Episode: 4105
Title: HPR4105: My story how I found a cure for my obesity
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4105/hpr4105.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:40:30

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4105 for Friday the 26th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, My Story How I Found A Cure for My Obesity.
It is the 20th show of Geron Baton, and is about 39 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a talk about my historical weight gain and what I recently learned so that I now lose weight.
Hello everybody.
This is Geron Baton, and it's time for my podcast confession.
It's been 536 days since my last podcast on HBR.
Sorry for that.
Life happens, you know, things, stuff.
I guess you, I hope you can relate to that.
Anyway, what I would like to talk to you about is basically my body.
And before you start thinking that, that's a weird subject.
It's a technical talk.
But it's a technical talk about my body, my physical body, and to separate it from any ethereal kind of weird stuff.
The thing is, I've been struggling with my weight since I was 35 and I'm now 60.
I know that not all listeners are familiar with the kilogram as unit of measurement.
But we can use the BMI, the body mass index, the formula at least to discuss this.
Usually it should be somewhere between 22 and 25 and mine has been 33 or more for a long time.
A very long time.
No matter what I tried, because clearly I wasn't happy about it.
But I couldn't put my finger on the cause and I couldn't find a solution to lose weight.
And recently something happened and something changed and it changed dramatically in a good way.
So I'm very happy. I'm very enthusiastic about this change.
And that's why I decided to record a podcast about it.
And I'm still trying to make this as technical as possible.
Simply because I'm a geek, I'm a nerd.
I relate to technical subjects and technical explanations.
For instance, 1 plus 1 is equals 2.
And it's not like 1 plus 1 equals red or slightly blue or something like that.
So over the years I tried some diets but they, as you probably know if you've tried them,
they only seem to work for some time but not a long time.
Because the only work if you keep doing them.
And that means if it doesn't come now normal or easy, then at some inevitable point,
you will stop after which your body will gain weight again.
And usually even more than what you started with, the yo-yo effect.
So yes, there's a lot of talk about changing lifestyle.
But any change that is too drastic is bound to fail in the end.
Because you're a human and that means that it's not a matter of being lazy or don't have a stamina.
I know that's been said over and over in the media but it trust me and I will prove it to you.
That is not the reason why diets fail.
Oh well, maybe diets but not you.
So, recently I read this book and this book absolutely changed my life.
And that is why I'm so motivated to tell you all about it.
The book is called the Obesity Code and it's written by Jason Fung.
Jason Fung is a Canadian nephrologist for all those out there who don't know what a nephrologist is.
It's a kidney specialist. So he specializes in kidney diseases.
And since then he's also become sort of a functional medicine advocate who promotes a low carbohydrate, high fed diet and intermittent fasting.
But we will come to that in a minute.
This to me is not another diet hype.
Diet are an industry on their own.
They have a certain life span at which they become popular.
People try it at the end. They will fail because diets don't work.
It's not the people who diet fail. It's just that diets themselves fail.
It's not the solution to being overweight.
And where am I with my notes?
This book, the Obesity Code, it's scientific stuff.
So this author, Jason Fung, he talks about it, but he also, he mentions decent research about the stuff that he talks about.
And with decent research, I mean, and he explains that in his book, he says, look, I'm going to use this book is for both doctors, but also regular Jones Street.
And there are a lot of links to research papers.
And he says, I only mentioned papers with a large quantity of subjects with a large body of data and that has been decently reviewed.
So, for instance, if I go to the pub and I ask two of my friends, what country do you think the best beers come from?
And they say, well, it's probably Belgium. I think they're probably right, but that does not make this a decent research.
Anyway, so he does this with large groups and thoroughly, solely peer-reviewed stuff.
Also, I like to say upfront that this whole podcast does not mean that this podcast is for everyone.
No, there are existing world, other medical reasons why people gain weight.
So if you have gained weight and you think about, you listen to this podcast or to not a podcast, I don't, whatever.
And you think maybe this will work, consult your own physicist of Dr. First, right?
Because that could be other reasons why you have gained weight.
But assuming most people start out in life being healthy, then most people gaining weight are not ill.
