00:04
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast, I speak to returning guest, Mari Kendall about data-driven fasting. Mari is returning to share with us his new paper that he has co-authored around the data he has collected on using this method in real life. So using his free app, Data Driven Fasting, people have been able to

00:33
determined the times that they eat with regards to what their blood sugar is telling them. And Mari does a great job of explaining what data-driven fasting is, how people can use it in the real world, what makes someone successful, how to tell if you've eaten too much or not eaten enough, other things that affect blood sugar, and a whole lot more. And this is just such a great conversation because Mari is super passionate about this area. And it's been a while since we catch up, so we...

01:00
Go down the rabbit hole on a couple of things as well, which hopefully you find interesting because I certainly did. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with Marty, as I said, he's been on the show a couple of times now, episode 120 and 182. He is an engineer who seeks to optimize nutrition using a data-driven approach. And Marty's interest in nutrition began 18 years ago to help his wife, Monica, control her type 1 diabetes. And since then, he has developed a systematic

01:30
approach to nutrition tailored for a wide range of goals, contexts and preferences. Over the past five years, Māori shared his research at OptimizingNutrition.com and he has developed the nutrient optimizer and data-driven fasting to guide thousands of people on their journey towards nutritional optimization. And throughout our conversation, you'll hear Māori refer to it not as fasting, but more about eating and glucose-driven eating. So

01:58
Super interesting to chat to him about that. Now I have links as to where you can find Mari on the show notes. Before we crack on into the interview though, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of Micopedia and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from the guests that I have on the show like Mari Kendall.

02:27
Alright team, enjoy the conversation.

02:33
bottom of your thing saying, part of this manuscript has been edited by chat GBT. And I thought, is this what we're doing now? Like, it's brilliant actually. It's just acknowledging. Oh yeah. I don't know. The editing was all me that I did, but maybe somebody reviewed it with chat GBT. yeah, chat GBT is an amazing tool to learn and ask questions. And I think if you've got intelligent questions, like

03:01
satiety aspect and trying to model satiety. I'm throwing all this data at it and saying, what are the best algorithms, equations? And it comes up and says, well, a Gaussian exponential regression combined can model this. And it's like, oh, that's really good. It's the learning iteration. You've got a coach. I've got a stats coach to help me model and optimize all this stuff. So it's been fun. You just got to have good questions and be curious.

03:29
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you with the curiosity and the questions. really, I sort of only half understood what you just said, but I appreciate what you're saying. And you're a deep thinker when it comes to nutrition, Mardi, which is why when I saw your new paper come out with Melissa Roy and Michelle Ho. Michelle Jospe. And they wrote the, we'll just start talking about just before we get caught.

03:56
They did the initial hunger training work. They did a couple of studies five or six years ago. I saw that and I went, that's really cool. We could use that and tweak it. given my context of type 1 diabetes and trying to optimize food choices for my wife, it all made sense. Who's type 1 diabetic to optimize her blood sugars. um I suppose in the context there, was when fasting was blowing up, know, had all these people.

04:26
bragging about how high the ketones were after fasting for, you know, I fasted for one week and I fasted for two weeks and I fasted for months. And then all these people are not looking so good after three or four or six months of doing that because I think they were, you know, they lose track of their actual hunger and satiety signals because they've been taught to ignore them and they push through them and then they, you know, refeed.

04:56
At the time, lot of people were thinking protein is bad because it kills your ketones. So they're refeeding on basically oil and to keep the ketones high. I went, oh, there has to be a better solution here to show people how to optimize the glucose to actually eat more regularly. We called it data-driven fasting at the time, but it was really a ploy to get people to eat when their body needed to, not more often, not less often, and give them what they need when they need it.

05:26
had 10,000 people use the app and we wrote a paper and here we are. Yeah, can you tell me that you mentioned and I missed the name. said I'm going to say Humdigger. It wasn't that, but what is that? What is the original data that Rachel Taylor and Melissa Roy sort of looked at that you then used with your approach? Yeah, they did a couple of little clinical studies and you're talking about Rachel Taylor um that you worked with and she my master's supervisor.

05:55
University of Otago. And yeah, it just made a lot of sense. And then they did nothing with it as they all moved on. think Melissa Roy went off to do medicine and do that more formally and yeah, never picked it up. And I went, well, has nobody doing anything with this? It just makes a lot of sense to be able to calibrate your hunger and then time when and what you eat and built a spreadsheet and made a Facebook group. And it just blew up.

06:24
And a lot of people, because fasting is popular, Keto was sort of popular and yeah, right time, right place. uh it changed my life and I got to take four years off engineering to guide people through it. So it's been a ton of fun. Yeah, amazing. So can you, Mali, because I know that we've talked about data-driven fasting briefly in one of our podcasts, maybe even both of them.

