Metabolic Freedom: Reverse Insulin Resistance & Burn Fat Naturally
with Ben Azadi
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals and chemical toxicity, health issues caused by heavy metals and toxins, and how to detox. We talk a lot about bioenergetics, anti-aging, and more advanced topics, and go more in-depth than you may hear on other podcasts. This is my personal passion and my personal health journey. I just wanna take you along with me. Today, we have Ben Azadi on the show. I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a really long time. He’s a huge voice in intermittent fasting, metabolic freedom, and the keto movement, and has a lot of amazing information on how to achieve metabolic freedom and how to free yourself from the life sentence of insulin resistance and diabetes. It’s estimated that 50% of people will be dealing with this in the very near future.
The odds are that you need to take a lot of the steps that we talk about on this show. It’s a really good show today. You want to listen to the very end. On this show, we’re gonna be talking about how insulin resistance can exist for 6 to 14 years before blood sugar levels rise. So, the little fasting glucose tests you’re getting from your doctors or even doing a continuous glucose monitoring won’t signal insulin resistance. You have to do an insulin fasting test. We talk about how 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which is shocking. We talk about how high blood sugar is an underlying root cause, not only of diabetes, but also of high blood pressure. It’s not salt. It’s sugar that causes high blood pressure. High blood sugar also causes heart disease, cancer, inflammation, and scarring of all of our arteries, which leads to high cholesterol and heart disease. A lot of issues are really insulin resistance and high blood sugar.
We also talk about how intermittent fasting and metabolite flexibility are key for optimizing health rather than long-term restrictive diets. We talk about environmental toxins, especially obesogenic chemicals and heavy metals, and how these specifically impact metabolic health and weight loss, metals like arsenic, uranium, and excess iron, and how those are linked to diabetes. We talk about strength training and muscle preservation, which are really key and crucial for maintaining metabolic health and longevity. We talk about how a fasting insulin test is optimal and crucial for determining what’s going on with our health. The three to six range is optimal. We talk about fasting benefits and how those start at 14 hours with increased autophagy, and a 16 to 17 hour longer fast, 24 to 72 hours offer additional benefits like increased BDNF and human growth hormone. We get into what those are on the show.
We also have to talk about seed oils and which ones you want to avoid, which ones you want to eat instead, and how seed oils are present in 80% of the food supply. So, it can take two years to do an oil change after you completely stop eating seed oils. They’re highly inflammatory and promote metabolic dysfunction, diabetes, insulin resistance, and cellular dysfunction. It’s basically like eating plastic and inserting that plastic into our brain and cellular membranes. It just throws a wrench into our whole body’s functioning. We talk about how one French fry is equivalent to one cigarette. That’s from a study that was done based on the aldehydes that are produced through either smoking or eating fried French fries. It’s really bad.
Ben has a new book coming out called Metabolic Freedom, and he has a great seed oil card that you can get so you can avoid seed oils when you’re dining out. We’ll talk about that on the show too. In 2008, Ben was an obese man who went through a personal health transformation, losing 80 pounds of extra weight and getting metabolically healthy. Ever since Ben Azadi, who’s an FDNP, has been on a mission to help 1 billion people live a healthier lifestyle, he has a 10-year mission to help over 1 million people naturally reverse their diabetes. Ben is the founder of Keto Camp, and he has over 17 years of experience in the health industry. He’s the author of four bestselling books, including his latest, Keto Flex. He’s the author of the upcoming book, Metabolic Freedom, published by Hay House. Ben’s been the go-to source for intermittent fasting in the ketogenic diet since 2013. He’s the host of the top 15 podcasts, the Metabolic Freedom Podcast, which won the keto podcast of the year award by the Metabolic Health Summit in 2022.
He has a fast-growing YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers, 25 million views, and his TikTok channel has over 330,000 subscribers and over 50 million views. Go check those out at @thebenazadi. You can learn more about Ben’s work at benazadi.com. He’s been featured in Forbes, NBC, Elle Weekly, Disrupt Magazine, New York Times Magazine, LA Entertainment Weekly, and many other publications. Ben, thanks so much for coming on the show
Ben Azadi
Wendy, I was just telling you, I’ve been a big fan of you since 2017. You’ve been a pioneer, and it’s an honor to be on your podcast.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, hopefully you’ve gotten into all kinds of detoxing and whatnot because detox is really important for metabolic health, and toxins poison our metabolic pathways in many different ways. I wanna hear your take on it because I know there’s roughly one in three people, like roughly 80 million people, that are diabetic. Two-thirds of people in the United States are overweight and obese. Can you talk a little about that and why our metabolism is so destroyed?
Ben Azadi
Yeah, those are the stats. It’s a sad state of affairs, not just in the US but, as you know, for first-world countries. Diabetes is near and dear to my heart. I lost my dad due to the complications of diabetes back in 2014, and it was really difficult seeing him deteriorate year after year. We followed that conventional wisdom of getting him on his insulin, managing his blood sugar, even changing his diet, yet he still gained weight, had debilitating neuropathy, vision loss, and eventually suffered a stroke. And then nine months later, he passed away. I was really angry when he passed away. I was sadm and I had a lot of questions. Why did he have to suffer so much when we followed everything his conventional doctors told us to do, from the nutrition to the medication. I would pick him up every Tuesday, refill his meds, and take him to the grocery store, yet he still suffered. I discovered that their conventional wisdom is to manage diabetes, not to reverse it.
When we talk about diabetes, especially type 2, it says it’s a lifestyle condition that is treated with medication, which is a mismatch in itself. The amazing thing about type two diabetes is that it is completely preventable. It’s completely reversible, and it really starts with looking at insulin. Of course, in the new book I have coming out, Metabolic Freedom, I emphasize how a fasting insulin test is one of the most important tests for your metabolism. It’s a test that most doctors don’t run. They’ll maybe run a fasting glucose or maybe an A1C, which, as you know, is a three-month average of your blood sugars, which are good tests as well. But there’s not a fasting insulin test being drawn from conventional doctors, and that’s because there’s no fasting insulin medication or medication to lower insulin. So, why would they test it?
With insulin levels, when it’s elevated, the studies, such as the Whitehall Study two and several other studies I put in the book, are showing that you could have full-blown insulin resistance. In other words, hyperinsulinemia for on average six to 14 years with your blood sugars looking perfect, A1C looking perfect because your pancreas is so busy just producing massive amounts of insulin to clear the excess glucose until it just can’t keep up. And now we’re going deaf to the receptor sites for insulin. death to the screens of insulin, and then our blood sugars dramatically increased.
