Top 10 Foods To Eat For Intermittent Fasting Benefits

Hello Health Champions. Today i want to talk about the best

foods to eat during intermittent fasting to get the most benefits with the least

amount of hunger and suffering. Coming right up!

Hey I'm Dr Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete

and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure you subscribe and hit that

notification bell so you don't miss anything. There are so many benefits to

intermittent fasting and weight loss is probably the number

one reason people do it but in my mind there are much more

important reasons such as lowering blood sugar reversing diabetes

reducing inflammation reducing brain fog heart disease having less risk of

alzheimer's parkinson risk of cancer goes down and

we can also improve immune function and we can live

longer not only that but we can have more

health and more joy during those extra years so the list can

go on and on and on but whatever the reason

you're doing it whatever the benefit you're getting

it all comes down to two common mechanisms

and the first one is that during the time you're not

eating your insulin goes down insulin is released in response to food

so when you don't put food in the body insulin keeps dropping for the duration

if you do that consistently for weeks and months and years

now you will reduce even stubborn cases of

insulin resistance and you can reverse type 2 diabetes in virtually every case

the second mechanism by which this works is called

autophagy and what is that well during the time that you're fasting

you're not eating you're not putting resources you're not putting new

resources into the body the body has to get much better at

utilizing the resources that are already there so the body up

regulates the crew that goes around recycling it goes out

scavenging looking for resources and it gets really good

at figuring out what's good what we want to keep

and what's junk what do we need to get rid of and in that process

we actually improve our detoxification significantly and our immune system

also during fasting our growth hormone increases

and it can go up as much as 10 fold or more

and what that does it improves fat burning but because the body also gets

really good at determining what it needs to keep and

what it needs to lose protein is really precious and the body

wants the protein for muscles and enzymes and hormones

so when you don't put protein into the body

it makes sure that it uses the protein effectively and it burns fat for energy

a lot of people when they hear fasting they think of long-term fasting

they think days or weeks without food and that's

not a bad thing to do you could go three days five days a week

ten days and do that every two to three months a couple of

times a year because what that will do is it will create very high levels

of autophagy you can reverse a lot of disease conditions

with that the problem is that it's not sustainable

as a lifestyle it's not something you do all the time

and this video is about the best foods for

intermittent fasting so we're talking about

a lifestyle intermittent fasting is where you can eat

on a regular period and fast on a regular period so you might be eating

once a day maybe eat for four hours or six hours

maybe every day maybe every other day whatever gets you to your goals

and when we do it this way it's sustainable

we can do this all the time we can do this every week

year after year so the foods we're looking for

are the ones with the most nutrition that maximize our satiety our fullness

and set us up for success and reduce the suffering

during the fasting period and while intermittent fasting can never get the

massive levels of autophagy that long-term fasting will we can still

get some autophagy on a regular basis and

that's kind of the whole point that if we can do it all the time and we can

get just a little bit that's still very valuable some people

say that carbs are not a problem with intermittent fasting and they

keep eating pizza and pasta and bread and as long as they keep a fasting

period they're doing great well that could work

for some people and for others it will be a disaster but

here's why i think that low carb is way better

if you're trying to go from a high insulin level to a low insulin level

let's say from this point to this point it's going to take

a certain amount of time for that insulin to drop where you can reverse

insulin resistance and get into autophagy but how long it

takes depends on how high your insulin is when

you start if you eat every meal with high carb

you're going to jack up that insulin so you kind of have a backlog to

compensate for each time you go into fasting

when you eat things with refined carbs like

sugar and bread and pasta and starches you trigger a lot of insulin

when you eat protein you trigger some and when you

eat fat you hardly trigger any insulin at all

and protein is very sensitive depending on how

much of it you eat because if you eat a lot of it

the body says here's an abundance we can turn

some of this into fuel so the protein becomes glucose and triggers insulin

whereas if you eat smaller amounts of protein now the body is not going to

turn that into fuel and then it triggers much less

insulin but let's say that you eat a low carb diet now

every time that you start fasting you're going to start off

from a much lower insulin level it's like

you've got a head start you've given yourself a huge advantage

not only are you going to get to that low point

much much faster but because you get there faster

you're going to spend a longer time in autophagy

and you're going to reach a much deeper level of autophagy the other thing that

carbs do is they trigger hunger and cravings if you eat

mostly fat and protein and fiber whole foods

no processed, no sugar then your glucose levels and your insulin levels

are going to stay in a very narrow range if you start eating sugar and starch and

