Weight Loss Myths Busted: How To Burn Fat Fast | Dr. Mark Hyman

So exercise is important. It's really important for longevity and health, but it doesn't really work alone when it comes to diet. You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. Your diet has the most important impact on your ability to maintain a healthy weight. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. Another edition of Health Bites. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. Have you noticed your scale inching up despite believing you're following a healthy diet? Well, you're certainly not alone. Many people struggle to maintain a healthy weight, even when they think they're making good food choices. Now, is weight gain an ozempic deficiency? Clearly not. So what is going on here? Why does it seem so challenging to keep those unwanted pounds off? And what can you do to feel confident and comfortable in your own skin? That's exactly what we're going to unpack in today's episode. I'll be sharing insights and strategies that have helped many of my patients not only achieve but sustain a healthy weight. In this episode, we're going to dive deep into the fundamentals of nutrition and explore the profound effects our diet has on our biology. We're also going to provide actionable tips to manage your weight effectively, all through the lens of functional medicine. Understanding how your body works and the reasons behind weight fluctuations is key to making empowered health decisions. Now, just a quick note on weight. It's a complex field of science and the predominant focus has been on eating less and exercising more or changes in diet, which is what we're going to talk about today. However, there are many reasons for weight gain that have nothing to do with what you eat. Now, many new discoveries have allowed us to understand the role of many other factors in weight regulation, including environmental toxins, now called obesogens, mold exposure, infections such as adenovirus, food sensitivities, changes in the microbiome and leaky gut, all of which drive inflammation, all of which causes weight gain. And there are other factors too, like hormone dysfunction, including thyroid, adrenal and sex hormone dysregulation, trauma, nutritional deficiencies, disrupted sleep, stress, and lots more. Now, before we dive into why maintaining a healthy weight can be so challenging, let's clarify what we mean by healthy weight and why it's so important for your overall well-being. Weight is not just about your BMI, your body mass index, or the numbers on your scale. It's about understanding body composition and visceral fat. So the weight matters less than your body composition. And that visceral fat, the type around your organs and your belly fat, is the one that significantly impacts your health. So how do you get a clear picture of your body composition? Well, there are a lot of tools like in-body scanners, which I have at our Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, or a DEXA scan, which is the gold standard. They give you a detailed view and they reveal what your fat free masses, your lean mass and your total body fat, and even what your visceral fat is and how much fat is on your arms and legs. So you get a really clear picture of what's going on. Now, if you can't get access to these tests for body composition, although you should be able to, there are certain lab tests that are really important in helping identify poor metabolic health and dysregulation of your biology, including fasting insulin, which is almost never measured by your doctor, your blood sugar, triglycerides, or HDL. your liver function test, many other things, hormones like leptin, adiponectin can offer key insights into what's going on with your metabolic health. And in fact, that's why I co-founded Function Health, a personalized health platform that allows you access to your own lab data and puts the power back into your hands by testing over 100 plus biomarkers for less than $500, including things that we talked about like fasting insulin, leptin, adiponectin, C-reactive protein, and more. Now, these biomarkers give us the picture, the big picture of what's going on with our, not just our weight, but our overall health and our risk for chronic disease. So if you wanna learn more, just go to functionhealth.com/mark. So obesity rates are climbing despite eating fewer calories, that's an interesting one, and despite eating less sugar as a global population. Now that's pretty interesting to me. So something else is going on, right? The World Obesity Atlas projects that by 2035, over 4 billion people would be considered obese. It's now over 2 billion that are overweight. why is this happening? Well, calorie counting doesn't address the issue of diet composition and its effect on our hormones. As I mentioned, insulin, cortisol. I mean, by the way, if you eat sugar and starch, it's a stress for your body. This is not up for debate. The data is really clear on this, that when you eat sugar and starch, it spikes your adrenaline and your cortisol level. Cortisol is a fat storing hormone. When you have high levels of cortisol, you will literally shut down your cells' ability to burn calories. you will increase fat deposition between around the middle, and you will lose muscle and you'll become diabetic and hypertensive. And this is what happens when people take prednisone or steroids when they have an autoimmune disease. We see the exact phenomenon or when someone's in the emergency room and they come in with some serious disease and they need to take steroids in the hospital, they become diabetic and hypertensive. We saw this all the time in our training. It's not up for question. So the key is to focus on diet quality. And the problem with Americans diets, crappy diet quality. 