Then there’s a type two diabetes diagnosis or a pre-diabetes diagnosis if caught early on. Once you’re diagnosed with diabetes, it opens up the door for an entire list of metabolic diseases from cancer to heart disease. As a matter of fact, it’s actually rare to die from diabetes. We die from the complications of it, such as heart disease, kidney failures, and stroke. You mentioned that about 60% of Americans are pre-diabetic or diabetic. Harvard is saying by the year 2030 that 50% of the population in the US will be classified as obese. We have the thought process, at least the conventional thought process, that it’s a genetic issue. Like obesity, for example, there was a representative from the government a couple years ago in 60 Minutes saying, it’s not your fault if you’re obese, it’s genetics, and we have medication. We have a surgery that could help you deal with it, but it’s not your fault.
But if that was the case, if it is genetics, then in the 1930s, our obesity rates in the US were around one to 2%. Now it’s close to 50% and our genes don’t change that fast. So, one of the most important things we can do to prevent a diabetes diagnosis is to run a fasting insulin test. Make sure that’s in the single] digits. Three to six would be considered optimal. One more note on the fasting insulin, when you get that test done, you would probably have to pay out of pocket. It’s a cheap test, which is good news, but the standard reference range is gonna be between 3 and 25 or 3 and 28. If it comes back as 21 or 17, most doctors in the conventional sense will not flag that as being an issue, but that is insulin resistance. You wanna make sure it’s between three and six. That means you’re very sensitive when it comes to insulin. It’s not just a diet issue when it comes to diabetes. It’s actually a toxicity issue as well, which we could get into and I know is your alley here.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I’m right there with you. My dad also suffered from complications of diabetes and he couldn’t even afford the amount of insulin he needed. I had to give him $900 a month. Even though if he had Medicare and supplemental, he still needed $900 a month. He joked that he’s taking enough insulin to kill a horse and he pretty much was. Insulin is the hormone that tells you store fat. He just got fatter and fatter and fatter and it just added more complications and more insulin resistance to what he was already dealing with. He eventually died as well of cancer. Half of diabetic people get cancer. I think people don’t realize that every health issue, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are all the results of high blood sugar. All of those issues are from high blood sugar. People think high blood pressure is due to salt. No, it’s high blood sugar and so many other health issues. Let’s talk about what insulin resistance is exactly, just to totally clarify that to people.
Ben Azadi
I’m sorry that you dealt with that and so you saw firsthand just like I did what diabetes could lead to. Cancer is an increased dramatically when somebody has type two diabetes and it is an issue with high blood sugar levels and high insulin levels. It strips nitric oxide from the body, which is a very important gaseous molecule with many functions. One of the functions of nitric oxide is vasodilation, the opening up of your blood vessels to allow nutrients and blood flow and oxygen to deliver to tissues. When you have high levels of glucose and insulin, it lowers no in the body, which makes the heart pump harder, which is high blood pressure. It’s not the salt. That’s the sugar, the glucose and insulin spike. So what is insulin resistance? Hyperinsulinemia is a better term for it than insulin resistance. Essentially, when we’re eating high carbohydrate diet, especially a processed carbohydrate diet, and we’re eating frequently. We’re gonna get constant glucose and insulin spikes.
When we break down the three macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein, and fat, we know that it is carbohydrates that will elicit the biggest blood insulin response when you consume it. Of course, processed carbs will elicit a larger blood insulin response than whole foods carbs, but all of them will elicit a blood insulin response. Protein has a very moderate response when it comes to glucose and insulin. It’s not much, but there is a response. Fat barely moves glucose and insulin. So, when you are eating high carbs and eating frequently, the average person is snacking and grazing throughout the day, causing constant glucose and insulin spike. When we raise glucose in the body, the body has this tightly controlled system in place for blood sugar. It wants one teaspoon of blood sugar in the entire bloodstream to be considered an optimal state, which if we tested our fasting blood glucose is 80 milligrams per deciliter. When we eat carbs, it turns into sugar, whether it’s oatmeal, cereal, or a donut.
All carbs turn into sugar. Then the body produce the pancreas, the beta cells and the pancreas produce insulin to clear that excess glucose out of the bloodstream because too much is considered toxic. If that happens from time to time, Wendy, it’s no big deal. We could raise glucose, clear it with insulin. When that’s happening year after year from high carbs and snacking, all of a sudden, we are producing massive amounts of insulin, and that is called hyperinsulinemia, or in other words, insulin resistance. And if that doesn’t change, then that turns into pre-diabetes and eventually type two diabetes. Essentially, we’re creating inflammation at the cell level. Those receptor sites for insulin just can’t keep up with the demand that is being produced from blood sugar and insulin and it leads to PCOS, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, and whole host of issues. So, we wanna stop it in its tracks and one of the best things we can do is to get that fasting insulin blood test done.
Dr. Wendy Myers
In the old school, back in the day, and even today, they talk about for weight loss, eating five or six times a dayM just eating those little meals to keep your blood sugar even. What’s wrong with that picture? I’ve seen people have success losing weight with eating low carb and six meals a day. What’s the problem with that?
Ben Azadi
Well, the problem with that is that we’re not designed to produce that amount of insulin and glucose throughout the day. If you think about just the way we lived for so long, our ancestors, we were feasting and then we were fasting. We weren’t grazing throughout the day. The thought process is that it’s gonna rev up your metabolism and it’s that fire stoked throughout the day. And that’s not true. It actually creates an inefficient metabolism. We don’t even necessarily want to increase our metabolism or boost our metabolism. Animals in the wildlife that have the fastest metabolism have the shortest lifespan.
It’s not about boosting the metabolism. As a matter of fact, the metabolism isn’t running on speeds. It’s running in either efficient or being inefficient. So, when you are stuck as a sugar burner because you’re grazing and eating every two to three hours and eating high carbs, that is an unhealthy metabolism. It’s a metabolic prison versus this metabolic freedom that we want to achieve. If you do it in a calorie deficit, yes, you might lose some weight in the beginning and you might think this works. Ben is wrong. Wendy doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But what ends up happening is the metabolism will match the energy coming in, and you’ll teach it to be a sugar burner.
