Dr fun welcome thanks for having me when we think about people around us it could be our family it could be our friends we probably know somebody that is overweight severely overweight or has a metabolic disease like diabetes cancer dementia even heart disease and we're told there's nothing that we can do about it so Dr Fang my first question let's talk about losing weight fixing obesity what is the biggest cause of obesity um essentially I think that the uh problem is hyperinsulinemia which is really a hormonal issue and this comes down to a lot of people will say well it's about 200 calories or you know or something like that um however I think that doesn't really address the actual underlying problem because um the thing is that our bodies respond to hormones right so if we are gaining uh body fat then it's because the hormones have signaled us to gain body fat really every single system in our body works the same way nothing happens by accident and it's because in order for us to um you know regulate this very highly complex system which has lots of interconnections everybody has to know what's happening with everything else so insulin is a hormone that essentially tells us to store body fat that's sort of its JW right so when you eat the hormone insulin is going to rise and therefore um that's a signal for us to store some of it as um you know body fat which is essentially a store of calories right so it doesn't happen by accident everybody has this mistaken notion that we have a certain amount that we put in a certain amount that we put you know that we burn and any excess goes into fat and it that that part that goes into fat is completely unregulated but it's simply not true it's actually completely inconceivable that the Body Works that way and the the reason is that most of us for most of us the body weight stay stable for example if you think about weight gain the average um over the last 30 40 years really even with this entire obesity epidemic is about a pound a year a pound of body fat is about 3,500 calories um you know which is about two days worth of um eating which means that our bodies has like we have to match the amount of calories we eat with calories we burn to within like a 99% you know uh failure rate right like there can be essentially no errors yeah we don't know how many uh calories we eat and how many calories we burn so how can you maintain it within a 99% sort of accuracy without that so this idea that it's simply some unregulated dump of calories is is not true so if if you think about it that way then what happens is people just say oh you eat less calories which is just not useful advice and I don't know why people think it's useful like that's the same advice that we've been giving for 25 35 years and it really hasn't helped anybody um you know you look at the number of people who have had struggled with it and essentially all of them have done calorie counting and it doesn't work so it's it's not understanding that it's not calor because our bodies respond to hormones there is certain calories are going to stimulate insulin more than other calories so if you eat cookies you're going to stimulate insulin more which means you're going to store more of that as body fat which simply means and and you compare that to an egg for example then you don't stimulate as much insulin which means you don't store as much of those calories as fat and you burn more of those calories right that's that's all that happens e