Some are, but not all of them. You see where I'm getting there?
So if you gain weight, consult your Dr. First to rule out any medical reason, medical reason, medical source.
Well, you know, any illness, clearly, English is not my native tongue. I'm doing my best here. Hang on.
So Jason Fung, the author of the book, noticed that his practice and the things he did with patients did not match with the theory.
Everybody, well, maybe not everybody, but a lot of people know that if you subscribe prednisone to people, they will gain weight.
And prednisone is an anti-inflammatory medicine, but the thing is, for some reason, you gain weight.
And so it turns out in his practice, everybody who has given insulin gains weight.
Even if you have diabetes type 2, then also they supply insulin to you, which means you will gain weight, which is not really productive.
Because normally, diabetes type 2 is something that happens when you are obese, you are overweight.
And then they give you insulin and you gain extra weight, which is not really helping, I guess.
So there are even several scientific studies that prove this, give people insulin and they will gain weight.
So let's stop there for a minute and think about this, if you have too much insulin in your body, you will gain weight.
That's also the premise of his book.
So what if insulin is the culprit for gaining weight?
Well, insulin is a hormone. It's in your body usually and its job is to send signals through the body.
It's used to allow body cells to absorb nutrients in the bloodstream.
So when you eat insulin will rise, they will prep your body cells.
Look, there is some food in your blood absorbed in your cells.
So that's sort of the signaling function of insulin. So you need it.
And every time you eat, there is an insulin peak and then it subsides.
So it's not like you have an insulin level all day long.
Normally, if you eat, you get a sort of a signal peak in your blood insulin.
And it will prep the cells. Look, there is some food in the blood, try to absorb that and they will normally.
So this happens, normally again, three times a day.
Breakfast, meal, and dinner.
And what happens when you eat is that there is a certain process in your liver.
That's called gluconeogenesis.
And gluconeogenesis means that the nutrients in your blood are sent to the cell but they are also stored in a little bit stored in your liver for the rest of your day.
So the liver will create a little bit of fat in the liver to later on in the day if you are a couple of hours past your meal to still be able to make sugars out of the fat to send to your body cells.
But the liver is as a limited capacity to do this.
Usually just for a regular day, you know, regular Joe, regular day.
So if you eat the body mix insulin, that's normal.
If you eat more, the body makes more insulin, it happens.
And body cells, if you eat too much sugars, then there is this thing in your body that will always look for a stable situation.
So if on average you eat too many sugars, the insulin level will rise every time and stay high for a longer time.
But your body cells will adjust to this and they will become sort of tone deaf to this higher than usual level of insulin.
It's called insulin resistance.
So if you eat too many sugary things, if your body creates too much insulin because in response to all these sugars, then the body cells will respond to that by becoming less responsive to insulin.
Which means that next time you have a normal meal, even then insulin must peak higher than normal to get your body cells to accept the nutrients.
And that's of course a bad thing because insulin resistance means higher level of insulin, higher level of insulin means that you gain weight.
If you eat sugar, it's so easy to, if you eat there are sugars in everything.
And you know, if fruit are sugars in all kinds of food, there are nutrients and sugars.
But the really refined sugar, the white stuff, not the snorting kind, but what you put in your coffee or tea sugar, that's highly refined, I guess so.
It's so easy to digest by the substances in your body that handle sugar, that it goes immediately into storage.
So it passes to liver, it says, oh, this is so too easy for me. It passes right into storage, meaning fat storage, meaning, well, wherever your body shows fat, you know, around your waist or in your hips or wherever.
Now you would think, well, I don't do a lot of sugar, I just eat bread in the morning, I eat bread in the afternoon, and well, maybe an occasional donut.
Well, the thing is, wheat is chemically seen, if you look at it from a chemical standpoint, wheat is a long string of sugar molecules.
And the body is very good adapted to break it down into individual sugars, and again, send it back to fat storage, meaning your waist or hips.
And almost any food we buy these days contains sugar, except, of course, for the unprocessed foods like vegetables.
Now, this is something we could talk on for hours, but I think personally that it's not in the best interest of food manufacturers to keep you healthy.
