I’ve Helped People Lose 480,000 Pounds — Eat These 4 Foods Every Day

Welcome back, you guys. I'm glad you're here today. Before we get into this one, I want to say something about the title of this episode because I am not going to tell you something I do not believe just to keep you listening. 50 pounds in 60 days is not a number I can promise you, and I would be careful with anyone who does. Now, at PhD Weight Loss, across more than 13,000 people, Most of our men drop around 3 pounds a week, and most of our women drop around 2. Some are slower, some are faster. Now, if you run that out over 60 days and you are looking at about 20 to 26 pounds, I'd say that's real, that's substantial, that changes how you feel in your body, but it's not 50. Now, some people, it depends on the amount of weight that they have to drop in the first place, they might achieve that. And we have clients achieve that all the time. There are some people who will drop 19, 20 pounds in the first week. So you guys, something like that is totally possible, and we see that happen every week. But I just want to be able to provide you with some realistic expectations. Now you guys, here is what 60 days will do though, and it matters far more than the number ever did. 60 days is long enough to quit the 7 habits keeping your body in fat storage mode. And once those habits are gone, weight stops being something you fight for, becomes something your body's finally willing to release. For plenty of people, that road could end at 50 pounds down. It just does not end there in 60 days. And once you see why, I think you're going to stop the tendency and the, the pattern of just restarting over and over again. Now, if this is your first time listening, I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist, a registered dietitian, and I'm the owner and founder of PhD Weight Loss, where to date we have helped over 13,000 people collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds nationwide. So settle in wherever you are— if you're walking, you're driving, maybe folding some laundry— and let's talk about the 7 habits. Habit 1: eating less and moving more. This is the habit underneath every other habit on the list. And I'm gonna be straight with you. It is the one that breaks my heart the most. People come to PhD eating almost nothing. Their doctor told them, you just need to eat less. You need to take this medication. You need to move more. You know, the diet industry told them this same thing for 30 years. And basically with these medications, they're saying the same thing, right? Take a medication for life so that you eat less. You're just going to be not as hungry, so you're going to consume less calories. Now, I'll often chat with our clients at PhD, and I'll ask them that if what they have eaten over the last 2 years account for the excess 80 pounds that they put on over that same time frame. Right? So, for example, let's say you're carrying 60 pounds and you told me that over the last 3 years you put that 60 pounds on. I would ask if the number of calories they consumed over that time frame accounts for the 60 excess pounds that are on their frame, and they will say no, absolutely not. I was barely eating. I believe them.

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I always have because it was never a math problem. Now here's what's happening for a lot of us in that situation. When you chronically undereat, Your body does exactly what it was designed to do. The body never makes a mistake. It lowers metabolic output to keep you alive. It raises your stress hormones. It pulls from muscle because muscle is expensive to maintain, and your body thinks that there's a famine going on. So you end up with a smaller engine. You have more stress and less of the very tissue that would have kept you burning and would have kept support. supporting your metabolism. Now I want you to sit with that for a second because it might just be the most important thing that I'll say today. Eating less did not fail you. You could think of it that it failed you because it actually worked. It just worked on the wrong thing, right? So then we quit. You guys, what we need to do is we need to eat enough protein, we need to eat enough food, and that's really where this starts, and it is not optional. Habit two is drinking your carbohydrates, juice, regular processed cow's milk, the smoothie you thought was the healthy choice, the acai bowls, beer. Liquid sugar arrives in your bloodstream with nothing to slow it down. Doesn't matter where it comes from. No protein, there's no fat, hardly any fiber. You're gonna have glucose spikes, insulin spikes, and I want you to think of insulin like a When insulin is up, the switch is set to store fat. When it settles, the switch can flip down to burn. You cannot burn fat through a wall of high insulin, and of everything we will talk about today, this is the easiest wall to take down. Now here's a little trick that I give to clients. I urge you to look at your food labels. Take the total carbs on it, on the package. on the label and divide it by 4. That will roughly tell you the number of teaspoons of sugar in that item. So if you have a smoothie that has 40 grams of carbohydrate in it, and most of them have more, but let's say it's 40 grams for this simple math, that's 10 teaspoons. 40 divided by 4, 10 teaspoons. I look at juice like melted candy. Nobody really needs it. Not you, not your grandkids. We don't need orange juice with our cornflakes. We don't need cornflakes either. That beer is like liquid bread, especially if you've got belly fat. So if the fat is sitting on your belly right now, beer is a no for the time being. For the time being. Habit number 3: fearing fat. You have to eat dietary fat to burn body fat in a healthy way. Now I know that that can land in a strange way, especially if you have come up in the low-fat era. I came up in it alongside you. It was hard to shift my mind. One of the books that I really love is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. You should check that out. Now, in my ballet days, I was a professional ballet dancer. I was eating about 5 grams of fat a day. 5. I remember getting to the end of those days feeling so proud of myself, like I had won a medal. But what I was doing to my body was so bad. I was starving my metabolism. My thyroid, my adrenals. I still had high cholesterol because carbs are what drives high cholesterol. I was pre-diabetic, but I just didn't know yet. I thought I was doing everything right. Fat, you guys, dietary fat slows glucose absorption. It keeps food in your stomach longer. It is the reason why a meal holds you instead of leaving you looking in the pantry 90 minutes later. So we're gonna stop the fat-free items. We're gonna stop the fat-free yogurt, the Snackwells, the fat-free popcorn, the fat-free Fig Newtons, the fat-free cottage cheese, the fat-free Coffee-Mate, the diet dressing. We're gonna stop cutting all the fat off of a delicious steak. Instead, we're gonna eat full-fat I'm okay with low-fat too, plain Greek yogurt. Real, we're gonna have real olive oil. We're gonna consume delicious butter on our food. This one change is what ends the 3 o'clock hunt for something sweet. I promise you it's gonna make a big difference. Habit number 4, under-proteining your first and last meal. When you eat, What you eat when you break your overnight fast, I want you to think that it sets the tone for every hour that follows. If that meal is gonna be carb-forward, you're gonna spike your blood sugar, you're gonna crash, and you're gonna spend the rest of the day chasing the low.

