 Now, have you been fasting or meal skipping with little to no results? You're not alone. If you've read my book, Unlocking the Keto Code, you now know that 50% of normal weight people are what we call metabolically inflexible. This means that they are actually insulin resistant, which quite frankly is the same as pre-diabetic. This means that they have a high fasting insulin level. That means that they cannot make a switch from burning sugar as a fuel to burning free fatty acids as a fuel because they can't release fat from fat cells. And we'll get into that in a minute. Now even worse, 88% of overweight people are insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible, and 99% of obese people are insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible. So if you're in that category and the vast majority of Americans are, one of the problems is that your mitochondria are dependent on using sugar as a fuel. One of our problems is we use insulin as a key to taking extra sugar and extra protein and delivering it into muscle cells to use as a fuel. Even if muscle cells are hungry, it's easy to unlock the door and deliver the fuel. But the vast majority of us are resistant to the action of insulin. They're not listening to the sales pitch. So insulin instead takes the extra calories that we eat and unlocks the door to fat cells and says, here, we're going to store this for later because a famine is going to come. It always has in the past and we'll be ready. We'll have our batteries charged. So when insulin levels are high, trying to deliver this, one of the things that most people don't know is that a high insulin level prevents fat cells from releasing fats back into the bloodstream. And think about it. If you're trying to put something into storage with a moving band, you certainly wouldn't want another guy with a different moving band taking what you put into storage out. And that's actually a great design. So when insulin levels are high, like most of us, unfortunately, we can put fat into storage, but that insulin blocks fat from coming out. Well, we can run on both sugar and free fatty acids or ketones. And we should be just like a hybrid car. If we run out of sugar, if our blood sugar drops, instantly those fat cells should start releasing free fatty acids into our bloodstream. And we can run on those. Or might I kind of go, great, I'm now using fats that's been stored wonderful. I'm perfect, but the vast majority of us have a high insulin level. So when we stop eating and our blood sugar starts to go low, our insulin level is still high. And so even though we would like to get to all that fat, the high insulin level prevents that from happening. It's literally water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Okay. What happens when we try to do intermittent fasting or meal skipping is that our blood sugar drops and we get hangry, we get grumpy, we get a headache and we get really hungry. So that when we start eating, our brain says, hey, I got to have sugar. Let me sugar. I am literally starving to death. And so what happens to everyone is that we crave carbohydrates because our brain says that's what I need. And so you could be skipping a meal while still metabolically inflexible, but you in general overeat and you overeat primarily on carbohydrates. And I see this all the time in my patients who are really trying hard to follow an intermittent fasting program, but they just don't realize that as long as their insulin levels are elevated, they're going to have a really hard time making it through this period of not eating. And when they finally start eating, they almost invariably overeat. Now there's one other solution that most people unfortunately are not aware of. So you can't get to all that fat that you've stored when your insulin level is high, but there's another option and it's a bad option. You can break down muscle to provide glucose and it's called gluconeogenesis. So if your insulin level is high and you can't get to that fat, your body instead will actually start cannibalizing your muscle to get the glucose that it needs to keep running. What's so bad about that? Well remember muscle in general is what your insulin sells the food you eat too. And if you've got lots of customers, lots of muscle, then it's an easy sale and insulin doesn't have to go up. Recent example of this is many of you have heard about this miracle weight loss drug Ozympic and its cousins. And it's given away like water in Los Angeles, I see it every day. The problem is that the studies done on ozympic weight loss shows that 50% of the weight loss that's achieved is lack of muscle. In other words muscle mass going down accounts for 50% of the weight loss. And so it's no wonder that when people stop that drug their weight balloons because now you don't have as many customers to sell the food you ate and it goes right into fat. And so the same thing happens when we try to muscle through not eating with a high insulin level, we're literally stealing protein from our muscles to make blood sugar. So it's a double whammy. So what does all this have to do with fasting? Well if you're metabolically flexible your body works like a hybrid car and it switches over literally instantaneously when you run out of gas, glucose, you just start burning battery power in your fat. And because your insulin is low you just switch back and forth. When your insulin level is high you literally sputter to a stop or start stealing from your muscles and when you start eating you are ravenously hungry and you overeat. Some of my patients say well but I'm going to eat lectin free foods or lectin light foods and I'll be fine. So they eat a bag of cassava chips or they eat a bag of plantain chips because they're so hungry and they come in and we look at their results and they're not losing weight and their triglycerides are elevated and they still have an elevated insulin and we go through their diet and they're shocked. When I show them the carbohydrate content of a bag of cassava chips or a bag of plantain chips and they go but there's no lectins in that. I said yeah but there's still carbohydrates and this actually proves to you that your brain is telling you to seek these things out. And when we finally break through that just because something's lectin free doesn't mean it's a safe food to eat if we're trying to lower insulin levels then we actually make some progress. All right now you're saying well what the heck am I supposed to do I'm like most Americans I'm insulin resistant I'm metabolically inflexible help. Well as I explained in the keto code becoming metabolically flexible is not as difficult as you think. So first of all MCT oil or powder. So MCTs are unlike any other fat MCTs are absorbed directly through the wall of our gut and they go directly to our liver where they're made into ketones and ketones you and your brain and your mitochondria can use as a fuel even though there's no glucose. So this is a really good trick to get you through these anxious times. As I mentioned before women do better with MCT powders in general MCT oils give a lot of women a queasy stomach and even loose bowel movements even diarrhea. So plenty of MCT oils try to get C8 MCTs and please coconut oil is not going to do the job for you. Most of the fats in coconut oil are not MCTs and I see this mistake made all the time people see that MCT oil is from coconut oil so they assume that coconut oil has a lot of MCTs it doesn't. And you will not get the benefit by using coconut oil you'll get the benefit by using MCT oil. Now how about diet? The problem is when you're doing these sorts of programs you want to eat more protein because you can take that protein and break it down into glucose without affecting your muscle mass. Also nuts are a great source of protein and nuts also really are satiating and you can get through this program. Now muscle strength training is actually one of the best ways to increase your metabolically flexible mitochondria. The more muscle mass you make by strength training the lower your insulin levels go. And remember 70% of your muscle mass is in your butt and your thighs so when you go to the gym concentrate on lower body exercising and you don't even need to go to the gym Like I say take some exercise snacking breaks brush your teeth twice a day for two minutes do squats deep knee bends while you're brushing your teeth you're going to use those deep muscles to do it do a plank do a modified plank you'll actually use almost all of your muscles to do a plank or a push up. Hot therapy like a sauna builds flexibility cold therapy like taking a cold shower or just even a 15 30 second blast of cold after your shower will activate mitochondrial and coupling. Polyphenols the more polyphenols you get in your diet the more metabolically flexible you become and there's a lot of foods that have MCT oil like goat and sheep cheeses and goat and sheep yogurts so all of these tricks will get you metabolically flexible. More amazing episodes just like this one watch now I know it's touted to clean out your system help you lose weight and reset your digestive system but I think this is actually the worst idea.