It's in the best interest of food manufacturers to get their products sold as much as possible.
And to distinguish themselves from the competitors, combined with the fact that a human body really likes sugar, they add sugar to everything.
For instance, go to the supermarket. Next time you're in the supermarket, pick out a can of any vegetable, and look at how many sugar is in there.
Probably, I hope so. In any case, that was in my case, zero.
Then, pick up a jar of the same vegetable, a jar that you can see the vegetables, you know, with a lid that you can turn.
And in that jar, that will always be in my experience, sugar added. Maybe the color stays better than it as a composition for the fact that it's exposed to daylight.
I don't know, I don't care, but they add sugar to vegetables in jars.
Yeah, where am I in my story?
Oh yeah, so almost any food we buy these days contain sugar.
Really, if you start looking around for it, if you start thinking, okay, I need to afford sugar. Let's skip sugar.
You will have a hell of a problem finding food that hasn't got any sugars in it, except, of course, for vegetables and meat.
Most of the rest, oh yeah, nuts, nuts also, no sugars, even salty nuts, but that's salty, you know, that's...
Okay, so, how do we, how did I lose weight? Because I've been losing weight since I read this book, and I'm very happy, and I want to share this with, well the world, and in this case, with you listening.
So, how do we lose weight? Wait, well, the body needs to access the fat that is in fat storage. Clearly, because we want to lose weight and there's too much fat in fat storage, so the body needs to access.
We need to make the body access the fat that is in storage. So, how do we do that? Well, we need to extend, not eating.
So, if we extend not eating until the liver has run dry of the daily dose of liver fat, then the body will switch to a getting fat from storage, and with the process, change that into the fuel that we need.
Make sense, right? So, how do we extend not eating? Well, that's easy. Just extend the daily period that you do not eat, and when don't you eat? Well, you don't eat when you sleep, right? It's easy, you're sleeping, and when you're sleeping, you're not eating.
So, that's a perfect time to allow the body to switch to burning your storage fat.
And how do we extend that? Well, guess what? We will extend, and we will skip breakfast. No breakfast. Yeah, I know, I know, this sounds weird, but think about it.
What's the name breakfast? The name itself already says, we are breaking our fast. So, drink some coffee, please no sugar, or tea, or water, or whatever, and try to start eating later in the day.
In my case, another word, of course, for no eating, is fasting, but it's not a bad fast, it's a voluntary fast, right? It was my choice not to eat breakfast.
So, I tried this for one day. Skip breakfast, I tried to eat at noon. Yeah, I know, I was ambitious, I thought, let's do this right away, and let's start eating at noon, and not before.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right? It was one day, and the next day, I had lost some weight. I was so happy, and for me, it was so easy. I just drank some water, I was doing my stuff.
All those stories about, yeah, but you know, I'm feeling fainted, or lightheaded, none of that happened to me in any way, and in any case, and at some point it was noon, and I started eating.
I could say, I lost that day, about 300 grams, but again, your mileage may vary, or you may have no clue what one gram is, let alone 300.
But that's not a point. The point is that I lost weight, and to me, this has been a super easy experience, so guess what? Second day, I did the same with the third day, and I've been doing this for two months.
To me, it's easy. So, if you are having weight problems, and you have no disease that you know of, or have checked with your physician, try it for one day. What's the worst? It can happen, right?
So, the solution turned out to be, extend the time, your insulin levels are low. And also in this book, Jason Feng, discusses this, he says, there are three possible periods to do this.
It's 16 hour fast. And so, let's say that last time you ate this eight o'clock in the afternoon, and then you don't eat breakfast, so you started noon, again, so you have a 16 hour fasting period.
And there's also the problem. There's also the option to make a 24 or 36 hours.
Well, I've never tried 36, but I did try 24, and what happens is, I had a dinner with friends, you know, and we had a four-course meal with cheeses, and desserts, and a whole sabang.
It was delicious, and it was lovely, and we had a little bit of wine, and we had a great fun. But, in the end of the dinner, you could roll me out of the restaurant. That's how I felt.
