You're Not Lazy. The Truth About Weight Loss

Hey guys, welcome back. I want to talk today about a word that I think has done much more quiet damage to people trying to lose weight than almost any other word out there. That one word is lazy. Maybe someone has said it to you. Maybe a doctor implied it without quite saying it, or maybe, and this is one that really breaks my heart, maybe You've said it about yourself late at night when the weight won't move and you can't for the life of you figure out why. So today I want to tell you the truth from the science and from more than a decade of sitting across from real people. You are not lazy, and I'm going to explain what is actually going on in your body, in your metabolism. If we haven't met yet, I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist and a registered dietitian, and I'm the founder of PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition, where to date we have served over 13,000 people nationwide and have helped them collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds to date. Now, here's what I hear all the time. Dr. Ashley, I know what to do. I just need to eat everything in moderation. I'm not stupid. I just can't seem to make myself do it consistently. I start strong and then I fall off. I must just be lazy. I need more willpower. I need more discipline. I hear this all the time and I always stop them right there because what they're describing is not a character flaw at all. It's exhaustion. It's the body running on empty and a nervous system that's been stuck in overdrive for so many years. And from the outside, that doesn't look like effort. It looks like laziness. This is why you think that you are lazy, but it's actually the opposite of laziness. It is a body working so hard to protect you that there's nothing left over for anything else.

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So I want to reframe the whole entire thing for you. Laziness is a moral word that we have slapped onto what is really a physiological state. When your body is stuck in what I'm calling survival mode, when it believes it's under threat, it does everything in its power to conserve energy. This means that it slows you down. It makes you really tired. It flattens your motivation. So motivation is really, really hard. And this happens not because you're weak. It happens because, because your body is trying to keep you alive on what it thinks is a very limited supply of fuel. What you've been calling laziness is actually your body being deeply, stubbornly smart. In almost every episode, every video I do, I say that the body never makes a mistake, and it's not making a mistake here either. Super intelligent. So I want to walk you through exactly what's happening, because when you actually understand it, the shame starts to fall away. And shame is just keeping you stuck. It's not doing anything good. So there are 3 systems that run most of this in your body, and the first system is insulin. I want you to think of insulin like a little switch. It's either telling your body to store fat, or it's telling your body to burn it. After years of dieting, after years of blood sugar swings, if you have PCOS, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, even type 1 diabetes, any kind of metabolic dysfunction, you are dealing with this. And a lot of people end up with chronically elevated insulin, and that switch gets stuck on the store mode. You're always just storing fat rather than burning it. So you can, when you're in this state, you can eat less than everyone else at the table and still not lose fat because the signal isn't about how much you're eating, it's about what your body has been told to do with it, right? I always say that the body is much more complicated than calories in and calories out. Yes, they play a part, but the type of calories and when you eat those calories matters just as much for this reason. All right, the second system is cortisol, and cortisol you've probably heard about. It is your stress hormone. When you're under chronic stress, and most of us in today's society, we're under chronic stress. It can be work, family, poor sleep, health, years of dieting itself. When you have these situations happening to your body all the time, or if you've had a lot of these happen for a long period of time, cortisol is going to stay elevated. When you have chronically high cortisol, it tells your body to store, uh, fat. And specifically, it tells your body to store fat around the belly, and it does this as a protective fuel reserve. Also, a perfect storm to store fat around the belly is if you've got low estrogen levels— so think perimenopause or menopause— or if you've got low testosterone and you're a man. So just with general aging in a high-stress environment. So when you have the situation happening, it also drains your energy and it drains your drive. That is a huge part of what feels like laziness, but it really isn't. Now, the third thing, and this is really important, is metabolic flexibility. Metabolic flexibility is your body's ability to switch smoothly between burning carbs for fuel and burning fat for fuel. Now, most people, especially if you are storing fat around the belly, this is you. You have lost that flexibility. This means that you're running on sugar. You're stuck running on sugar. You're crashing, you're craving, and you're feeling totally wiped out by the afternoon. Now, this is not a willpower problem. This is a fuel problem. And the great news is that it's totally fixable. So just a few minutes ago, I told you that we are a lot more complicated than calories in and calories out. That deep belly fat around your organ, it is not just sitting there. It behaves like its own organ. And I've done a lot of videos on the topic of this belly fat. I am so passionate about belly fat. If you are sitting here listening to this, watching this, and you're like, oh my gosh, I struggle with belly fat, then you definitely need to check out that video. I will include the best one in the link in the description. So if you're watching this on YouTube, head on over in there, click the link and watch it. Now, visceral fat, it can be up to only 1/10 of the fat on your body. But in the research, it shows that even just that amount can pump out up to a third of one of the main inflammation signals in your blood. Those signals travel up to your brain and they switch on what researchers call sickness behavior. This is the same fatigue, and the same low motivation and brain fog, let's say, or just a whole body fog, really, that your body creates when you're fighting off an illness. You know, when you have a cold and you're just like, oh my gosh, I can't even get up and muster the energy to go to the bathroom. So when you feel too wiped out to move, this is not a character flaw. This is your own fat stored specifically in the belly, sending your brain a signal to slow down. You are not lazy. You're simply inflamed and you're running on empty. Now, if you have been carrying around this belief that you are just lazy and you are so tired of it because you know inside you are not a lazy person, I want you to know that there is a completely different way to look at all of this. And that is the work that we do every single day at PhD Weight Loss. We don't just hand you a harder diet and tell you to try again or to try to force the weight loss. Forcing your body does not work. We actually figure out why your body has been stuck in the first place, and we build you a specific plan to bring it back into balance so your body