60% of our calories comes from ultra processed food. People might think they're eating healthy, but most are not aware they're eating mostly ultra processed food because it's often marked as a healthy food, right? Low carb, low sugar, all natural, gluten free. My joke is gluten free cake and cookies is still cake and cookies. If it's got a health claim on the label, my rule is don't eat it. It's bad for you. things that are just food don't have labels anyway, right? An avocado doesn't have a label. A can of tomatoes has a label, but it doesn't have a health claim on it. Just eat simple real food. Now, according to a 2022 survey that was done by the International Food Information Council, 76% of Americans were unfamiliar with what qualifies as an ultra-processed food. No surprise. I mean, most people, most doctors can't even define it. and this is a definition, there's many different kinds of definitions, but this is based on something called the NOVA classification. You can look it up, it was developed by Brazil by the scientists there who understood that the diet was affecting their population's health and they came up with a classification system which is unprocessed food, minimally processed food, ultra processed food. So there's different categories. So, I mean, if you, for example, make soup, that's a processed food because you're chopping ingredients, you're putting the pot together, but that's fine. But if it's, you know, made from ingredients that you wouldn't have in your kitchen that you don't recognize the names of, like maltodextrin or butylated hydroxy toluene or guar gum or weird things that you don't know what they are and that you won't have in your kitchen and cook with, you probably shouldn't eat them because they're basically from deconstructed ingredients from raw materials like soy, wheat and corn that are processed in factories designed to be addictive and have a certain mouthfeel and sort of brain activity with them. And they study this with MRIs. It's pretty bad, actually. They know exactly what they're doing these companies. The key here is it's not your fault. You cannot blame yourself if you can't lose weight. It's just because you don't have the right information. It's an education problem. We're never taught the impact that food or food quality, have a metabolism and overall health. We don't really know what to eat for the food industry has made us confused and confounded by their marketing and by food labeling and which I'm trying to change right now in Washington actually working on an effort to change the FDA food labeling. Hopefully we'll win that battle, but it's a tough battle because there's gonna be a lot of pushback from the food industry which we might need your help in being a little bit advocates for and calling your congressmen and senators and getting behind this, calling the FDA to kind of have comment. There's gonna be a comment period. So we might call on you to do that. Now we're eating too much bad stuff. Starch, sugar and refined fats and processed ingredients and none of the good stuff, right? Lots of veggies, high quality protein, lots of fiber, good fats. All of this is simple. They just eat real food, get off the crap. Now, in my opinion, the carbohydrate insulin model is a little bit better explaining why often people struggle to lose weight. It sort of acknowledges the complexity of human metabolism, that humans are not living in a vacuum and a closed system. Our diet has physiological effects on hormones, on insulin, on blood sugar, on inflammation. And when this happens, high insulin levels stores fat and blocks your ability to burn fat. The carbohydrate insulin model isn't the full explanation. everything related to weight. We have to look at all the things that might matter and we have to consider all the things that we talked about earlier, which includes the toxins, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, imbalances in gut flora, sleep issues, and so forth. I've done several episodes on the impact of toxins on weight loss, but you can check it out on the show notes. So how much protein do you need to eat to maintain a healthy weight? Well, 25 to 30% of your total calories. It's about one gram per pound of ideal body weight, about 4 to 6 ounces of protein with each meal. That's animal protein, about 30 grams. Aim for about a palm size portion. That's about the size of your palm, not somebody else's palm, protein every meal. Now, it might be hard for you to start if you're not used to eating that much protein, but start small and work up. For example, add one palm size portion of lean protein or protein, chicken, fish, meat, maybe even tempeh to one meal in addition to what they already are eating is a good idea. gradually increase your intake once you feel comfortable. You can also front load your protein intake by eating a high protein breakfast. This makes it easier to reach your protein goals, and the research shows that it's associated with increasing lean body mass. So what type of protein should you focus on eating? Animal protein is easier to digest, absorb, and assimilate really important nutrients and amino acids in plant