Intermittent Fasting Tips (My Top 3 Tips 2021) | Jason Fung

31 March 2025


Intermittent Fasting Tips (My Top 3 Tips 2021) | Jason Fung



Dr. Jason Fung gives his top three intermittent fasting tips. Fasting is simple, but not always easy, and these fasting tips may help you stick with it to lose weight. Intermittent fasting tip #3 – stay hydrated. Intermittent fasting tip #2 – Face your hunger. Hunger comes in waves, and if you simply ignore it, it will wash over you like a wave. Intermittent fasting Tip #1 – Stay busy. Some suggestions on what NOT to do during fasting and what are some better alternatives. Check out my blog at https://medium.com/@drjasonfung

More Information:
BOOKS:

The Obesity Code – Reviewing underlying physiology of weight loss and how low carb diets and fasting can help. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771641258?ref=exp_jasonfung_dp_vv_d

The Diabetes Code – Reviewing how type 2 diabetes is a reversible disease and dietary strategies. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0795BLS8D?ref=exp_jasonfung_dp_vv_d

The Cancer Code – Scientific exploration of how cancer develops – https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062894005?ref=exp_jasonfung_dp_vv_d

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Canada – https://www.amazon.ca/shop/jasonfung

**Fasting Aids**
Pique Fasting Tea (recommended)
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Fasting Community and Coaching:

Welcome to The Fasting Method

YouTube Medical Lectures (for specialist physicians):

1. The Roots of the Obesity Epidemic – https://youtu.be/q8BGYhreaco
2. Therapeutic Fasting – The Two Compartment Problem: https://youtu.be/ETkwZIi3R7w​​
3. Does Calorie Counting work? https://youtu.be/5F5o0a4p_3U​​
4. Two Big Lies of Type 2 Diabetes – https://youtu.be/FcLoaVNQ3rc
5. Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Naturally – https://youtu.be/mAwgdX5VxGc
6. Insulin Toxicity – https://youtu.be/4oZ4UqtbB_g​​
7. Saturated Fat – Friend or Foe? https://youtu.be/QetsIU-3k7Y
8. Diet and Disease – https://youtu.be/2yoOx_7MLn0
9. Dangers of Fructose – https://youtu.be/pG89j432w-Y
10. Insulin Resistance – https://youtu.be/dimP7IdM2Og
11. Role of Hormones in Weight Loss – https://youtu.be/ZbnshVO4PRM
12. The Obesity Code Lecture 1 – https://youtu.be/YpllomiDMX0

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#jasonfung #drjasonfung #fasting #fastingbenefits #weightlosstips #intermittentfasting #drfung #fung #calories #weightlosstips #caloriesincaloriesout #weightloss #nutrition #diet #health

2016 Green Tea Meta-Analysis – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26093535/
2009 Green Tea effect on Weight Loss – https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2009135.pdf
Green Tea Catechins – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115335/
Catechin effects on energy expenditure – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21366839/

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
0:19 Marina's story
1:22 Intermittent Fasting Tip #3 – Stay Hydrated
2:03 Intermittent Fasting Fluids – Green Tea
4:43 Intermittent Fasting Fluids – Black Tea, Coffee, Bone Broth
6:23 Intermittent Fasting Tip #2 – Ride out the Hunger Waves
9:33 Fasting reduces cravings for sweets
11:06 Intermittent Fasting Tip #1 – Stay Busy
15:55 Marina's Fasting Regimen