Mm-hmm.

So like that Cinnabon at the airport is not serving you. At all. Instead, you're gonna put 40 to 50, I'd say 35 to 50 grams of protein into the first meal. And it doesn't matter what time that happens. And then at dinner, you're gonna do the same thing because that last lump amount of protein, that last bolus, is gonna support muscle repair all night while you sleep. Whatever's left of your protein allotment, you're gonna spread across the middle of the day, into your lunch and your mid-afternoon snack. Remember that muscle is what we are protecting here. It is the largest place that your body has to put the glucose you eat, and it keeps your metabolism responsive as you age. When you drop weight without adequate protein, a meaningful share of what you lose is muscle. People taking GLP-1s, if they are not very, very careful and do all the things you need to do to drop weight anyway, Someone on a GLP-1 still needs to lift weights and eat protein and show up in a healthy way, right? When we don't do this, this is how people end up smaller on the scale but also slower at the same time. And it's exactly why the weight comes back, and it comes back so quickly no matter what route you do if you don't make these changes. But especially with these medications, man, if you don't make these changes and you get off the drug, it will be not good. Now listen, I know this is a lot to carry in your head, and I also know some of you have quit these habits before and you've still stalled out. And that's usually because your body has a specific history that needs a specific plan. And that is the gap that we fill at PhD Weight Loss. We will build you a customized plan around your metabolism, around your health history, and your actual life, and we keep adjusting it as you go because as your body changes, your needs change. Your dietary approach has to shift as you slim down. Now, if you're in a program where the meal plan never changes, that's not gonna serve you. If you want this specific customized kind of support, if you want us to make sure that you're creating not only the dietary changes but the mental and emotional changes too, which by the way are necessary for successful and sustainable weight loss, you should check out myphdweightloss.com and one of our nutritionists will get on the phone with you. They'll learn about you. No medications, no hormones, no chronic exercise or severe calorie restriction. Habit 5, white-knuckling until dinner. You skip lunch, you skip your afternoon snack. You're like, Dr. Ashley doesn't know what she's talking about. I'm not gonna eat my afternoon snack. In the moment, you feel pretty good about skipping that. Then you walk in the door at 6 and you eat everything that is not nailed down. You're eating your kids' or your grandkids' like lunch scraps. Now, I want to name this clearly because people carry so much shame about their evenings, and evenings are a really hard time for people. If you have a hard time in the evening, drop that in the comments below because you will see that you are not the only one. This isn't a weakness, this is actually your physiology. A ravenous body can't make good decisions, especially at the end of the day when you have total decision fatigue. You know, we have a finite amount of willpower. We think it should just be going on and on forever. It is not about that. It's about creating standards. We live by those specific standards. And the standards are, hey, I eat my afternoon snack. But let's say you, Let's say you skipped it because you're just experimenting, right? A ravenous body can't make a good decision, and it cannot even properly use an enormous amount of protein load that's dumped in all at once either. The grazing will also happen after dinner when we don't eat throughout the day for the majority of us, and that grazing that follows is where most people's entire week quietly comes apart. So instead, you're going to eat your lunch And you're gonna eat your afternoon snack around 3 to 4 PM. Full-fat, low-fat, plain Greek yogurt with some seeds, some berries, maybe some bone broth with collagen, maybe a protein shake. It could be a couple of hard-boiled eggs with salt. You could do some chicken or roast beef, deli meat if you're, you know, moving quickly with some avocado or string cheese. This isn't a cheat. This isn't like useless calories. This is how you arrive at dinner. As a person instead of an emergency. Habit number 6, feeding your gut nothing it can use. This is an important one, and for a lot of the people that I work with, it is the thing that really holds the whole structure up. GLP-1, this is the hormone that everyone is talking about because of all these medications. It's actually made in your gut. It's made from the L cells in your intestines and your colon. And it tells your brain, it signals to the brain that you've been fed. This is important because it dictates your fullness signaling. It dictates your appetite regulation. This is your whole ability to feel satisfied and full by a normal amount of food. That infrastructure actually lives in your gut microbiome. So think about what most of us have been feeding it. Years of ultra-processed food. Artificial sweeteners like crazy, probably no fermented food really, and for most of us, not much fiber. Plus round after round of restriction that starved the good bacteria right along with everything else, probably some antibiotics in there. And then