Theresa Piela
Okay, welcome back to the bioenergetics view. I'm your host, Teresa Piela, joined as always by Mike Fave and Jay Feldman. And we're going to dive back in for part two on our discussion on the sugar diet and maybe some of the downfalls in that department. And let's just jump right back in with this clip.

Jay Feldman
And just to provide a bit of context with the clip. this is, uh, I guess I don't know whose channel or podcast it was on, but it's Jay Campbell talking with Mark Bell and Hunter Williams. Mark is talking about the sugar diet and they're talking about whether it's a good idea to use metformin while sugar fasting. So sugar fasting being the version where you're only eating sugars, you know, from fruit juice, candy, and not eating any protein, not eating any fat. Should you, can you still use metformin? And then they talk about some other drugs and supplements as well, while, you know, in this clip. And so that's what we'll be commenting on.

Theresa Piela
Thank you, Jay.

¨Do you think that people should use metformin while on the sugar fast? Might as well, right? mean, keep the A1C, you know, in line. I mean, I don't think it's going to block them because it's really just improving insulin sensitivity. I think you would want probably not to dispose of glucose like with ALA, Hunter, but metformin is probably okay, right? Because it's all it's really doing is improving insulin sensitivity at the receptor level.¨

Theresa Piela
Okay, Jay, start us off. What's coming to mind?

Jay Feldman

Sure. So they dig into a number of other compounds later on in the clip. was, you know, I think it's good to maybe just start with the Metformin piece. Although they all, they all do go hand in hand, but, so we have this, this perspective of people who, maybe they're already taking Metformin. It seems like they are talking about longevity protocols and things like that later, which maybe we'll circle back to, but so they're basically saying, you know, you might as well keep using something like Metformin while on a sugar fast to keep your A1C down and improve insulin sensitivity. And he says later, like, it just improves insulin sensitivity. Like that's, that is the mechanism of metformin and we're, missing a lot there. And I think it's really, again, very similar to what we were talking about in part one with coal and kind of like the surface level ideas and simplicity here. It's, think maybe a lot of people have that perspective about metformin, like metformin just lowers blood sugar and increases insulin sensitivity, but it's another really good example of why we want to look, you know, below the surface, look under the hood and see what's actually going on because it's not that simple. And it also helps inform us as to whether it would make sense to use it in a case like the sugar diet. So I think the first thing is worth noting is metformin has a number of effects. One of the beneficial ones, which is really one of the ones that's not very much talked about is that it has some antibiotic effects in the gut helps to therefore lower the growth of harmful bacteria and lowers endotoxin.

And so that's one of the mechanisms the, for its benefits. And I would say it's one of the actual legitimate ones, but on the flip side, it also has mitochondrial toxicity and inhibits especially complex one of the electron transport chain. And so what this does is it reduces the efficiency of our mitochondria and our metabolism. And when it comes to the utilization of glucose, it prevents us from using glucose efficiently all the way through oxidative phosphorylation. Instead, it causes glucose to be converted to lactate through glycolysis.

And that's why one of the side effects that's known from metformin is an increase in lactate and the effect being lactic acidosis is something that, you know, people have to be aware of. that's because it causes us to basically use glucose very inefficiently, which causes us to use it faster. Basically, instead of going through the whole process of converting glucose through the ATP, we just run it through, convert it to lactate. It's a very rapid process. This is, you know, what happens to the muscles when we sprint, for example, and It allows us to produce a lot of ATP in a very short period of time, but it's not very efficient at all, not something we want to be relying on. And so in the long-term, we end up with a number of issues. For one, because of the blockage in the electron transport chain, we end up with more ROS, which means more oxidative stress. And we also end up with less ATP in the long-term because we're not getting all of the energy that we could get out of the glucose. We're just converting it to lactate.

So this is not something you generally would want to be doing, right? We do have this benefit at the gut. But generally in terms of the mitochondria, we have an overall negative effect when it comes to metformin, which is part of why, you know, we've talked about this on previous episodes, but part of why we don't think it's a very good idea in the vast majority of cases. Now to tie that in here with the sugar diet, or I guess even the first, the other comment he made, which is this is just improving insulin sensitivity. What I'm first getting at here is that's not what it's doing. It is causing the wasting of glucose. So we do decrease glucose availability inside the cells which does then increase insulin sensitivity because we've converted that glucose to lactate. So now the cells can accept more glucose, but it's doing it via mitochondrial toxicity. So the insulin sensitivity you're seeing is not actually a good thing. I would say kind of like we were talking about earlier in part one, where just because you're seeing the weight go down on the scale, doesn't mean it's happening through beneficial mechanisms. Even if you're seeing loss in body fat, same thing here, just because you see the blood sugar levels go down or just because you see improved insulin sensitivity, doesn't mean it's happening via good mechanisms.

So that's the first thing. But the second thing is this assumption that if you're like, it's still baked in here that if you're doing the sugar diet, it'll keep your blood sugar up. So you might as well do this to keep the A1C down, right? And I think this is a situation where people, I mean, they're, they're probably not familiar with the literature looking at very high carb, low fat diets where you tend to see blood sugar decrease. see A1C decrease. see people with type two diabetes get off of medications like metformin as well as insulin.

I mean, it has major improvements in insulin sensitivity. It doesn't mean this is the approach that we would take. Obviously we talked about that in part one. I don't think sugar fasting is the best way to take advantage of those mechanisms, but that will be the case. And you should see a reduction in A1C, a reduction in blood sugar because of how little fat is coming in and you should be using that glucose pretty well. So you, this would actually be a case where you wouldn't want to use metformin for two reasons. One, you're going to cause that glucose to all be converted to lactate.

And you're going to be at even greater of an energy deficiency because not only are you not having fat as a fuel, but now you're, you're also not using the glucose efficiently, which is not a good idea, but also you could cause excessively low blood trigger, in a case like this, which is something I'd be concerned about as well. and probably excess hunger as well from, from the metformin. So it's not something that I think would be a good idea in this context. And I also just don't even think the conversation is getting to where it needs to be.

And they're just kind of, you know, they're kind of spitballing about it, but that's, think, kind of part of the problem and part of what we were pointing to as a problem with, you know, Cole Robinson's approach as well.

Yeah, I had a similar thought thinking, if someone's on a sugar diet, why would you need to increase insulin sensitivity? Wouldn't the body naturally be in kind of a prime state? Mike, can you talk a little bit more about that?

Mike Fave

 I think the fact that metformin was the recommendation means that or implies to me that both these guys don't understand how carbohydrates are oxidized in the mitochondria. So it's like, let's massively ramp up carbohydrate intake and try to push carbohydrate oxidation. And we know that when carbs are oxidized, they produce roughly five to one ratio of NADH to FADH2, whereas fats will produce a ratio of two to one.

NADH, FADH2. So, NADH is dropped off at complex 1. FADH is dropped off at complex 2. And so, the carbs give you much more NADH, which goes to complex 1. And so, we're going to take a drug that then blocks complex 1. It's like, it doesn't even make any sense because you want to improve insulin sensitivity. Like, it's not going to be helpful in any capacity here.

Because you have a circumstance where you're forcing carboxidation in the body, you're, you're, you're increasing insulin signaling, you're lowering free fatty acids, you're trying to run on carbohydrate and you're not letting your cells oxidize that carbohydrate effectively into ATP through the oxidative phosphorylation. You are then going to shunt it to lactic acid production. And that lactic acid production is going to net less ATP just such that you can try to recycle the NADH into NAD+. Because you, you're overloaded with NAD +, now because complex one is shut down.

It's just, again, this what you were mentioning, Jay, where you just see like metformin equals insulin sensitivity and since I'm eating more carbs, I should have insulin sensitivity. I want more insulin sensitivity. So then I should just take metformin. So like if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C type of thing without understanding like how does metformin increase insulin sensitivity. And if you don't understand how and this is actually extremely important thing for every single intervention that you ever do, that we ever do, whatever it is, if you don't know how that intervention works, it doesn't always mean that because you see the outcome is good, that it's working through a good mechanism and that the outcome is good. And this is why like when A1C is dropped with these medications, you have less glycation of hemoglobin because there's less sugar in the blood. But how is that like what's adjusting how that sugar is in the blood? Are you fixing the problem at the cell and the ability to oxidize that carbohydrate?

Or are you just forcing the liver to run the glucose through through lactic acid fermentation, forcing the tissues to run that carbohydrate through lactic acid fermentation? You're not fundamentally fixing the problem. So this is where it's like, yeah, for me, when I watched this, I was like, I don't know if this guy understands what goes on inside the mitochondria and what complex one does or even how metformin works. But it's like, this is like not the intervention that you want to do when you're trying to force really low fat, really high carbon take.

And then basically inhibit the utilization of the carbs that you're taking in. Cause insulin sensitivity, it's just, it's out of, it's out of control. Like so it's so anti what you would want to do. It's such a weird suggestion for me. But again, like that's because you have to understand how metformin works and how carbs are oxidized. And so this is it's, it's just, yeah, for me, I was like, this is crazy. See, and then the drug stack that this other guy gets into is like on another world with this in mind, especially like.