06:52
But can you just remind people what it is? And I've got some specific questions around it. Yeah, so it's just the concept of using your glucose as a fuel gauge. If you don't eat for long enough, your glucose starts to come down. And a lot of people focus on the rising glucose after you eat and trying to flatline that and stabilize glucose and end up becoming quite, especially with CGMs,

07:22
why it's paranoid and I think it's mentally healthy and sometimes you see a lot of people go, oh, geez, it's really nice just to check my glucose when I'm hungry before I eat a couple of times a day rather than trying to manage that rising glucose afterwards. And really, if you want to deplete the energy in your body, which is like a long-term calorie deficit, energy deficit, just waiting until your glucose is just below your normal, um

07:50
It works really, well. You're waiting just a little bit longer, ensuring you're in a deficit. But eating before you get too hungry and get to that binge phase and you get so hungry you overeat. And it can also guide not just when you eat, but what you eat with what is my current glucose. Okay, so a couple of things there. Did you initially with this, do think, people struggle to understand

08:19
When are they hungry enough? Are people in tune with, I guess this is, mean, to your point earlier, are people even in tune with their hunger? No, no. And that's the problem. We're in a food environment that 24-7 is this massive profit-making, dopaminergic, autumnal food environment that makes us want to eat all the time. And we've really lost touch with, are we really hungry? And nobody really feels, experiences true hunger.

08:49
But then in comes fasting and you know, can fast for a week or days or I'll ignore my hunger and I'll just push through it. And I think when you eat again, you've lost your satiety, true hunger signals and you end up overeating and not able to stop. I Eric Helms talks about his first bodybuilding competition and you get to a point where you have 30 kilos heavier.

09:18
and worse than you were before if you push it too hard. yeah, so I'm an engineer, optimizing nutrition is all about finding that right balance that you can sustain for the long term. And that's the key. Everybody wants to lose weight quickly, push it really hard, and then they push it too hard and they rebound. And so this is a way of just nudging people to in a consistent energy deficit. Yeah, I know I really liked that.

09:48
to your point about how people can sort of ignore their hunger and satiety cues. And I know in my work, I see, and I wonder about people who you might be interacting with who have not necessarily gone three days or a week fasting, but even that 16 eight, which then turns into 18 six. And it's actually, find it relatively easy to write out the morning because they're able to distract themselves. But it's once they sort of like,

10:17
I don't know, like open that gateway and then suddenly it's really difficult to control. Yeah, that was the concept of eating window and you know, I'm opening my eating window and you know, what happens then if you haven't eaten for 20 hours, it's just like, oh, you can eat buffet for four hours. I'm just feeding my face because I'm so hungry and the food choices you make at that point are often worse when you're extremely hungry and what we tried to do with

10:45
we now call it glucose guided eating because trying to move on from fasting and it really guides when and what should we to say, well, is my glucose below well below my normal? Maybe I some carbs. Is it above normal? But I'm hungry. Maybe I'll just, you know, I know I need protein. I'm not, I don't need carbs to raise my glucose. I'll have some, some protein. Yeah. So you can understand.

11:13
through the day the times you need to eat is at two, three, four. And it's a space to eating, you have a good meal, you wait a few hours for your glucose to come back down and you eat again. Rather than an eating window that it's just, know, all you can eat because I'm so hungry. Well, that's interesting, isn't it? So do you think that glucose is always going to be a reliable indicator of hunger? Like if I think of people who

11:39
Who might have, what about those who have elevated glucose across the day? Like what's our, what's the go there? Yeah. Well, one, one unique thing we did with dietary and fasting at the time was, um, the original hunger training paper took an average or, know, put a nominal eating trigger, um, glucose. And if you are a raging type two diabetic with an average glucose, of 18 or 200 or something, how long is it going to take to get to?

12:09
5.6 or a hundred, you're to have to wait two weeks, five weeks, and it's going to be a long time. But what we did is we take the average of your premium glucose over three days and then that's your new target. You just have to wait until you get just below that. And then the target continues to creep down to make sure you continue to move forward. um So yeah, if you've by default got elevated glucose, your initial trigger should be

12:39
a lot higher. Is glucose a good hunger signal? I mean, there's a lot of other factors, like you said, exercise or sleep or stress, and we factor all those things in um to allow people to eat. If like pain was the biggest one, if you're in pain, your glucose is more elevated, your cortisol is more elevated. And if

13:02
your glucose is elevated, that's sort of a signal to that's your homeostasis is out, your body's under stress and you probably need to deal with that and pay attention to it. um Yeah, so there is a bit of noise in the system, but if you use an accurate glucometer, it works quite well to allow people to wait until they need to eat and then make an intelligent choice of what they eat. Unfortunately with CGMs, they're often

13:32
We just find people go, you know, it's 30 points above what my glucometer tells me. And I put in a new sensor and the calibration changed massively. And it's like, oh, just buy a simple glucometer. It's a lot cheaper. Oh, that's interesting. So the CGM in your experience doesn't give you quite as much of a clear picture. No, there's a lot more noise. And I think CGMs are designed for diabetics, people with diabetes who are

14:00
dosing with insulin. So it seems they're calibrated or unless you can calibrate it, which is the depths, which is a lot more expensive. It reads higher in the low range because the Abbott diabetes or whatever want to make sure you're not dosing yourself to go really low. So this is sort of a safety factor that they want to keep you high. So it seems to higher than actual blood sugar in the lower range, which is the people we're trying to

14:30
help with not necessarily all raging diabetes. Yeah. Okay. No, that makes sense. So if someone just gets a simple and relatively inexpensive glucometer and they're like that one there. Yep. Amazing. And they assess hunger before a meal. Talk us through how we would actually do this in real life. You sort of hinted a little bit at it. Maybe I just missed it. So the first three days is baselining.

