DAILY HACKS for LASTING & SUSTAINABLE WEIGHT LOSS | Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

80% of us change our eating behavior in response to stress. Most patients aren't looking for short-term change. They're looking for real transformation in their lives. Talk about some of the sort of.

Hunger cues and how we kind of get off track with that and how we can start to regulate our hunger. Because what most people say to me is, I don't know how I'm going to do this because I'm hungry and I get cravings and it's hard and I don't know what to do. And it's really a struggle.

I mean, the first thing as you were just touching on there is really identifying what are you hungry for, right? Because as I mentioned, you know, we're often eating to fill that hole in our heart, not our stomach. And I had this really nice exercise in the book that I think your audience will probably really like. It's called the 3Fs or the freedom exercise. And, you know, let's say someone's listening to this, Mark, and they're sitting on their sofa. In the evening, it's 8:30 at night, they've got the television on and they feel like having some ice cream, right? Let's say, because that's pretty common for people to feel like that in the evening. Okay, so the first F is feel. Just take a pause for a minute. You can write it down if you want or just think, what am I really feeling? Am I hungry for food or am I hungry for something else? Right? So it could be, oh, actually I'm really stressed today. I've been on Zoom calls all day and I've not managed to go out yet. Or it could be, I've had a row with my partner or the children's bedtime took too long. Or as many people are facing now, Mark, I'm lonely. You know what? I've not seen anyone. And actually, that food is providing a bit of nourishment for me. So, first F is feel. What are you feeling? The second F is feed. How does food feed that feeling? Okay, I'm feeling stressed. When I eat ice cream, For 20 minutes or so, I feel less stressed. Okay, now you're building in awareness, right? So, without that awareness, it can be very hard for somebody to change in the long term. And the third F is fines. Now that you know what the feeling is, now that you know how food feeds that feeling, can you find now a non-food behavior to feed the same feeling? So, if you're stressed out, it could be maybe I'll run myself a bath instead of having ice cream. or maybe I'll do 10 minutes of yoga from YouTube. Or as we were saying before, if you're lonely, maybe actually you're better off phoning a friend or phoning your parents. You know, for many of us, we use food instead of something else. And I've used that kind of, I've used that exercise with patients for many years now. And it's hard to change straight away, right? You can't necessarily change it the first time. But you just start to build in that awareness. So day after day, week after week, I was actually doing an interview last week and the journalist said to me, she said, Dr. Sherry, that's so interesting because two days ago I was driving home from work and I went into a fast food restaurant. I had fried chicken and fries, even though I'm trying not to, I had it. And that exercise now really makes sense to me because I enjoyed it in the moment. I felt disgusting afterwards. I didn't sleep well. I woke up with a headache the next day. and she goes, Now that you've just told me that exercise, now when I'm in that position next time, I'll just take a pause and really try and figure out what's going on. So, you know, as you said about hunger, the first thing is, what do we truly hunger for? Now, if we are hungry for food, that's okay, right? If we're hungry for food, it's going to be very hard to resist eating if you're always hungry. Very, very hard if you're fighting hunger, which I know, Mark, you've always spoken about in your books is like, you know, let me Let me help you eat in a way where you're not constantly fighting hunger, where you feel satisfied and full. And in the book, I write about something that I call Blissy Foods. So, Blissy Foods are, you know, these are the food products that are about as far away as possible from the real foods that both you and I like to promote people can eat. And so, what are these Blissy Foods, right? These Blissy Foods are products that tend to have been designed by the food industry with these clever combinations of fats, sugar and salt to be quite literally irresistible. And a lot of people don't really understand the neuroscience of this and what's really going on. So our brain is wired to uniquely respond to certain properties in food. So certain kinds of carbs, starch, sugar, protein, fat, salt, even the umami flavor that you get in cooked meats and broths and seaweeds. When you eat these foods in certain combinations, your brain releases a chemical called dopamine. And dopamine is the learning molecule. Dopamine helps to, you know, dopamine does many things. It creates these feelings of intense reward in your brain. These really feel good intense feelings of rewards. So much so that if you keep eating these Yeah, you keep eating those foods, very soon the dopamine starts to get released in anticipation of eating those foods. So not even when you're eating them, the sights, the smell, being in the same location as you were before when you ate them. And actually, I find it useful to explain this to patients because then they understand, oh, my biology is changing, my neurochemistry is actually starting to change. So that's why it can be so hard to resist when you're being exposed to those foods. And Mark, I had this patient in her 30s who was trying her best to eat well, right? She would buy cookbooks, she'd be motivated in her kitchen to cook. But you know what? In her job, it's really interesting in her job, she'd often finish about 7:30 p.m. This is pre-pandemic. And she would drive home. And at one of the roundabouts, Do you guys have, do you call them roundabouts?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

She would drive it and this roundabout there would be a very well-known fast food restaurant there. And the smell off that food would permeate the air around that roundabout. And she said, Dr. Chassy, I'm trying my best, but at least two times a week, I'm tired, I'm stressed out after the day, that smell hits me and I have this overwhelming feeling that I have to eat it. So I stop and eat it. and I explained to her about dopamine. And then I said to her, I said, listen, is there an alternative route for you to drive home? And she said, yeah, but it will take me a good 10-15 minutes longer. I said, you know what? For the next few weeks, I honestly want you to try this as an experiment. Take the other routes home. And so she started taking the other route home. She doesn't pass the junk food store, right? temptation's not there. And I promise you, that was the only change we had to do because suddenly she's no longer having to fight temptation. She gets home, cooks a healthy, wholesome meal, and over the next few months, she lost significant amounts of weight and she didn't feel as though she was even trying. So again, with this personalized approach, Mark, that was the right approach for her. It may not be for me, it may not be for someone else, but for her understanding dopamine allowed her to take a different route home.