These guys also don't based on what the recommendations are, they don't understand how FGF 21 is working or what the sugar diet is doing to increase FGF 21. Because even with FGF 21, this is another piece. You have a circumstance where you are forcing the utilization of substrate, fats and carbohydrates at the fat tissue and it's just burning it off either through uncoupling or through futile cycling, where basically you have an energy producing cycle and an energy consuming cycle.

And they're just running together. So you're just basically on your exercise bike, spinning your wheels in place. You're not going anywhere. You're not producing anything net besides maybe heat. And then it's like, so you don't have ATP from the substrate you're taking in. And then we're going to put another mechanism in there to further lower the amount of ATP that you have. So it's like at the cell, the cells are like, are getting screwed because they don't have any ATP because you're forcing FGF 21 and you're blocking complex one and you're eating all carbs. don't have any fat. So it's like, where's this?

Where is this energy supply gonna come from? You can't just exist on glycolysis. So it's a very weird setup to try to use metformin in this circumstance. I'd say this is a counter to what you're trying to do even within the mentality of sugar fasting, but even from like a general health perspective.

I mean, I've always learned to trust people with yellow tinted glasses and trust that they've done their research so that I don't have to do my own. But Jay, what were you going to add?

Jay Feldman
That's a great point. Much more important point. Thank you. Yeah. I was going to say, just to add something in that to what you were saying, Mike, which is that, you know, this is one of those cases, again, where understanding the mechanism as opposed to just looking at an outcome at one moment in time is really important. We talk about that a lot with PUFA, you know, short-term, you'll see a decrease in inflammation. We need to understand why that's happening. You might see some better metabolic outcomes, but again, it's really important to understand how it's happening so that we can understand the longer-term consequences, but you brought up FGF 21 and that's another really important one because so many people have been saying FGF 21 increases your metabolic rate. That's what you say is a good thing, right? Like this is, this should be the answer or it increases insulin sensitivity. Isn't that a good thing? But as you, as you're reporting out, we need to know how that's actually happening. Increasing the metabolic rate by activating the sympathetic nervous system, the stress system is not what we're going for. That's not what we're referring to. And we say increased metabolism. We're not saying, you know, just take a bunch of epinephrine or do a cold plunge, right? Those will increase your metabolic rate too, but in a wasteful way that actually decreases it in the long-term. yeah, just, it's just a great point that, a good example of why we need to understand what's happening in between as opposed to just looking at the outcome. When it comes to creating a diet for optimal health, there's a lot of conflicting information out there.

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Just one quick thing too, it's weird that some of the FGF21 stuff comes out of the bioenergetics sphere because it's actually a bit counter to the perspective of bioenergetics. The idea of bioenergetics, like Dr. Pete's central ideas was about increasing the energy at the cell because as you have more energy, you can make more structure and if you have more structure, you can produce more energy. So it's a feed forward reaction. And so this system is saying, we're not going to fundamentally create more energy. We're just going to burn through the substrate. The analogy I used in the video I made on FGF 21 was you have a circumstance where you have, you don't have enough material to build your house. We're getting back to carpenter Mike status, right? So just bear with me. I did a lot of construction my dad when I was younger. So basically you're trying to have the material build your house, but you don't have enough nails, right? You don't have enough of this resource, but every time you get a shipment of wood, you also get some nails.

You keep taking in shipments of wood to get the nails and then what you do with that wood, this your building material, your substrate, your energy substrate, you just burn it in the backyard. We're just going to burn in the backyard because we don't have enough nails, but we need to keep getting the shipments so we can get those nails. FGF 21 is working in that similar capacity. So it's not fundamentally getting you to increase the amount of ATP that you have at the cellular level and then pushing for uncoupling because you have a large amount of ATP in general from optimized metabolic function. What it's doing is saying, we don't have all the resources we need and we got a lot of this substrate and we can't really use it that well. So we're just going to burn through this stuff and hopefully we get what we need. In this case, the amino acids or when you have somebody who's overfeeding, they will upregulate FGF 21. The liver gets under pressure and the liver is like, I just can't deal with all this wood. Like I don't know where else to put it. I don't want to store it. It's going to cause problems. I'm going to burn it. Send it to the fat tissues. You guys just light that stuff on fire, get rid of it.

That's not an optimal mechanism. This is counter to that perspective that we're looking for. We want maximized ATP production. And then if you get uncoupling because you have optimized thyroid hormone production and maximum amount of ATP at the cell, that's very different from being in a stress state that's driving the uncoupling. On top of that, the thyroid hormones function. This is something that people have, I've seen mentioned again, some of our perspectives on this. Thyroid hormone doesn't necessarily increase your sympathetic nervous system and drive up stress.

Thyroid hormone makes your cells more sensitive to those signals. The thyroid hormone allows the cells when they get a sympathetic response to actually respond to it. So you need less sympathetic activity to get the same output. FGF21 is increasing sympathetic outflow and hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis activity to have its effect. So they're not the same thing. It's actually very different. And again, understanding the mechanisms and the nuanced details is important. Do you make sure that the thing that you are doing is for the outcome you're getting to. I want to maximize my health. I want to improve my blood glucose numbers. OK, take metformin and the other drugs that we're going to talk about here and you'll get better numbers. It's like, we want to make sure your cells are processing that fuel well. And this is not fundamentally doing that. There's some case there's a circumstance with there's some components of metformin that can be beneficial. There's some very narrow circumstances where it has some specific effects that you can maybe make an argument around having benefit.

But by and large, like it's  basically inhibiting mitochondrial respiration and carb utilization in the mitochondria. And then this context doesn't make sense in the FGF 21 perspective doesn't fundamentally align with a general bioenergetics perspective where you want to maximize cellular energy production. You'll increase metabolic rate. You will, right? You do that when you fast as well and cold plunge and you get in a sauna and you cook yourself to 170 degrees or whatever the deal is. You'll see increases in metabolism, all types of stuff, but it's not the same thing as fundamentally improving cellular energy production. These are happening through other mechanisms. And again, how it's working is so, so important. that requires, that's what our job is to get into the weeds and like figure out like how is this thing going to get this outcome? And is there some other way that we can do this or get that outcome that doesn't create this or doesn't do it in these bad mechanisms? It works in a good way and then also gets the outcome.

Yeah. And there's a couple of things I just wanted to add on there. One is talking about thyroid hormone and activating like the stress pathways or activating and coupling, for example, you can see that with excessively high levels of T3, let's say, where it will start to actually cause stress like that someone could experience physiologically. but also like in a, in an in vitro study where they introduce an excessively high, not a physiological amount, but excessively high amounts of something like T3, you'll see an activation of stress, but that's because you have a cell with limited fuel, limited energy capacity, and you're causing too much stimulation in the same way that you could with like too much caffeine or something. But we know that if you have fuel, nutrients and everything on board, you won't actually see that stress effect. And we don't want that stress effect where, you know, that's not what we're wanting here. And you mentioned that too, Mike, you know, with fasting and cold plungers and people will point to that with low carb diets and say, there's an increase in energy expenditure, a potential one in the research.

Some of the research showing that is there's some issues with the methods done, but they also show, you know, cortisol during that shift into, into low carbon. And that's responsible for the increase in energy expenditure. And that's not what we're going for. That's not what we're talking about when it comes to an increase in metabolic rate. And the last thing I liked the house analogy from carpenter Mike over there. And I wanted to add in what we're looking for here. What we want with the wood is not to have all this excess wood that we burn. We want to be able to use that constructively to create a better house, a bigger house, a more complex house, however you want to call it. That's, that's what we're aiming towards.

That's what the increased metabolic rate looks like in that analogy, as opposed to just, you know, throwing it to the side and burning off the extra until we get more nails the house, the garage, a gondola, and a casita for mom and dad.

Yeah, I think it really questions this idea of what you take in a certain amount of fuel and then you burn it off and that's how it should be working. And I love that both of you are bringing up this idea of what can we generate? What can we build? What can actually become richer and more complex and function better because of not just burning, but regenerating. So let's finish this clip so we can talk more about it.

I mean, I've been taking a thousand milligrams a night. That's what I usually do. I've been taking Jardience and Metformin and Red Attrutide together with this and it feels really good. So I think it only makes it work that much better. So that's like the ultimate Holy grail like insulin sensitivity stack as Jardience, Dihydrobrubarin, Metformin and then Red Attrutide again, a microdoses, but I like it with it. I don't see why you wouldn't if you were having, if you had that like in your longevity protocol otherwise. So I mean, everyone's gonna be different, but I think it only makes it work that much better in my experience.

Wow, okay. Mike, talk to us about this guy's stack. Whoa.

I mean, the funny thing with this stack is like these guys promote themselves as biohackers and he's like, yeah, his justification for doing this was because I feel so I just feel good on it. And I don't think that's a justification for these things. And it gets even worse. So he mentioned the hydro berberine, which is basically a more absorbable form of berberine that has similar impacts in the in the mitochondria as metformin. So it also works to inhibit complex 1. There's some benefits to berberine inside the microbiome. So that's a little bit different. But in this case, like he is using it for the complex 1 inhibition, which is the same stuff we just talked about metformin. But then we get to Jardians. Now, this is also a weird one because it's like Jardians' mechanism of action is to basically when you have glucose in your blood, it goes to the kidney and the kidney reabsorbs it. There's a sodium glucose transporter.

