#235 The Fasting Method - Megan Ramos

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today our guest is Megan Ramos. Megan is the co-founder of The Fasting Method with Dr. Jason Fung. She's also written books with Dr. Fung about Intermittent Fasting and Helping Diabetes. This episode is brought to you by the Metabolic Autophagy Master Class. It's the most comprehensive and in-depth program about applying the benefits of Intermittent Fasting and Metabolic Flexibility for both longevity and body composition. You get access to over 13 hours of video content about the science of autophagy, as well as a four-week meal plan, a workout routine with precise macros and food recommendations. Head over to siimland.com forward slash master class in one word, and use the code POD20 for a sweet 20 percent discount.

All right.

Welcome everyone. We're doing this podcast and we're actually doing it live with Megan Ramos from California. So yeah, I'm glad to have you back on the podcast. We first did our first show, like I said, maybe like a few years ago. And yes, a lot of us happened ever since. So how are you?

Megan Ramos (1:02)

I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah, I'm in sunny California now. I was in Toronto last time we talked. So a lot has happened in the last few years.

Siim Land (1:11)

Yeah, that's for sure.

But yeah, maybe let's start about your like backstory. Like how did you get into the world of fasting? And what have you been like researching?

Megan Ramos (1:23)

Yeah, absolutely. When I was young, I was really skinny, but I had these diseases of obesity. At 12, I was diagnosed with fatty liver, and at 14, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And my doctors just told my parents, that doesn't make sense, she's really skinny. She'll just grow out of it. That was their great medical explanation.

Simultaneously, my mother was really sick with some unique genetic conditions that I believe were caused by Moldy House that she lived in, in hindsight, but she was a real medical mystery. So I got really into medical research and preventative medicine because of my mother's medical history. So at the age of 15, I started doing research in this nephrology, which is a study of kidney disease clinic. And I was working with this young nephrologist, Jason Fung. And I just love nephrology. I love the clinic's focus on preventative medicine. There were a lot of lifestyle interventions. Unfortunately, they're all the wrong ones. But at the time, I appreciated them trying to do something other than, here's a bunch of medications, let's go on dialysis. There was some actual people trying to be preventative, which is rare in traditional medicine. So I stuck around there throughout all my education. Then I continued working there when I was done with school, working on prospective research with diabetic kidney disease, looking at what interventions would actually slow down the progression of diabetic-related kidney disease. Nothing, the diabetes got worse. There was nothing you can do with the kidneys. It just seemed that all of the interventions for type 2 diabetes just made the diabetes worse. I actually got really frustrated, took some time off from going back to school, still worked in the neurology clinic doing my research. I thought maybe I'll go to law school or something. Just thinking about how depressing it was just to watch all these people die from type 2 diabetes. Then I said to myself, okay, Megan, you've got this hugely terrifying family history of cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson's, you name it, I've got it in my family history.

Take this year while you're figuring out what you want to do with your life and get your health on track. I started to force myself to eat several times throughout the day, even when I wasn't hungry, eat all of these healthy whole grains, all of these fruit. Well, 18 months later, I was a type 2 diabetic and I was 80 pounds overweight.

Traditionally, I had experienced exactly what the patients had experienced. Keep doing these interventions, everybody, and wait, your diabetes is just getting worse and you're becoming more obese and your kidneys are failing even more.

Jason Fung, he was researching fasting at the same time, because he was getting frustrated. All we're doing is watching people die left, right, and center.

There was no space to dialyze people anymore. We went from not having many patients that need a dialysis, to dialyzing thousands of people 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it was all due to diabetes and obesity.

Jason had actually become really interested in fasting through more of a social conversation that he had with a friend, and he talked to me about it. I was struggling so much with eating. If I wasn't a cook, I was too sick to even want to cook. I barely had enough energy to order a pizza, let alone try to reinvent my whole diet when I was never taught cooking skills, because I was that sick. So it was just easier not to eat, and within six months of starting to fast, I reversed not just the type 2 diabetes, like I brought my A1C down to 4.6. I lost all of the fat, but I also reversed the fatty liver disease and the polycystic ovarian disease that didn't go away as I became older. So in hindsight, in my youth, I was a toffee, I was thin on the outside, but I was fat on the inside. Then I became fat both on the inside and the outside in my mid-20s. But I was fortunate. By the time I was 28 years old, I had control of my health. That's how we actually got into fasting patients.