hi I'm Dr Jason fun today what we're going to share is my top three tips for intermittent fasting because there's a lot of people that want to try intermittent fasting and there's a few tips that we learned along the way that might be able to help you first we're going to talk about Marina in 2018 she was already diagnosed with breast cancer and fatty liver disease and she said she was just waiting to get diagnosed with diabetes as well she knew it was coming so desperate she tried lots of things she tried eating six small meals a day didn't work she tried joining a gym didn't really help finally she learned about intermittent fasting and thought she would give it a go so she read my book the complete guide to fasting and started to try it at first it was tough so she joined the fasting method.com to learn more about it and also developed some friends who she might be able to do this with and she was able to lose over 50 lbs and reverse much of her disease we're going to share some tips that allowed her to do that and also her fasting regimen at the end of this video so let's get right to [Music] it so here's tip number three make sure that you stay hydrated so remember when you're fasting you're not eating but you can still drink water water a classic fast is water only and water is great A lot of people do very well with that it makes it a lot easier if you're staying hydrated because some of the hunger tends to go down but there's a few other things that you can drink other than water that might be very uh helpful to include the first one I would like to talk about is green tea green tea might be especially useful for weight laws for a number of different reasons and what's the difference well green tea is brewed from the unfermented uh tea leaves and these contain certain antioxidants most important of which are called cakin also called ecgc is the specific one and the reason that they're so beneficial is that they may have a role in suppressing hunger but also increasing the metabolic rate and those two things are going to make it easier to lose weight and to fast and some of the studies that have been done in the scientific literature really bear this out we can look at a certain metaanalysis which are studies which group other studies together to look at the overall effect and you can see when they look at this that drinking green tea seems to lead to an extra 1.5 to 2 kg of weight loss well well that's a real benefit and green tea is cheap it's available it's been used for thousands of years and it's also very tasty so there's no reason not to use it the other thing that green tea tends to do is increase the metabolic rate and this may be due to not only the cakin but also some of the caffeine that's in green tea may increase the sympathetic nervous system and lead your body to use more calories so in this metaanalysis what they find is that perhaps about 3 to 400 extra calories per day is used extra when you're taking this green tea so again the caffeine and the cakin will tend to make your body sort of a little bit more active and therefore it needs more energy and therefore it burns more calories the green tea through these various mechanisms may increase the amount of fat oxidation as well as carbohydrate oxidation which means that your body is using up some of the glucose and using up some of the fat remember that the kakin are thought to be the main mechanism through which this happens if you drink regular hot brewed green tea you're going to get a good amount of cakin more than any other type of tea or any other type of Beverage but we can do even better than that if you use a special cold brew then you can actually extract more of the cakin because just like when you use cold brew coffee you can get more of the flavor when you use the cold brew for green tea you can also get more of the cakin out because the heat of the water can sometimes destroy them but it's not just green tea if you don't like green tea that's fine you can also drink black teas and oolong teas so the difference between black teas and green teas is that the black teas are fermented oolong is a sort of semi- fermentation so you don't get as many of the kakin but these kakin actually get changed into other antioxidants called theop flavens and they may also have some of the same benefits such as this study where it showed that it also increase the amount of energy expenditure the other uh beverage is to stay hydrated and also help you with the fasting might be something such as coffee now coffee of course can be taken black but be careful about what you add to it if you're just adding a small amount of cream that's likely okay but adding too much sweeteners or sugar or uh other dairy products is going to add calories and work against you for weight loss it's the same for bone broth so bone broth is another beverage that can be very effective to get you through your fasting day uh however just remember that it does have calories it does have some protein and so on but again if it allows you to go longer easier it might be worth it in the end so all of these fasting Vari ations are very useful uh the other thing to consider is also herbal teas so these are not true teas because they don't contain tea leaves but things like mint for example can be very calming chamomile for example at night time is very soothing lemon that kind of thing so here's tip number two remember to ride the hunger waves what I mean is that when you fast you have to understand that you are going to to get hungry that's just natural so you have to know how to deal with it because the number one worry about fasting is that people think that they're going to get hungry and then they're going to get more and more and more hungry if they don't eat until they're completely consumed by the hunger and they can't do anything else luckily that's not true so you have to prepare for it so if we look at the hunger hormone gellin we can see what happens during fasting in this study they took people and fasted them for 24 hours to see what would happen to their Granda levels which will correlate to their hunger levels over 24 hours of not eating and what you see is that during breakfast or lunch or dinner if you don't eat your hunger does not keep going up it actually Peaks and then Falls just like a wave and if you look at lunch for example if you eat lunch normally at 12:00 at 1:00 1:30 you're going to be hungry but by 4:00 in fact you are no more hungry than if you ate because your Gill levels are back to Baseline because your body took the calories that it needed out of your body fats you're essentially feeding your body off of your body fat so that's why you're not hungry anymore so it comes as a wave if you know that you can simply do something maybe drink a big cup of green tea for example and by the time you finish it the hunger wave will have pass and you can get on with your day what if you do multiple days of fasting does the hunger just keep going up and up and up actually it does quite the opposite what you see is that over day one your gellin goes up very high and then starts to come down on day two it goes up again but not quite as high so over multiple days of fasting what happens is that this hunger actually slowly disappears which is the reason that people have been able to do these long fasts uh you know in the 60s and 70s people