You’ll create insulin resistance. The weight will come back, and then the thought is, okay, I just need to cut the calories more or exercise more, or do both. And then it budges, the weight comes down a little bit and then all of a sudden it stalls again. It’s a very difficult way to try to lose weight because it’s tackling the symptom, meaning nobody has a weight problem. It is a weight symptom. We don’t lose weight to get healthy. We get healthy to lose weight. Just focusing on calorie cutting and small meals throughout the day is looking at the symptom. What we instead need to do is what you teach Wendy, which is focusing on cellular metabolism, inflammation and hormones. When you get healthy and lower inflammation at the cell level, the weight comes off as a side effect. I’m a perfect example of that because I was obese for 20 plus years and I lost the weight 17 years ago. I’ve kept it off focusing on health, not calories and versus calories out.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about doing that simple test. You mentioned the insulin fasting test and also maybe using a continuous glucose monitor. I recently started using one and I was really shocked that my blood sugar was higher than I would like it to be. That would not have been caught with a fasting glucose test that like single tests you do at your physical test once you’re at your docs. Good luck. You need to do a continuous glucose monitor. Can you talk about that and the importance of testing early? I know, like myself, I’ve been a sugar addict my whole life since I was two years old. I’ve worn out my pancreas and I’ve just done it in unfortunately. I think a lot of other people are in the same boat and they need to start testing early and paying attention to this early to prevent damage to their body from that high blood sugar.
Ben Azadi
I agree. I talk about the value of a continuous glucose monitor in the book. It’s such a great tool. It’s one of my favorite tools that we can use and it’s becoming more and more readily available for us in the US, which is great news and in other parts of the world as well. A continuous glucose monitor is a great device that you put typically behind your tricep area, but really anywhere in your body. It gives you this 24-7 snapshot of your blood sugar levels and you wear it for 14 days. It shows you what food does to your glucose levels, what stress does, poor sleep, and even exercise. It gives you some really good data. Even like interviews like this, sometimes I’ve worn it and I’ve seen my glucose levels go up from getting excited talking on a podcast or speaking on stage. It helps you customize your lifestyle to fine tune some things because I could have maybe a bowl of blueberries and see a good glucose response on my CGM.
Somebody else, like my fiance, maybe might have a bowl of blueberries and see a different response. So, it gives you that data and it gives you 24-7 look at that data. Another option would be like a single finger prick device that you could buy. The challenge with that is that it’s not giving you continuous glucose monitors. You’d have to prick your finger each time. But what I also love about the CGM or just the finger prick looking at glucose is postprandial glucose, meaning after you eat, where does your glucose levels go? How high does it go? How high does it stay elevated? That could give you an idea if you have insulin resistance or not.
Ideally, what we want to see after eating two hours after eating, we want to see our glucose levels go back to baseline. So, if we tested our fasting blood glucose and let’s say it was 85 milligrams per deciliter, and then we have breakfast or a meal, whatever it is, and then test it two hours later, if we see it around 85 milligrams per deciliter, two hours later, that food was great. That was a good response. It might go to like 110, 115, and about an hour after, and then back to 85. That showed your pancreas produced the right amount of insulin to get it back to baseline. But if you see it, go to 130, 140 and stay elevated two hours after eating, it shows you that the food you ate was probably not the best combination of foods.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I started wearing a continuous glucose monitor because I got really obsessed for a period with sleep. I’m like, what in the f do I need to do to sleep? And I’m like, I’m gonna leave no stone unturned. I realized that I was having dinner, probably eating a little bit too much dinner even though it was healthy, and then maybe having a little snack, some sugar afterwards. I realized that my blood sugar was crashing in the middle of the night and then waking me up. I think people don’t realize when they’re doing a big dinner, even if it’s super healthy, it might be too much food or they’re having the dessert right before bed or little snack and they don’t realize it affects their sleep as well, which in turn negatively impacts their blood sugar and blood sugar control the following day. So it becomes this vicious cycle.
Ben Azadi
Yeah, that’s exactly right. When you don’t get quality sleep the next day you’re hungrier, you’re less satisfied. It shows with the studies. You have higher levels of ghrelin, the hunger hormone, lower levels of leptin, the satiety slash fat burning hormone, and you’re just on a vicious cycle where you’re just gonna want to consume glucose to sustain your energy levels. You are energy deprived because you didn’t rest well. It’s one of the worst things we can do for our health is to eat before bed. It destroys me, Wendy and I use the AA ring to track my heart rate variability, deep sleep, REM sleep, resting heart rate. And every time I eat too close to bed, which is not common, but sometimes there are dinners and exceptions, but every time I do that, the next morning, my heart rate variability has dropped. My resting heart rate has increased. I got less deep sleep, less REM sleep. So, a good rule of thumb, is no food at least three hours before bed. I do really well if I close the kitchen at least five hours before bed, personally.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I do the aura ring also for sure and I’m finding the same thing. I need to do the early bird special and eat at five. My mom eats at 3:30. I’m like, oh, I totally get it. My boyfriend’s Argentinian. He is like, we need to eat at 10:00 PM. I’m like, no, they eat late.
Ben Azadi
It’s such an Argentinian thing. I have a lot of Argentinian friends. They just love that. Then they have coffee after the meal. It’s crazy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’m like, no stop. But yeah, I’m trying to teach him the other way, the other path he could be taking. A lot of people that are looking at intermittent fasting, keto, they’re looking to lose weight. Let’s just be honest. We don’t wanna it because it can be hard to switch your metabolism. It takes some discipline. So, many times people go to their doctors and they’re saying, oh, you need to eat less and you need to exercise more. The calories in, calories out. Let’s talk about how that’s just not the case anymore. Obviously, we’re looking at many different layers that affect our weight and metabolism. Why is that just an outdated term and doesn’t work for a lot of people?
Ben Azadi
It’s so outdated and unfortunately there’s still the debate out there, just it’s all about calories and versus calories out. One camp has that idea, the CCO method, calories in versus calories out, and the premise that they have, and I used to teach it by the way, back in 2008 eight when I first lost my weight. I thought that was the way to do it. The premise that the calorie counters have is that we need to lose weight to get healthy. But that’s not the way the body works, as I’ve already mentioned, our premise is that we get healthy to lose weight and it just doesn’t give you the full picture. When you just count calories and cut calories, you have to rely on willpower deprivation, and eventually your metabolism will match the calories coming in, meaning it’ll start to slow down.