processed foods your blood sugar starts spiking

and whenever it's really high your body makes a lot of insulin

the insulin pushes the blood sugar down quickly

so now you have peaks and valleys and anytime it's low

then it's called reactive hypoglycemia and now you get lethargic you get tired

you get headaches and most importantly you get

massive hunger and cravings carbs create unstable blood sugar but not only that

some of these carbs have drug-like effects

like sugar wheat and refined carbs they actually stimulate opiate receptors

pleasure receptors in the brain so not only are you trying to go without food

for a while but you're trying to overcome an addiction

not an easy thing to do so one more reason that

going low carb will make it much much easier

and it will reduce hunger and cravings and make you suffer

much less now let's talk about the only thing that makes this

a little tricky which is that satiety and insulin is very straightforward

if we want to get full we eat protein with fat like fatty meats we eat we add

fat to it we eat things with fiber and we get very full insulin is the same

three factors in a slightly different order

to get full we can eat tons of protein with to control

insulin we can eat protein but it needs to be moderate

however with autophagy it's very sensitive to protein even very small

amounts of protein will shut off autophagy because it's the lack of

protein that makes the body get really good at recycling those

resources a lot of research has been done around

fasting mimicking diet and they have found that

if you keep your protein under 18 grams per day then you still

maintain most of the benefits of fasting

so i know 18 grams is hardly anything and you can't do that for very

long but stay with me and we're going to come back to that and see how we can use

that to our advantage so protein becomes kind

of the balancing factor between these benefits on the one hand

satiety and insulin which is pretty simple and

if we also want to get some autophagy so animal foods like fatty fish

grass-fed meat and eggs they are the most

filling you can have these as a meal in themselves and they're very very

satisfying they're low to moderate in the insulin

response unless you eat a lot of it they're moderate to high

protein however so they're not going to be the best

for autophagy we can't have hardly any of these until we shut off the autophagy

fatty nuts are a little bit better like macadamia nuts and pecans are the best

ones especially raw they're quite filling not as much as

animal meats but pretty good they're low carb low protein they are

very high fat high fiber and they have a very low

insulin response so you can't eat tons of them

because the toffee is sensitive to both the amount of calories

and protein but you could have some of this and still

sort of stay in that autophagy zone other foods you can use

are leafy greens cabbage non-starchy vegetables like

cauliflower broccoli brussels sprouts etc

they're very low carb very low protein very low fat

they're hardly going to trigger any nutrient sensors

or insulin they're also high fiber and even though they provide a certain

volume through the fiber and they don't trigger

insulin you don't get very full it is hard for most people to eat enough

of just this to get full however if you combine it

with fat if you put some butter and olive oil on this then they can be

quite filling now let's look at the timing and see how we can

tweak the benefits a little bit let's say that you have dinner at 6 pm

one day and you eat a large meal with lots of protein and fat and fiber

you're really full you make it through the night you skip

breakfast but then you come around noon time and you start getting hungry

now you've gone 18 hours and you could push through but you're really feeling

sort of like i really want something to eat and

autophagy and these insulin resistance benefits of reversing

insulin resistance they kind of start kicking in really

after 12-14 hours so by 18 hours we're really just getting

going wouldn't it be great if we could get

another six hours out of it then we would like

triple the benefits out of this now if we had a

big meal of protein then we would shut down the process

cold the autophagy goes away insulin goes up

we broke in the fast however if we had something

small just enough to get us through and that little thing we had was

pure fat or at least very low in protein and very low in sugar now maybe we could

get those extra six hours and

we could maintain the benefits of autophagy

so if you can go the 24 hours and feel great

then do that but if you're not feeling so great and you really want something

then this is a trick that can help you get through

so what would you be using then well here's where we bring in our famous

bulletproof coffee and all that is it's black coffee or

black tea and you add some fat to it it could be

butter it could be mct oil could be coconut oil

and what that does it gives you some nutrients it gives you some

calories but it has zero carbs zero protein it's very high fat almost

zero insulin response so your body's nutrient sensors don't really

react much to it unless you exaggerate it so in the strictest sense

you definitely break your fast but from a practical standpoint you're

still getting most of the benefits of intermittent

fasting and if it helps you get from 18 hours to

24 hours you have dramatically increased the

benefits we also have different forms of fat like butter extra

virgin olive oil coconut oil lard etc they're quite filling zero carbs zero or

trace protein like in the case of butter

they're very high fat and almost a zero insulin response and

while these things are not something that you

would eat by themselves necessarily you could use them for your bulletproof

coffee and you can also put them on vegetables so if you had a salad for

example instead of the bulletproof coffee

then you're not eating enough protein or calories to really get out of that

fasting zone coconut cream is also great it's

very filling has all of these benefits that we talked about

and you can use it for your coffee you can use it as a creamer

coffee or tea and i often use it in smoothies

and you can also make some delicious hot chocolate with it

and then we get to nature's perfect food that seems to show up in

every list anyone ever does avocado because it is quite filling very low

carb very low protein moderate fat high fiber very low

insulin it meets virtually every one of these criteria and yet it has a lot of

properties of vegetables it's strictly speaking

it's a fruit but it sort of behaves like a vegetable

in many ways and i call it moderate fat compared to

other really fatty foods like nuts but for plant it is very high fat and

that's why it is more filling more satisfying in

itself than virtually any other plant i'm not

suggesting that this is the perfect list but i think it's a great list and it's a

good place to start and the reason i set it up like this is

that you if you understand the principles if you understand the

mechanisms and why these things are on the list then you can take these and

then you can expand it into similar foods and you can grow

your list and you can find out the things that work best for you

because what's really filling for one person

may not be perceived that way by another because

we're all very different if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn

more about how health really works i think that that next video will really

hit the spot for you thank you so much for watching i'll see

you next time