14:59
And you, when you're hungry and decide to eat, test the glucose. And that gives you your average over three days. And that's your personalized glucose trigger. And then going forward for five days, we say, let's try to just wait until you get at or below that. So people have been more conscious of their actual hunger. They're saying, am I hungry? Am I hungry enough to test my glucose? Okay. I'll test my glucose and where is it at? So in a way it's definitely a pattern interrupt.

15:29
that it helps people consider if they're actually hungry rather than just mindlessly, know, I'm comfort eating or whatever. um And then they start to go, oh yeah, I can calibrate my hunger with my glucose. And that might take a few rounds for people to get to that point where they can go, can accurately guess my glucose based on my symptoms of hunger. But that does happen. And then going forward, the glucose

15:57
drops the glucose trigger if they're successfully getting below it. It's just progressive overload for your glucose and training your excess energy stores in your body. And the key is doing it incrementally. Like if you uh started a triathlon training, if you did Kona on day one, you'd probably die. Day one, let's walk to the letterbox and day two, let's walk across the street, which is what I did with my wife when she, uh

16:27
broker ankle or fracture ankle. It's like, okay, let's get back into the rehab of we're just going to walk to the letterbox today. And that's, that's the goal. And that's what we try to do with all our programs is uh incremental increase in intensity. And it's all about the psychology. Like the biggest, the biggest problem that people have is trying too hard. They go on doing a program and doing a challenge. going to

16:53
When this and like they tried too hard in the first week or two and then they go, yeah, I can't keep up with this because your body fights back. That is the best description. Trying too hard and and you know, I often talk to people and this is such a I guess perfect illustration of it is is the way that you describe that. Mali is a little bit like learning a new skill, right? And I have this conversation with other people like people.

17:19
Don't think about eating properly as a skill. It's almost like they think it's something they should just be able to like, Oh, you tell me to do this. I can do this. Whereas, you know, like you can't do that when you learn a new skill, you actually need those reps and the board on the board. Everybody wants overnight instant results because they're trying really hard, but it's the people who tried too hard that fail quickest. The ones with the perfectionistic, I've got to get this right from day one. um but it's really a.

17:49
a learning process of becoming in tune with your amygdala, your instincts, your lizard brain. And by looking at your glucose and quantifying it, it sort of joins the dots of, I really hungry? Is this the best time for me to eat? And then you see patterns and then we help them fine tune. Maybe you need to move your meals a little bit earlier and have protein earlier in the day and your glucose is a little bit lower later in the day.

18:19
maybe a little bit of carbs then, because that'll help you sleep better, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I find the food timing thing super interesting because I'm a little, and I think we're probably on the same page in that overall it's a deficit that is, if we're thinking about metabolic health, maybe improving body composition, getting rid of excess body fat, we need that calorie deficit for that. But then of course that's almost, and so therefore food.

18:46
not food choice, that's maybe food timing. Like uh amount would trump timing in that instance. But then of course you see the data and I'm interested to see what your experience is with it because you know your data in and out like of we know that the liver doesn't metabolize carbohydrate as well at night. But the flip side is that actually people can sleep better sometimes when they've got carbohydrate on board. Is there a disconnect?

19:15
For most people who are trying to lose weight, who have got some degree of dawn phenomenon, having protein earlier in the day when you're first hungry. And after everybody celebrates Bay 10 of our challenges, which is the main meal when we say, know, stop testing when you're first hungry, just eat a protein focused meal when you're first hungry first in the day. So that ties into your, all your programs of, know, sometime before midday.

19:45
get a big bowl of protein. If you're an athlete about to go for a triathlon training, you probably need some carbs, but most people getting a solid bowl of protein first up and then they just test when they're hungry before the other meals. And then like you're sort of saying, how much carbs do you have at night? If you're in a massive energy deficit, your sleep suffers. um But if you overeat carbs, then

20:13
You get a massive rise in glucose and then you're metabolizing them all through the night. that's where we, we do test. We do like look at post meal glucose to some degree. And if you're rising by more than 1.6 millimole or 30 milligrams per liter, we say, know, dial back your carbs, you're overdoing it. So if, if you're in that range, you're in a, you know, you haven't over, over-eaten in general and you haven't over-eaten the carbs at night.

20:42
you can sleep well, find that balance. It's all about finding the balance between the extremes. like, can't cut at night bad or good. It's like, well, how much you're having and how do we fine tune that? Well, I saw that in the paper, actually, the threshold sort of post meal. So if I'm thinking about the units that we use here in Australia as well, like the 1.6 millimoles, if my personalized threshold is at four, are we saying that

21:11
Ideally my blood sugar post meal, I don't know when I would actually measure this. So I'd like to know that as well, is an hour, it shouldn't be above 5.6. Ideally, but most people aren't sitting at full. You're a freak, you even know what mine is. made that up. Well, yeah, I can see you maybe having four is very on the athletic oh spectrum, but four would be definitely.