There are many studies that back this up. I put it in the book, Metabolic Freedom. We all have heard of the Biggest Loser TV show here in the United States. Several years ago, they had these really obese individuals and they put them on a calorie deficit plan, exercised them, and they lost a ton of weight, like hundreds of pounds. They celebrated these individuals on the final episode. The studies actually followed a lot of these contestants after the show was over. The one study that I referenced in the book show that 13 out of 14 of them gained all the way back, and a portion of them gained even more weight back before they even started the Biggest Loser TV show. That’s why there’s never a Biggest Loser TV reunion show because they’re gaining the weight back. It also showed that they’re hungrier, their ghrelin levels are high and their hunger hormone is through the roof. The body’s not a calculator. It’s not a bank account. It is a very complex chemistry lab. When we focus on calories in versus calories out, it’s a distraction.
I think calories matter. I don’t think they’re the most important thing. They’re more of a distraction. Instead, we wanna focus on hormones, inflammation and once you get that right, you don’t have to count calories. You don’t have to deprive yourself. In fact, it’s easy. The body just starts burning fat when you remove the interference, which has caused cellular inflammation. That is the number one cause of weight gain and weight loss resistance. It’s cellular inflammation.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I had a girlfriend of mine that would always go on the, I won’t mention any names, but these companies you go to and they have classes every week and they have their prepackaged food for weight loss. The food that she brought home was a prepackaged microwaveable biscuit with a piece of sausage. Her snack was bagel chips, and then for dinner it was like noodles and something else. It was just all carbs. So technically 1200 calories a day. And I just thought, wow, that just really doesn’t make any sense. She lost weight doing it, but there’s a hormonal price to pay with that, like you’ve mentioned. Let’s talk about the solution, that’s doing intermittent fasting. Can you discuss what that is?
Ben Azadi
The tricky thing, as you mentioned with your friend’s example, is that when you cut calories, you will lose weight. It always works in the beginning. It just doesn’t work long term. And as you mentioned, there’s a hormonal price to pay. It’s just not the best option. Fasting is incredible. I love intermittent fasting and block fast, different variations of fasting. In the book, I have an entire chapter on fasting. One of the best ways to harness the innate intelligence is fasting. When we eat food, it takes a lot of resources for the body to process that food from the enzymes that need to get produced, the bile that needs to break down, the fat, the blood flow, and the bandwidth. That all goes to the digestive system to process a meal, whether it’s a full meal or a snack. These are resources that are being used. When you fast, you create this energy diversion process that I talk about in the book where you divert energy away from what would have been used for digestion.
To heal the body, blood flow back to the brain healing for the liver for the pancreas. The inner physician within our cells will determine where that bandwidth is spread out to and where that energy is being diverted to, and it gives your digestive system a huge break, like just 14 hours of a fast, which is not a long time. Let’s say you’ve done eating your last meal at 7:00 PM and you wait until 9:00 AM to break the fast. That’s a 14-hour fast and just a 14-hour fast has benefits. You lower insulin, which as you mentioned earlier, is a fat storage hormone. You lower that, so you’re gonna start tapping into store body fat for energy, which is great for fat loss.
You complete digestion, so your body now starts to divert those resources towards healing. Depending on how metabolically flexible you are, you might be producing ketones at this time as well, which are really beneficial. And then as you continue and do more like a 16, 17-hour fast, you get this autophagy process, which is the cellular cleanup where your body starts looking for damaged cells and proteins and it starts fixing it.
I always give the analogy of a refrigerator that we have in our kitchens. When we open up that refrigerator, we have these groceries that all have an expiration date. If we let all the groceries expire, and instead of throwing those expired groceries in the trash, we just shoved them towards the back of the fridge, buy fresh groceries and close that door and come back later, open up the door. It’s gonna be a toxic environment. Disease will manifest in that environment. The human body is like that refrigerator. We have cells and mitochondria and proteins that have that expiration dates on them. When you fast, especially towards 16, 17 hours, you activate autophagy this self-cleaning process to start getting rid of those expired groceries essentially.
It goes a step farther where we have these senescent cells, zombie cells that have no function. They’re not producing energy. They’re not using fat for fuel. They’re just creating problems and infecting other cells leading to diseases in cancer and Alzheimer’s where the innate intelligence will start to get rid of those cells through apoptosis, program cell death, and then produce a stem cell, which is all happening during a fast. The longer you go into a fast 24 hours, 36 hours, the more of these benefits start to happen. You have your brain producing brain derived neurotropic factor BDNF, which is like miracle growth for the brain. You have human growth hormone being increased, which is anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, and fat burning. I love responsible fasting. I think we need to understand that fasting is a stress to the body and too much and at the wrong time is not good for you. But the right duration at the right time is amazing for the human body.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I have to say, I feel so much better eating in an eight-hour window. Sometimes I do it to six hours. I feel so much better doing that. But partners like little devil on my shoulder. It’s like, you need to eat breakfast, you need to have your protein breakfast, and that’ll control your blood sugar all day. I know everyone’s a little bit different, but what is your take on that?
Ben Azadi
If somebody is a sugar burner, if their metabolism is only burning sugar and glucose, then it’s difficult to do a longer fast. It’s difficult to extend that and skip breakfast because their body will rebel. The glucose will drop in the body and the brain and it’ll send the body intense signals for carbohydrates. It’ll even create glucose via gluconeogenesis to fulfill that desire of getting glucose. But when you’re a fat burner instead of a sugar burner, which is simple to do, I teach how to do that in the book, you just simply lower the carbs, gradually increase protein and fat. When you go into a fast being fat adapted, then what happens is you go into that fast and yes, blood sugars drop, but then the body produces ketones and it uses that for an energy source. So, you actually have amazing energy. You don’t break down muscle, you don’t feel lethargic, you actually feel better.
I feel incredible in a fast because I have ketones being produced. So, it really depends on the person’s metabolism. If they’re a sugar burner and they’ve been eating every two to three hours for years. They say, I’m gonna go do a 16 hour fast tomorrow. It’s probably not a good idea. But if they first do low carb or even keto, which is very low carb for seven days, and then go into the fast, they’ll get all those benefits and you don’t need to have the protein, the breakfast or anything like that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I just feel better not eating breakfast. I just wait untilI’m just starving to death and then I eat, and because I did so bad last week with my diet, this week I’m doing the snake diet where I’m just eating one big meal a day in the middle of the day. I’m feeling really good doing that. I think we fall off the wagon sometimes. I discovered these chocolate-covered raspberries at Whole Foods and of course, kitted myself that I was eating fruit. My blood sugar was all over the place and I thought, wait a second, I’m feeling terrible. I need to stop eating this fruit. I’m trying to fix that and get my insulin under control.