So what winds up happening is a jar dience inhibits that transporters. You just start peeing out all of your, all of your glucose and you could basically be in a circumstance where you lose between 64 to 78 grams of sugar per day from jar dience's action, depending on, depending on what your dose is. You're on, you're on the sugar diet, you're taking in carbohydrates and you're trying to increase FGF 21 at the liver by increasing this, this sugar intake.

But then I'm going to take a drug that makes you pee it all out. So I'm peeing out my sugar and I'm going to take a drug that inhibits my ability to utilize the sugar. It's just a weird combination of components where it's like I'm not going to be able to use the carbohydrate effectively. And then the carbohydrate and substrate that I'm taking in, I'm just going to pee out on a consistent basis, which again, like it's, out of this world that this is, this is considered like a good way to optimize metabolic health. You're basically, you're not allowing yourself to take your fuel and convert it to energy and you're just wasting your fuel and then waxing a mechanism insulin sensitivity. So it's completely counter to not only FGF 21, but it seems to, creates a lack of understanding of how the cells actually process and metabolize the fuel sources and understanding like this match between the fuel that you're taking in and then what your energy output is going to be.

Not to mention that Jardience has a bunch of other, potentially negative effects. if you're not somebody who's a diabetic, you may want to like it. would say really consider whether you're going to use this medication because there are downsides to this where number one, because Giardian's Inc. or decrease reabsorption of sodium and glucose, it can decrease your volume, the amount of fluid that you have in your vasculature, and that can lead to a circumstance where you get hypotension. The other thing that it does is it decreases kidney function.

All overall, like over the long term, see a drop in glomerular filtration rate or GFR. And on top of that, because you're peeing out all your glucose into your bladder and into your, your genital urinary tract, you have an increased risk for fungal infections for both men and women, as well as a really high risk of a rare bacterial infection called Fournier's gangrene, which is basically a necrotizing fasciitis of your, of your perineum. So it's not really like you want to know the risk versus reward. And if you're not, not a diabetic.

And you're just taking this because insulin sensitivity like and you're on the you're looking at this to do with the with the the sugar diet like it doesn't even make sense in the context of the sugar diet. And also there is some downsides to the medication to keep in mind if you are if you are a diabetic and it fundamentally doesn't make sense within a bioenergetics perspective because it lowers A1C because your blood glucose is lower because you're peeing it out not because you're improving energy metabolism at the cellular level so that you're able to oxidize that sugar appropriately into ATP.

So the Jardience is just like, I just can't believe that this one is the recommendation. And then on the Reda 2 Tride, this is a GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon agonistic drug. Which again is like, it's mind blowing that this the recommendation because this drug's function is to basically decrease your gastric emptying so that you feel very full and so that you don't want to eat. And the purpose of the sugar diet, the premise of the sugar diet was I want to be able to eat as much carbohydrate as I desire and not have to restrict myself. And it's like, I'm to throw a GLP-1 drug on there. That just makes me not hungry altogether because my stomach is so full all the time. So you have this set up. And then on top of that, you have a glucagon agonist drug. So the glucagon's job is to force fat oxidation. So you're having a high carb diet and you're inhibiting complex one and you're trying to optimize insulin sensitivity and you're gonna force fat oxidation by agonizing the glucagon receptor. These things won't work. Like glucagon itself, when it enters the cell, is gonna block acetyl-CoA carboxylase and is gonna increase malonyl-CoA decarboxylase, which will increase malonyl-CoA and that will block carnitine pommel soil transferase one, which is the transport that brings fats into the mitochondria. so basically what winds up happening is you're gonna get rid of malonyl-CoA, you're gonna allow fatty acid oxidation because you're agonizing glucagon. And then on top of that, you're gonna throw a bunch of carbohydrates in the system. That doesn't make any sense. That's not what you want to work here. On top of this, I'm gonna just nuke my overall appetite by massively decreasing my rate of gastric emptying. It's counter to the sugar diet perspective across the board. And obviously I made a video on the GLP-1 drugs.

This one is more than a GLP-1 drug, red atutride. It's still in clinical trials. It hasn't finished. But this medication is counter even to the bioenergetics perspective and how it actually works. Magnetizing the gluon receptor and then again, basically just inhibiting your appetite such you're better at starving yourself. So weird combination, a weird stack of medications to try to use to improve energy metabolism and even to optimize FGF21. It doesn't necessarily make sense.

So I should probably stop taking this stack is what you're saying. Cause I just started after watching the clip. Jay jump on in. What else should we be concerned about? mean, are there like, like Mike was talking about, are there any benefits to, to this stack of compounds aside from maybe the antimicrobial effect and the anti endotoxin effect, or is it just sending the, the body into chaos?

I can't, you know, obviously the first thing I think of is all of the clear negative effects that would be happening in terms of the positives. think outside of the antimicrobial effects of the metformin and berberine, I can't consider any other, I mean, unless you consider severe calorie restriction and, and weight loss a benefit. again, this comes back to what we were talking about in part one, where when you're just looking at that outcome without regard to how we got there, yes, you might consider it to be beneficial, right? But it's going to be coming at a major cost.

And also with the dihydro berberine, is better absorbed than typical berberine, you're going to get less of the antimicrobial effect. There's a reason why berberine is very poorly absorbed. that's because we would prefer to have its effects in our gut where it can exert its antimicrobial effects. If you're taking a fat soluble form like that, that's highly absorbed. You're not even getting that benefit. You're just getting the mitochondrial toxicity. And, uh, that's not what we're going for here. Uh, you know, as Mike was saying, it's like, this is almost an anti-sugar diet stack. Like it makes.

It should be very, very much be separated. Like they, first off, I mean, I don't think we would ever recommend this stack or really anything in there. And, know, the vast majority of cases, but to pair that with the sugar diet just makes it, it makes opposite sense. Like it is, it is just opposing the things that you're trying to do with the sugar diet. It like, it's, very similar to, you know, we talked about Brian Johnson's approach at one point, and he was talking about, you know, eating carbs and then taking carb blockers to like that block the absorption of the carbs. I remember which she was using, I think some natural versions and maybe pharmaceutical ones as well. which it's just like, what, what are you, what are you doing here? You know? and there is a cost to those things. You know, we talked about it with, if you're not absorbing those carbs, more likely to feed bacteria cause microbial problems. In this case with the GRDNs as Mike was saying, when you excrete more sodium in this case, you're then going to cause other issues. And basically when I, you know, the, the first place is lower.

Volume of fluid in the vasculature and so you have hypotension, but then there's a response when your body recognizes there's not enough salt here, there's not enough fluid here. It increases aldosterone to retain more sodium. And then there's a cost to that. have an increased excretion of potassium and magnesium. So you're more likely to have deficiencies of those now, but then there's other effects as well. Cause aldosterone also lowers insulin sensitivity, the exact thing that you're supposedly trying to improve. And it's also harmful for a number of other reasons, like, know, cardiovascular health and swelling and things like that.

So certainly not something we would want to just be taking, especially haphazardly. this is, you know, it's one thing if you wanted to say this person has, you know, as type two diabetes, their blood sugars are typically between 300 and 600. So I'm going to take GRD needs to try to lower that a little bit. Like there, think there's a case for that. It's still not fixing the underlying problem, but there's more of a case for it as opposed to someone who's generally lean and healthy and eating a very high carb diet.

And then to do that, I mean, I think there needs to be a lot more caution. And again, the recognition of the mechanisms really helps point to that. but yeah, I mean, all of these things are basically, it's like, if you wanted to have a diet that was doing similar things, you would eat a low carb diet. You would shift toward more fat oxidation because know, GRDNs lowers the carbs, the retinol trutide, which increases glucagon activity is the same as a low carb diet shifting us toward fat oxidation. And then where we want to inhibit effective glucose oxidation with our metformin and berberine.

So we should be taking the opposite diet approach if we wanted something to encourage these effects. And yeah, so I think it's, those two things are not only incompatible, but just make, don't make coherent logical sense.

Yeah. Just watching these clips, it's been a lot today. You guys want to shift into some of the Q &A comments on some of the negative effects of the sugar diet? Or do you have more you want to dive into with just some of the, I don't know, some of the things to be aware of when people are recommending these drugs without even really understanding the mechanism or talking about what could be really harmful and damaging long-term.

don't have anything to add there, Mike.

Find a jump into the Q &A's here so these were from some of your videos on the sugar diet and just people sharing what they were experiencing and pretty alarming actually. So even just to start off with cool finds.

Sorry, sorry, just to hop in. I do want to clarify, like we were intentionally picking out comments that were people saying the negative effects they had. A lot of other people were saying that they felt good, good energy, weight loss. So the point with these comments was not to say this is going to lead to everybody feeling really bad right away. It was just to highlight some of the negative things that are corroborating the mechanisms we cited and recognizing that these are the types of things that are especially more likely to happen in the longterm, even if someone feels really good initially.

