 What happens to your body when you start intermittent fasting for a week? Well, the answer is going to come as a surprise. So here's the thing, the vast majority of people in this country have such high insulin levels, have such insulin-resistant levels, are so metabolically inflexible that they absolutely do not do well with intermittent fasting. Shocking but true. You've seen in my last book and heard me talk that 50% of normal weight individuals in the United States are metabolically inflexible. Now, just to review very quickly, normally our mitochondria should be able to take sugar, glucose, and turn it into ATP, our energy currency. They should also, when the need arrives, instantaneously switch from burning sugar as a fuel to burning free fatty acids and ketones as a fuel that come from our fat cells and from our liver. And that switch should happen instantaneously, very much like a hybrid car. It can switch from gasoline powering the engine to the battery powering the motors. And that switch can happen instantaneously. But 50% of normal weight individuals can't make that switch. That means when they stop eating, they can't switch over to immediately drawing on battery power or releasing fat from their fat cells. And I'll talk about why that is in a second. If you look at overweight people and the vast majority of Americans are overweight, 88% of overweight people can't switch between burning sugar and burning fat. And 99.5% of obese individuals, and that's a ton of us in the United States, cannot make that switch. Okay, so why is that so important? Well, when you have high insulin levels, insulin is a fat storage hormone. And insulin's job is to take any extra food that you eat and store it for harder times. That makes sense. But insulin is going up and up and up in our bloodstream as we eat more and more processed foods, we exercise less. So the vast majority of Americans have elevated insulin levels. So not only is insulin a fat storage hormone, but when insulin is elevated, it prevents fat from leaving the fat cell. It's literally blocking the exit. And until insulin levels fall, all that fat that's in all of our fat cells is literally locked in there. And you could stop eating, but you will not release the fat until your insulin levels begin to fall. And here's the bad news. It may take two to three to four weeks of dramatically reducing your food intake or your carbohydrate intake for insulin levels to fall enough to start releasing fat from fat cells. Number two, ketones are made in the liver from free fatty acids that are released from fat cells. Ketones are designed to age your brain and your muscles in times of starvation by keeping the brain and muscles functioning. But if you can't release fat from fat cells, then there's no free fatty acids going to the liver to make ketones. So what happens? You don't have any sugar in your blood. You don't have any free fatty acids in your blood. You don't have any ketones going to your brain. And what happens? You crash. You get headachey. You get weak. You get hangry. You just do not feel well. And that's your body saying, hey, I can't make this switch. So when people start trying to cut out a meal because they heard, oh, you know, I need to have my first meal of the day at noon, and you're used to eating a breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning, that's five hours of going without fuel coupled with what you went through in the night where you don't have any chance to keep your brain happy, much less your body happy. And that's why this is so difficult to do. I can't tell you the number of people, and I've written about this, who fail a ketogenic diet or an intermittent fasting diet because they just have too high an insulin level to access what they really need to do. And 60% of people who try a ketogenic diet, a low-carb, high-fat diet, quit after a month. And it's obvious why they quit because they quite frankly feel miserable. Now, this will happen if you are insulin resistant. I guarantee it. I like to use the example. I could have King James LeBron teach me how to dunk a basketball. And as much as he would show me over and over and over again, I am height-impaired compared to King James. And as much as I would like to replicate exactly what he was doing, I can't do that. So when you see influencers, particularly young influencers, who tell you how easy it is to do an intermittent fasting program, these are people who start with metabolic flexibility. And they're right. It's really easy. Once you have metabolic flexibility, this is easy. But most people are starting from a place where they, with all the instruction in the world, with all the here's what you should do, can't get off the dime because they can't break their metabolic flexibility. All right. So how do we do it? As I've talked about in my last two books, there's actually a fairly easy way to get metabolic flexibility. And rather jumping in the deep end of the pool and trying to push out your fasting period, what I ask you to do is one hour a week extend when you're going to have breakfast. So if you have breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning, this week we're going to have it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And then take the weekend off. Relax. The following week we're going to extend another hour. We're going to go to 9 o'clock in the morning. And so on each week, rather than going, oh, you're not going to eat until noon and you'll fall on your face, any of us can make it for one hour. And even that one hour change going slowly, week after week, will start to lower our insulin resistance. And I see this all the time. Now, there's places where people kind of run into a brick wall. Let's suppose you made it to 9 o'clock and you're pretty good at that. But then pushing to 10 o'clock, then you go, oh, you know, I'm hungry or I'm feeling weak. That's actually telling you that this is, you still have insulin resistance. And this is where you're running into trouble. And as I talk about in the books, we got lots of tricks. One, get yourself a handful of nuts. It won't break your fast. Have a teaspoon or a tablespoon of MCT oil. Have a bar that contains MCT oil. These are really easy tricks. And just hold it at 9 o'clock for another week and then try for 9.30. Lots of different ways. The other thing that I think is important that I've talked about before is when you break your fast, the first meal of the day, make it what's called a mono meal. Make it either mostly carbohydrates or mostly protein or mostly fat. That actually makes it much easier for your mitochondria to power up and make energy. Now, how do you know when you're metabolically flexible? Well, quite frankly, the longer you can go without these feelings, the more you're becoming metabolically flexible. So, long story short, for most of us, please, please, please do not jump off the deep end and try time-restricted eating of 6 to 8 hours a day. It's going to not work. Instead, try time-restricted eating on a variable schedule of just extending your eating period one hour a week and watch what happens. The point of this is, doing intermittent fasting for one week, you're going to see some most likely bad effects. But if you slowly but surely week after week extend your intermittent fasting period, you're going to feel the benefits, you're going to see it on the scale, and that's what I'm looking out for you to do. I think you're going to love this next one. Believe it or not, after five weeks, you'll be eating breakfast at noon as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Oh, and here's the good news. You can take the weekends off.