21:41
quite low. Well, I really like actually is that your tolerance for glucose rise is actually not that high. Like, and it's a little bit in line. I know, have you read Peter Atiyah's Outlive book? I think I did. Delved into it a little bit. I listened to all of his podcasts in the year he was writing it and heard everything 10 times over. Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And he's got a

22:09
pretty low tolerance for glucose rise. Whereas other health professionals out there, thinking of dietitians on X and stuff, think that we're just a little bit zealous over a glucose spike and what it should look like. And I also find, and I don't agree with that either. Like if you are healthy, like metabolically healthy, sure, it's probably not an issue, but most of us actually aren't metabolically healthy. Yeah. Why is your glucose spiking and what is the solution?

22:37
is the fundamental question that I think most people get wrong. And everybody in keto world who picks up a CGM goes, carbs are really bad and I need to just eat fat. And that stabilizes my glucose. Huzzah, I'm healed. But unless you fix the energy toxicity, that is really, it's the fat backing up in your system that then means that

23:03
You're metabolizing carbs all the time and the glucose overflows into your bloodstream and you see higher glucose. It's really the energy toxicity overall that is the root cause of having high glucose. So the most effective way that we've found is just waiting until your glucose is just below your normal before you eat. then you're in an energy deficit. You know, tick, I'm in an energy deficit, a slight energy deficit.

23:32
it before I eat. that if you do that successively without pushing it too hard, you lose the body fat after you drain the glucose and then you've sold your diabetes. we're trying to attack the root cause rather than just addressing the symptom by avoiding your carbs and then eating fat. then, you know, eventually people wants to drain the excess fat from their body. They can tolerate carbs again. That's interesting, isn't it? Because of course, if you dip your blue

24:02
glucose below that personal threshold, then that is sort of telling, then the body is obviously looking for other sources of energy and it's getting into that body fat, which a lot of us actually can't do. you know, that metabolic flexibility, the ability to burn fat is, I think this is another area which people just often overlook. They're just like, oh, you know, women are metabolically healthy. And I'm just like, well, no, like at some point, maybe, but

24:32
Not like if we think about population statistics, like that would actually tell us that not the opposite is true, but that's just not a given. Yeah. Yeah. You're always burning some degree of fat and glucose at the same time, but if your glucose is low, you know, you're tapping into your body fat. So as long as you're not overeating the dietary fat, you're burning body fat, which is what you want to do. So that's sort of how this system really helps people go.

24:59
Okay, I'm depleting my glucose. So I know I'm tapping into my body fat. And then what kind of guidelines Mali would be given to people in this instance to not then just overeat when they do eat like, and then I'm, I guess this is it's learning, right? Probably like they might, these people might. an iterative process. go, wow, it took me a long time to get back to trigger again. ate a pizza or I went out to a party and Jesus, it took me a couple of days to get back to.

25:29
to my normal trigger again, next time I go out, I'll moderate what I do because I can see the impact of my glucose for days after. Oh, this is interesting. Is this in your experience, like with your data points, is this what people experience? Like if I go and have a big blowout and I'm pizza, beer, ice cream, I don't need ice cream, I don't like ice cream actually. You have the fish and chips, don't you? uh

25:56
Yeah, I love fish and chips. And it's a really good hazy or whatever. Like a good burger and beer. Yeah. So with this one, if I wasn't exercising and actually utilizing that fuel, could it take the average person like a day or two to actually get back to their baseline glucose levels? Definitely. Definitely. And with my wife, you know, I watch her glucose and insulin and you can see the insulin with the closed lube. um

26:23
pancreas system as hammering insulin, extra insulin for days after if she goes out to a family buffet or something and doesn't have good food choices. So the solution then is just if you're above trigger, prioritize a higher protein percentage, ideally smaller meal, probably not going to be as hungry. You know, you've got plenty of glucose and fat on board. So you just drop in smaller, know, high protein percentage.

26:52
protein-spearing-modified-fast sort of approach. This is what I'm thinking. And you've written a fabulous, a whole huge book on protein-spearing-modified-fast on your website. That was ages ago. Yeah, That was fascinating. thank you. Yeah. Yeah. But what a perfect solution, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you had a blowout binge, then it's sort of PSMF. you uh know.

27:18
50, 60 % protein as hell. If you try to do it for too long, that's unsustainable. So we're trying to find that balance based on your glucose. If your glucose is elevated, then go for that PSMF sort of approach. But if your glucose is low, time to drop in a good hearty meal. You've earned it. You've probably exercised and it's time to eat well and not go, I'm going to PSMF again and again and again. the sustainability of the PSMF is...

27:49
not great because we need some energy. So I've got a question though, because I know that people will be listening to this going, yeah, but after I have a binge, all I want to do is eat McDonald's the day after. So how, what is going on with my blood sugar? And I guess that they'd have to test to know, like, what do you think is happening there? Like it could be low blood sugar still though, right? I mean, there is the hypogasemic dip that you see sometimes if people go up,

28:18
and then crash down. That can be part of the factor. So that's sort of why we're trying to get people to go, well, if your glucose rose more than 30 points or 1.6 millimole after you ate and you're trying to lose weight, you probably ate too much and maybe too much carbs. And if you're crashing afterwards, you're to make poorer food choices. So let's bring the oscillation down into a healthy range, but not try to smash it so much that you have to go to a 80 % fat diet.