Maybe they are losing body fat and their energy is better initially. The types of things that we're seeing here are really reflective of what we would expect to see longer term physiologically. So that's why we wanted to highlight them and just, you know, as something that reflects those things, but also we're very much aware that this is not everyone's immediate experience, but these are things to be aware of when you're losing body fat via really stressful mechanisms or when you're, you know, eating a very low protein, low fat diet, there are inherent costs to that, that we've been discussing. So that's why we wanted to share these.

Yeah, thanks for that caveat. cool finds. 5124 said, the sugar diet, which brought up on FGF21, got my metabolism so cranked up, I believe, helped bring on an AFib attack, and I was in emergency room for a weekend. And Mike, I wanted to ask you what could have potentially contributed to that and what maybe, what warning signs or even certain symptoms could they have paid attention to maybe avoid such an extreme reaction?

So ideally you're not doing a sugar fast. Okay, done, moving on to the next one.

Yeah. Basically what happens with the sugar fast and up regulation FGF21, as we kind of talked about, FGF21 signals to the brain to increase the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis by increasing corticotrophin releasing hormone inside the brain, which also increases sympathetic nervous system activity. Now, one of the major drivers of pushing people into heart arrhythmias is increased sympathetic innervation onto the heart or delivery to the heart and the drugs that they actually use to help people manage arrhythmias. Um, especially in the hospital, somebody starts getting tachycardias or stuff like this. We'll actually give them a toprolol, which is a beta blocker. So it blocks sympathetic nervous activity on the heart. So when you are running an F this diet, you're pushing up FGF 21 and you start to drastically up regulate sympathetic nervous system activity. I think there's a chance for people to actually get, potentially if sensitive people, people in certain contexts to create arrhythmias for them like atrial fibrillation through that increased sympathetic innervation onto the heart. Basically, what you would see beforehand, it would probably be palpitations and anxiety and insomnia would probably be precipitating or I guess prior symptoms that would lead fully into the arrhythmias. You feel like maybe a little fluttering. You get PDCs.

Which are premature ventricular contractions, and you can start to get, feel like your heart is skipping beats, then before it goes into full APIP. It's the same thing if your thyroid dose gets too high. So like say you push your T3 to I, that could also create the same thing, not because it increases sympathetic nervous system activity, but it increases the heart sensitivity to that sympathetic nervous system activity.

So anytime you rapidly increase sympathetic nervous system activity onto the heart, that can create circumstances where you get these like arrhythmias or changes in your heart rhythm. The other thing is I think with the sugar diet, you have this increase of the sympathetic nervous activity through FGF 21, but you also have a circumstance where the constant fluctuation in blood glucose with the blood glucose dropping between meals because you don't have the fat and the protein that can also trigger these adrenaline rushes. I think the adrenaline rush from the change in blood glucose can also like kind of enhance the FGF21 sympathetic nervous system stimulation. And this is also why people on a sugar diet typically don't use caffeine on the diet or sodas that contain caffeine because they can further increase the sympathetic nervous system activity as well. this is I think altogether seeing this, it's through the stress mechanisms. It's not because metabolism is so ramped up. It's because you're driving stress so heavily.

Your increases in that nervous activity and then insensitive people are susceptible people. It could push the cardiovascular system into dysfunction like atrial fibrillation, which is essentially hyper excitability of different portions inside the atria of the heart so that they are stuck in this futile contraction loop. they're kind of quivering, the atria are quivering. They're not able to contract appropriately because of this hyper excited. So it's almost like being stunned, like they're tased.

It's typically from hyper excitability because the sympathetic nervous system increases the contractility and the rate of contraction on the cells by increasing the electrical stimulation to them and then the release of calcium into the cardiomyocyte. So it's causing excessive excitation, which is not a high energy state on the heart. That's a low energy state on the heart because you're depleting the cellular energy level by forcing continual rapid contraction through sympathetic nervous system activity and high levels of sympathetic nervous activity as well as glucocorticoids are directly involved in cardiac pathology, cardiac remodeling, and also the RAS systems involved as well, which is why if you have a heart attack or you have heart failure, the drugs you use block the RAS system like Intresto, which is a combination angiotensin receptor blocker and angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor, and in a beta blocker like Carvetilol, or if you have an arrhythmia, they'll give you Metoprolol. So it's like they're just...

that drugs are lowering the stress systems because they are directly involved in pushing up those pathologies.

Thank you for explaining that. Yeah, I think that it's interesting to think about when people feel like they're cranked up, like differentiating that between is the metabolic rate kicking up or are they in a very stressful state and they don't have enough fuel to keep up with those metabolic demands? And I think, you know, maybe it's a kind of a fine line when someone tips over into that area of feeling like their body can't meet those demands.

Yeah, I think the body whispers and maybe starts to yell and complain and show us very clearly when things are not moving in a great direction, when stress is reaching a certain point where, you know.

So the one thing I want to mention just briefly, because I know Jay you probably have quite a bit to say about this as well, but there is increasing metabolism in the sense that you're taking more substrate and converting it or you're using more substrate, but it's not increasing metabolism by increasing energy production, by taking that substrate and creating its ATP. it's like you do get an increase in metabolism, but it's through a stress mechanism. we don't want to say that it doesn't do it because it does, but at the same time it's doing it through an ideal mechanism, which is, as we talked about, it's important to understand the mechanism.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you for clarifying because I think that's really, yeah, just good to understand and knowing that we can kind of feel the difference too between like a robust, flourishing, balanced metabolic state versus one that is shifting into more of the stress domain. you know, our body expresses that very clearly if we pay attention.

Yep, 100%. And again, mechanisms important there, right? Because if you increase metabolism through these stress mechanisms, you see this in the studies. If you drive it through glucocorticoids or adrenaline, initially you could increase mitochondrial biogenesis and you can increase mitochondrial activity. But at a certain point of running those stress hormones, it will just destroy the mitochondria because they can't keep up with that demand with that. And it forces fat oxidation as well, which fat oxidation is also not ideal.

And again, this is a of people make well, I don't want to burn fat. But when you primarily rely on fatty acids, it increases ROS and it changes that NADH to NAD plus ratio and it decreases the glutathione that you have as well as your oxygen uptake has to be increased with fat oxidation and the uptake. The amount of oxygen you need needs to be increased because the amount of ATP that's produced per unit of oxygen is decreased. And on top of that, you have a circumstance where the oxygen uptake is not the same because you're not producing the same amount of CO2.

So across the board, the forcing that fat oxidation and forcing these stress hormones eventually burns out the cells. It's like you're driving your car and you're redlining it all the time. You're constantly hitting that red line in the upper gears, those higher RPMs. And then eventually like your engine is going to blow out and it's through those stress mechanisms. So that's, you don't want to do something like that. It's not ideal long-term and it will damage the system.

The stress hormones across the board you see like gluco-corticoids, adrenaline, all these things damage the system, the mineral corticoids and the RAS system components, angiotensin 2, endothelium 1, aldosterone damage the system even though they can create short-term increases in metabolism and short-term specific effects.

Jay, what do you want to add to this?

Jay Feldman
Yeah, I mean, great points brought up here. as, as you were touching on Mike, we don't want to chronically rely on stress. We've talked about this extensively in those hormesis episodes, but that's actually what we see in degenerative states. That's what we see in diabetes. That's what we see in fatty liver disease. That's what we see in neurodegenerative disease is we see constant upregulation of the defense pathways that are trying to respond to increased oxidative stress and an over-activated sympathetic nervous system over time. And you just aren't able to continue to have the adaptation. It like there's only so much stress that we can deal with before you start to have that dysfunction. And that's what we definitely don't want to lead to. that's what we will see here in like with a diet like this that relies so heavily on up-regulated stress systems. And again, to be clear, and I know you're adding this clarification Mike, but when you look at something like energy expenditure or the metabolic rate in the study, they aren't identifying whether this is driven by stress.

Or rather this is driven by a good, healthy upregulation of the metabolic rate and energy expenditure or energy production, should say ATP production. A lot of times that an increase in energy expenditure in a study is driven by stress. And that's very much the case here with FGF21. And so when you're on a very low protein diet, that'll increase FGF21 or carbohydrate overfeeding that increases de novo lipogenesis where you're converting the carbs to fat, that'll also increase FGF21.

And they've actually done studies doing exactly what you were talking about, Mike, where they provide a beta blocker to, uh, you know, when, uh, I believe it's in rodents, but it might've been an actually in humans. think it actually, well, I don't remember it off the top of my head. was, it was in the episode that I did on FGF 21, but they found that it blunted the increase in energy expenditure from the increase in FGF 21, basically telling us that this is operating through stress mechanisms.

When we're relying on that, whether it's from low carb, whether it's from cold plunging, whether it's from under eating severely, whether it's from drinking a lot of coffee on an empty stomach and just running on coffee all day, whether it's from using aphedrine, whether it's from using massive amounts of T3, whether it's also just from dropping the fat too low, because in addition to the stress effects of FGF21, too little fat will also cause stress effects because we have a need for fat. And if you're dropping it down to the floor of 10 grams or less per day is as cold suggesting that will also increase stress effects.