You had a little bit bloated, maybe you know the feeling. And I decided, you know, maybe tomorrow is a good day to naughty 24 hours.
So, it was dinner with friends, and I drank, but didn't eat until it was again time to have dinner.
And it's a little less easy than 16 hours, but it's pretty doable.
And also, because of that, when I went on the scale, I believe the word is, you know, to measure your weight, scale, right?
I hadn't gained weight. I hadn't lost anything either. Yeah, I gained some weight immediately the morning after this fancy dinner, but the next day, it was gone.
So, although I hadn't lost weight, I also hadn't gained weight. So, good on me, I thought. I still think.
So, the solution turns out to be, extend the time, your insulin levels, all insulin levels, all low, 16, 24, 36 hours, whatever works for you, and eat as little sugar as possible.
Which brings me to food categories. There are basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
I count 5 food categories. One is the carbohydrates.
Carbon hybrids are sugars, and sugars are also often disguised by using other names for them, like corn syrup, which is basically sugar, or fructose, which is sugar, or whatever.
There are about 50 different words that are all in some way or form sugar.
Anyway, so, carbohydrates like sugar, but also wheat and flour. And if you have white wheat, that's worse than brown wheat, because there's less fiber in white wheat, and because there's less fiber, there's more carbohydrates, which means it's worse than brown wheat.
The other category is proteins. So, that's basically the stuff where meat is made of, sausages. Then you have fats and oil.
That's a third category. The fourth are the vitamins and minerals that you need. Yeah, you definitely need that.
To give you an example, your body needs minerals, because, as you probably know, your heart beats with a pulse.
That's why it's called pulse, and it's an electrical signal. So, there needs to be minerals in your body that can conduct the electrical signal.
So, if you are getting lower minerals, it could be unhealthy. So, you need minerals and vitamins. And the last category is fibers.
Fibres are just the thing that you eat that are maybe the encasing for a nut could be a fiber, and it's not digested, it's excreted at the end.
I know, it's a shit job, but you know. Anyway, so, these categories have different average digestion times.
Take again the carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are getting digested in about 30 minutes. It's so fast, the body's very good equipped to digest this stuff.
But if you only eat carbohydrates after 30 minutes, your body will say, I'm hungry, I need more.
Then there's proteins, proteins like meat, that takes about three to five hours of digestion time. So, that's enough time to make it from one meal to the next.
Fat and oil can take up to 40 hours to digest. So, the good thing about that used to, there was a thinking back in, there was even a very bad research.
It's already been concluded that it was very bad, but anyway, somewhere in 1954 somebody wrote, yeah, you know, all these heart attacks that come from eating too much fat.
No, that's just not how the body works, that's been proven over and over and over again. So, the good news is that fat will give you a full feeling, but it will not add immediately to your waist because it's not sugar.
It doesn't raise your insulin levels too much.
Anyway, vitamins and minerals you need, I just explained at 5 or so, well, they leave the body. So, how has all this theory changed my life and died?
Well, I try to start eating at noon and that works most of the time and sometimes, not sometimes, I'm at 11 getting hungry and then I'll have my breakfast at 11.
I eat as little carbohydrates as possible, little to no bread, definitely no sugar and I avoid artificial sweetness also, but any sweetener, actually.
Try to eat as little sugar as possible.
These days, my meal at noon is most of the times quark with some fruit for flavoring, that's it. And it doesn't matter if it's a lot because it's protein.
Protein has a 3 to 5 hour digestion time and protein does not raise the insulin to a level that it will make the sugars go to fat storage.
So, I'm good there.
Evening food, well, vegetables are good, some meat is good and I try to avoid desserts as much as possible without becoming a hermit.
You know, if for some reason, me and my wife, she has a board of delicious desserts. Oh yeah, sure. For this day, I will do that.
And oh yeah, I do not eat between meals because this would cause an extra insulin peak I want to avoid because I want to keep my insulin as low and as modest level as possible.
So, since I started to month ago, I have on average lost 4 kilograms. That maybe does not sound like a dramatic, like an insane amount, but my weight is going down. It's not going up.
So, it's just a matter of time before I've lost all my extra weight. Some days it's better, some days it's worse, some days I have a festivity and I don't want to.