28:48
And we're just trying to help people use their data to avoid the swinging to extremes that humans always do. You know, if a little bit is good, more is better. And then I crashed and hit the wall again and failed another diet. It's like, no, the diet failed you. You just need to understand what's going in your body. Use the data intelligently to inform a progressive overload for your metabolism. Cause your body's going to fight back. Your body wants to survive.

29:15
You're fighting with your survival instincts and in a fight to the death. there's pizza and seven 11 and everything around. Everybody's having at work. Everybody's just like Uber eating their McDonald's. It's like, my gosh. I'm eating the salad and eggs and tuna and my wife has lovingly prepared for me. then it's like, anyway, I don't know.

29:42
I love that your wife prepares for you lunch. To be fair, I quite like preparing Barry's lunch for him as well. It's a sense of like, I know you're off to work and you've got some good fuel on board, so she must get the same. You open it and you go, my wife loves me. I love it. I love it. love it. Everybody else goes, who's eating the fish? Marnie's eating fish again. So Marnie, I do really love the idea of the personalized thresholds

30:12
Because I think, feel like, and this is another thing that Atiyah talks about as well, is that sometimes our limits for what is healthy is a little bit like generous, I think, you know, like to the point, I think Adi Dykman sees this a lot, you know, that people with type 1 diabetes actually deserve low blood sugars and we shouldn't just accept that blood sugars will be higher. And I feel like in this modern, like a lot of those, I don't actually know if blood sugar has,

30:42
shifted the range of blood sugar has shifted over the years. know other markets have. of the four glucose is higher. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like it's actually now just an accepted thing. Whereas what we're trying to do is understand what we particularly need, which could actually be a lot lower than the four to eight that's often sort of bandied about. Not four, but the eight. Four is getting to the lower end. Yeah. But eight is still, or eight or 10 even. I'm thinking about CGMs.

31:11
I've got clients who occasionally wear CGM and the normal range has that allowance up to 10. uh Yeah, yeah, and we had a long philosophical, our live Q &A's these days, because a lot of people have done it before, um really great times in our micros class yesterday. You've got someone going, I want to watch my target be, and it's like.

31:40
you're doing well, you're making progress, your A1C is coming down, um your weight's coming down, you're looking better, you're feeling better. All those things are a win. And just because your A1C is 5.7 and you think it should be 5.6 or under, um how much effort do you put into reaching an arbitrary number that is the population average when your genetics might be different? And so there's a trade-off there of how much you push it and how much

32:10
sacrificing your lifestyle to because you feel like you've failed and you go, well, I've pushed as far as I can. I've got great results. I'm happy with this and now I can maintain it. So there's sort of a, can't put one number on everything for everybody because they've all got different, not just glucose thresholds, but personal fat thresholds based on their genetics. uh some people can carry a lot of weight and still have really great blood sugars, whereas other people, they're

32:38
bodies can't store their energy as well and it overflows into the glucose and they're diabetic at a much lower body fat level. So yeah, you have to be personalized and we see a massive range and wherever people start, um they make progress, I suppose, once you get down to really, really healthy blood sugars, ah that you don't see as much signal in the glucose to guide the process. So that's when we go, do our...

33:07
macros course or a micros course, which focuses on satiety and nutrient density and quantifying that. So the glucose signals course, which is what we're calling it now, is sort of the entry point that people find really easy. go, oh, yeah, this really works. I've lost a lot of weight. But my glucose has told me that, you know, I really understand now that I need to look at my food, what I'm eating, improve that. And then we can dial up satiety and the nutrient density quantitatively.

33:36
When they do it, works. When they are human and get busy and don't always do it, then yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which is always part of the journey regardless, isn't it? Like, it doesn't matter how much you know or how diligent you are in certain times. Like, sometimes things just fall off. And I think if people understood that more, they'd actually probably be more successful in the long run, which is a bit of a tangent. But I think about that a bit. Marty?

34:01
You talk a lot about nutrients outside of just carbs and this is again a tangent, but have you come across any insights into diet quality and its effects on glucose? Because obviously vitamins and minerals I would imagine might play a role. Yeah, yeah. mean, getting protein is always a good thing, but we just, one lady, Liza, in our courses,

34:30
asked a million questions and she was doing the micro's course and she got to a point where it's like, oh, my, my minerals are low. And, um, she started supplementing, think the element tea and, um, her blood sugar radically improved really quickly and she went way up. My doctor's been telling me to avoid salt and I've been working really hard to avoid sodium and I had a bit and I had some potassium magnesium.

34:58
calcium and sodium and my blood sugars noticeably improved because she's really micromanaging and watching the CGM. So yeah, the minerals are definitely involved in glucose metabolism and important in that. then your B vitamins, some of the B vitamins help you burn carbs. Some of them help you metabolize fat. So just most people don't quantify it or don't consider, they don't know what to do with.

35:25
A lot of people can track in chronometer maybe and that's as good as they get, but they get the numbers and go, what do I do with those data? don't know. And that was sort of my quest to say, how do we help people optimize the micronutrients as well as the macronutrients to really take them to that end level? Yeah, I find that so interesting and particularly the sodium because to your point, one of the biggest, one of the public health recommendations for healthy people

35:55
is to ensure you don't have a sodium level above 1600, above 2300 milligrams or something like half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of salt actually. But I've seen data before looking at sodium and glucose and low sodium, high glucose levels. It's interesting you're seeing the same. Yeah. I think the American guidelines for sodium intake are based on people on with ket

36:23
diagnose kidney issues and they're trying to limit their intake and blood pressure issues. But the other flip side of that is really the studies that I've seen show that it's not really too much sodium per se that gives you blood pressure issues. It's the potassium-sodium balance and nobody's getting enough potassium because potassium is found in whole foods, fresh foods, and they're really expensive these days.