When we're getting down to those low levels. And so this effect that we saw from Cool Finds, obviously was a more extreme reaction than a lot of people are experiencing. But again, to be clear, that doesn't mean that you're not also incurring that same stress or having negative effects from it just because it doesn't land you in the emergency room. And the same way that just because you didn't see your muscle and bone melt off in 24 hours, doesn't mean you're not actually having negative effects to your lean mass. You know, these things can take time to build up, like the effects can take some time to actually be seen. And you're still driving the pathways that push you toward those effects. So some other symptoms you might notice, Mike, you touched on a number of these, but, uh, you know, anxiety, trouble sleeping, heart palpitations are all common things. We'll talk through some others that are seen, uh, well, actually, and I think some of these other comments, people mentioned anxiety.

They mentioned, um, inability to recover from workouts. You know, some other things like that, that we'll come back to some other symptoms of the chronic stress or the elevated stress would be.

You know, irritability, jitteriness, finding it hard to concentrate, excessive muscle tightness or cramping. Like those can all be driven by this excess stress and, things that we want to be aware of. But again, even if you're not noticing those exact symptoms quite yet, or they're very mild, you're still, if you're doing the sugar diet as, you know, a very low protein diet, increased FGF 21 and a very low fat diet, you will be activating the same pathways. Even if you're not in the emergency room, you're still going to be noticing.

Those same pathways are still at play here. And that's why it's so important for us to highlight this comment again, just to be clear, because I think sometimes people might take it the wrong way. We're not saying that saying that anyone who does the sugar diet will end up in the same situation in the emergency room due to AFib, but they will be, you know, you will still be up regulating the stress pathways and there are consequences to that think paying attention early on, like if your body is starting to tell you that something is not right, like you're feeling anxious, you're feeling irritable, you're feeling shaky, your sleep starts to become broken, you're waking up to pee all the time, that's not necessarily something you have to push through with this idea that you're, you know, it's temporary and you can lose this weight and then get back to normal because there are other ways to lose weight that won't cause such chaos in the system. So just wanted to add that in.

No, it's a great point, for sure.

So, Johnny Blackrance, Blackrance7625 said, I'm done with sugar fasting. I can't train more than once a week and recover, which is a deal breaker on its own. I was confused for a while, but when I watched your last podcast, it all came together. Thanks guys. And I realized I need to stop all of these intermittent fasting stress provoking diets and save the stress for training. Like, of course my body down regulates protein synthesis if I'm restricting protein and my soft tissue can't adequately repair itself between sessions. Of course my body is screaming at me, like I was saying, not to go back out there and do it again. It makes so much sense in hindsight, but I got caught up in the fad. Also, my metabolism dropped sugar fasting. maintenance is now 2,500 at 172 pounds. Instead of the 3,000, it was at the same weight for the four months prior.

So I ended up in a 500 calorie quote, deficit without losing any weight. Restricting fat below 100 grams per day never ever felt good and always left me drained, unable to recover within days. Leaving this comment so that you don't get gaslighted into thinking this is magic and works for everyone if when it doesn't work for you and actually makes you markedly less healthy. The only thing I've taken from this entire thing is that 150 grams of protein is unnecessary and 120 grams works just fine. There's no need to overeat my beef appetite. Other than that, it's back to high carb, low toxin, low PUFA, intuitive eating for me.

Jay, do you have any reactions, reflections or I mean, if you're kind of responding to Johnny Blackrin 7625, what would you say?

Jay Feldman
Yeah, well, I'm glad he shared this for sure. And, you know, I think it encapsulated a lot of what we've been saying on our, different content that we've been putting out regarding the sugar diet. and, you know, he seems to have experienced exactly the kinds of things we were talking about. And, and, know, he was feeling he, he tried it, you know, and that's fine. It's okay to try different things, but we of course would want to at least be aware of what to expect and what could be going on underneath if we're going to try it.

And it sounds like he experienced exactly what we would have expected. he's got his head on straight now. Uh, just playing of course, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, I, and I think, you know, with time, obviously you can get his metabolic rate back up so he can, uh, be back at that 3000 calories a day. But yeah, great, great points here, intuitive eating, recognizing how you're feeling. And obviously this is, these are some of the effects we can expect. If we're relying on these sorts of diets due to the stress we talked about due to the protein deficiency.

So yeah, no, surprises here per se, but glad that he shared that of course. And I did, you he mentioned that one of his takeaways was recognizing that he didn't actually need 150 grams of protein per day and 120 is just fine. And I would totally agree with that. mean, at 170 pounds, 150 grams of protein is 0.88 grams per pound, which is a bit higher than we normally recommend. Normally we recommend the 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound range.

And he said, one 20 works fine, which is right in the middle. They're at 0.7 grams per pound. So, that is, think an important takeaway is especially people coming from low carb tend to be overdoing the protein. And so I think there can be some benefit in recognizing that maybe we didn't need all that protein. And, of course, on the flip side for other people coming from low carb, recognizing that we can actually have carbs can be a great benefit as well here. So, yeah, I mean, I don't have too much to add, but it sounds like, he I mean, his experience definitely aligns with, with a lot of what we would expect here. Glad to see that he's back on track.

Yeah, Mike, what would you add in terms of helping him get back to what he was eating prior to this? The state he's in now where he's kind of at this deficit, but maintain his weight. What would you suggest to him to help repair some of the damage that was done?

So first thing I want to point out, and now I'm going to get directly into what he could do to get back to his previous energy intake, is, and this is something that Jay and I've talked about in multiple podcast episodes, but one thing that people I think don't understand overall, or it's like not super clear, stress is cumulative across multiple different things. So whether you got in a fight with your boss and you just did a workout, and you're also running FGF 21 on the sugar diet, and then you didn't sleep last night, like they're all separate life events. They're all separate things and you think, hey, these aren't connected, but they are. Your body is processing each one of these events as a stressor. And stress here being defined as a mismatch between your energy supply and your energy demand.

So when your body has an excessive energy demand, you get in a fight with your boss, you're going and doing some training, whatever the thing is, or you have a lack of energy supply or resource supply in this circumstance with the sugar diet with a lack of amino acids, it triggers stress. So there's only so much capacity each of us have at one point in time to be able to effectively manage stress without dealing with the negative ramifications of the stress. We're going to be exposed to stress all the time. This is not a call to get rid of all the stressors.

But this is a call to understand that you don't just want to start throwing stressors into the mix. And I'm wondering why I'm not, you're not doing as well after you start throwing all these stressors on board. Because again, you only have so much recovery capacity. And after a certain point, when you start really dipping into that stress pathways, those stress hormones, those things start coming at a cost. Those things come at a cost. see with FGF 21, bone mass, muscle mass, fertility. So we start to see these things will drop.

When you're doing the FGF21 stuff, because again, the body's in a state where it doesn't have enough, at least for the sugar diet, enough amino acids. So you don't wanna drive this. We see that FGF21 mechanism upregulated in obesity, type two diabetes, kidney failure, heart failure, cardiovascular disease. Why? It is a stress hormone. Its job is when the body and the different tissues are put under a metabolic stressor, whether an oversupply of certain types of nutrients, or lack of supply of other types of nutrients, the body increases FGF21 to help it manage that mismatch. And then the FGF21, to help manage that mismatch, turns down processes that are gonna like say you don't have enough supply of certain components like the building blocks, like your amino acids. Well, it's gonna turn down that anabolic response. It's gonna turn down muscle anabolism. It's gonna turn down bone anabolism. It's gonna say to the body, hey, it's not really time to build a baby right now.

Because we don't have the supplies. I can't make my house if I don't have wood. I can't make my house if I don't have bricks. So I'm not going to make that house. I'm not going to make that baby if I don't have the supplies. It's like it comes down to be that simple. The hormones really are working in this capacity. It's basically like the board gets around and it's like, right guys, this is how much money we have for marketing, for HR, for pensions, for whatever. And when you don't have enough money, it's like, well, there goes marketing and there goes HR.

We got to pay the pensions. And by the way, the janitor, he's gone too, because the board members need to get paid. So the, the, the system is trying to adjust based on its resources. And I think Johnny Blackrant 7, 6, 2, 5 here, I think he saw that in this circumstance where he couldn't recover from his training because he had this other stressor coming with the diet. You have enough resources. So it dropped his training way back. And his body is saying, Hey, I have this high energy demand with training and I have this lack of supply of resources.

So then it's like, I gotta bring down my metabolic rate to allow myself to still exist. Cause the body's very intelligent. These systems are very powerful and it's meant to keep us going under the worst circumstances. You're still gonna go, just some stuff is gonna suffer and not be so great. And the goal is to not have to be running that circumstance. It's like you wanna have good body composition. You have the whole team is there. You got two janitors on there. Everybody's getting their pension and HR is crushing it.

Right? So you want to have all of that while managing body composition and all this type of stuff as well. the goal is to have it all, not to necessarily create a circumstance where you're just like, you're just constantly stressing all these systems and enforcing the body to make these trade-offs in different areas. Now, in order to get his body back, what do do to get things back under control? You start sending signals to the body saying, hey, we got the resources, man. We got the dough coming in the door. We can start hiring again. We don't have to lay anybody off anymore.