Let’s talk about fasting. What is your advice if people should fast say like, one day a week or do a three day fast once a quarter? Once people are doing intermittent fasting for a minute, what is your recommendation on doing actual fasts?
Ben Azadi
I love the idea of what you just shared. Once you’re familiar with fasting and you’ve built up that fasting muscle, then yeah, throwing in a 24 hour fast at least once a week could be incredible. You’re doing it every day pretty much this week as a reset, which is a great reset, but just doing it once a week is amazing. You essentially just go either breakfast to breakfast, lunch to lunch, or dinner to dinner in a fast where you just have water and some electrolytes and minerals, but no food for 24 hours. It’s great. You complete digestion, lower insulin, get autophagy, raise the brain, derive neurotropic factor, and raise human growth hormone. All the things I mentioned are amazing for fat loss, amazing for gut health. I love the idea of a 24-hour fast once a week. When I travel, I rarely eat at the airport or on an airplane just because we know how difficult it is to find clean food there. I fast and those are usually 24 hour fast days for me. I’m metabolically free and healthy that I’m like just gonna use my body fat for fuel and produce ketones.
So for me, I’m doing a 24-hour fast at least once a week. And then we have these block fast, which are three days or longer, which is 72 hours or longer, or even 36 hours is a great fat burn fast. But if you go even longer, I’ve done a five- day water fast. My first one was in 2018 where I just had water for five days. It’s a spiritual experience. It’s no surprise that every religion practices some form of fasting because it really connects you closer to your source, whether it’s God, mother nature, whatever it is. So for me, I was connected closer to God. I felt incredible. It was a euphoric experience.
What I noticed that was really interesting during my fast is I started to get back pain. And what’s interesting is that I used to have a lot of lower back pain and it was the autophagy my body healing my lower back during the long fast. When I broke the fast, the pain went away. But if you experience, like if you had an old injury, like knee pain or whatever it is, neck pain, it might reoccur during a long fast, and that’s your body’s way of healing that area. That happens to me from time to time. But I check glucose and ketones during a fast. I keep my electrolytes up. I do it responsible. So, I recommend it, but only if you do it responsibly. But Wendy, have you done a long fast before? I’m curious to hear if you have.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve done a three day fast, but I haven’t done any longer than that. I just didn’t wanna sign up for more torture. I had a friend of mine, we tried to do like a 10 day fast and I cracked on day two. I haven’t quite gone there, but I think it’s so important to reduce inflammation and like anyone that has pain syndromes or chronic inflammation or you get high blood sugar or something’s going on, just fast.
You can fix that really, really quickly, and you don’t need medication to do that. One thing I noticed that people that do keto long term is some of them don’t look very good. Some of the people that are keto proponents look too skinny. They don’t really look super healthy to me. What is your take on doing keto long-term, especially for women, because I feel like it’s more of a therapeutic diet and you can do something close to keto or like a lion diet carnivore where you’re only eating meat. Some people really take it to the extreme. What is your take on that?
Ben Azadi
I’m not a big fan of long-term continuous ketosis, especially for women. To your point, Wendy, keto is a great tool. I have an entire chapter in the book of Metabolic Freedom. I love it, especially for sugar burners and 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. That’s not just like a number I’m throwing out there. That’s according to a 2022 study. 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. They’re sugar burners. I call them being an a keto deficiency. They have forgotten how to burn fat. Keto is an amazing tool for them to remind their metabolism to burn fat, balance the hormones, and restore their metabolism. But you don’t do it forever. You do it until you’ve done enough to work on that metabolism and teach it to become metabolically flexible.
I love the idea of metabolic flexibility, which is going in and out of ketosis, especially for women. There’s a time to do it for women and for men and postmenopausal women versus menstruating women, but continuous ketosis is a stress to the body. And again, that’s not bad when it’s done therapeutically, short term, but continuous ketosis keeps signaling to your body, you’re in a famine. It’s too much of a stress, and you could increase cortisol levels. It has an impact on neuro adrenal glands. It could impact your thyroid health as well, where you have less T three, the active version of thyroid circulating. It could impact testosterone levels in men. It could impact sex hormone binding globulin in men and women. It’s a problem long term. So, I am not an advocate of long-term ketosis.
Now, I know my company is called Keto Camp, and I love keto. I talk a lot about keto, but believe me, I’m not dogmatic about it and I don’t recommend it long term. I advise against it. I’ve spoken at a lot of low carb conferences, keto conferences, and I’ve done lectures. I share this with the audience, and it’s a message that sometimes it lands well with people and sometimes they think I’m crazy because I’m telling them not to do keto forever, but it’s the truth, just like burning sugar and only burning sugar is being metabolically inflexible. Same thing in my keto space. If you’re just burning fat and ketones, it’s also another sign of metabolic inflexibility. The goal is to go back and forth between sugar burning and fat burning, and that’s metabolic freedom.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I can understand where people that start doing a diet like keto or any type of diet, vegan or vegetarian or whatever, people are trying out to see what works for them when they get initially really good results and they feel great, they want to keep doing it. I think any extreme diet where it’s very limited on one particular macro like carbs or fat or what have you, you’re eventually gonna run into problems for sure. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s really big on the carnivore diet and his wife is and daughter and they’re promoting that may very well work for some people in some genetic makeups. But I caution people about that because that may very well not be you or good for your genetics. I like plants. That’s right. I like salads. I like leaves and herbs and things like that. So, I just can’t imagine only eating steak.
Ben Azadi
I don’t like plants, so I could just eat steak all the time. My diet is more of a carnivore diet most days, not long term like a Jordan Peterson, but there’s always outliers. If you’re doing keto and it’s been a while or carnivore and you feel great, look great, your lab markers look great, then hey, keep doing it. But there probably will come a time where that will start to change. And you’re right, it’s hard because they do keto and it really reversed my PCOS, my diabetes. I felt so great. Why should I leave this? But the goal is to be metabolically flexible and keto is a metabolic process, not even a diet technically. It’s a tool in the shed, but not the only tool in the shed. I have been guilty of doing long-term ketosis back in 2013 when I got into it and teaching it. But I’ve learned over the years that it shouldn’t be sustainable. You can make it sustainable, but it’s not the best idea, especially for women.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I agree. A hundred million people have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and are just behind the eight ball. They’re gonna have trouble with a super high fat diet. You have to ease your way into that and support your liver through that process for sure. I think also that some people don’t tolerate plants like you talked about. Some people can’t do the lectins. They can’t do the phytates or other plant toxins. They just don’t tolerate them for whatever reason, and that just doesn’t work for them. everyone’s so different.
