The 4 Hidden Reasons You Can't Lose Weight.

A friend of mine once looked at a framed photo of me standing on a bodybuilding stage. This was back in college, uh, 215 pounds, 3% body fat, and actually asked me if I Photoshopped my head onto that body. I didn't. I spent 3 years leading up to that point cracking the code on burning tons of fat without wasting into malnourished, muscle-depleted oblivion. Uh, and then after that, I did 13 Ironman triathlons and then 4 years of professional obstacle course racing. And in the mix over 20 years of just experimenting on my own body with all these different tools, many of them related to body composition. So my approach to fat loss goes far beyond the age-old advice to just move more and eat less, which is good advice, but there's a lot more to it than that. When it comes to losing fat fast, staying shredded and toned year-round without, say, two-a-day workouts and being cold and starving and hangry all the time, there are potent strategies that fly under the radar. So in this video, you're about to discover 4 simple reasons why you are not burning fat, why you might be resistant to weight loss, or why you are piling on pounds, and exactly what you can do to turn yourself into a fat-burning machine. Inflammation. You've probably heard that fat cells don't go away, never go away, that if you've ever had excess weight on your waist or your hips or your butt, those fat cells never disappear even with weight loss. They just shrink. Now, that's been the commonly accepted dogma in the fitness and diet industry for years, but that simply isn't the case. There is something that you can do to annihilate fat cells. And it's not just cutting carbs, and it's not just more cardio. It's controlling and knowing about inflammation. Here's what most people don't realize: inflammation can make fat cells resistant to death, causing higher insulin levels to accumulate in your blood. And in the response, your body reduces the metabolism of stored body fat while simultaneously just churning out more and more inflammatory cytokines. So if you're already eating less and moving more and the scale just won't budge, often inflammation is one of the significant underlying reasons why. Now, not all inflammation is bad. Acute inflammation, like right off the bat after a workout, for example, is a natural biological reaction to stressors like cuts or exercise. But chronic inflammation from overloading your body with physical stress and mental stress and diet stress makes fat cells resistant to dying and reduces your body's ability to metabolize stored body fat. One example of inflammation is high consumption of rancid, excessively heated, and fried oils such as the canola, safflower, peanut, and sunflower oils so commonly found in restaurants and in popular ultra-processed foods. When these oils become oxidized, and they are a little bit more fragile and a little bit more prone to oxidation, this can drive chronic inflammation throughout your body. Including inflammation of cholesterol. Chronic stress is a second major cause of inflammation. Chronic stress pushes your limbic system into a fight and flight response, triggering what's called a cytokine cascade and systemic inflammation throughout your entire body. If that stress just runs out of control all the time, you pair that with lack of proper polyphenol and flavanol and natural antioxidant intake from a nutrient-dense diet rich in, say, plants or anti-inflammatory substances or compounds or supplements, and that can be another big cause of resistance to weight loss. So the takeaway here: cut out rancid oils and fried foods, ultra-processed foods, and oils and fats that you don't know the source of when you're eating out at a restaurant. Manage chronic stress and eat a colorful diet, or at least consume compounds that would normally come from a colorful diet. Those are 3 big levers for controlling inflammation and keeping fat loss resistance at bay. Cortisol and stress. You just learned that stress drives inflammation, but stress has a second, completely separate mechanism that is also potentially blocking your fat loss. Now, I've personally coached a lot of lean, hard-charging Type A athletes who are already doing everything right, and they still couldn't eliminate that last little bit of belly fat. But once they learned how to manage stress and reduce cortisol, that extra belly fat often vanished, much to their surprise and satisfaction. And here's why. Cortisol suppresses insulin secretion, especially when it's just churned out all the time. That inhibits glucose uptake into your cells and disrupts insulin signaling to muscle tissue. And that means that chronic stress and out-of-control cortisol levels all the time directly cause insulin resistance, which can lead to weight loss resistance, increased inflammation, which you already learned about earlier in this video, and elevated blood fats. And here's what most people never consider: even exercise, when performed in excess, can leave you chronically stressed, with elevated cortisol levels. There are other stressors that spike cortisol: relationship conflicts, work stress, excess social media use, anger, anxiety, toxins from your food, toxins from your environment paired with lack of nature time. The list goes on and on. But one of the best ways to know if you're chronically stressed is to use a simple tool that's accessible to a lot of people now: your heart rate variability. You can measure the HRV, which is the variability in the amount of time between heartbeats, and that's used to track your nervous system health. And the balance between the two different branches of your nervous system. A high HRV can indicate a low state of stress, while a low HRV could be a clue, even without getting blood and salivary and urine measurements, that your body is producing excess cortisol or becoming somewhat resistant to weight loss. Any wearable or app should be able to show you when your HRV is low and even give you tips about what to do about that. Not moving enough. The brutal truth is that for many people, sitting for 8 hours a day does just not expend enough energy to counterbalance breakfast breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snacks, no matter how much exercise you're doing at the beginning or the end of the day. Even in people who exercise, say hit the gym before work or hit the gym after work, habitual sedentary behavior such as sitting at work all day long without moving is associated with metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality. And here's what most people never consider: sitting, and even just like standing in one position for too long a period of