And so basically you want to slowly increase your energy intake and just make sure as you slowly increase your energy intake that your body composition maintains. So say you're at 2,500, maybe you do 2,700 for two weeks and then you go for another two weeks, you do 2,900 and then you go up to 3,000 from there and you get back to that maintenance point. You just slowly increase and you don't need that much protein, right? You 0.64 to 0.82 grams per pound per day, solidify that there and then just play around your carbs and fats, slowly increasing your carbs and fats. If you do 25 grams of carbs, it's gonna be 100 calories. If you do the 10 grams of fat, that's gonna be 90 calories, roughly 100 calories. You could do 25 grams of carbs, 10 grams of fats, for a bump for a two week timeframe, then go up another 25 and 10 and just kind of play around. You'd better, you want the 100 gram fat minimum and then from there you just wanna ramp your carbs up.

Or do you want to get a little bit more fats? You got to kind of play. I tend to have people stay between that 20 to 30 % fat range. I find that that helps with insulin sensitivity and helps people that like have solid meals across the day because you have too much fat, it can make you pretty full for a longer period of time. So I usually set things between 20 to 30%. Some people may go up a little bit higher. That's fine. got, again, you got to play. There's some individuality with these dynamics and with people's physiology. So that's how I would do it.

And just make sure that you recover your micronutrient status and things like this as well. Because depending on how you ran the sugar diet, you could have created some issues in certain micronutrients, particularly water soluble micronutrients. So just replete all that stuff and slowly increase your energy intake. And then maybe take it easy a little bit on the gym just for a period of time. And then slowly bring that activity level back up in the gym to where you were before. Because now you're basically taking the pressure off, bringing some of this nutrient supply in.

And then you're slowly increasing the nutrient supply and slowly bringing your activity back. You're telling your body, hey, like we don't really have that much stress and we have the resources now. You can handle these workouts and you don't have to, you don't only get one workout per week. And on top of that, you can start to eat more again. So it just takes a little bit of time. Cause again, like you see it even in companies and in the economy, economy gets pretty bad. They hold on, hold on, hold on, lay everybody off and the economy gets pretty good. It's like going pretty good, pretty good hire all these people. So it's like the body kind of works in this in a similar fashion where there's a little bit of lag as things change and adjust because you have to down regulate the stress systems and up regulate the these beneficial systems and start to get things to come back online.

So recovery is possible. Hang in there, Johnny Blackran 7625, and be easy with yourself as your body. Readjust.

Yeah. One thing I just wanted to touch on real quick, you know, he mentioned saving his stress for working out, like for the exercise for training. think like there's a, an important nuance there that he's highlighting, which is the stress inherently comes at a cost. And as Mike was saying, we're never not going to have any stress at all. And we're never not going to, going to be exposed to stressors. Right. Stressors are a part of life that whether we're sitting in the sun or we're having a meeting with somebody or.

You know, there's we're working out, know, anything is going to connect as a stressor, but we do want to minimize the stress effects of it. And some of that stress is going to be unavoidable and that's okay. That's why we want to make sure we're recovering and that our diet isn't also something that's adding to the stress, but rather is actually something that's helping us recover and make up for the stress. So we're seeing that here. I, you know, just wanted to touch on this idea that people have, which is that the stress itself is beneficial. And we've talked through this in a number of episodes talking about hormesis, but that's something that.

I would say is very much not the case. It's not the stress that's beneficial. There's other effects of the exercise that that's beneficial. And we want to recognize that because if we keep adding all these things on that, that are stressful, we're going to run into the issues that Mike was talking through. And so a good analogy for this, if you have a shell company that has like six other companies underneath it, and each of those companies employees are on the board of the shell company. I'm just, I'm just kidding. Anyway, we can go back to the next comment excited for the for the continued analogies.

Okay. We're gonna get a lesson in financial planning.

So Smitty Powerbelly says, haven't listened to it all yet, but just wanted to share my experience. Once I got below 10 % body fat, the low protein, low fat, high carb diet led to much more anxiety. Could literally pinpoint the days that were low fat between 10 and 30 grams as my anxiety and uneasy feelings would be higher, leading to worse sleep and generally fatigue.

Not sure exactly how this happens, perhaps stored PUFA being released due to low fat intake and low body fat, or perhaps we become more in tune to stress signals when we are lean, or the stress signals are stronger when we are lean as a means of survival. Always felt better after a few fatty meals. I've currently bumped my fats back up to around 100 most days from short chain fatty acids, and I've rarely felt the anxiety, saturated fatty acid, sorry the times I felt the times I have felt it are when I haven't eaten enough for a while. Last night, two hours after a workout, I had to go to work and only ate a snack. no, buddy. And got a bit jittery. Anyways, sugar diet can help speed up some fat loss. Its themes could be handy for overweight and obese folk with a long-term plan of eating a balanced diet. Maybe this is mentioned in the vid.

But for anyone reading the long-term goal needs to be a balanced diet of adequate amounts of each macro. All right. I mean, I think there's a lot we can take from that. Mike, do you want to comment on what Powerbelly's quote? Smitty Powerbelly's comment.

I mean, for me, it was a similar experience that I had. think you have people who, if your body fat percentage on the lower end, you could think of this as your bank account. And when you don't have the energy intake or you don't have adequate fat coming in, things like this, you're basically running on empty. You're going to be hand in mouth with your food. And so for me, when I ran a really low fat diet and my body fat percentage on the lower end, I basically couldn't sleep at night, I had anxiety throughout the day, blood sugar was crashing.

And I was at some points it like really ramped up. I was getting like panic attacks. I did it for, I did the experiment for quite some time. So I think when you have somebody who's lower body fat percentage, I think you start to suffer more with the low fat, especially if you're training, you have a high muscle tissue components like this. On the flip side, if you have somebody has a higher body fat percentage, they could probably get away with this. They get away with a little bit lower. Now 10 to 30 grams is pretty low.

So the bottom intake of fat that I usually recommend is about 20 % of caloric intake. Because after that point, again, you start to get into a circumstance where you're not going to absorb your fat soluble vitamins very well. You're going to have issues with dropping those biolacidating tests that we talked about in the previous episode. You're going to have issues with satiety, blood glucose regulation. And you may start to have issues with hormonal function. And people say, well, I'll just pull the fats from my tissues and then that will supply my hormones. Yeah, to some extent, but to pull the fats from the tissues, you have to upregulate certain adaptive stress hormones like adrenaline and depending, glucagon and cortisol, that may also lead to circumstance where you are lowering your youth associated steroid hormones like testosterone because you're again, you're sending that signal that you don't have enough supply of these things. So the body, when it doesn't have enough supply, even if you have to store it on the fat tissue, it may not turn around and be like, hey, yeah, like I'm just gonna take this fat tissue that I'm liberating and turn that into these hormones, because you're not signaling for those for that hormonal production. So this is something I think it's important that you understand different contexts.

The leaner you are, the more you'll suffer from lower fat. Usually, especially if you're a guy who's active, has high muscle tissue, because that muscle tissue will burn those fatty acids at rest. When you're heavier, you have more body fat that you have to lose. You can get away with a little bit lower fat, but even going too low can start to cause issues, digestion, blood glucose regulation, satiety, hormonal profile, et cetera. And with this, I would say that there I have had clients who had higher body fat percentage lose significant amounts of weight. I've had some people lose over a hundred pounds when they their hormonal profile, even though they did lose the weight, they lose lost a significant amount of weight. Obviously didn't happen in in 14 days or anything like this. It took time for us to do that, but it led to circumstance where their hormones got significantly better because taking off the body fat allowed them to not divert their testosterone, estradiol, had lowered the inflammatory signaling.

And allow for better processing of substrate so that the gonads can start producing the hormones effectively again. The losing the body fat can be important and improve hormonal profile, but when you drop fat too low, you try to do some of these more extreme things. There are side effects that come on board. And on top of that, when you're thinking, when anybody's thinking about losing body fat, losing weight in general, you shouldn't be thinking in weeks, especially if you have a significant amount of body fat to lose. You should be thinking on a longer term timeframe.

So any dietary setup that promises rapid, fast weight loss, like just like that, and you have a lot of weight to lose, here's what's gonna happen. Most times, more often than not, you have a quick fix, you lose a couple pounds quickly, you can't sustain that diet long term, because you start getting into side effects that you didn't know about, and you don't wind up losing the weight, and you hop off, and you rebound. What you want is something that's sustainable, that is progressive, doesn't cause a lot of downsides, it's easy to run.

It doesn't, you don't suffer while you're doing it and you slowly just take off only the body fat. You only take off the body fat. You protect your bones. You make sure that calcium, vitamin D, magnesium, vitamin K is dialed in. Your protein intake is dialed in. Your carb intake is dialed in to protect that lean muscle tissue and also to minimize the breakdown of muscle tissue to provide for gluconeogenesis. And you make sure you have enough fat as well to manage your blood glucose digestion, et cetera. So you have enough of these things.

