Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

I know we all have busy lives and you're tired of scouring the internet for real information on how to revolutionize your health.

That's why I'm here with a new series of short and sweet episodes that can save you time and even your life.

Stay tuned while I get straight to the point on some of the best life-changing health tips.

What happens to your body when you start intermittent fasting for a week?

Well, the answer is going to come as a surprise.

So here's the thing. The vast majority of people in this country have such high insulin levels.

Have such insulin-resistant levels are so metabolically inflexible that they absolutely do not do well with intermittent fasting.

Shocking but true.

You've seen in my last book and heard me talk that 50% of normal weight individuals in the United States are metabolically inflexible.

Now, just to review very quickly, normally our mitochondria should be able to take sugar glucose and turn it into ATP, our energy currency.

They should also, when the need arrives, instantaneously switch from burning sugar as a fuel to burning free fatty acids and ketones as a fuel that come from our fat cells

and from our liver. And that switch should happen instantaneously, very much like a hybrid car.

You can switch from gasoline powering the engine to the battery powering the motors.

And that switch can happen instantaneously. But 50% of normal weight individuals can't make that switch.

That means when they stop eating, they can't switch over to immediately drawing on battery power or releasing fat from their fat cells.

And I'll talk about why that is in a second.

If you look at overweight people and the vast majority of Americans are overweight, 88% of overweight people can't switch between burning sugar and burning fat.

And 99.5% of obese individuals, and that's a ton of us in the United States, cannot make that switch.

Okay, so why is that so important? Well, when you have high insulin levels, insulin is a fat storage hormone.

And insulin's job is to take any extra food that you eat and store it for harder times. That makes sense.

But insulin is going up and up and up in our bloodstream as we eat more and more processed foods, we exercise less.

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