 Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Sugar MD channel. This is a channel designated for diabetics. You don't have diabetes? That's okay brother. You can watch it too because one of the most important thing is to avoid or prevent diabetes. If you have metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, that's a perfect channel too. Now we will talk about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is good for some people and some people say it doesn't work. Why? We are going to talk about five or six common mistakes that I know of is preventing you from losing weight or controlling your diabetes, although you are trying to do intermittent fasting. I am Dr. Ahmed Ergin. I'm an endocrinologist and a diabetes education specialist and we will talk about today the common mistakes that is made with intermittent fasting. All right guys, the most common mistake, the most common mistake with intermittent fasting is when I tell people to go intermittent fast. Of course they do their own research. They look around if they don't want to ask me. They say, oh yeah, I know what intermittent fasting is. I can do it. I'm like, okay, you want to do it? Go do it. And then they come back and say, ah, no, it doesn't work for me. And when we try to uncover what's going on with these people, I understand that you know, they sometimes start too soon, too quick and they want results immediately. Now that's the number one mistake. So anything in life, anything valuable doesn't come overnight. You have to work for it. And I'll always say start slow. If you have an exercise for a year now and you don't want to go hit the gym full force, you have to take it easy. Now with intermittent fasting, I would suggest guys start with, hey, you can't stay more than four hours. Try five hours. You can't stay more than five hours. You start getting shaky. You know, start six hours, eight hours. And of course, adjust your medications. You know, if you're diabetic, you may be on insulin, you may be on other agents such as sulfonylureus. If your doctor may say, hey, you cannot go without eating because you're on this and this. In that case, you can tell your doctor, hey doc, you know, I want to do this. Can you help me, please? Can you cut my medications? I promise I'll intermittent fast. And this is how am I going to do it? Is that okay? If you do it, how do we work it around? What do we do with the medications? Right? So be open with your doctor. So let's say you want to fast. You want to, you know, as I said, five hours, six hours, eight hours, you can gradually increase it. It is a marathon. Okay. It is a slow pace and it is a long journey. And yes, you can put your diabetes into remission within two weeks if you just totally stop eating and drinking, but that's not a long-term solution. So you have to find a good pace and you need to gradually increase your fitness when it comes to being able to fast for a longer time. You will realize, even look, even let's forget about diabetes, there are exercises that teaches you how to hold your breath. Hold your breath for a second. How many seconds, when I say for a second, for, try for a minute. For most people, holding the breath for a minute is almost impossible, right? But when you train your body, there are people out there, they can hold their breath for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even longer without dying. How do they do that? Because they can train their body. Now, do they do it overnight? No, it takes a while, guys. So you can start with six hours for a week, for a couple of weeks, a month, whatever it takes. Next day, you tried eight hours or 10 hours. That was too much. That's okay. Back off a little bit. Try it again. Try it again. Next time, fast an hour longer. Fast an hour longer. Soon, you are going to find yourself that you are fasting 24 hours or even 48 hours, and you're going to feel still energetic. And you're going to be surprised with yourself how you can fast that long. The only barrier is going to be your people around you. That is the only barrier. If you can stick with your own rule, you can do anything you want. But as I said, you have to make it gradually and slowly. That's going to also give time to people around you to kind of catch up with your pace and understand what's going on instead of giving them a different shock every day. The second mistake is continue to eat high carb meal. Well, that's kind of my problem sometimes too, because I work out a lot and I fast. And the next thing you know, if you crave carbs, now for people like me, you're still athletic, still working out. That may not be a huge problem. But even you have diabetes, you know, it is a problem because your body has no means to get this carbohydrates under control unless, like I said, unless you're very athletic and you're exercising a lot. So when you eat high carbohydrate meal, unfortunately, your insulin spike, your sugar spikes, and it comes down, it becomes like peaks and troughs. And you keep craving you want to get this high again. And unfortunately, every time when we eat carbs or sugar, our dopamine receptors are being stimulated as the same receptors that actually are stimulated with the street drugs, to be honest with you, you know, and then you become addicted to the sugar. So as a result, even if you're fasting for a long time, it makes the fast difficult, first of all. But the second of all, when you eat carbs, you are creating insulin resistance and