Ben Azadi
Yes, exactly. It really comes down to their gut health. If they have poor gut health, intestinal permeability, and if it’s severe, they can’t really tolerate the raspberries as you mentioned, or any oxalates and antinutrients, almonds, spinach, kale. It doesn’t mean you avoid them forever. It means you find out, what was the cause of that? Intestinal permeability, probably toxins. You work on the gut, clear the toxins, and you might want to bring them back in and see. Everybody responds differently
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love BPC 157 for healing the gut. I think that’s probably the best peptide on the planet
Ben Azadi
Injectable Or does it matter to you which one?
Dr. Wendy Myers
I don’t think it really matters. I think the injectable is probably, more efficacious, but I’ve been taking a capsule also. I forget the brand of the company, but there was just a spectrum of quality with any product you’re taking. I’ve taken both, but I think the injectable works better. I think people can make a lot of headway in their digestion and in their health by taking something like BPC 157 that really quickly heals and seals your gut.
Ben Azadi
That’s interesting. I haven’t used it as much or experimented with it as much, but I’m inspired to do so.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Many people due to toxins and their diet and whatnot have gut issues, digestive issues and food sensitivity issues, immune system issues, and that can be helped so much with just quickly healing that gut super fast. The whole bone broth doesn’t really work for everybody. It’s a long road, I think, to healing your gut. It can take a year or two and making a lot of dietary changes, a lot of work, but you have to do anyways. Let’s talk about your book. So, let’s talk about the things that you go over in your book. I mean, much of what we talked about in the podcast today, but how can someone benefit from getting your book?
Ben Azadi
Thank you, Wendy, for the opportunity to talk about it. The book is called Metabolic Freedom. I just got a galley copy here, which I’m holding up. It’s a two-part book, meaning the first part of the book, the first half, is all about the causes to metabolic dysfunction. I get into why burning sugar and high levels of insulin similar to what we spoke about today, is problematic. There’s a chapter on processed foods and rancid seed oils and high fructose corn syrup and what that does to disrupt the metabolism. Another chapter on poor sleep, which we spoke about as well per circadian rhythm health, what that does to lead to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome and environmental toxins, which is chapter five, how this is right up your alley.
I think it’s the number one thing in this day and age. How environmental toxins disrupt our metabolism, leading to weight loss resistance. I talk about these obesogens and some simple things to do to eliminate these toxins and open up your downstream detox pathways. So, the first half of the book is all about the causes. We need to identify the interference before we could remove it. That’s the first half of the book. The second half of the book gets into the solution. So, we get into keto, low carb, and fasting. My favorite part of the book is how your thoughts influence your metabolism, longevity and anti-aging. And then it’s all wrapped together with a 30 day plan that shows you how to achieve metabolic freedom. I teach you exactly what to do for 30 days, day by day. And then there’s a whole bunch of low-carb, fat-burning recipes at the end of the book.
The book was written for the masses. It’s not a niche book. It’s not a keto book or a fasting book, although I talk about both keto and fasting in there. It’s a book for the 93% of Americans that are metabolically unhealthy. How do you get out of this metabolic prison to metabolic freedom? How do you learn about the metabolism? One of the most interesting things that I put in the book that I loved to share in the book was about the metabolism, Wendy, because I hear so many people over the years saying, I have a slow metabolism, or once I hit 40 or once I hit 50, my metabolism slowed down. I kept hearing this time after time from clients and just people on social media and I wanted to find out is that actually true? Is our metabolism declining because of age or is it just an excuse?
There was a study from Duke, 2021, I put in the book, and this study was amazing with 8,000 people. The youngest person in the study was 1-year-old and the oldest person was 94 years old. It looked all in between different ages and measured their metabolism. The study showed that there are no significant changes in our metabolism once we reach age 20 until we reach age 60. And once we hit age 60, the study said there’s about a 0.7% decline in the metabolism every year after age 60. That might sound like a bad thing if you’re 60 and above, but the study said the only reason there’s the decline after age 60 is loss of muscle mass. So, if you preserve lean muscle mass, or if you’re over age 60, build lean muscle mass.
Here’s the great news, you could be 75 years old with the same metabolism as when you were 25 years old. So, I get into the metabolism. It’s written in a way where the average person understands, and for the person who’s already in this space, there’s 275 resources and citations in there to go deep into the sign. I’m really excited about the book. Dr. Mindy Pelz wrote the forward. It’s been endorsed by a lot of our great colleagues, so I’m excited to get it out there into the world.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, I know. It just sounds like such a fantastic book. It’s a must read because these are like the basics that we’re talking about. You’ve gotta get these down. You’ve gotta get these foundational practices down. Let’s talk about weightlifting also. I know for me, the only time I’ve been healthy and looked my best, great blood sugar control, I have to lift weights. I absolutely have to. I’ve been lifting weights since I was 13 years old, thankfully, but very seriously since I was 19. I think that’s played a huge factor in staying youthful. It’s more challenging now as we get older. It’s honestly more challenging for me to like, hit the gym as much as I would like. I’d love to do five days a week, but usually I’m two or three if I’m lucky. Let’s talk about muscle preservation and building muscle for meta health.
Ben Azadi
I’m like you, I feel great when I’m consistently strength training and building lean muscle. It’s so important. Muscle has been called the longevity organ. There’s a lot of truth to that when you have more muscle mass, and let’s be clear, I’m not saying to become a bodybuilder or a Cross Fitter, I’m just saying putting extra lean muscle mass on your body. When you have more lean muscle mass, you’re more insulin sensitive. You are able to process glucose more efficiently. It acts like your muscle cells act like a sponge to absorb the glucose. So, less insulin is produced to clear the glucose, so you have more flexibility to have more carbs or if to mess up.
It’ll mitigate some of the damage with the muscle mass that you have. It also helps prevent bone fractures, osteopenia, and osteoporosis, which is something that is a problem as we age, so you could prevent that. It also helps with hormone health as well, and it helps with inflammation. Building muscle is so important. It doesn’t really have to be five times in the gym, but finding maybe your groove two to three times could be great of strength training, movements that are compound movements like squats, pushups, bench press, lunges. I mean, it could be with weights or your own body weight, but finding some sort of stimulus to create this muscle protein synthesis. When you combine the strength training with high quality protein, you start to build lean muscle mass, and it also increases your metabolic rate, which means you just burn more calories sitting on the couch with more muscle versus somebody who has less muscle without having to count the calories.