would go 30 days 60 days the world record was 380 days people say how can you do that it's like because the hunger had largely disappeared and you can use that to your advantage if you decide to do a long fast is there a difference between men and women well if you look at the studies it suggests that both men and women have this same effect so both of the gellin go up when you don't eat and both of them will show a slow decline over time so we would expect this effect to be the same in both men and women the other real benefit in terms of fasting is the effect on Cravings so Cravings are things that we really feel like eating so people really crave ice cream or they create crave sweets or any of those things when you don't eat it appears that the Cravings significantly go down so in this study what they did is they compared a low calorie diet which is a sort of Standard 1 1200 calorie a day diet compared to an extremely low calorie diet which is less than 500 which some people would consider onp par with fasting and you can see that the low calorie diet didn't really do much in terms of reducing Cravings but if you look at the very low calorie diets you can see that the Cravings virtually disappeared so this will be no surprise to parents uh if you have a child who is Itchy the last thing you want to do is scratch it it's the same with Cravings if you have a craving and you feed that Cravings you're it's not going to go away it's just going to get worse the only way to get rid of those Cravings is to not feed it at all and then over time those Cravings will disappear even after you start eating them again what the studies show is that the Cravings still remain at a much lower level than before and this is another benefit of the fasting is that it's going to reduce the cravings and therefore reduce not just the hunger but some of the psychological drives that are leading you to eat these things that we know are not good for us the sweets the desserts those types of foods so here's the number one tip for fasting stay busy so if you're not eating you're going to have a little bit more time but there's a few things that you should do and a few things that you shouldn't do so here's the things that you should not do when you're fasting go on social media on social media you're going to see lots of people talking about what they ate what they are want to eat you know you're going to see ads for uh food and so on and it's going to make it a lot harder for you to fast on the same lines grocery shopping is not a good idea because you're surrounded by food cooking is definitely going to make you hungry so again that's just going to make it difficult for you to do your fast so what can you do if you're the one who cooks because a lot of us for example have kids that we cook for well there's a few strategies but you have to plan a little bit ahead for example what you could do is cook ahead of time and then they can simply uh reheat that or for example you can ask them uh you know either your spouse or your kids or your parents whoever you're cooking for maybe to go out for that meal or maybe take it somewhere else so you could send your kids for example to their grandparents for uh that meal and that won't make you tempted because the sights and the sounds of people eating that's going to stimulate you to want to eat as well and that's going to make it tough for you to fast if you uh are asking a family member to cook for example then you can simply get out of the house for a little while so a few other things that you should keep in mind is that going to a mall is probably not a good idea because again you've got smells all around you from the food core that's what a lot of uh people rely on to get you in to buy their food Cinnabon for example was famous for wafting the smell all over the mall and then making everybody want to buy their Foods seeing a movie in the movie theater for example is the same there's a smell of popcorn you see people eating and so on and parties are much the same idea because a lot of parties are going to have food and people are going to want to socialize and socialization and the food often go together so what can you do when you're fasting well here's some suggestions you can take a bath very relaxing you can add some bubbles to it you can add some scents to it maybe light some candles you could listen to some music you could call your mom call your dad call your kids a conversation is going to take your mind completely off of it maybe you could organize your closet you could organize your shoes you could organize your jewelry you could clean up your room you could clean up the basement you know there's a lot of stuff down there that gets uh piled up over the years uh you could dust the baseboards you could clean you could go out you could get a haircut try a new hairstyle maybe you could look online for some vacation ideas you can go swimming you could go for a walk outside if it's cold maybe you can go snowshoeing or you can go cross country skiing you could go to the lake you could take a drive you could walk your dog you could read a book try some Zumba try a class take your bicycle if you haven't done that for a while maybe go out to a field take some pictures pick some flowers do some gardening call a friend go to the library and how about this watch some YouTube videos all of these things are great ways to get your mind off of eating it's especially easy at work because there's always more work to be done you could schedule a meeting at work you could go through your emails this is what I usually do in fact when I have these podcasts to do or somebody wants to do an interview I schedule it at lunchtime and then I simply don't eat and by the time I finish talking to somebody then it's time to do the next thing or good to the next meeting I've completely forgotten about it the hunger has settled down because you're so focused on doing something else and guess what you just made it easy for yourself to fast and to lose weight and get work done at the same time maybe even go home a little bit early so all of these things you got to keep in mind plan ahead these are great tips to help you lose weight for the new year and what was Marina's schedule Marina used a lot of 24 hours a day fasting which is also called a one meal a day so in a one meal a day schedule people will for example eat breakfast and not eat again until the next day's breakfast or more typically uh eat dinner and then not eat again until dinner time and the reason that dinner tends to work the best is that it's the meal that is the most social that is you often take it with friends or family whereas it's very easy to skip breakfast than lunch some people ask well is there a difference I think for weight loss truthfully it would be better to skip the dinner take your uh meal earlier in the day rather than later but again you have to balance the realities of life with the sort of uh benefits uh to the fasting so it's really hard sometimes to skip the dinner thanks for watching I'm going to do a short survey and leave a comment below to say which tip helped you the most and what sort of things did you do during fasting that might help you or maybe help some others let me know and remember if you like this video make sure to subscribe hit the like button and turn on the bell for notifications bye everybody