protein. The science is just clear on this. There's no argument. Fatty meats are more calorie dense, so you want to be mindful of those hidden sorts of calories. But if it's a grass fed animal, that's fine. The fats aren't bad for you. Plant protein also can help. It has fiber in it that makes you feel full like nuts and seeds or beans. Focus on whole food sources like plant protein, lentils, legumes. If you can tolerate them, non-GMO tofu and tempeh are the most dense protein plant sources. You can get high quality protein powder. My favorite is goat whey without gums or fillers or additives or sweeteners. And that makes it a lot easier to reach your goals. You can get a lot of protein in a smoothie in the morning. to worry about it. Make sure you don't eat processed fake meat. It's bad. It's ultra processed food, beyond meat, impossible meat. It's just texturized soy protein. It's often full of junk, gluten, weird stuff. Basically you can combine plant and animal proteins and you'll get high quality protein. So make sure you're also eating enough fiber. This is really important. 95% of Americans don't eat enough fiber. Now fiber goes through feeling full. It actually activates your natural OZempic or GLP-1. and PYY. This also increases stomach distension and slows gastric emptying. Basically what Ozempic does, right? That's what fiber does. It makes you full and slows the whole process. In fact, one of the things I do is I have my patients take something called PGX, which is polyglycoplex from cornic root, a Japanese tuber, super high in fiber, absorbs 50 times its weight in water. So basically it fills up your stomach when you eat it and then people will lose tens of pounds. On one patient who lost 40 pounds just taking that, a few minutes before each meal. Now, the other good thing about fiber is it helps you improve your microbiome. It helps regular bowel movements. It promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria. It helps them produce short-chain fatty acids, which is important in energy metabolism, and that improves insulin sensitivity and burning of calories. So the good bugs in the gut will produce compounds like these short-chain fats that are really good for you and they help burn calories. They also produce hormones, these gut bacteria, and they produce neurotransmitters that can influence our appetite. and our satiety signals. Next, you want to eat the rainbow. Lots of veggies, eight to 10 servings, even more, not five to nine, probably more like nine to 20 if you can do it. There's never too much veggies. You can unload refills. So basically a serving is a half a cup of cooked one cup raw. Also focus on color. The color reflects something called the phytochemical richness of a food, and this has medicinal benefits. These are the medicines in food. They're anti-aging, they're anti-inflammatory. And basically how my plate looks is basically a piece of protein, which is 25% of my plate, up to three or four veggies, side of broccoli, a purple sweet potato, asparagus, mushrooms. I basically make the meat a side dish and the majority of my volume of food is veggies. Not like a giant piece of meat, three asparagus, and a potato. That's the way we eat in America. It's bad. I encourage you to think about it. Maybe you can think about how many different plant foods you eat per week. probably not that many. The average person, most of our food is based on three crops, corn, wheat and soy. And then that's probably 60% of our diet. And then another probably nine plants comprise the rest, like tomatoes or onions. But, you know, we used to see, you know, 800 different species of plants. We need to kind of up our game a little bit and go to the farmer's market, eat weird food, you know, like, it's fine. Learn how to make it. Now, the good news is the more diverse your fiber intake, the more diverse your microbiome. So eat a lot of different sorts of fiber. When you look at the data on obesity and weight gain, what they find is that there's less microbiome diversity, that your gut flora isn't healthy, and that when you have high levels of diversity or complexity in your gut microbiome, it's more associated with a healthy weight. Each gut bacteria feeds and thrives on different foods. It likes prebiotic fibers, it likes polyphenols. So, for example, bifidobacterium, which is the key, key species in your gut feeds on prebiotic fiber rich foods like green bananas, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, garlic, onions. You can eat probiotic rich foods like fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, and these leads to an increase in the production of these short chain fatty acids, which provides good fuel for the colon cells and the intestinal cells, strengthens the gut barrier, and are anti-inflammatory. Also, you want to eat enough healthy fats. Fat does not make you fat. It just doesn't. We've looked for decades at this, and we've demonized dietary fat. I wrote a whole book called Eat Fat, Get been if you want to look at the science and the history of this, but it's pretty bad. The problem is we listen. When the government told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, and pasta day and eat low-fat foods and low-fat snack, all cookies and low-fat yogurt with lots of sugar, we did it. And what happened? Where are we at now? We have 42 of the population over weight. We've had doubling and tripling of diabetes rates. You know, we've seen staggering rates of obesity in