You know, they say, don't drink, don't smoke and only eat vegetables all your life and you have a long life and the joke is, well, not really, but it feels so much longer.
That's a joke.
So, in my case, it could have been more, but then that's the occasional dinner with friends, like I said, what is bad, but so good is sometimes unavoidable. And I don't want to be a hermit.
So, some other stuff that I learned that is good to know, exercising. And I don't know about you, but I don't like exercising.
And I don't know a lot of people who do like exercising except for those people who are addicted to those positive hormones that your body will create when you exercise a lot.
Well, we humans, and that's been the result of millions of years of evolution, we excel at walking and thus varying out our prey.
We simply start walking behind our prey and it runs away and it runs away again and at some point it gets exhausted and we've got it by whatever, the endless.
Okay, we've got it by the endless. Let's not get weird here.
So, walking is good. Every day, half an hour, excellent. If you have a dog, you're in the clear. Simple as that. Just get a dog if you can.
And take care of the dog, right? Don't neglect it.
Doing an intensive workout for a minimum of 10 minutes per week happens to be good to keep your cardiovascular system and your brain up to speed.
It doesn't need to be more than that. Yes, if you love to do it, go ahead, make my day.
Go ahead, have a workout. If you like to do that kind of stuff, great. Just know that the bare minimum is one week, one day, sorry, 10 minutes a week.
And I have, well, it's a Dutch but there's a podcast of this university physiologist who did the research and explained and even give you a sort of a program where you, but it's in Dutch.
But just 10 minutes, high intensity workout. Try to move, try to use all your muscle groups and you're in the clear. You should be in the clear.
The other thing, can you compensate cookies with sports? Well, every cookie would take you about two and a half hours of intensive sports to compensate.
So you cannot compensate bad eating with sports as much as you would like, maybe.
Okay, what's with the calories in and calories out? Well, studies have proven that this is a false claim.
Your body just doesn't work that way. If you eat too many calories in a day, your body will increase its metabolism to burn those calories
and not store them into fat storage as much as you would think.
So, and why has this been the mantra for so many years? Beats me, ask Jason Fang, but he also says, no clue.
What about stress? Well, I had a gut feeling for years that stress played into me gaining weight and it turns out that's the case.
Stress leads to heightened levels of the hormones called adrenaline and cortisol. That's everybody knows that, right? Increased stress, you get increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol.
And it turns out that when the cortisol level rises, so too does the insulin level in your body. So, heightened insulin gaining weight.
So, this simply means that stress will lead to weight gain.
Okay, the other thing, can I simply drink diet sodas? Can I drink diet sodas because they don't contain water? Well, I got some bad news for you there.
Bauer, because although diet sodas do not contain calories nor sugars, they will result in a rise in your insulin level, probably because your body thinks that you're eating sugar,
because it tastes sugar. I don't know, but so they are basically not good for losing weight.
There's so much more to tell about this. The book is not a thin book, but I found it incredibly helpful in understanding what I tried to describe here in a short form.
I will put in the show notes the link to the podcast. And that's the podcast in English from Jason Fang, who is getting interviewed by Steven Buffett from the podcast called The Diary of CEO.
And this was for me the game changer. I listened to this podcast that I will put in the show notes. And I read the book and just to get to understand a little bit more of this whole process.
And I've been doing intermittent fasting and I hate that it's now a hype. I'm sorry for that. I don't care, just call it not eating for a longer time. I don't care.
But it helped me and I sure as hell hope it will also help you. That's the reason why I am recording it podcast.
Jason Fang also has a YouTube channel where he explains things clearly he's not in it for the money because he is just a doctor at a hospital and he has a fasting clinic.
But over and over he tells people look I'm giving away this knowledge because I don't want to earn money out of this knowledge.
And also because we've been doing and knowing this for thousands of years every major religion in the world has a fasting period somewhere during the year or the week or whatever.
And it's simply because we know from past times that this stuff works. Anyway, that's all I wanted to talk to you about for today.
I hope you found this explanation helpful and I wish you all a very nice day. Bye bye.
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