Well, most of us don't really realize that the food that we eat has effects on our brain in ways that control our behavior. And then it's not a moral failing or some problem with your psychology, although sometimes it is a trauma, but sometimes it's just damn biology that hijacks you and doing the things you said, you really literally can stop and end all those hunger cravings. So that's just great. You know, one of the things that you also talk about is our environment. And I think this is something that that most people don't understand is you can self-sabotage by having the wrong environment. So, for example, if I'm trying to get off coffee and I have coffee in my house, probably not a good idea. Or if I'm trying to get off ice cream and I got a freezer full of ice cream, probably a problem. So talk about how do we structure our environments for making our lives more effective in terms of achieving our goals, whether it's weight loss or anything else.

Yeah, environment is arguably the number one thing to try and influence because our environment influences our behavior so much more than we think. We kind of feel we've got some sort of super willpower that we can resist all this temptation, but it's simply not true. Our environments influences our behavior so much. We know there's so much data on this. There's research showing that if you live within a half mile radius of your house, there are six fast food restaurants compared to three, I think it's 40% more likely you're going to be overweight or obese. I think in schools, if they ban snacking in classrooms and in corridors, the BMI goes down on average by 11%. No one's changing, you know, telling people what to eat. They're just saying you can only eat in the eating space and the canteen, right? You can't eat everywhere else. So our environment really influences this massively. So what can we do? Well, I've always said, control the environments you can control. And I've heard you say this for years as well, Mark. It's like, let's not use willpower out there. I mean, it's hard out there. Make sure your house is a safe zone. So, I have a rule that in our house, we don't bring in the foods that I'm trying to avoid by and large. Now, if they ever do come in, you know what? I'm human just like everyone else. I can know the science. I can know about dopamine. But you have that stuff in the house. if I'm tired and stressed and the TV's on in the evening, I'm gonna open the packet of chips or crisps.

You know, or biscuits just like anyone else. Yeah, biscuits means cookies in the UK for those listening. Yeah, I'm so- Biscuits sounds healthy, biscuit.

Sounds healthy, and you mean cookies. I mean cookies, I mean cookies. Yeah, but then also, you know, what is the food you are gonna expose yourself to in your environment? So, you know, make sure it's fruit that you've got out. Make sure it's like, you know, chopped carrots and hummus or whatever it is you want to be inputting signals into your brain. You know, I'm not encouraging people to overeat more than they should be eating, but if you are going to have food around, make sure it's the food that's really going to help support your health and promote health and longevity, not the one that's going to take away from that. Your toaster, right? If you have a toast habit, put your toaster in a cupboard, right? Don't have it on the counter.

It's a-- Forget it, don't have the bread for the toaster. That's the big problem.

Yeah, so don't bring that into the house in the first place. But it's like, you know, if you, it's like trying to make the habits, trying to make the behaviors that you're trying to avoid, make it harder to do those behaviors, right? But then the behaviors you do want, right? Make it easier to do them. And, you know, we spoke about this on when I came on your show last year, Mark, with my last book on habit change and five minute snacks. But, you know, one of my favorite tips at the moment frankly, for anyone here in the UK, we're in a third complete national lockdown. So pretty much everyone or most of the population are working from home, right? And it's really affecting people's mental health and well-being, especially in the dark British winter now. It's not like last March and April when it was springtime. It is dark, it is cold. People are really struggling. But one of my favorite tips, and it's also in the book, is that In your kitchen, right? If you have a kettle bell or you have a dumbbell, and many people do these days, because in the lockdowns they all sold out everywhere, I say keep it next to your coffee machine, right? I can see you've got a coffee machine in the background there, Mark, in the image, right? Keep a dumbbell, buy your espresso machine. And here in the UK, if you, you know, many people will have at least three hot drinks a day, a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. Right? So I'm saying, okay, every time you go into your kitchen to make a hot drink, if all you do is lift up that dumbbell and do five bicep curls on each arm, right? If you have three hot drinks a day, you will lift that weight 30 times. In a week, that's over 200 times. In a month, that's nearly a thousand times. And the beauty is, Mark, in the moment, it will feel like nothing. and why that's so powerful is it helps to build up your self-esteem, your resilience. You feel better about yourself. You know, it's not like a 40 minute workout. Great if you can do that, but these small things, it's that feel great, lose weight. Do that every day. You're going to feel better about yourself and that's going to ripple into other areas of your life. You're going to want to make better choices around your food. And I love that I use that tip myself and I don't have to lose weight. I do it because it helps improve how I feel about myself.

Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, you know, these tiny little steps that seem like nothing but add up. And this is really a science of behavior change. I know you've studied with BJ Fogg. He's been on my podcast. And there really is a science around incorporating simple changes that you want to do, that you're motivated to do, that you have the ability to do, and you need a trigger to do. So what you're talking about, some say you're motivated to do a little exercise. You have the ability to do the exercise.

And the trigger is having your drink, having a little cup of hot tea. But it's also about having the weight visible. Like we're like, let's make the food we don't want to eat.

Well, that's the trigger. Right, right. Yeah.

Let's make, I say, like my wife and I for years have had a debate whether the dumbbell and kettlebell should be visible in the kitchen or it should be packed away tidily.

If you want me to be buff, if you want me to be, if you want your stud husband, you gotta, Let me have that out there in the kitchen on the counter, right?

Hey, listen, from a health and safety perspective, I'm not asking people to have an accident, but I have to trip over my dumbbell to put my kettle on, which means even if all I do is lift it up to move it, I'm still lifting the weights. And so it's about applying behavior change to everything. It's about applying the rules of behavior change to everything we want, whether that's weight loss, mental health, fiscal, whatever it is, don't try and think willpower will be enough because in the long term, it rarely will be.