children. We see 93 of us are metabolic and healthy. It's not an accident. It's clearly a result of this. We followed those. And when we followed those low-fat diets, it was basically more starch, more sugar, and. And we got fatter and sicker. if so, again, if you want to learn more, I published this in 2016, but eFatGetThin is a great summary of this. And I basically have combined the latest research of the time with my personal experience and decades of evidence working with patients to prove what I've known a long time. The right fats actually help you become lean, healthy environment. They make you feel full too. In fact, the average person is made up between 15 to 30% body fat and your body has more than a hundred trillion cells and every cell wall is made of fat and fat is one of the most important building blocks of the body and the brain. In fact, your brain is 60% fat. The key is fat quality. The better the quality fat, the better your body's gonna function. Why are healthy fats important? 'Cause they make you feel full fat for satiety. We learned that in medical school. That's probably the only thing we learned in medical school nutrition. Or maybe I, maybe I learned it after, I can't remember. It helps stabilize your blood sugar. It provides a source of energy. It balances hormones, which are important for appetite regulation like leptin and ghrelin. it can reduce inflammation if you eat the right fats like the Omega-3s. It can help the body's ability to burn other fats and increase the absorption of fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A and D and K and E. The industrialized seed oils and bean oils in ultra processed food are generally low quality fats. They're vegetable oil, soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, sunflower, cotton seeds. Stay away from those. Some of these are fine. You need Omega-6s in some amounts. but eat them from good sources, from whole foods, from even expeller pressed or organic forms of these oils can be fine in small amounts. Our diet has way too many Omega-6s out of balance with the Omega-3s. We need both, but it creates an imbalance and that leads to inflammation. Now, fast food chains and restaurants, even fancy ones, often use cheap oils for cooking and they can rack up all kinds of problems. They can increase inflammation, they can be a source of phantom calories, and they don't really make you feel that great. So cook your food in olive oil, butter, you know, you can use avocado oil, obviously stay away from trans fats, those are poison. They should be out of the food supply, but they're still in there. They were, you know, ruled as not safe to eat in 2015 by the government, the FDA, but they're still out there in the food. Margarine, vegan butters, white rice, pizza, popcorn, desserts, all that stuff. And they make your cell walls rigid. In other words, Crisco or shortening, you know what they call it shortening 'cause it shortens your life. It makes your body vulnerable to inflammation. Instead of being fluid and flexible and responsive to the intracellular communication, your cells just don't work as well. So what are the good fats? Well, omega-3 fats, they're anti-inflammatory. And things like cold water fish are great. Salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies. Mono and saturated fats are heart healthy. These olive oil, nuts and seeds, macadamias are great. They're the olive oil of nuts. Pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds are great. Pine nuts, I love those are my favorite. Here's the deal. Dietary fat is the most energy dense nutrient, macronutrient, and it's essential for optimal health, but it kind of can be easy to overdo from fatty dairy, from cooking oils, from too much fatty meats, and that can create a calorie surplus, which leads to my next tip, track your food, at least temporarily. The data is pretty clear on this. And, you know, in an ideal world, we'd all eat completely intuitively. It was a great study I read, it was set in the 20s. It was in a book called Nourishment by Fred Provenza. It's an amazing book. where he talked about kids who were orphans and they did this experiment on them where they basically allowed them to eat whatever they wanted and they gave them, you know, these kids like brains and liver and weird things. And these kids actually would eat exactly what they needed to meet their nutritional needs on an intuitive basis. Animals are like this, but we've lost that because we've come completely dysregulated. Now, once your hormones and your brain chemistry and your gut microbiome have not been hijacked by the food industry and you've taken them back, from the body snatchers, you actually naturally will regulate your weight and metabolism. I don't have to think about it. Now, sometimes if I go crazy, like I go to Italy and I just kind of go off the rails and I have pasta and gelato and I overeat and I drink wine, I'll come back heavier. But when I eat properly, my body actually naturally regulates its weight and my body naturally regulates its appetite. And that's true for everybody else too. Now, it's hard to eat in line with your body's needs without any guardrails. So you have to know what's going on, particularly if you struggle with your weight. Now, most people don't realize how much they're eating, right? So research shows that people are terrible at measuring their energy intake and they underestimate their consumption by up to 50%. I always said this when people came