But you create enough of an energetic deficit. So you're pulling some of the body fat just in a progressive fashion, but you're not suffering and up regulating those stress hormones over the long term. And then you keep it, you keep in mind it's a long-term process. The first thing I'm talking about with somebody like, I need to lose 70 pounds. It's like, right, we, like it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time for that to occur. We're looking at like 70 weeks, maybe down to 35 weeks, maybe up to hundred weeks, depending on your weight of weight loss.

At the end of this though, the weight's gonna be gone, we're gonna increase your muscle tissue, and you're gonna be able to eat quite a bit more than you are now, because you have a higher lean body mass, less body fat, and you're gonna feel better overall, and you should not suffer throughout the entire process. But it's gonna take time. I think when people know, okay, it's gonna take time, but I can do it, then I think it's fine. When you start doing this stuff, you see like, I did really low fat, and I started getting these problems, and it's like, how long can you sustain that?

You can't really sustain that that long and you ultimately won't lose the weight. So it's actually worse to do it this way because you won't get your ultimate outcome and you may do this lose fast and regain fast and be in a worse spot. There's a problem with this really rapid stuff. It doesn't last. People don't make the full, they won't make the full timeline. They'll stop early because they're suffering and suffering is only so much that you can handle. There's only so much willpower you have to actually go through that type of stuff. So there's no pain, no gain mentality I think actually is counterproductive.

You want something that's like, don't, you I feel pretty good. I'm sleeping. My energy is good. You know, I feel I can eat. I'm full. I'm satiated. And then you just do it over the long term. See it slowly come off. For me, that's the mentality that I work with. And that's where I see people get the best success over the long term. And they actually reach those weight loss goals and then maintain it afterwards. Cause that's the big thing. Can they maintain that into perpetuity with Ozempic and GLP-1 drugs? They don't maintain it. With a sugar diet, I bet you they're not going to maintain it.

with the biggest loser type diets, really low calorie or protein sparing modified fast, people don't maintain that because it's not sustainable. You lose the weight and it's like, well, now what do I do? So you want to make sure you have a system where it's like the transition is out of it. It's very easy. The transition to normal eating again. just, okay, I'm going to do like maybe I was doing 16 ounces of pineapple juice or I was doing 12, now I do 16. That's it. It's not that big of a change. It's very minor adjustment.

Jay, for someone that tends to notice they feel a lot better after a few fatty meals, what's the mechanism behind that? I mean, we've talked about kind of like the buffering effect and like the stabilizing blood sugar effect. In someone in a case like this where someone's maybe almost like starving to a certain degree and their body's in an interesting territory, what's going on when they feel immediately better after having a fatty meal?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I would say there's two really likely reasons. One is just, you know, concentration of calories, right? Total amount of fuel coming in. And if we're eating a higher fat meal, normally it's going to mean there's a lot more fuel there, but also there are actual basically fat deficiencies, right? We use fat not only for hormonal reasons, not only for structural purposes in ourselves, but also it's a fuel. And Mike had touched on this where when we have too little fat, we have to pull it from our fat stores.

And that requires stress hormones to do so. And especially for someone here who is lean and working out and has a lot of muscle mass, we're going to need much higher amounts of fat to prevent that fat deficiency and prevent that stress. So that's normally why when looking at fat intake, I'd normally recommend that people titrate their fat intake based on those things. If they have more muscle mass, if they're more active, they're going to have higher fat needs. And that's when we might get up to 30 to 40 % of our total calories from fat.

Whereas if someone is much less active using a lot less of that muscle or they have a lot less, they mass that's where we would want to go lower, like below 30 % normally in the 20 to 30 % range. And this does tie in with something else Mike was alluding to, which is that it's somebody who has much more body fat and typically less muscle mass. But if they're on the high body fat and high, higher insulin resistant side, they're tends to be a lot more fat being constantly released from the fat stores. see chronically high stress hormones, chronically high glucagon especially, and therefore chronically high free fatty acids. And so that's a situation where we aren't really going to be creating a fat deficiency from a low fat diet because there's all of this fat already available. And so this is why normally it's a lot more tolerable. There's a lot fewer negative effects and you aren't actually causing the same stress. Even if you drop the fat potentially below 20%, you know, getting into much lower fat ranges.

For someone in that scenario. And oftentimes we can see great improvements in insulin sensitivity and in weight loss when dropping the fat lower for somebody in that scenario. So yeah, it's part of why we want to individualize our macro needs based on our individual needs, but also just a recognition that fat is an important nutrient. is an essential nutrient to our physiology, just like carbs are, you know, is important as well. We definitely don't want to get into the habit of swinging from demonizing one macronutrient to the other. Or we are putting ourselves at risk of driving stress, whether it's due to a protein deficiency, a carb deficiency, or a fat deficiency, because while we can, we have a lot of adaptive mechanisms to deal with those things, they come at a cost and that cost involves different versions of stress. And then we end up with different versions of negative side effects as a result. So yeah, I think those are all important things to consider here.

And, as Mike was talking about as well, when it comes to rapid weight loss, that's something we want to be careful about. Also because of the effects metabolically, normally these are interventions that drive way more stress in order to get that quick weight loss. And that comes at a toll. There's a tax of that stress on our metabolic state. And that's what we've been talking about throughout this episode in the last, but there are really interesting studies looking at this in rodent models where they have them lose large amounts of weight, you know, from severe calorie restriction and they regain that weight.

Twice as fast after they've lost it. And then it's that much harder for them to lose the weight again. Every time they lose the weight, it's easier to regain it and harder to lose it again. And they show this in these weight cycling studies, which is why we want to make sure that we're not utilizing stress mechanisms in terms of our weight loss. We want to do it in a way that's sustainable in terms of what we're actually doing in terms of the approach and the intervention, but also sustainable physiologically because, especially people who have done the really extreme diets, the HDG diets, really extreme calorie restriction. People have been on some of these GLP-1 agonist drugs. Getting off of it, it's not just about sustainability in terms of can you maintain what you were doing, but also physiologically your body is primed to regain body fat when we've done these sorts of intensely stressful methods for weight loss. So that's why it's so important that we want to, I would say, focus on health first as our primary focus and then have that weight loss be a by-product as opposed to this idea of focusing on weight on whatever's going to move the scale without regard to our health. then dealing with those ramifications, which normally means short-term weight loss at a long-term cost, both to health and to weight, right? Most people throughout their lifetime, they have this, this, um, you know, general trend where, where they regain some weight, they lose some, but then they regain it they're higher than where they were before. And then they lose it again, but they don't get back down to their low and they regain higher. And you end up just with that.

You know, basically a linear graph where it just keeps going up, up and up because we're not actually prioritizing our health and we're focusing on the weight as the problem, but the weight is, is a symptom. It's a byproduct of the underlying metabolic state. So that's why that's really where we want to put our focus. but in any case, we're seeing some of the effects here of what happens when we're not considering the fact that, you know, fat is, is an important nutrient, just like carbs are and, that will notice that once we get down to those lower body fat percentages. And I think he did a great job at the end of, of putting it all together and recognizing that, um, you know, long-term goal needs to be a balanced diet of adequate amounts of each macro. And again, adequate can mean different things for different individuals. As we were touching on, we need to tailor that to ourselves and also balanced. This does not just mean a little bit of everything or a little bit of grains, a little bit of seed oils, a little bit of pizza, a little bit of donuts, a little bit of fruit, a little bit of vegetables. That's not what we're saying. We're talking about balance.

And I think a lot of people who are new to our work and coming from the sugar diet, don't, you know, we're talking about a more, they think there's basically two approaches. There's the extreme sugar diet approach, or there's everyone else who just says it's all about calories and balance. And that's not what we're saying here. There's a lot more to the picture. And I think what we would regard as a healthy diet is very different from what most people might picture as a balanced diet. And so, yeah, obviously that's, we'll just direct people to prior episodes where we talk through what we would regard as an actual healthy quote unquote balanced diet from the bioenergetics perspective.

Yeah, lots of Omega threes, lots of brown rice and the occasional donut.

Okay, so CWade15 said, I'm following several sugar diet channels and judging from the comments I'm reading, the majority are not successfully losing body fat on this diet. They're losing and regaining the few pounds. And we've got a couple comments below, people chiming in saying, you are right. It's the same thing I see. As soon as they eat out of the sugar diet, they gain the water weight right back.

And someone else chimes in and says, yep, same thing happened to me. Mike, you've probably noticed a lot of comments echoing this same sentiment where, and you guys have touched on it today. Yes, the weight drops off and then boom, it comes right back when they resume whatever normal diet they're eating. this something that, I mean, when you think about the problems and some of the stressful effects of this.

Is this something that we would expect for most people? Is this just a risk to be aware of if people are determined to do the sugar diet? Are there ways to avoid this? think that, I think people are gonna have varying responses of course, but there's people talking about losing weight extremely rapidly with a sugar diet, eating ad libitum, like basically eating as much as they want. And there's a couple of things that change. I think the rate of some of people's weight loss is not possible to be fat tissue. So especially even if you have a 20%, like even just like your numerical sense.