You know, looking at what's happening to our population, we've gone from in America from, I think, a rate of about 2% obesity or 4% obesity to like 42% obesity in the time of my lifetime. And in the UK, it's coming close to that and Europe is right behind. And yet, you know, we spend billions and billions of dollars as, people, literally the weight loss industry, is billions and billions of dollars. And people still struggle. And what most people try doesn't work and they tend to drop a few pounds, they gain it back and it's a vicious cycle and over the years they end up getting into real trouble. And we do see this increasing burden of obesity related diseases that's now killing over 11 million people a year. And so we're kind of stuck. Now, what are some of the key ways that you have reframed things according to what you call the four Ws and maybe the 1H to rethink the problem of how we lose weight and sustain the weight loss?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, Mark, and as you so well pointed out, this is a massive problem not just in the US, not just in the UK, but in many, many countries around the world. And we're all struggling to find, you know, what is the best way? Is there a way that's going to work for everybody? And many different people are trying. And we're all trying to contribute in the best way that we can to help tackle this problem. But the reason I wrote this book, Mark, is because I felt that in the common narrative, what I felt was missing was a compassionate approach to this issue. A lot of the approaches are based on deprivation, restriction, punishing regimes. I think those things can work in the short term for sure. You can do any diet or regime for two or three weeks and you'll probably feel better. But as you know what most patients, yes, that can be helpful, but most patients aren't looking for short term change. They're looking for real transformation in their lives. They want more energy. They want to feel great, right? They don't want to lose weight and feel that their life it's not going the way they want to. And I've seen this with many patients, Mark, that they were so, they had to really punish themselves to lose weight. And yes, they lost weight, but they weren't liking themselves. They didn't enjoy who they were. And what I tried to do is, as you say, there's so many books on this topic already. What can I contribute that might be fresh? Because I'm not interested in writing a book that's already been written. I'm interested in trying to contribute maybe a fresh perspective that may help some people who've not been helped with other approaches. And it's a it's a very rounded approach. So I split the book up into yes, what we eat, which of course, what we eat is, you know, you've written many fantastic books on this topic about what we should be eating to fuel our bodies. But often what doesn't get written about also is why we eat, you know, what's driving us to eat certain things, even when we know they're probably not helping us. And so that could be stress, loneliness, boredom, all kinds of emotional issues, which I don't feel are tackled enough. So it's what we eat, why we eat, when we eat, how we eat, and also where we eat. And I felt that was quite a fresh way of looking at this, looking at these five separate areas. But the underlying belief mark behind this book is I've been seeing patients for 20 years now. I know you've been seeing patients for a lot longer than I have, but in those 20 years, I found that you can almost always help somebody lose weight in a sustainable way in one that works them in the long term once you find the right approach for them. And I think that's what my book does. It helps people find what is the right approach for me.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's funny. I love the way you titled it, which is Feel Great, lose weight, not lose weight, feel great. And I think that's a very, that's a very important distinction because, you know, my framework is not actually telling people to lose weight, is to get them healthy. And as you create Health, the side effect is weight loss. Yeah. I just spot on. Well, I think that's what you talk about in the book. That's so important that people don't understand, is that as you regulate your body's biological systems, as you eat in a way and live in a way and address all those five aspects, you know, what, why, where, when and how of food, we automatically will regulate the brain chemistry and the hormones that are causing us to overeat or to crave the wrong things or to want things at the wrong time of day or, you know, we're setting our biology straight in a way that makes it not about hunger, deprivation or lack or starvation or even calorie restriction. And I think most people don't understand that weight loss is really not about calorie restriction or any of those other things. It's about, in some ways, it's more about those other four things than what you eat. I mean, yes, you have to focus on what, but you also have to focus on all these other aspects that you address that most people aren't really looking at. And it's funny, and I just finished, my book also came out, the Pegan Diet, and afterwards someone pointed out, Dr. Hyman, you wrote a whole book on food. nothing in there about weight loss. And I was like, you know, you're right. And I think that that was semi-intentional semi-an accident. But, but it, you know, was eat great for your mood or eat for longevity or, you know, eat as the regentarian or how to personalize nutrition or, you know, what different. There's all sorts of different things in there, but they're all about, they're all about helping the body get reset to its natural Factory settings. And when you create health, disease goes away, which you wrote in your book, How to Make Disease Disappear, and also the weight just comes off automatically. And I think when you focus on weight loss, it's often a punitive thing. And I think that's the thing I love about your book, Feel Great Lose Weight. It's not blaming the victim. It's not saying, oh, you're just a glutton. You're not able to control yourself. You don't have enough willpower. That's why you can't lose weight. And that that is an incredible stigma that's put on people who have weight issues. And if you look at the data on children, for example, if you're in a wheelchair and you're a quadriplegic kid, you're less likely to be stigmatized than if you're an overweight kid. That's pretty shocking. And so tell us more about how we can kind of think about these other aspects. For example, when we're thinking about You know, one of these other aspects about why we're eating or where you're eating. Tell us, dive down into some of these sort of more subtle aspects of your book.