we wonder why we never feel full and what's happening in our bodies. So generally we give up on what we're doing. Instead, what we want to do is put fermented food into our day. Sauerkraut on the side, fermented applesauce, kimchi with lunch, fermented salsa. You can use a fermented miso dressing, kefir in your dressing if you like that. You want to make sure you're getting real fiber if your gut tolerates fiber from vegetables and seeds like Zen basil or chia seeds. You're not just fixing digestion, right? You're rebuilding the system that tells your brain that you've had enough. Now, if you want direct support for that gut piece while you rebuild it, this is the product that I am most excited about right now. It is called GLP-1 Gut Longevity Plus, and it combines a next-generation probiotic called Akkermansia. It has— this Akkermansia has been shown to increase natural GLP-1 levels, and I've combined it with other ingredients like Iriomin, which research shows a 37% increase in our natural GLP-1 secretions. Plus, I added powerful polyphenols like grapeseed extract and resveratrol for metabolism, helps to support the gut lining, and healthy aging. Now, it was built for the root of weight regulation— your gut, your metabolic pathways— and you can find it at drashleywellness.com. I crafted this supplement based off of my own research, so it's very unique product. Um, you can check out the link in the description. Make sure you use code ASHLEY10 because that's going to get you 10% off your first purchase or 20% off your first subscription order with free shipping. Habit 7, treating sleep and stress as separate from your weight. If one of our clients tells me that they followed their PhD meal plan perfectly and that the scale did not move for them, I would first look at their food record. And then when I really believe that the food is on point, I would ask 2 questions. And the questions would be, how was your sleep and how was your stress? And I will tell you that 99% of the time that person is living in a high stress state and really no longer recognizes it as unusual. Like this is their new normal. It has become the water that they swim in. Or maybe they're not sleeping and they have made peace with not sleeping, thinking it's not a big deal. Chronic stress, you guys, keeps cortisol out of its natural rhythm, which keeps the body in conservation mode, in this survival mode. A body in this mode holds central fat— central fat, I'm talking about belly fat— as a protected, quick fuel reserve. Right? It's not being difficult with you. Your body's not being difficult with you. It's being careful with you. It's there to protect you. Now, here is the reframe that has changed everything for me. Real safety is not about control. I'm a big control person, but real safety doesn't come from that. Real safety is actually a body that trusts you. This could be as simple as taking pauses throughout the day. Like, if you are like me and you're in back-to-back meetings all day long, it's not scheduling them back-to-back anymore and giving yourself 10 minutes of a break. It could be getting off screens before bed. You know, I like the 10-3-2-1-0 rule. 10 hours before bed, no more coffee. 3 hours before bed, No more food or alcohol. 2 hours before bed, no more work. 1 hour before bed, no more screens. And 0 is the time, number of times that you're gonna hit the snooze button the next day. And not hitting the snooze button the next day also helps to build trust with your body, right? Usually it's more softness coming into the day is what allows your body to build trust. And that is not the soft part of this work. It's actually the part that unlocks the rest of it. So there they are, you guys. Quit eating less and moving more. Quit drinking your carbs. Quit fearing fat. Quit underproteining. That's a new word, underproteining your first and last meal. Quit white-knuckling until dinner. Quit starving your gut and quit treating your sleep and stress like they belong to somebody else's department. That's your department and you. Are the co-creator of it, not the victim, right? You are the only one that can change these things. Give it 60 days, not because 60 days finishes the job, but because it's long enough for your body to start believing you. Your body wants to work for you, and a body that feels safe stops defending the weight. You're not behind. You've just been protected. You can thank your body like, okay, body, thank you. I am safe. I can see that you're protecting me. And when you do this, protection can be renegotiated the moment you stop asking, why is this happening to me? And start asking, why is this happening for me? Right? You are the co-creator. It's up to you to make the change. Now, if this episode has been helpful to you, I would love for you to leave a review if you're watching this on a podcast platform. If you are watching this on YouTube, please subscribe so that you don't miss another video and drop your thoughts in the comments below. Now, if you want to go deeper on this, go back and listen to my episode on stubborn belly fat where I break down the 3 systems that make it so hard to let go of. It pairs really well with what we talked about today, and if you're watching this on YouTube, it'll be right here for you to check out. Remember, you've got to step up to make the change. Lead with your heart, train your mind, and listen to what your body already knows. I'll see you next time.