in, they said, but you overestimate the amount of exercise by twofold and underestimate the amount they eat by half, right? And there's two reasons. People don't realize how calorically dense many foods are and they often misjudge portion size. size, around two-thirds of the time in fact. So measuring and tracking your food can help you better understand your current eating habits and your portion sizes while retraining your body to regulate hunger and satiety cues. But the thing is, if you eat the right foods, you don't really have to worry so much. Your body will naturally take care of itself. Weight management is not about counting calories, but calories are still important. And it's a good idea to get a sense of what you're doing. So estimate your body's daily energy expenditure, Now it's easy to estimate your body's daily energy expenditure. You take your weight and you multiply it times 13. And that gives you a pretty good idea of the total calories you should be eating. And then you add on how much exercise activity you do, and that gives you a sense of what your average needs are. If you're a 150 pound person, you're basically going to be eating let's say 1800 calories a day for maintenance. If you're not exercising, if you exercise a lot, you might need another 500 calories a day. So you can kind of figure it out pretty easily. That's an ideal body weight. Now, if you go above that, you're basically increasing your risk for weight gain, even if you're eating only healthy foods. Now, you can download an app, MyFitnessPal is great, and you can use a food scale to measure. Even just writing it down can create a really powerful awareness that helps you automatically make better choices, be more thoughtful about how much you're eating, and it can help you identify patterns where you struggle. So you can see. For example, maybe you do okay till 3 o'clock and then you hit that bag of chips or eat a package of Pop-Tarts. That's good news. You know where you can make big time progress in your eating habits. Because you know this, you can plan for it and ensure that at 3 p.m. you have something really healthy that you also like. Maybe that's already ready to go instead of having something like Pop-Tarts. The goal for tracking is to be temporary, not forever, right? Some people need these training wheels for longer or shorter periods of time. But ultimately the goal is to shed your training wheels and move towards knowing what, how much and when to eat without Milton tracking or monitoring by listening to your body. Now, don't necessarily if you're anxious about this or worried about it, you don't have to track your stuff. If you're obsessed with food, maybe just look at your visual chart in the notes that we're going to provide you about hand portions. But basically a serving of protein is the palm size portion of your hand. A serving of vegetables, a fist size serving. A serving of carbs is your cupped hand. A serving of fat is your thumb, right? So it's pretty easy. And stock your fridge with real food. Real whole food. Lots of non-starchy veggies, kale, broccoli, lettuce, radish, arugula, bok choy, snap peas. I had those for dinner with great asparagus, bell pepper, watercress, cauliflower, whatever, you know, just hearts of palm, cucumbers. Get lots of good fruit in there. Berries, kiwis, you know, pomegranate, whatever you like. Frozen fruit and veggies are fine. They last longer. They don't take up as much space in the fridge. and they're actually nutrient dense, often more than the fresh veggies unless you get them right from the farmer's market. Also eat high quality lean protein. You want to get regeneratively raised grass-fed meats, lamb, beef, pasture raised chicken, wild caught fish. I love force of nature. They have elk, deer, bison, really yummy stuff. Check out your local farmer's market. They have great quality meats at an adequate price. Thrive Market, Butcher Box, Force of Nature, Sea Totopia.fish are all great sources of healthy, clean and often regenerative protein. You don't have to be a chef and have fancy meals every night, but just get a basic repertoire of really affordable, easy to prepare meals that decrease time, stress and cost of eating. And just, they're your go-to three dinners, three breakfasts, three lunches. If you want some sweeteners to use in something, get real food. Real food sweeteners. Honey, date sugar, coconut sugar. You don't want the sugar, have some monk fruit. So that's a lot of stuff we covered. And weight is a complex topic. It's not so simple as calories in, calories out. We've covered a lot of stuff that I think could help. you understand the complexity of weight management and explores the role of diet, hormones, lifestyle factors, and many other things. So remember, maintaining a healthy weight is not about counting calories or chasing the next diet or fancy detox program. It's really about understanding what your body needs to thrive and making small, consistent changes to your diet and lifestyle that align with your own unique biology. Now, if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone. my benefit for more resources and to learn about function health lab testing. Go to functionhealth.com/mark that together we can take control of our health and live our best lives. Remember, it's never too late to start making positive changes. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time on Health Bites. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.