time, can place you at risk for heart issues during exercise because a hard workout at the end of a sedentary day becomes an attempt to force blood through what is basically kinked blood vessels. When you're regularly sedentary for extended periods of time, your blood sugar levels go haywire. You have a high amount of what's called glycemic variability because a low level of physical activity causes unfavorable changes in insulin signaling, in glucose transport, and in the activity of something called lipoprotein lipase. That's a mouthful. It's the primary enzyme responsible for breaking down fats. Now, research suggests that the effects of being sedentary, including insulin resistance, which I talked about earlier in this video, are partly independent of the amount of time spent in moderate and vigorous physical activity. The solution? Well, move more, especially when you're at work, which is when most people tend to move the least. While a formal hard gym workout at the beginning or the end of the day isn't technically necessary for weight loss, low-level physical activity throughout the entire day is, including things like Pre- and post-meal walks and brief exercise snacks during the day like air squats, jumping jacks, or push-ups. Hack your environment in such a way that you're forced to constantly move. Chronic cardio. No gym these days seems complete without a whole room or many rooms devoted to treadmills and stationary bikes and elliptical trainers. But cardio tends to be vastly misunderstood as a fat-burning tool. The general belief amongst, say, the jogging crowd is that running melts fat off the belly like butter. The best way to burn calories. But the truth is a bit more nuanced than cardio is good or cardio is bad. And here's why. Endurance training, especially a ton of it, a voluminous amount of endurance training and chronic cardiovascular exercise, create a state of extreme metabolic efficiency. Your body learns to work as efficiently as possible when you're running 8 miles a day to protect you and to conserve calories. And you know what weight is more or less unnecessary when you run? Muscle. And you know what a great source of stored usable energy is for cardio? Body fat. So when you perform increasingly grueling, long, low-intensity aerobic, pound the pavement for an hour a day cardio sessions, your body tends to get rid of muscle and just store a little bit of extra fat. This would be like the skinny fat marathoner that you see running down the street every morning. So when your body sheds muscle and stores fat, it also downregulates anabolic hormones that help you to burn fat, things like testosterone and growth hormone. The less muscle mass you have, the less fat you tend to burn because your metabolic rate tends to decrease. Your body will eventually adapt to long endurance cardio sessions by burning energy more efficiently, using less and less of your stored body fat. So research suggests that aerobic exercise and cardio are effective only when you're both overweight and new to exercise. Do a Google image search for sprinter versus marathon. Many marathoners, especially recreational ones, even have a visible paunch of fat at the waistline or the lower belly. Now, if you don't like that look and that's not what you're going for, if you're already active, swap long steady-state aerobic cardio for something like HIIT, high-intensity interval training, where you alternate between short bursts of intense effort and brief rest periods, like sprinting and then walking, over and over again. Now, one study found that after 20 weeks, people who performed HIIT exercise lost more body fat than the people who engage in just steady-state aerobic endurance endurance training. Most HIIT sessions last a maximum of about 30 minutes, which gives you a lot more bang for your buck than an hour on the treadmill or the elliptical. Now here's the last thing to think about in this video. Before you go chasing a perfect shredded physique, understand this: everybody is different, and so is every body. If you've nailed every element that I just talked about in this video and you still just can't lose more weight and can't get any leaner. Well, you may have reached what is called healthy homeostasis. Excessive exercising and excessive dieting while beating your bodies to smithereens with fat loss biohacking is not going to shrink your waistline. In fact, it's more likely to downregulate the vital components of having boundless energy, like relationships and satisfaction and happiness. Get this, here is something to think about, and this is something they don't tell you on social media influence channels or the COVID of magazines. This is based on research. A healthy body fat percent is about 11 to 22% for men and 22 to 35% for women. So don't just myopically burn fat at all costs. Consider the fact that in many cases the modern popular world is lying to you when it comes to what a healthy lean body actually should be. Here's one final potent tip that you can try this week. Every morning, or on as many mornings of the week as possible, try the Strike, Stroll, Shiver strategy. So here's how it goes. First, strike. Strike means you consume some form of caffeine like black coffee or green tea. That just mildly speeds up fat oxidation. Second, stroll. Perform 10 to 40 minutes of light fat-burning aerobic activity at an easy conversational pace. I'm not talking about frowny-faced hour on the elliptical trainer. I'm literally talking about like walking the dog or strolling around the block while you check emails on your phone. Now, that's a very low barrier to entry way to move each morning without having to feel like you have to go and do a soul-crushing gym workout. And then after strike and after stroll comes shiver. You finish with 2 to 5 minutes of cold. This could be a cold shower, a cold plunge, jump in a river or lake or ocean if that happens to be near your house. Now, that sparks your metabolism and burns just a little bit of extra calories fat in your fasted state. Now, should some of you be skeptical of the Strike, Stroll, Shiver strategy, I will admit there's zero formal research or double-blinded human clinical studies on using this strategy, but there's plenty of poly-anecdotal data. That means that I and my clients and many of the friends that I've shared this with use it to get lean and to stay lean year-round. And if you combine that strategy with the other tips that I've given you throughout this video, you'll be fast track to get the ideal healthy body composition that you dream of. Thanks for watching this video. Hit subscribe, hit like, share it wherever you're seeing it, and I'll see you next time.