#Intermittent #Fasting #Tips #Top #Tips #Jason #Fung

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31 Comments
  1. Great educational video. I needed to hear “ride the hunger wave” very encouraging. I’ve been following OMAD. Today is day 31, I’ve lost 17 lbs. long ways to go but I feel encouraged and determined. Thank you Dr. Fung!

  2. Three TIPS for….
    3. Hydration (Water Or other fasting fliuds like green tea/herbal tea or bullet proof coffee)
    2. Hunger: Ride the hunger waves: reduce cravings
    3. Stay busy: Social media (Watching Fat burning videos/Watching fasting videos/Long walks/organize your wardrobe etc.)

  3. Water is my biggest alley for riding out the hunger wave!

  4. Thanks Dr. Fung. I finished a 5-day Dry Fast last week. It was a very beneficial experience, and I felt ready to begin intermittent fasting. So I pulled out your beautiful Guide to Fasting, and we are using that to help us. The recipes are great, and the content is clear and helpful. I'm following your videos as well. Your analyses make good sense.

  5. Lmao I love the part where he spends 1-2 minutes providing examples of activities that are not eating

  6. I agree about the social media to counter that i watch Jason Fung videos lol im currently on day 7 of a water fast – im 20lbs down already- i do an extended fast twice a year

  7. 1. drink fluids, 6:18 2. endure through the hunger peaks (the times you usually eat), 3. keep busy

  8. Is ginger tea as healthy as green tea?

  9. Here I am finding new hobbies through Dr. Fung's lol great ideas 💡

  10. I really don't like green tea, but Dr Fung says it can help you lose up to 1.5kg of weight. Is that per week, month, or year?

  11. I just found this video and plan to start fasting. I am a diabetic type 2. My AIC has never been over 7, and is usually 6.5. I once hit 6.9 and my doctor put me on Metformin, which seemed to cause unbelievable gas, all the time. Dr. changed me to Ozempic but again I had major digestive issues but did lost 12 pounds. I am 76 years old, 5'1 and weight 169. My goal is to get my A1C under 5.5, lose at least 40 pounds and feel healthy again. I will do as Jason Fung said and see my doctor first to discuss this with him.

  12. One month of IF and i have lost some weight and inches . May be around 2 to 3 kgs as i am not over weight. Just around 55 kgs. And for my height 5'1" as a lady of 30 yrs age thats ideal weight. But i looked little chubby . So trying IF to get under 50 kgs. After one month my family memebers have noticed that i look little slim than earlier. So yeah 17:7 is working for me. I was skeptical at the begining but really happy now. And continuing it and wanting to go down to 47 kgs😊😊

  13. I wanna read your book! All of this was helpful. I do 2MAD which has helped me a great deal. I’d like to get to 1MAD, but I’m diabetic and take meds. I’ll need to research some more.

  14. During FAST, I recommend watching Dr Fung videos

  15. I do the OMAD, works wonders for me

  16. Is there such a thing as green tea extract that works the same as drinking green tea? I’m not much of a tea drinker.

  17. I have been following Jason Fung for last ten yrs. I don’t believe in God but believe in Jason Fung. By intermittent fasting I dropped my weight from 71 kg to 55kg😁

  18. What do you think of yerba matte as part of a diet regimen? Good info, doc.

  19. Well, I now try my best to do a 16/8 fast every day. I've been an insulin-dependent diabetic for almost 30 years and believed for most of that time that diabetes is a disease that gets progressively worse and that's just the way it is. Only lately, happy surprise, did I learn about your approach to diabetes. I've been on a low carb diet for about 5 months now, have steadily lowered my insulin shots, and today is the second day I haven't shot up with insulin at all. It was very hard to lose any weight at all while taking insulin, so I lost about 6 pounds in six months, but at least It's going in the right direction. I hope to lose some more weight in the coming months at a slightly higher rate. Intermittent fasting is immensely helpful in this adventure! I'm 70 yrs. old now and feel better than I have in the past 25 years. Thanks for all your great advice, Dr. Fung!

  20. The suggestions about how to spend time when fasting were particularly helpful and motivating for me. Thank you!

  21. Things that helped me with extended fasting were: making and working on a long list of time consumong projects, watching YouTube videos on the benefits of fasting on a daily basis, preparing my four 40 oz waters or hot teas in advance for the day, exercise daily, sleep longer, create a daily diary of the wierd foods i would crave and document anything strange coming out of my body, weigh myself daily, make time for prayer daily .

  22. Vegetarians can not have bone broth . What are the option

  23. Stay Busy during fasting is easy. also aware that fasting is better than living in hospitals.

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