36:52
Nobody's eating green stuff that's fresh because you have to be, know, that's a bougie flex that you've got a lot of money that you can afford. 200 grams of spinach. Yeah. Yeah. So just nobody's getting enough potassium in their diet and potassium is really important as a satiety factor as well. Yeah. How expensive is food in Australia? I'm trying to think of, I think it's cheaper than in New Zealand actually.

37:22
Yeah, I've heard New Zealand's coming up. The price of everything real is coming up. Fake food, fake money, you can print it. Yeah. food that you have to grow, cows, dairy, um veggies, they're more and more more more expensive. But we can just take fossil fuel fertilizer and throw it into crops to accelerate the growth, to make uh sugar and oil and they make

37:51
really cheap food that makes us feel like we can still eat and everything in the world isn't just getting outrageously expensive thanks to inflation and debt and money printing, but that's a whole other rabbit hole that I'm absolutely fascinated by. our broken money is the root cause of our nutritional corruptness that we've got now because, yeah, I mean, back in the day, eggs were getting expensive.

38:22
When was it the US health general wrote a paper saying eggs are bad for you? the price of my eggs is going up. What the hell happened after we went off the gold standard in 1971? You uh sounds to me like you have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, which is great. I'll you the article. Please, I'm super interested.

38:52
inflation became rampant and money wasn't tied to anything real like it was before. 1971 when we had everything was pegged to gold, everything real became more expensive. So they had to say, let's make food cheaper so the population doesn't realize that I can't eat because of this inflation thing that's going at eight or nine or 10 % a year because governments are funding wars with debt that dilates everybody's purchasing power.

39:22
Is it, do you know what, like this is interesting, and obviously when, can I go, I don't know enough about it. Massive diversion rabbit hole. I know, I know. And I probably, don't know enough to ask you intelligent questions around that, but isn't that like an interesting lens to look through because other people explain the changes in the food supply due to nutritional or marketing type thing, but this is actually a bit different from other. Yeah. think of it as the government had to work with the food manufacturers to

39:51
create a food system that was affordable so populations don't revolt because you've seen, there's a really good book about fiat food, think it's called, that talks about when food got too expensive in India, the population radically revolted against the government and the price of things can power and whatever can go up to a point, but if you can't afford to feed your family,

40:19
the people actually revolt. So think of the modern nutrition guidelines as an acceptable level that will prevent death, but it's not actually optimal nutrition. It's not designed for health or weight loss. It's just enough to get by to the point that you won't, you'll survive, but it's not optimal.

40:45
So my quest has been to go, what is optimal nutrition? How do we quantify that? And that food is unfortunately more expensive. Yeah. And interesting, like we often talk about that from a protein perspective, but I know that you've got some excellent resources on your website looking at other nutrients and you've got the RDIs and then the actual optimizing nutrition intakes, the ONIs and where they should actually sit, which is quite a lot higher. Yeah. Yeah. And the,

41:14
The adequate intake of the dietary reference intakes are typically the minimum we crave and there's this bliss point and they often basically bliss point um which aligns with maximum intake. So if you're eating the recommended concentration of B1, B2, B3, and all vitamins and minerals, you're going to be pretty much at the maximum calorie intake point.

41:41
But if you want to eat less, you want to get more protein per calorie, more potassium per calorie, more sodium per calorie, all the vitamins and minerals per calorie. And that's more satiating. And we get the nutrients we crave with less energy. yeah, it'd be nice if one day that was central to the nutrition guidelines that were aimed at health. Yeah, yeah. Would be. I can dream.

42:06
Yeah, I know you could. Mari, now if I go back to your data-driven fasting, I mean, there are so many rabbit holes we could go into and I've actually got one, but I'll save it for a little bit. A lot of people say they're not hungry in the morning at all. Like, are those people in your experience? I know everyone is different, but generally, is that actually, are they literally not hungry or like, it, or is it a stress response? Like, can we see this in glucose? yeah.

42:36
A lot of people eat the main meal and biggest meal at night. And then after their main meal, they've got the bag of Doritos in front of the TV as they relax and chill out. But if they're not over eating at night, if you start to bring your last meal earlier, then you actually get hungry earlier in the next day. So that's probably a symptom of over eating at night. And if you weren't, and we make poor food choices when we eat at night in the dark in front of the TV or in bed.

43:05
scrolling our phones, we're going to be having the comfort foods to help us manage our cortisol after a big day at work. We're not making eating steak and veggies or salmon um at that point. So yeah, the food quality is always worse later in the day. So if you can front load the day with protein, try to not eat as late, bring, you know, bring it half an hour forward, half an hour forward, and then you're to be hungry at the end of the day.