Yeah, so why we eat is the second section of these five sections in the book. And I've got to say it's my favorite one. It's the one that I really put my heart and soul into the whole book, but that one in particular, I don't think is getting enough air time. and I nearly started the book with it actually, but I chose not to. I went with what We Eat in the End because I kind of thought we're so conditioned to only thinking about that aspect when it comes to our health and weight loss that I thought, let me meet people where they're at and then move them over into these other areas. But why we eat, so look, the best way I can describe it is we used to only eat to fill a hole in our stomachs. Now we eat to fill a hole in our hearts, right? When we're lonely, we eat. When we're bored, we eat. When we're stressed, we eat. When we feel disconnected, we eat. And that's okay. But you've got to understand that, right? A lot of the time this is going on in the background. We don't take time to understand that and we keep looking for the latest diet book to give us the solution. Look, the times in which we're living, Mark, I guess are the perfect way to describe this. So, in the pandemic, with these lockdowns, with these restrictions, many people have put on weight. I don't know about the American media, but the UK media have these terms like the Corona Stone, the Quarantine 15. So, the people recognize that they're- COVID 19. Yeah, I didn't know that one, but yeah. A lot of people, especially when they're seeing the evidence for what that does to their risk of complications, they're getting quite stressed and they're looking for a new diet book to help them get on top of things. But what if that's the wrong place to look for some people? So the research suggests that about 80% of us change our eating behavior in response to stress. 45% of us or so will eat more 35% or so will eat less. So that's almost half the population are eating more in response to stress, right? So if that's you or me, if we're eating more in response to stress and we're putting on weight, do we need a new diet book or do we need better strategies managing stress? It's the same with sleep, for example. Like sleep, a lot of people are sleep deprived at the moment. A lot of people are worried, they're anxious. we know from the data that if you sleep, let's say five and a half hours a night compared to eight hours, you're gonna eat on average 22% more calories the following day. So five days of not sleeping well, you may eat a whole extra day's worth of calories just from not sleeping well. And, you know, I'm sure your audience may be familiar with this, but what happens when you don't sleep well? Well, well, ghrelin, your hunger hormone goes up, so you're always feeling hungry. your satiety hormones go down so you never feel full. You're more emotionally reactive in your brain. You find it harder to say no to temptation. So some of my patients, Mark, I can remember this 44 year old lady who every January would go on a brand new diet. She'd have a bit of success. Then by March, she was back to where she was before. She was even heavier. That wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing was actually that her self-esteem had gone. And that's the funny thing about the diet industry, Mark. It's the only industry where we don't blame the diet we're following. We blame ourselves. We feel like we're worthless, which speaks to what you said before, which is why I think the first paragraph in the book says, it's not your fault. Right. So really try and understand that, hey, you know what? This is not your fault. So that 44 year old.

And by the way, you know, the message that we're all here, which is losing weight is about eating less and exercising more. Implicit in that statement is that it's your fault. If you can't control your hunger and you can't get your lazy butt off the couch, it's your fault. And that is the biggest propaganda that's been put on our population that undermines people's self-worth, like you're saying, and undermines their ability to actually understand how their body works and lose weight in a way that is integrity with their natural biological systems, which they're not doing. And so keep going. I think this is really an important point around the blame, not blaming the victim.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, just to finish off on sleep. So that lady, that 44 year old lady, I helped her lose significant amounts of weight sustainably without her even trying. I didn't actually have to focus on her diet. I just got her sleeping eight hours a night. And actually, what she was sleeping eight hours a night, It was like a ripple effect. She made better choices in every other aspect of her life. And again, the point of this book is to help people find the right approach for them. For someone else, it might be changing what they eat. For someone, it might be why we eat. But if we personalize that approach, we're much more likely to be successful rather than trying to follow a one-size-fits-all. But what you said about blame Mark, there's another section in the book which I think really speaks to this. And that's, You know, I know you know the ACEs study with Dr. Vincent Felitti and how he's shown- What does ACEs mean? Adverse childhood experiences. So if we have been, you know, if we have gone through, you know, there's a list of what these- Child.

Abuse, beating, emotional abuse, abandonment, physical, mental.

Emotional, then we're significantly more likely to be overweight and obese later on in life, which kind of makes sense if you really think about it. But But again, this is missing from the conversation around weight loss. And I detail a case study in the book. I remember really well this lady I saw. I think I saw her when she was about 19 or 20. And she was really struggling to lose weight. She was carrying a lot of excess body fat. And she said, Dr. Chachi, what's interesting is I never used to. Like this, this only happened in the last few years. I'm not entirely sure what's happening. and we tried various things. We weren't getting anywhere. And as I got to know her better, Mark, I could. I started to pick up that there was something else going on here. We started to unpick that when she was 16, she was in an abusive relationship. Right. With it. With it. With a. With a man. And I. I could tell that there was real unexplored, unresolved emotion with that. I sent her for some therapy, and in those therapy sessions, it turned out that. she was being abused when she was 16. And then her strategy to not be in that position ever again was to put on weight. And what I mean by that is this, she never wanted to be in an abusive relationship again. So her subconscious mind basically thought, hey, listen, if I put on weight, I'm no longer gonna be unattractive, I'm no longer gonna be attracted to men. Therefore, I will never be in an abusive relationship again. and it was only when we sat, we managed to unpick that in therapy over a course of months and even into years, once she had processed that emotional trauma, right? The weight started to come off. But there was no point beating her up saying, you,'re being lazy, you're not following the diet, you're not moving enough. That wasn't the right approach for her. And Mark, I tell you one of the most gratifying things, because I nearly didn't write this book, because I thought, why go into a device of area like weight loss? you start writing about weight loss and you start getting attacked because you're like, you know, we can talk about body positivity shortly. I'm largely in agreement with people saying we shouldn't, I'm definitely in agreement saying that we shouldn't shame people who are carrying excess body fat, which is different from not being able to talk about what are the consequences of that from a health perspective. It's two separate arguments. But since the book came out, Mark, I've had so many messages particularly on Instagram from people saying, Dr. Chesi, I just want to thank you for writing that section. And one lady in particular said, I can now see why the last 20 years I've not managed to stick to anything. I was also abused when I was 16 and reading that section has made me phone up a therapist. I've now got a session booked and I'm now going to get back on top of my life. And that's why we write these books, Mark, it's because just for that one person who read that, and now is going to take action and realize that she's not a failure. For me, that's worth it.

