's also craving the food more tasty, the high sugary and high calorie types of food. So regulating your sleep removes all this craving and all this drive for eating extra calories. Then our fourth strategy is also about how to curb hunger, but this is using coffee and tea. Strategically, both of them are natural hunger suppressors. So if you're doing an intermittent fasting, that you are having a late breakfast, your breakfast around 11am or 12pm the morning time when you feel hungry is a great time to have a cup of coffee. Because not only it suppresses hunger, but the caffeine in coffee or tea, you know, green tea or black tea, also helps mobilize the energy from inside fat cells and kind of put it out there in your body so you can use them for energy. So it increases your abilities to burn fat a little bit more. The first four strategies were all about how you decrease, how you manage the hunger signal. The fifth one is exactly the opposite. It's about riding the hunger wave. In a lot of other nutritional strategies, there is this thing that if you are hungry, you freak out. The feeling of hunger is something that people are afraid of. If you feel that thing, you are unconsciously eating or you need to do something right here and right now. You can use intermittent fasting as also your own mindfulness practice. Even though if your meals are regular and if you have more protein, if you have coffee and tea and regulate your sleep, you are decreasing a lot the amount of hunger that you experience to the point that you're completely not having it anymore. When you do have it, instead of reacting straight away and going for food or, you know, freaking out, breathe into it, feel it, imagine you take your awareness to where it is in your body. You will realize, especially if you do an extended fast, their hunger doesn't linearly increase over time, that if you're hungry right now, and if you stay for four more hours without eating, hunger, it's just getting higher and higher. No, hunger comes in waves. At some point you feel hungry, and if you wait for a little bit, it disappears, and then it may hit again. And if you wait a little bit, it disappears. So use that to identify what kind of sensations you have in your body, what kind of thoughts come. Maybe there are thoughts that make you desperate for food. Or maybe there are thoughts of lack. There are different things that you can learn about yourself by riding the wave of hunger. Now in different videos together with this one, I showed you how to get started with intermittent fasting. I showed you how to avoid the main mistakes and how to optimize your practice. Now I want to know from you what is it that I'm missing? Maybe you are practicing, there's something that you still struggling with or you have questions that I haven't covered. Please let me know in the comments below because I would love to know and make the following videos about that and talking about this series of videos. I'm gonna take a break right now to start a second season in a few weeks from now, so your comments will be highly appreciated so I can also prepare more things. They speak exactly about what you want to know. Looking forward to this. I see you in the next video.