I’m a big fan of it. It’s something I’ve been working on pretty consistently. I have a goal this year of putting on about 10 pounds of lean muscle mass. I just finished up a nice string training workout this morning in a fasted state. I felt great. And when I do that, when I’m consistent, I feel great. It’s very important for longevity and for the metabolism.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s interesting how when you work out, you end up generating more energy. I always have more energy.
Ben Azadi
Yes, same when I work out.
Dr. Wendy Myers
A lot of people, they won’t go work out because they’re tired, and it’s this very counterintuitive thing. I saw a really good interview with Dr. Peter Attia, who’s absolutely brilliant. He was saying how one of the biggest factors in longevity is the strength of your thigh muscles, which I thought was really fascinating that that’s the biggest predictor of longevity.
Ben Azadi
That’s interesting.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s important to lift weight. I’m definitely doing more squats now. I’m more motivated.
Ben Azadi
I know grip strength is also a good predictor and VO2 max, which is the consumption of oxygen at really high intensity training as well. Those are all accomplished through strain training, sprinting, interval training, et cetera.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about toxins that are killing our pancreas, killing our metabolic health since this show is about toxins. I’ve gotta cover that.
Ben Azadi
This is so important, and it’s something you’ve been teaching for a very long time, and it’s become even more important over the years. I think you would agree that it’s the number one cause of metabolic dysfunction and all these diseases out there. It is these environmental toxins that are everywhere. So, chapter five in the book goes deep into these environmental toxins, and there are two main toxins that I identify in that chapter.
The Obesogens and the ens. Obesogens are lipophilic toxins, fat loving toxins that end up in our fat cells. The reason this happens is because the number one priority for the human body is survival. So, when we have these toxins enter the body through our food supply, water supply, chemical detergents, and agents in our household cleaners and perfumes, or even hopping in an Uber with somebody who has a Febreze thing in their car or just in our environment with the airplane pollution, these toxins are everywhere is my point. When the toxins enter the body, the body activates PR Gamma. PR Gamma’s job is to shuttle those toxins outta the bloodstream so they don’t kill you right away because survival’s number one priority and it shuttles them into your fat cells.
It acts very similar to insulin. Insulin shuttles the glucose, which is toxic at high levels, and then PR gamma shuttles the toxins, which of course is also toxic. So it sends it to your fat cells because there’s room in the fat cells and the solution to pollution is dilution. If there’s not enough room in your adipose sites for fat cells, your innate intelligence will increase, your metabolism will increase the size of your fat cells to put those toxins into them, and if you run outta room, it creates new fat cells. This is how toxins make us fat and unhealthy and sick and inflamed.
So that’s one classification. Then we have diabetes genes. We were talking about the story with your dad and my dad. There’s a study I put in the book, Wendy, that shows about 33% of diabetes cases are from these toxins, which are toxins that disrupt beta cell function in the pancreas triggering pre-diabetes and diabetes, and they’re everywhere.
According to the University of Newcastle, the average American is consuming a credit card size worth of plastic every week in the form of microplastics from plastic water bottles, plastic cutting boards, and plastic Tupperware. So glass is where it’s at. Glass water bottles, glass Tupperware, wooden cutting boards and some simple things we can do in terms of like BPA. We hear about BPA being toxic, it’s found in canned food. But studies show cash register receipts have a thousand times greater BPA than that in canned food. So, saying no to cash register receipts because when you grab it, that goes into your bloodstream. And then keeping the detox pathways open.
All the things you talk about, Wendy, right? I don’t know if I could say the term we were talking about earlier, but it’s something with coffee. There are different things you can do and I talk about that in the book, but keeping your lymphatic system going by moving the body, doing some dry brushing the right way, cast or oil packs is great for the liver, sweating, sauna binders, different things you can do. All the things you talk about, keeping those detox pathways open because we cannot escape these toxins. We can’t. We could eliminate them much more efficiently if we do the things that we learned from Wendy and what I also share in the book as well,
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I think also when people are really having trouble losing weight, say there’s a lot of people that are checking all the boxes and they’re doing everything right and they’re not losing weight, they’ve gotta focus on some detoxification or sauna and binders. Your body is a protective mechanism. It may not let you lose weight because it’s storing those toxins away from your organs for a reason. It needs certain nutrients and resources in order to process those and have them leave the body. So, they need vitamin C, they need antioxidants and vitamin E and glutathione and all kinds of things that many people have used up.
Eating bad food has tons of toxins in it, It’s a whole other can of worms, but also when people are losing weight very rapidly, they can release a lot of toxins. I had a girlfriend that lost a hundred pounds very quickly and she developed a huge cyst at the base of her spine and people create cyst to store toxins in them. And so she had to have that surgically removed. So, if you’re losing weight rapidly, you wanna take a binder to prevent that from happening. Some other toxins that promote diabetes are arsenic. Arsenic is the number one cause of diabetes. I had extensive conversation with Dr. Joe on this. He’s very deep on the research on that. Arsenic is a big cause that’s found in chicken and eggs and contaminated water sources. And then uranium is another one that causes blood sugar issues. That is found in a lot of people in southwest United States, just in your shower water, even if you’re drinking filtered water.
And then iron. A lot of people in the eighties taking Geritol, getting that iron for energy and iron is a lot of supplements and doctors recommend it when that may not be the cause of people’s anemia, even though it seems like that makes sense. But many times, anemia is caused by many other things magnesium deficiency. I think iron is a huge toxin in all of the carbohydrates, all the enriched flowers and things like that. Those are three of the metals that promote diabetes and insulin dysfunction.
Ben Azadi
That’s really good. It’s so important, especially in this day and age, because you could be eating clean, but if you have a lot of these toxins, it’s gonna be very difficult to lose the weight, to reverse the diabetes. So you gotta address the toxicity component here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about seed oils. I’m really trying hard not to eat the seed oils, but it’s, it’s tough. You basically can’t eat out. You essentially can’t go out to eat unless it’s a really high-end restaurant, a very expensive, high-end restaurant. They’re not gonna be using seed oils typically. But let’s talk about what the problem with seed oils and how they’re damaging our metabolism.