Amazing. Yeah, I think, you know, I think it's important to sort of this why is so important. It's underappreciated. And I often joke and I see, you know, often we don't ask the right questions. We ask, what are you eating? Not what's eating you. And I often would ask my patients when they want to open the fridge or the pantry to get something, I say, ask yourself two questions. what am I feeling and what do I need? You know, am I lonely? Do I need to call a friend? Am I hungry? Do I need to eat? Am I tired? Do I need to sleep? You know, am I angry? Do I need to, you know, get it off my chest? Like what is really driving it? And, you know, it's often different for different people, but it's that other layer that we don't think about, which is in our way, that is those beliefs or those mental obstacles or those sort of missed cues. But one of the challenges I find with people is that, they spend days and hours and hours, weeks researching their vacation spot and rental and what the restaurants are going to go to and the rare planes are going to do and what they're going to bring and what they're going to pack and everything they need. And most people don't give five minutes of thought to planning their nutritional week. What is my week going to look like? Where is my food going to come from? What do I have to get? How do I have to prepare? How do I not end up in a food emergency? How do I have the things around that actually work. And I, I, I, I do it now automatically, but I understand it's not something that people normally have. So I have, for example, in the morning, I, I'm doing, like, a shake now. I'm trying to, like, put on some muscle, and I'm just focusing on this super shake that I've been creating. But I have all the ingredients on the counter, and I make sure I have my bananas I buy that are, or my frozen fruit that I buy, and it's in the freezer, and I have everything ready. So. And I buy extra jars of the macadamia milk, so I, I have everything just all there. So it's super quick and easy for me to do, but if I had to, like, go shopping and I forgot this and I didn't do that and it would be very difficult. And so I think sometimes it's even as extreme as people organizing their fridges with Tupperware with pre-cut vegetables and pre-cut fruit and pre-cut all these prepared things that are easy to make. And I see people who do that and it's like, wow, that's even next level for me. I just make sure that you have to think about what you're doing. You have to plan what you're doing to plan your activity. And I think we don't schedule ourselves first. We schedule ourselves last and then eating is an afterthought and it just becomes, well, I don't know, let me go get some this and something quick or package this or, you know, just eat crap, whatever is there. And I think that's a challenge for people. So I think it's important that the environment, as you say, is structured to succeed as opposed to fail. And that's, I think that's the take home. The other thing, you know, I really want to get into, and this is challenging because right now during COVID you know, people are isolated alone. They're, you know, they may not have been great chefs or cooks before, or you can't go out to restaurants, sometimes you're not even take out anymore. And people have been, I think, taught that cooking is difficult, that eating healthy is expensive. Is this true? And how do you address the issues of cooking and cost and feel great, lose weight?

Yeah, so there is a section on cooking and explaining just how important it is. It's that basic life skill that Until recently, I'm pretty sure all families, all humans, all tribes would have had that ability. And it's something that is now optional. It can only have been optional because we have the ability to buy all these food products so quickly, so cheaply, and our lives are so busy, they're stressed out. A lot of us feel we don't have time to cook, and certainly in certain socioeconomic groups, I think we have to accept that actually it's not only it's not about money so much, it's about having the luxury of time to cook, which a lot of people say, if I'm working two jobs, I don't have time to cook, right? So I think cost and time poverty is something we should be absolutely aware of. Now, I don't think, I think the research, and I think what we spoke about this when you came on my podcast recently, It's simply not true that eating well has to be really, really expensive. Of course, there are certain things that are more expensive. There's no question. Like wild salmon, for example, is probably more expensive. But, you know, a can of sardines is dirt cheap here in the UK. Do you know what I mean? There are ways that actually we can eat in a way that actually is whole food, but isn't super, super expensive. And I think where you live can really influence what's available, what you consider normal. You know, we mentioned environment before, but our friend circle, our own sort of network of tribes, that's important as well. You know, the research by Nicholas Christakis has shown that, you know, someone in your social circle is obese, you're 45% more likely to be obese. If a friend of a friend is obese, you're 25% more likely to be obese. And if it's a friend, offer friend, offer friend, you're 10% more likely to be obese, which just shows just how powerful these social connections are and the environment, even our friends and family environment is at influencing us. But it really isn't Mark as expensive as we think or some people think it might be to eat well. but you have to be able to cook, right? That is a basic, basic skill. And if you cannot cook, that's okay, right? Recognize it and go. Learning to cook may be one of the most important things that you can learn to do, whether it's from one of your cookbooks, Mark, whether it's to go on YouTube. There is so many free and cheap resources now to teach people how to cook some basic meals. and you know, the truth is, is that the pandemic for some people, not for everyone, but for some people, Mark, there's been a lot more time at home, a lot more time with family. And I know many people who have got into cooking during lockdowns, during these restrictions, suddenly they're not commuting for two and a half hours a day and they're actually buying cookbooks and they're learning how to cook recipes. I've got to say, Mark, you know, my new routine on a Sunday afternoon which really has been has come in in the last year. I love nothing more than this on a Sunday afternoon after lunch, right? I clear out the kitchen. I'm a bit old school. I put on a CD and I've got a CD player in the kitchen. I put on one of my favorite CDs and I cook a big batch of butternut squash soup to last us for the week, right? I've got lentils in it, butternut squash, it's got leaks, onions, Ginger, I'm trying to think about the price of it, but you know lentils are dirt cheap, right? Two or three butternut squashes are not that expensive. And apart from that it stock leaks, onions and ginger. It's kind of like that not only is it not expensive, but those one and a half, two hours are some of the most enjoyable times I spend in the week. I've got some great tunes on. I'm chilling. My daughter may be there drawing on the kitchen counter. We may be chatting at the same time. And at the end of it, there's the smell, there's the feeling that you really connected with the food. And then you know, oh, that's gonna go in the fridge. So in the week, if we ever need something for a meal, we can just go and heat that up. And so I really encourage people to find what works for them. Where is that moment in your week where you can actually find a bit of time to batch cook? If you are trying to cook something from scratch three meals a day, seven days a week, that's where it can become really challenging. Not only is that a huge cognitive load, 21 times now I need to think about what I'm going to eat in just one week, right? So batch cook, cook more. And one of the tips in the what We Eat section is eat dinner for breakfast, right? It's such a simple thing that people haven't thought of before. It's like eating, you know what it's like, Mark, the breakfast foods that we often start our days with are literally setting ourselves up for a hangover. For mood swings and if you cook a bit extra at night, heat it up in the morning, have some salmon, sweet potatoes and broccoli in the morning sometimes if that's what you have the night before. And often people find that they're just not hungry until lunchtime. There was this case I had, this exactly, someone who was having what he thought was healthy granola every morning.