43:35
And then if you get a good protein bolus earlier in the day, your glucose is much more stable. Your satiety is more there for you through the day. And when you get hungry later on, you're able to make a better food choice again. Yeah. And it is. Have the energy when you need it rather than when you've allowed sort of time for it. Because you're right. Like when people are, can be distracted, can ignore their hunger and satiety cues across the day, eat very little.

44:04
And then they sort of just relax and that's from the... And then if you have most of your energy at night, you're metabolizing it while you're trying to sleep and you're not sleeping as well. Your glucose is higher and yeah, that's great if you're a caveman. think, know, paleolithic people used to eat at night around the fire and that was really good for energy storage because they had limited energy. But for us, it's better the other way around. Marley, the paper that

44:34
that we sort of, um, we're meant to talk about. Yeah. Inspired me to go, Marty, it's been a while. Tell me what you're up to. Um, you did actually like, was no calorie counting, um, involved or at least it, but people did manage to lose some weight, but modest, but still it was, it was a weight loss. Uh, the, the numbers in the paper are based on

45:00
It's free app that we use in our challenges. So we've had more than 10,000 people log into the app and log a glucose value or two. And it's all those people counted. So if you log two values, we've taken that, the paper's taken the average weight loss of all those people, even if they just did two glucose values. But after 30 days, if you stick with it, the average is 3 % weight loss and you know,

45:29
10th percentile is 6 % weight loss. So for the people who actually stick with it for um the 30 days consistently, the weight loss is actually incredible. But if you take the average of everybody who just downloaded a free app and had a bit of a hack and logged a couple of values, it's not as good. for the people who do the program, stick with it. And 3 % average weight loss in 30 days is quite incredible. is. And isn't it interesting? It's the same with any program.

45:59
you do it, you're going to get results. Actually stick with it. Yeah, uh like you're saying, without counting calories, monitoring your premal glucose, having a lower premal glucose is a surrogate calorie deficit, but it focuses on your premal glucose. And I think in a lot of ways, this is better than calorie counting because there's so many inaccuracies with counting calories and some days you're more active, some days you're less active.

46:28
So if you're trying to stick to the same set calorie target every day. You might be really hungry and then binge the next day. But this actually tails it to your current fuel gauge based on your activity and whether you had that binge on the weekend and whatever. I also think that probably just the mere act of engaging in something like this will get people thinking about their food choices, whereas possibly.

46:55
You know, and it's always a good behavioral change tool. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it forces you to think, I hungry? And then if you're testing three hours later and your glucose is elevated, you think back and go, well, what did I eat? Why is my glucose still elevated? Did I eat too much? Did have a donut? How could I change my food? And that's what we do in the program is sort of help people to iteratively think about, you know, what happened to your glucose.

47:24
What did you eat last time and when you're planning your next meal think hey what's my glucose going to be doing in three four five hours is it to be allowed to eat again sooner which is eating is fun. You want to do it regularly you don't want to have to eat once a day we're not snakes. No I know I totally agree and some people go down the rabbit hole with fasting and that's where they sort of end up and

47:49
pretty unsuccessful too, because then they're just not eating any of their nutrient requirements and they feel sluggish and they end up gaining weight, despite the fact that, you know, they're only eating once a day. Yeah, it's really, OMAD makes it very, very hard to get the protein and nutrients in there. You're not gonna, you know, haven't eaten for 24 hours, I'm just gonna have a sirloin steak or some tuna. It's just not gonna cut it at that point. Yeah, no, I agree. Marty, what about people who

48:18
do tend to stress each and I wonder whether just anecdotally you've seen this in your group like has this changed or allowed them to sort of change behavior around? Yeah, yeah, not explicitly, but if you're going why am I eating if my glucose is elevated? I'm going to and your focus changes to I'm gamifying my glucose and that's sort of a different focus and then

48:47
If you're stressed, if your glucose is elevated, Judy is stressed, and hey, let's deal with the root cause like an adult, not just going to eat junk because it makes me feel better. You've got to separate the why am I stressed, act on the root cause, and then yeah. Yeah. Do you have a sense of who, I mean, obviously you've got data from anyone who's just going to pick up an app and is interested in it. What type of people are interested in this approach?

49:16
you get a sense of that? 80, 70, 80 % of the people are post-menopausal women who have tried everything. They've tried fasting and paleo and keto and low carb and then their friend did this thing and told them about us because it worked really well. people have tried every diet and get to a point they need to quantify it a little bit more. yeah, works. That's our whole program.

49:44
demographic who it's really hard when the hormones start to fail and then they try everything and extended fasting can be damaging for that demographic because as you get older, it gets harder to build the muscle back after you've eliminated protein and really depleted your muscle mass. So it's really important. Yeah, no, I think it sounds great. Now, this is my rabbit hole.