you are creating more need for medicine. So your sugar may be great all day long. For example, I have a lot of patients on continuous glucose monitoring systems. I see their blood sugars are very nice from all day long. And it's 6pm. And after that, your blood sugar is 300 400 because they eat, they fast, they fast, but then they break their fast with a very high carbohydrate meal. And that's not going to help your diabetes or weight loss. Because in a few hours before you go to bed, you will be hungry again. And you'll look for snacks. And more than likely, you're going to be looking for some sweet snacks. So avoid that mistake. The third mistake is the free foods. For example, coffee in the morning, right? We say, Oh, coffee is okay. You know, we don't really want to, we don't bother. You know, it's just a coffee, you know, I have to wake up, right? I have to have my coffee. And I tell a lot of times, coffee is okay to people, which is all right, right? A black coffee is okay, or a one cup of coffee with some creamer is okay. If you have to have one stevia is okay. But for people who drink cups after cups after cups, those creamers that fat content and some carbohydrate in those creamers will add up to your calories. And it's not going to necessarily be a real fasting. So if you are a big coffee drinker, or if you are putting creams into your drinks and stuff like that, you have to avoid and try to stick with your black coffee if you want to drink a couple cups of coffee. And the next problem is expecting too much. Sometimes, you know, it happens with medications too. I start a patient on a medication, for example, or people use our supplement, which is called Dr. Ergen's Sugar MD Advanced Glucose Support. They expect results within a few days. Well, that happens with anything, the exercise, the diet, the medications, you have to give some time to anything. And unfortunately, we tend to reward ourselves pretty quickly. So when we fast, for example, three, four days in two weeks, we think that we have made a major progress. We are so proud of ourselves that we can reward ourselves on the weekend. And we can kind of, you know, grab something here and there, because you fasted and then you expect results. Well, you know, it's only been two weeks, you fasted only four times, you know, your body has been damaged, to be honest with you for years and years of neglect, misbehavior, and nobody to blame here. But all of us are guilty, you know, we all do things that are not necessarily best for us. And we do not or should not expect to fix those problems overnight. Anyways, that's one another mistake. Let's move on to the next one. Like the carbohydrate, so we talk about the calories too. So a lot of times, especially middle age women or men, especially women after menopause, they are having a real seriously difficult time losing weight. Because although they fast, when they break their fast, they are still consuming quite a bit of calories. And it's hard to believe that and you believe or not, and I see this all the time in my patients, they do not necessarily lose weight unless they go really low calorie with intermittent fasting. So if you're intermittent fasting, you can have maybe 800 to 1000 calorie at a time. But if you are having 2000 calories as a 55 year old woman, unless you're genetically very gifted, I don't think you will be able to lose weight if you are consuming such a large amount of calories at once. If you're a, you know, younger individual, more athletic individual that may be okay. But again, fasting is not necessarily a credit for you to go and eat whatever you want during that feeding period. And the last problem is eating too late at night. So when you eat too late at night, unfortunately, your blood sugars will be high in the morning. You're not going to have a good night's sleep. Your cortisol, your growth hormone will be aggravated. You're going to be under stress, your insulin resistance will go high. So not having snacks or a meal after 6pm, if possible, 5pm is to your benefit. So sometimes people fast, it's easier to fast during the day, because, you know, you're at work, you're busy, whatever. But then when you come home, it says relaxation time, the snack time, and people start eating and they keep eating until eight and nine o'clock sometimes. And they're not having a good sleep and their blood sugar remains high. They're not active and so forth. So if you are going to fast, the best fasting period, in my opinion, is starting from 5 or 6pm overnight all the way to the next day until afternoon. So if you're having one meal a day, that will be like 4 or 5 o'clock and not having any snacks. But if you want to have snacks, maybe you can have some snacks in the afternoon, a few snacks will help you avoid having a large meal at 5 o'clock because, you know, seriously, if you are, if you don't eat for 15 hours and if you don't snack for the next few hours before you hit 18 hours, at 18 hour mark, you are going to be extremely hungry and you are at risk of eating a lot of calories at once, which may prevent you having a good sleep, which may prevent you from burning the calories off and so forth. So I hope you guys can understand this. Again, I am trying to help you do my best because there are mistakes that happen all the time and I want you guys to be successful, happy and healthy. Alright, so please give a comment, write a comment, share this video and give a thumbs up and we'll see you in the next video.