Sugar-filled granola. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He thought it was healthy. and he didn't really need to lose that much weight, but he found that his concentration was going, his focus was going, he'd get a bit shaky by 12 o'clock. And he started having, and he, this guy was vegetarian, right? And I remember it so well. He said, well, what shall I have? I said, well, what do you have in the evening? Guess what? I love roast, roast vegetables. I said, okay, what do you have with it? He says, goat's cheese. I said, okay, why don't you start there? So the next morning he has goat's cheese with roast vegetable. and he said it got to 2:00 PM before he was even hungry. And he said, I didn't realize before that my concentration wasn't good and my energy wasn't good. It's only when I had a real food breakfast that I realized, oh wow, I've been functioning suboptimally for years. And so, you know, you know this as well as I do, Mart, I mean, there's plenty of tips on how people can do this inside the book. But, you know, I really want to encourage people to take this rounded approach. If you have tried already and focused on one area, and it's not been sustainable for you, let me help you figure out why that is. Maybe there's something else that you've not tackled that's actually the underlying root cause.

Yeah, it's so important because we don't, we just sort of stay on the surface and don't really figure it out. I just love your story of cooking. I think most of us feel so disenfranchised from it. But with COVID now, it's an opportunity for us to really dig in and, and try new things and to be with family and to be with the people you love and we have more time. And I think if people can reclaim their kitchens, it's really the key to weight loss. I mean, I always tell the story of this family. I worked with in South Carolina who was living on food stamps and disability in a trailer with a family of five and were massively overweight. The father was diabetic on dialysis. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The son was probably 100 pounds overweight, almost diabetic at 16 years old. All he did was cook a simple meal with them, show it how fun it was to do it together. They didn't even have cutting boards and knives. get them that afterwards. And they ended up losing, you know, 200 pounds together as a family in the first year. And the son actually went back and gained weight because he had to go work at Bojangles, which is the only place this kids could get work, which is a junk food, fast food restaurant in the South. And, but then he went on to lose 138 pounds, went to medical school, and it was really all through the simple Act of cooking one meal. And, you know, I think if you can imagine if we could go into everybody's home and show them how to shop and cook one simple meal, the basic cooking techniques, how to cut things, how to, I mean, they know how to peel an onion, they know how to peel garlic, they're not make a salad dressing from simple olive and vinegar. They don't have to stir fry. They don't have to, I mean, it was just, it was stunning. Everything they'd had was from a box of packaged can that was either heated in a microwave in the oven or, you know, it was just, it was terrible. And I made me really realize how powerful it is just to empower people for the simple act of cooking real food at home. And it's much, much cheaper. And I gave them a guide on good food on a tight budget, which is how to eat well for less.

And they were able to do it.

And within the budget that they had for five people on disability and food stamps.

Yeah, I mean, that's so powerful, Mark, when stories like that. And, you know, when I filmed the first series of BBC One's Doctor in the House, where I'd go and live alongside families for four to six weeks, it was a common theme. I'm going to say in at least half of the families that I went and stayed with, they didn't know how to cook. or it was something they used to do and they've lost the habit. And I remember in the first season, the lady with type 2 diabetes, I remember just again cooking them a meal, a basic meal, chopping things together. You know, these guys were used to getting McDonald's several times a week. And I remember so, you know, you mentioned cost. I can remember that so well in 2015, my first day filming ever, Mark. Right. So I go to this family's house in Shrewsbury in the UK. First day I meet them and we start off because I'm going to stay at their house that night for the first night, which they didn't know. I didn't realize that. And the father said to me, he said, Hey, I said to them, Hey guys, I'd love to find out a little bit about what you guys eat normally. And the dad said to me, okay, well look, why don't you come along and I'll show you. So he points to his car seat. So I get into his car. We drive for 15 minutes out of town, right? One five, 15 minutes out of town. We go into a McDonald's drive-thru and this is a family of four. So husband and wife, I think the daughter, you know, the daughter and the son were like teenagers, 15, 16, 17, something like that. He ordered four double meals from McDonald's. Right? And the cost was £48. So let's put that in perspective. £48. I don't know what the exchange rate is at the moment. Must be at least 65 to $70. Dollars. Right? And he said we do this. And what was interesting, Marcus, as we were driving there, he said to me, Hey, Doc, this is actually really embarrassing. Now you coming with me, but this is what we do four to five times a week. So what's interesting is several things. He's spending $65-$70 on four double meals from McDonald's, right? Which when they ate, they were hungry 30 minutes later and they were moody afterwards, right? But the second thing is, and this speaks to what we were talking about before, is that when he's driving there with me sitting next to him, he suddenly says, Hey, Doc, you know what? This is really embarrassing, right? But he only realized that with me sitting in the car next to him because if it's just him, and his family, he can do it. No one's questioning him. I wasn't judging him. I wasn't questioning him. But the simple act of me being there was like a mirror to him. And he goes, man, we do this four or five times a week. You know, and that's, that's really interesting from an emotional viewpoint, isn't it? What's really going on there?