50:13
which have you heard of metabolic fast like actual like dry fasting? I've heard of it. Okay. Well, interesting because there are people who do and this is merely me just chatting to you about this because I know you're sort of interested in this rather than that I expect an expert, an expert like commentary on it. However, I'm sure you've got some thoughts. So I listened to a podcast

50:40
Brett Weinstein and Heather Weinstein, it's the Dark Horse podcast, I only listen to it occasionally, but they chatted about dry fasting. And the thing with dry fasting is that we are told that you can't go for three days without any fluid or you'll die. You know, like the body is like desperate for water, which actually they've proven themselves and all the people that are sort of into this space also proven that's actually not true. Like they've dry fasted for like 10 days without any fluid at all. m

51:09
What they say is not them, but they've chatted about it. there's not a lot of, I don't think there's any research in this. I'll be super interested if anyone listening knows of research. um But because there is no water, what happens is the body draws on its own reservoir, its own metabolic water, which comes from fat tissue. And so it starts breaking down fat preserving muscle. isn't that interesting? And so another interesting thing from this,

51:39
dry fasting that Bret and Heather talk about is Heather's had chronic pain since a car crash. it was in 2015, 2016. she would, they would do sort of periodic three-day normal fasting, having electrolytes and water, but no food. And it didn't really move the needle. And it wasn't until she tried dry fasting. And I listened to a podcast maybe back in March. So it was recorded in February and she said they'd done one 10 day fast and it's been super, like her pain is almost like,

52:08
just disappeared. Probably a massive detox that you're getting everything out of your body and giving clearing out all the debris, which can be really valuable for some people with some conditions. I suppose generally, think 99 % of people who are interested in fasting really just want the weight loss and improved blood sugar and metabolic health. So yeah, that's, that's the focus of what we do, but yeah, I think there's other interesting things when you push your body to that.

52:38
Well, I think that now I've mentioned it to you, what I'm sort of gunning for is to you to get interested and do a deep dive and then write a huge thing on it. Cause if anyone can find research, Marty, I think it's you actually. I'll talk to chat GPT afterwards. Yeah. And see what chat has to say. But it is interesting, isn't it? Like what I find interesting is that, you know, we've got these, you know, ways of doing things like

53:07
you know, ways of using devices like GOOGOOCommodars. We've got ways that people eat. But then I guess what I find interesting is that things like, for example, dry fasting has probably been around for centuries, but it's sort of old knowledge that maybe it's lost. I don't know. For what it's worth, I'm not trying dry fasting anytime soon. Fasting doesn't necessarily appeal to me, but... It'd be a challenge for you as a very lean athlete to dry fast for 10 days.

53:35
Yeah, oh yeah, no, I, and even like I've got friends who do normal fasting for about five days. I'm like, there is no way, like, I couldn't do that. And to your point, eating is a joy, like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And our goal is to teach people when they need to eat on a regular basis. Yeah. I like that. achieve their goals. Yeah.

53:56
Yeah, nice one. Mari, m I'm obviously putting links in the show notes to the paper, which is Open Access, because I think the geeks amongst us, which is a lot of us, will really enjoy reading about it. And you've done a great job of just the how-to. But if people are interested in joining your groups and actually having a guided experience, which I think is really important, actually, rather than just try to do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We've got a 30-day challenge. um We're calling it.

54:25
glucose signals, because rather than fasting or glucose gut eating, we're using it to focus on when and what to eat and finding the foods that work for you that help manage glucose and achieve weight loss and diabetes reversal. we've got another 42 of them now over the last four years. And we've got the 43rd starting this Saturday. So we do it in our group for 30 days and we have a community where we

54:55
interact with people every weekend and have the live Q and A's and have daily guided lessons. Anybody can pick up the app and I've written a 200 page data-driven fasting manual and some people love to nerd out on that, but the course just guides people through the things pop up as they go through the process. they go, I've got a question. Oh, that's answered in tomorrow's lesson. And it's just the right time to guide people through it. people definitely have a lot of

55:24
better success in the community when they can keep on getting iterative feedback without getting overwhelmed with information. And I like to share, like we're talking about before, I like to share all the information and the hows and whys. Most people just want to have that experiential journey and have someone to answer the question when it pops up and goes, why is my glucose doing this? I'll check this out and try that. And we've got really awesome community of 13,000 people who, you

55:53
in the community and I'm really eager to help other people who've done it before. So um optimizing nutrition website that'll lead you into our community and you can join a course, guided course. And yeah, it's a really awesome community of people who support each other. And I just love that we've built that community, which are all my friends after all these years. Yeah, I think it's great, Marty. And I think there's something really to be said about the community.

56:23
aspect of it more than anything. think that's such a powerful. And toll for people to sort of lean on because anything from unfamiliar and slightly intimidating is always uh buffered by the fact that you got loads of other people either experienced or not doing it with you. Yeah, and if you can see people who have done it before and you can talk to them and how did you get results and give some feedback and works really well rather than just picking up a free app and trying to.

56:52
give it a go, which a lot of people have done really well with that, but most people do a lot better with actual course. Yeah. Nice one. Marty, thank you so much for your time this morning. And I look forward to hearing about your deep dive into that dry fasting. Dry fasting? And then we can come back and talk about that. And I'll send you my article on broken money and broken food. I would love that. That sounds awesome. a more productive deep dive. So yeah. Yeah.

57:21
Awesome, Manny. Thanks so much. Thanks, Vicky. It's a ton of fun. See you.

57:37
already. Hopefully you really enjoyed that and I mean the app is free and looking at your blood biomarkers can give you just such insights that you wouldn't otherwise have. So if this is an area of interest to you, absolutely check out Māori's website optimisingnutrition.com. It is in the show notes. Let me know what you think. I am over on

57:59
Instagram threads and X @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @MikkiWillidennutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com. Alright team you have the best week. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you soon. See you later.