Ben Azadi
Yeah, they’re an issue. They’re in about 80% of our food supply in the US. These rancid fats, these seed oils are an issue for many reasons. Number one, they’re very unstable fats. They’re polyunsaturated fatty acids, so they contain the chemical structure of them. The word poly means many, so it contains many double bonds. The chemical structure does. So, the more double bonds these fats contain, the more reactive they are to heat pressure oxygen, and that’s exactly how they process them. Heat pressure and oxygen. Not to mention all the other chemical agents they put into processing canola or soybean or all these vegetable oils.
So, it’s really rancid in the bottle before we even purchase it. And then we buy it and heat it up even more fry with it and it goes rancid even more. They stay in the body for a very long time. The half-life of these fats, these seed oils are 680 days, about two years. Meaning if we stopped eating them today, two years later, half of them will be around our cell membranes, our mitochondrial membranes, creating low grade inflammation. In metabolic freedom, I shared a study from Dr. Martin Gutfeld who looked at French fries that were fried in vegetable oils, and he looked at the aldehyde content being produced from them. Aldehydes are carcinogenic. When you smoke a tobacco cigarette, there’s also aldehydes being produced. That’s how cigarette smoking is linked to cancer.
It showed that essentially a large serving of French fries, which is about 25 French fries, produces the same amount of aldehydes as 25 tobacco cigarettes smoked, meaning one French fry is one tobacco cigarette smoked in terms of the aldehydes being produced. It is bad news for us all. So if you’ve never smoked a tobacco cigarette, but you’ve had maybe 10,000 French fries in your life, you’ve smoked about 10,000 tobacco cigarettes, essentially.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that. There are healthier swaps. We want saturated fats, monounsaturated fats like butter, coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil, duck fat. But when we go to restaurants, to your point, it is very difficult to avoid them. Even, high-end restaurants, unless it’s like a real authentic Italian or Greek restaurant that uses just olive oil, a lot of the times they’re going to use these bad oils. What I do is I actually have a seed oil allergy card that I take with me to restaurants and I show this to the server. I’m like, look, can you please show this with the chef? It shows that I’m allergic to these bad oils. Can you use healthier oils?
It has them all listed here and they accommodate. It works like a charm. So I have this seed oil card and I have it available for free if anybody wants it. It’s in the notes, but it’s seedoilcard.com to download it. You don’t want to take the hit. Now if you’re doing so many things right, you’re working on detox or eating clean and then from time to time you’re getting a hit of seed oils, it won’t be as bad as this person who is already toxic and eating unhealthy. I aim to avoid them a hundred percent as much as possible. But even with that, I’m sure I’m, I’m getting it somewhere without my knowledge. So, it is important to remove these bad fats because they create a lot of cell inflammation for many, many years.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and it’s interesting when you think of them almost like plastics and you’re inserting all these plastics into your brain cells and into your cell membranes, and of course they’re not gonna function properly. Your brain is not gonna function properly and it’s gonna cause all these different metabolic issues, nutrients getting in, toxins getting out. It just creates a mess. Which seed oil should people avoid?
Ben Azadi
I didn’t list them. I only mentioned a few of them. So there are eight of them. We have canola oil, corn oil, cotton seed oil, soybean, sunflower, safflower, rice brand and grape seed oil. Those are what Dr. Kate Shehan calls the hateful eight. This might be controversial and you might disagree with me, I’m not sure, but I would throw in fish oil as a bad fat to avoid as well. It’s not a seed oil, but it’s also very unstable and typically processed the wrong way and sometimes even contains heavy metal. So, I don’t recommend any fish oil or take it personally. I simply get it from small fatty fish like sardines or salmon, wild caught. I’m not a fan of fish oil, but those are the eight plus the fish oil.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I agree. I think there’s some good brands out there for sure that are really meticulous. But 98% of fish oil, I think it’s garbage. I stopped taking it probably 15 years ago. It had fish burps. It’s rancid or I’d poke a hole in it and smell it and it would just smell horrible. When I’d go to reach for the bottle, my body would be screaming. I’d be like trying to reach for it. It just wouldn’t let me. There was a lot of resistance, so I thought, I think I’m just gonna listen to that. It just doesn’t feel right. I’m like, why don’t I just eat fish? There’s fish oil and fish. And it’s protected in the fish. It makes so much more sense. But I think there’s some great band brands, like cod oil can be great. I’ve seen, like fish row, dehydrated fish eggs, which I think are amazing. I try to eat those as much as I can because they’re so healthy for you in so many ways. So, there are workarounds with the whole fish oil thing.
Ben Azadi
Absolutely
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us what your website is and where we can reach you and learn more about your work?
Ben Azadi
Wendy, it’s an honor to be on your podcast. I’m a huge fan and you’re coming on mine in a couple days. I’m excited about that as well. I’d love for your audience, if this resonated with anybody who’s listening or watching to order the book, Metabolic Freedom. It’s published by Hay House. It’s gonna be released on May 13th. So, depending on when this comes out, you could either pre-order it or order it, but we have an entire bonus for anybody who orders the book, either as a pre-order or a regular order. It’s an entire course on the metabolism. 12 lessons that I built out and exclusive interviews in the course with Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Daniel Pompa, Cynthia Faro, and Megan Ramos. All of that is in the course along with the 12 lessons that I recorded. All that’s for free. When you order the book over at metabolicfreedombook.com, you can see different links to get the book worldwide. And then once you purchase it, you just go back to the page, put the name, email, order number, and then you’re instantly sent the course with the interviews. The book is available on hardcover, Kindle and on Audible. I narrated the audible myself. So that’s where you can find the book. And then my main website is benazadi.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Where are you on social media?
Ben Azadi
@thebenazadi on most social media platforms. So just the, and then my full name, Ben Azaid, only because Bedi was taken. So I added “the.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. Well, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so informative, and it’s just so foundational. All these things you talk about, there’s no way around it. You have to incorporate many or all of the things that we mentioned on this show because the odds are against you. The statistics are out there that the majority of people around the world are experiencing metabolic issues. You have to take agency of your health and make better choices. You can’t eat fast food and processed food and expect some sort of miracle results in your health. So, Ben, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Ben Azadi
Thank you, Wendy. I love what you’re doing. It’s an honor. Thank you for having me on your show.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Thank you for coming on. I’ve wanted you to come on for so long. I’m glad we finally connected and got you on. Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks so much for joining the Myers Detox Podcast and using your most valuable resource, your time, to join me every week. My only goal for you is to help you learn, to help you improve your health. I want you to live a long, healthy, disease-free and medication-free life. I’m trying to give you tools every week to meet that goal. Thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