Yeah, it's so powerful. I think we don't realize how much we get into habits unconsciously and just do those things without. thinking and then it leads over the course of our life to just traumatic changes in our health and our well-being and it's, you know, what kills me and I think you experience the same thing is how close people are to feeling good. If the feel great part, I mean, the lose weight part, you know, is slow. You can do a pound a week maybe, but when there's more, depending on what you're doing, you know, initially you might lose more, but the feel great part can happen pretty quick and I think most people, when they start to shift their diet and they start to change their habits and they start to understand how to sort of reprogram their biology for well-being and health, that they were like, wow, I didn't know how quickly I could feel better. I didn't know I was feeling so bad till I started feeling so good. And it's so rewarding for me to see that the simple act of eating real food and regulating your life in a way that supports health has such dramatic downstream benefits on mental health, on mood, on relationships, on work, on productivity, on just parenting, on everything that you care about in your life. If you don't have your biology well regulated, you're a victim to the whims of all these influences that are outside of us, which is, you know, the food we're eating is information, as we learned from our mentor, Jeff Bland. And it is a instruction manual that is telling everything in our body what to do. and we often think that our emotional states, our psychological states, or our relationships are not triggered by food, but it can be really dramatic. And just to sort of recap a little bit about what our friend David Perlmutter wrote about in his book, Brainwash, where he was on the podcast, he talked about how people are eating the processed food that we're all eating now, 60% of our diet. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the limbic brain, which means the limbic brain is the reptile brain that is reacting, responding, is angry, you know, fight or flight, all that. It disconnects that from the frontal lobe, which is the adult in the brain. It's sort of the higher self.

And.

And so all of a sudden, you've got this dysregulated reptile in your brain that's not being supervised by an adult, and it leads to all this disordered behavior. And I I. Part of me wonders if our societies become so devices. divisive, so conflicted, and there's so much rancor because of our diet in part, because how it affects our brains and our functioning.

Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful to hear that. It wouldn't surprise me at all. I think it's not just gonna be one thing, is it? It's all these multiple inputs coming from all the way around. And that's the whole thing about food, isn't it? It's so reductive to talk about it just in terms of calories and energy into the body and energy out, as you say, food is information. It's so much more than just those calories. And actually, we're doing food a disservice by just talking about it in terms of energy. It is more than that. Genetic expression, hormones, as you say, with the brain, what it might be doing. Absolutely incredible. And we mentioned emotions before, but again, it goes both ways, doesn't it? You can feel stressed, and want to eat more. But actually eating the wrong kinds of food consistently can make you more hungry and cause you to overeat and can cause you to crave more of those foods. So it kind of it feeds it on both ways. And I sort of feel that the right approach for each person is going to be slightly different. But I think, you know, we can we can absolutely agree that I don't know anybody who won't benefit from eating more real food in their diets. I can't see the downside of doing that.

No. Now let's talk about the other boogeyman in the room around weight, which is exercise. And part of the equation is eat less, exercise more, which implies that you're not thin because you don't exercise enough or you don't move enough. And I think there's some really fundamental flaws with that idea. Not that exercise isn't important, but that in the hierarchy of weight loss, it really is not as important as what you eat, where you eat, when you eat, how you eat, why you eat in determining your metabolism. And so can you talk a little bit about some of the myths about exercise and also what the role of exercise is in metabolism and weight?

Yeah, no for sure. I mean, you're absolutely right. That's one of the biggest myths out there. And it makes sense, doesn't it, that it's just a simple equation that you just sort of add up, and at the end of the day, that didn't determine that you're going to put on weight or put off weight, if only it was that simple. Right, so what does the deal with exercise? So there's some new research from Herman Pontzer, which has come out in the last few years, and he's been studying the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. and he's been measuring their energy expenditure. And it's super fascinating, Mark, because what he's shown is that these hunter-gatherers are moving a lot more than the average sedentary Westerner, right? They're moving a lot more. But you know how many calories they're burning off? Roughly the same, 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, which is roughly the same as the average sedentary Westerner burns off, even though they're moving more. so what is going on there? And this is kind of one of those big myths. So we think that if we go for a run and we burn off 400 calories on our run, let's say, we feel that that number is additive. We just add it on to the number we would have burnt off and we've got 400 extra calories there. But it's simply not true. Our body is a complex system. Your body will compensate. If you burn off more calories running, it will reduce how many calories it burns off in other areas. And there's multiple ways it will do that. It will reduce neat non-exercise activated thermogenesis. So, you know, toe tapping and fidgeting, it will reduce that. It can change how many calories it burns off in other departments in the body. And the point is that we are this complex system. And I think this is where it gets really misunderstood. Going back to what we said at the start, Mark, people are not only depriving themselves and restricting themselves with foods, they're putting themselves on punishing exercise regimes. We all know when we see that person really struggling in the gym, you know, who's pounding the treadmill three, four times a week for an hour, wondering why the fat is not coming off without realizing that for some times you're actually stressing out your body even more and raising cortisol, which can actually make the weight loss harder in the first place. But it's not, you know, it's not that moving more is necessarily going to burn off more. And I think that is brand new information for some people. I think that science is really, really fascinating and it really it reshapes everything we've been told for the last 20-30 years that you've got to move more, you've got to move more. Now, what role does it play? I think exercise is really important. So can you lose weight without doing any exercise at all? Absolutely. Would I recommend it? Absolutely not. I feel that the reason to move is not to burn off calories, but it's to make yourself feel good. It's to build your self-esteem up. You know, when we're moving regularly, we're showing our body that we're an active, thriving human who's engaging with life. Humans are animals. We're designed to move. So I think movement is very important, but it's about feeling good, not burning off calories. So, like I said before, that tip about the dumbbell by the kitchen. What's that going to do in isolation by the kettle? You know, lifting that several times a day? You know, it's not like the 30-40 minute workout we've been told for years that we have to be doing to losing weight. But what it will do is it changes the signals in your body. It just keeps giving you these little inputs that actually, you know what? I'm alive. I'm engaging with life. I'm an active human who is able to lift a heavy weight or a mediumly heavy weight. and it really boosts self-esteem, which helps you engage in other behaviors in a much better way. And actually, Mark, you know, I've been thinking recently that for many people, weight loss is actually a self-esteem issue. It's about how they feel about themselves. Once they start to love themselves, have compassion to themselves, they no longer want to punish themselves. with highly processed sugary foods. They no longer want to punish themselves by sitting on the sofa all day, watching TV, not getting up and moving. So I kind of feel that compassion part, that self-love is also a part of this equation that we're not speaking about enough. Because when you truly love yourself and value yourself for who you are, you don't want to beat yourself up. You don't want to engage in lots of unhealthy behaviors. So, I think movement has a very important role to play, but it's not the role that we've been taught. You don't need it to lose weight. I just think it helps you boost how you feel.