You have a 20 % increase in the amount of food that's required to maintain your body weight, which on the diet in young healthy men, I think that took like five weeks. It was towards the end of that five week timeframe that they actually achieved that. I think what winds up happening is even with that, people are not going to lose the level of weight in body fat that they are seeing go down on the scale, which this is one of the major problems using the scale as your metric.

The scale is a blunt instrument. It's as blunt as calories are for determining your food intake. It doesn't tell you anything about the tissue that is being lost. It doesn't say you're losing from your fat stores, from your muscle tissue, or you're just dropping total water weight. So I do think the rapid weight loss that we are seeing is largely related to water weight initially. People are seeing this loss in water weight and then it's going down the scale and it's great. It looks good. It's motivating, but I don't think it's all body fat.

There's probably a large portion of water weight. When you switch to sugars from starches, in my experience, the sugars, I think the way that they're digested compared to the starch in terms of have a portion of starch is going to the colon. It leads to a loss of water. Like you're not holding water. You lose water off your abdomen. I've experienced this myself and the decrease in fibers. You don't have much stool weight sitting inside the colon, which I think also leads to drop in water weight. And then some of the changes potentially shortening fatty acid metabolism.

All of these components I tend to see people will lose water weight pretty quickly even if they still have protein present, but they went on a higher sugar intake, particularly from fruits that can I think lead people to have some of this diuretic effect on top of the fact that if they are doing this diet with large amounts of fruits, you can get a very you can get a much higher potassium intake and the higher potassium and sugar intake from the fruits tends to have a bit of a diuretic effect in my experience. People go on a really higher high carb high sugar diet from fruits and fruit juices and the fat is lower and maybe salt is lower as well, they tend to urinate quite a bit. And the adrenaline can cause people to urinate quite a bit, which I think they start losing quite a bit of water. That's some of the mechanisms where you're seeing that rapid shift and loss in some of the water. I do think people are also losing body fat, but the other thing that comes into this is saying, well, I'm not losing, it's nothing to do about a caloric deficit or anything like this. So I get a hundred percent is and like whether it's...

Calories, we end up with calories out, know there's problems with that because it doesn't account for the ability of you to take the substrate and convert it to energy. And there's a lot of things that go into that middle piece of that conversion process that can be gummed up by a lot of different components. Endotoxin, heavy metals, nutrient deficiencies, hormonal imbalance, et cetera, right? There's a lot of things in that center piece that gets glossed over with the calories and calories out. It's like all these are the only two things you need to know. But if we do take it from that perspective in and of itself, with this diet and I made this in the first video and people like, you're, you know, they say don't be a calorie counting bleep is what you're hearing these fears. And it's like, people are calling me that, but it's like, if you have a bump in metabolism of 20%, right? Say you achieve it, you're not FGF 21 resistant because people with disease states, diabetes, heart failure, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver, they already have FGF 21 up regulated and they may be resistant, but say you're not resistant. Say you get that 20 % bump in energy intake.

And we also know that FGF 21 decrease your drive to eat sweet things, right? So can't eat, you don't want to eat as much sweet things and your metabolism is bumped 20 % and you can't eat protein and fats. What's going to happen? Deficit. You're going to lose weight. You're going to drop your total energy intake. And even for me, when I was doing a diet like this, it is really hard to get enough energy just from sugars and carbs. You can't, I have a client right now. He wants to do the sugar diet stuff.

Obviously I'd not like, I don't think it's the best strategy overall. He had already lost like 15 pounds working together without doing any of the sugar diet stuff, but he wants to test it out because he's curious. So I help him set up some of the, it's not a sugar fast. It's more like a honey diet type of situation where you basically have the fruit and juice across the day and you have the protein meal at night. There's some benefits for that different story. But for him, when he, he's like, I want to try sugar fast just to see when I was like, just put in a chronometer, try to do it without adding
sugar sources. For him, he was at 2800 calories a day. When he did the sugar diet, was he was couldn't even make 2000 of fruit and juice. And then we added in maple syrup and honey to hit his targets. He only got up to 2500. So he's automatically setting himself up into a deficit. And then after a couple days, he didn't want to eat anymore. He's like, I just can't I don't want to have more maple syrup and honey. I just don't want it. So I think people are not either they maybe they get a bump in metabolism from FGF 21.

And then you only have carbs to eat and your desire to eat them drops and then you're going to lose weight through this through this mechanism over time, but it's still through a caloric deficit. It's just that you're bumping up a stress pathway to increase your energy output and you're putting restrictions on yourself that make it extremely difficult to actually eat enough food. And you can sit there and say, yeah, don't be a calorie counting bleep. But at the same time, it's like, well, then how do you guys know that you're you're not entering into an energy deficit? How do you know you don't?

And then if you try to run the diet and you're like, okay, I'm not going to do this granulated sugar stuff. I'm not going to do these refined sources and you just do a fruit and juice. It's to be even harder. So I think this is what people, I think that's why people are seeing the rapid weight loss, but I don't think they should get it mixed up here. I think that they're seeing rapid weight loss because they're going into huge deficits. They don't realize it. And then on top of that, they're losing water weight initially kind of like with some of the keto stuff. I think that's why people are seeing such a rapid weight loss. And again, the mechanism of this, I don't think are a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, so important to remember, like you both are highlighting that there are other ways to go about this. And Steve Wade's comment does kind of sum up like, Hey, it's this works and here's what to expect long-term. And I think that's, it's great for people to be slowing down enough to take the time to think about what's, what's my life going to look like months from now? You know, sure. There's this shortcut, but what kind of health do I want to step into for the rest of my life? Not just as this like crash diet that will change my aesthetic for the short term, but yeah, knowing that there will be some risks for maybe not even being able to stick to a certain lower body weight that the people are hoping to achieve in the first place. Jay, do you have anything to add to these comments or any reflections or responses?

Yeah, I mean, just, I think Mike touched on really the most important things here. And as, as you were saying, under eating is probably very common on these diets. And if you especially consider there's an increase in energy expenditure, uh, you know, due to the stress effects and then you're eating less. mean, that's a recipe for weight loss, of course, on one hand, but also even worse problems physiologically. So I do think that that's a big part of it. think also, as you were saying, weight, uh, water, weight can be a part of it.

And then also I think there's legitimate weight loss, you know, I don't want to act as though this is in the same way we were saying with those negative effects. It's not like everybody's going to the emergency room with this and it's not like everybody is just losing a few pounds and regaining it either. But that process, the likelihood of regaining it is going to be high considering everything we've talked through here. But also I do think that there are people who have legitimately benefited from this. I just don't think it's because of the sugar diet per se, I think it's kind of inadvertent and we can achieve those same benefits without the same costs here. So as an example, for someone who has troubles digesting, like fats, let's say, you know, low bioflow, maybe low pancreatic enzyme production, low lipase. If they dropped their fat really low, they could have huge relief, major benefits from the gut, major reduction in inflammation and bloating and weight loss as well. Cause if you're having a lot of undigested fat, irritating the colon causing intestinal permeability, you can have tons of downstream effects that cause, you know, someone to hold on to weight.

Same thing could be happening with protein issues, right? If somebody's not digesting protein well and you cut down on the protein, you could have a lot of benefits from that. It still isn't our long-term solution here. You know, we'd want to fix our ability to digest the protein or the fat in those cases. The other thing too, and we've talked about this with a lot of different diets, but if you're cutting, cutting out macronutrients, you're cutting out a lot of the really harmful foods, a lot of the bad foods that most people are eating. lot of the, you know, if you're not eating fat, you're not eating Pufa, you're not eating any fried food, you know, and that's

There's going be lot of benefits to that. If you're just eating sugar, you're not eating the really hard to digest grains, you know, that could be causing you to hold onto body fat. So I think there are legitimate benefits to them. We're not discounting those. but with, within those legitimate benefits, we can get those without all of the costs here and we can do it in a slightly more directed way or intentional way, as opposed to this sort of an approach. I guess what I'm trying to get at is for people who are feeling legitimately better here.

When they're on the sugar diet. And for people who are noticing considerable weight loss, it's important to dig into that. Don't ignore that. Consider why that might be. Consider what kinds of changes you've made, what seems to be most responsible, maybe do some testing where we bring in a little bit of fat and you keep the protein low just for a bit. See what you notice there. You're still maintaining the same benefits. What if we add some protein now, but we're just really intentional about the sources of protein, the sources of fats and carbs, know, pay attention to your digestive symptoms. I think that there's a lot of good that can come from this experimentation, even if the underlying mechanisms are things that we would say are pointing you in a not ideal route, I think that we can still gain a lot from this. So I think that would be my closing thoughts here.

I think we've given the sugar diet some good consideration today. All right, Mike, where can people find you?

Mike Fave
You can find me at my YouTube channel, MikeFave , as well as my website, MikeFave.com.

All right, Jay, what about you?

Jay Feldman
Feel free to head over to my website, jfeldmanwellness.com. There's tons of free resources there. And then my YouTube channel is Jay Feldman Wellness.

Theresa Piela
Awesome. You can find me at livingrootswellness.com or livingrootswellness on Instagram and also tapping with T the app and website. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening for this wonderful discussion and we can't wait to see you for the next episode.