can get into this safe state where it feels safe enough to release this excess fat weight that is no longer serving you. If you want to learn more about this process, I urge you to go to myphdweightloss.com. You can check it out in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, Just go to myphdweightloss.com and one of our nutritionists will get to know you and your whole story. Okay, so what changes this situation with the body? What can get our body out of this, quote unquote, laziness mode? It starts with getting your body out of survival mode and back into the state where it feels safe. And I mean this physiologically. It could come across as like some fluffy idea, But when your body feels safe, when it's fed enough food, when it has enough sleep, when it's not under constant stress, it stops hoarding energy and it starts releasing it. That means you need to eat enough, not less. It means protein at your meals, every single meal, to protect your muscle and steady your blood sugar. It means making the right choices around your food and when you're eating. It also means moving your body in a state that reduces stress. So this means walking. It means actually resting, less intense cardio. It means lifting something heavy. I talk about exercise a lot, and it means really taking control of your sleep. All of these things really matter because metabolically they matter every bit as much as the food on your plate. So I always say that, you know, how you think, the stuff that you're taking in, What you're consuming mentally and emotionally, how you're moving your body, how you're sleeping matter just as much as the type of fuel you're putting in your body. It means being done talking to yourself the way that you would never talk to someone you love, because that self-attack actually keeps cortisol really high. And remember, high cortisol keeps you stuck. So kindness, believe it or not, is metabolic. If I have clients coming in to me at PhD Weight Loss and their food is right on par, they're doing everything right, and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm working so hard, it's just not working for me. This is a form of beating themselves up. And I say, you got to stop beating yourself up. You got to give yourself a hug. Let's dive into if it's stress from that self-disdain, right? And when we can solve that, and bring kindness and love into the body, it is wild what the body will do, and it will start releasing the fat weight again. Now, I want to say a word on medication when it comes to weight loss, because I know some of you are wondering, maybe you're on these medications, considering them, wanting to come off. I personally am not completely against these medications for the right person at the right amount with the right time, with a plan. Um, to get off of the medications. They can be a helpful tool for some people, but I want you to hold on to this. You have two honest choices when you look at the decision to use the medications or not. Choice 1: you do the work and you let your body release the weight naturally. And you can do this, by the way, in our program at PhD Weight Loss. We don't use the medications, and our clients drop 2-3 pounds a week, even faster than people on the medications, and they have a higher success rate of fully collapsing the belly fat and keeping it off for good. So this is one option. Or you do just the same work. You still do the work and you add a medication on top of it if you feel like that really is right for you. Look at what stays the same in both, you guys. You have to do the work. There is no version in this world where you get to skip the work and still see a sustainable outcome. Now, there's a really interesting reason for that, and it is older than any diet. When you are handed something you did not earn— say a medication is an example of this— and not doing any of the work underneath it, no dietary shifts, no lifestyle approaches, no change in the mental and emotional aspects of what you're doing. When you are handed this, something that you did not earn, and it could be anything outside of weight loss as well, anything in life, Part of you cannot hold on to it. It feels good for a moment, but then it slips away because the effort is what builds the container that actually holds the result. Now, this is where this old wisdom and the biology turn out to be the same thing. So follow me with this because it's super important. I want you to think of that container in this situation being your metabolism and your body. The food the strength, the sleep, the safety. All the work is what rebuilds it. And a rebuilt metabolism and a rebuilt body is the only thing strong enough to actually hold the weight off for good. An injection, a shot, a pill, it can hand you a smaller body. But if you skipped the work on the other side, you never actually built the container. So there is nowhere to hold the result and your body will find its way back. Now, if you are on one of these right now, one of these medications, I really want you to hear this. That quiet heaviness that you might feel, that sense that something is a little off even as the scale drops, that is not a weakness of yours. It is not the drug. It is your own body knowing the result showed up before the container did. Now, the way out of this is not to feel worse about it. It is to build the container so the weight loss finally becomes yours to keep with a medication or without one. No matter what you decide, you get to keep the end result. So people ask me around the medications, like, when would we ever add one on? I would say only after the foundation is built, only if your body really, really still needs a little help responding. And only with a plan to build you back off of the drug so you're not dependent on it forever. Now, the specifics on this belong in a real conversation with someone who knows your whole history, not on this podcast or not in this video, because the medication is never the transformation. This is so important. We don't want to put the weight on the medication. Your body is the transformation. Instead, what we're going to do if you were to work with us at PhD Weight Loss is build you off of it, off of the drug, not onto it. So I want to leave you with this. The word lazy has never once described you. What it's described is your body doing exactly what it was built to do under pressure. The moment you stop fighting that body and you start listening to what it's telling you, the moment you start giving it safety instead of punishment, everything for you is gonna begin to shift no matter what your decision is. Say medication or no medication. Also, you were never the problem. You've just been carrying a body that has been working overtime to protect you. And when you finally work with it instead of against it, it's going to meet you halfway. If this episode spoke to you, the most helpful thing you can do if you're listening to this on a podcast platform is to leave a 5-star review. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe because it really helps more people who feel exactly this way to find these conversations. Weight loss is so confusing. There are so many conversations out there, and I hope to provide you a north star in your journey. Now, if you are watching this on YouTube and you want to keep going, go back and listen to this episode right here. And this is episode— I talk about losing stubborn belly fat. I break down the same systems and walk you through exactly how to start shifting them. 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.