No, it's true. I've had people lose 100 pounds without changing their exercise. But, the other thing is that you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. So, if you have one cookie, you have to walk four miles. If you eat one super-sized meal, you have to run four miles a day for a week to burn it off. And if you eat that every day, you have to run a marathon every day just to keep up. So you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. That's really important. People understand. On the other hand, you know what you're saying is really important that it is about one, just improving your overall well-being your mental health and, and the side effect. If you do certain kinds of exercise, like high intensity interval training and strength training, you will literally increase your metabolic rate so that you burn calories all day long as opposed to, you know, just when you're exercising. So there is a strategy to including it, but you can exercise all you want if you're eating poorly. My weight trainer, the guy who was sort of my trainer in New York, was incredibly fit. He had big muscles, but he had a sort of big layer of fat on him as well. And within six weeks, he lost 20 pounds just by shifting his his diet. And, this is a guy who worked out hours and hours a day. And, I think even somebody like that who's an extreme level of fitness still can have a lot of body fat if they don't understand how to eat in a way to regulate their biology.

And, it speaks to what we were chatting about before, Mark, about this. It's so reductive to talk about food in terms of energy and movement and exercise. in terms of energy. I remember one patient I had who said, I still remember Dr. Chachi when I was, I think when I was nine years old, I was on holiday with my parents and I was in the hotel gym with my dad and we were on the treadmill. And at the end of our run, my dad said to me, Look son, you just burnt off 300 calories. You've earned yourself a Mars bar. And off they went to buy a Mars bar, right? And this guy literally, that set off a problematic relationship with food and exercise because In his head, it's just energy. It's like, well, that's the only value it has. And this is where, you know, movement is like food. Movement is information, right? Movements send your body signals that you're alive, you're thriving, that actually, you know, we've reduced these concepts down to just these dry scientific equations, but there's so much more that they help create the vitality and the vibrancy of life. And I think we need more of that in health. We need to talk about these things are going to help you feel amazing and feel good. Do you know what I mean?

What would you tell people who are listening about where to start if they're struggling, if they're frustrated, if they've been on the yo-yo, roller coaster, weight loss track? How do you get them to think differently about what's ahead?

I understand, Mark, that many people are struggling all over the world right now, not just with trying to lose weight. They're struggling with their physical health, their mental health, how they feel about the world. Will the world that they once used to occupy is that world going to return? So I get people have got all kinds of anxiety and worry in them at the moment. So I would say, you know what? Keep it simple. Don't try and overhaul your entire lifestyle. There's three daily habits that I have in the book that I recommend people do. And I think that's the best advice I can leave people with. They're very simple in isolation, but they're very, very powerful. So the three habits are every day, lift, connect, and reflect. So lift is lift something heavy every day. That could be, you know, a dumbbell or a kettlebell by your kitchen. There is this core three workout in the book if people want to actually see what more they can do with it that only takes five minutes, actually less than five minutes, right? But lift something heavy each day. The next one, connect. Connect with another human being in some way every single day. Often when we're trying to snack, when we're trying to eat foods that we don't want to be eating, we're just lonely. And I know many people are feeling lonely at the moment. So, that can be connection on a phone call, on a Zoom, If you're lucky enough to meet in person, great, but if you're not, there are other ways to do it. So that's lift, connect. And the final one I'd say is reflect. Now, there's a simple exercise in the book, which is every evening, ask yourself two questions. What went well today? And what's one thing I might want to change for tomorrow? So simple, but very, very powerful because as I said before, awareness of your own behavior is so key to make change. And it could be something simple like this. It could be, you know what? I was really tired and stressed out today, but I still made time to cook my children and me a home cooked meal. Okay? So that's what went well today. What didn't go so well that you might want to change tomorrow could have been, you know what? I was cranky today. I was craving sugar all day. And I was up till midnight last night watching Netflix, right? Tonight, I'm not going to stay until midnight watching Netflix because I know an extra hour's sleep means tomorrow I won't be craving sugar and I won't be as cranky. These small things are so powerful when you do them consistently. You don't need to overhaul your whole life. And my closing thoughts, people, is you can always, and I mean always, improve your health and almost always help people lose weight in a sustainable way once you find the right approach for them. And that's what your work aims to do, Mark. That's what my work aims to do, is to help people find this is the right approach for me that works for me, with my lifestyle, with my friends, and with my ethical beliefs and my cultural beliefs. So there's always a way, Mark, but I say to people, start small, be consistent, and watch the results start to come.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. All of these things we tend to medicate, right? We're like, symptom, medication, boom. But actually, these symptoms are your body telling you, hey, hello, there's actually glucose spikes happening in here. There's something you can change and heal from within.