Weight Loss Hacks: Achieve Your Goals Naturally

Foreign. This is open mind. 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, biome 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. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to Health Hacks.

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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's 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, your hdl, your liver function tests, many other things, hormones like leptin, adeponectin can offer key insights into what's going on with your metabolic health. 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 want to learn more, just go to functionhealth.com mark all right, let's talk about it. Let's get into it. Why is it so hard to maintain a healthy weight? Now, so many people struggle with creeping weight gain even if they count every calorie or carb. I mean, if you're just off a hundred calories a day, over a decade or two, you could gain up to 20 pounds of weight. So counting calories isn't exactly the most helpful thing because nobody can get it that accurate. So what is maintaining a healthy weight about? Is it all about calories in, calories out, or exercise more, eat less? Is it about eating too many carbs or insulin? So what's the right approach? Is there a one size fits all approach for everyone? Well, no, sadly no. But there are really important lenses that we've developed to help look at the problem of obesity and weight gain. And scientists are looking primarily through two lenses, although there's, there's some more complexity to this. The first is what we call the energy balance model, or calories in, calories out. That's really the idea that, that the quality of your diet doesn't matter. As long as you're in an energy deficit, you'll lose weight. Now, typically that's reached by reducing calorie intake by a diet and by increasing calorie expenditure by exercise. But just think about it. Even if, you know, you just think about calories as a uniform phenomena, is it the same to drink a thousand calories of cola or eat a thousand calories of almonds? Do they have the same effect on your biology, on your body, on your weight, on your metabolism? The answer is no. Everybody understands that intuitively, and yet we're still sort of stuck in this whole paradigm. It doesn't mean that calories don't matter or that energy balance doesn't matter. It's just the quality matters, too. So it's a little more nuanced than that. 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. In fact, I was having dinner with someone the other night in New York. They lost 65 pounds simply by cutting out sugar and starch and junk food, and they didn't exercise at all. So on the other hand, if you have one cookie, you have to run four miles to walk it off, to work it off. So not a good, not a good strategy. If you ate a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, you don't even have to run a marathon to burn it off, which would not be good. Now, there's another model that scientists have looked at, including my colleague and friend David Ludwig, and has done a lot of extensive research on this, called the carbohydrate insulin model. And this is a model that really focuses on the idea of hormonal regulation of weight and that keeping insulin levels low is critical to maintaining and losing weight. In fact, insulin, and this is just straight up science and biology, there's no argument here. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. It's designed to let energy into cells like glucose and fatty acids. It's designed to keep those stores of energy in your fat tissue. It's designed to slow your metabolism and to make you more hungry. So having the insulin levels high is a huge risk factor for not just weight issues, but pretty much everything that happens that you don't want, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia. So in terms of the carbohydrate insulin model, the main thesis there is the quality of the calories matters, that it may not be how much you eat that matters as what you eat. Because when you eat the right foods, then your hormones and your metabolism is naturally regulated, your appetite's naturally regulated and it really helps you to lose weight. And I've seen this over and over with patients, particularly who are metabolically unhealthy. And this, this involves avoiding what are quickly absorbing carbohydrates like refined starch and sugar, to keep the insulin low and to lose weight. And, and I think, you know, if you measure fasting insulin, it's over 5. You probably have some degree of, of insulin insensitivity or insulin resistance and that's why your insulin starts going up. And then you need to actually kind of cut the starch and sugar to make it come down. And that'll often cause a lot of weight loss. So the question is, which theory is right? Is it all about energy or is it all about the carbohydrate insulin model of hormone regulation? Well, they're both right and they're both wrong. Calories are important, right? You can't eat 20,000 calories a day, even if it's healthy food, and be okay, but they're not the only thing that matters. You need to look at the hormonal effects too. And that's why we combine those to really come up with a more integrated strategy around weight regulation. Now if you're eating ultra processed junk, it's just hard to lose weight cuz your insulin levels are gonna be spiking. In fact, Kevin hall at the NIH did a really elegant study where he allowed people to eat as much as they want of whole food or health or, or processed food. And they were matched for calorie calories, carbs, protein, fat, fiber and so forth. Uh, but when they were eating the ultra processed food, the, the eat an actual extra 500 calories a day, that's 3,500 calories a week. That equates to a pound a week of weight gain or 52 pounds a year just because of the dysregulated appetite and how the food doesn't actually make you feel satisfied because it's not designed to, it's designed to make you crave and eat more. So Food quality is really important. You can overeat healthy foods, but it's harder, right? I mean, you can get too much of anything and it's going to for sure matter, but. And if you eat more calories than you expend, you're probably going to gain weight. But here's the problem. When we try to make the weight, weight loss about one thing, but not about the root causes and not really looking at each of us as an individual, it interferes with our ability to really maintain a healthy weight. So you have to look at all of it. You have to look at diet hormones, your blood sugar, your gut health, your brain health, environmental toxins, mitochondrial function, inflammation, stress, all the things I mentioned earlier that are often not considered when it comes to weight. So if you're resistant to weight loss or there's something going on and you think you're doing everything right, it may not be just what you're eating or how much you're exercising. So that's important. It may not even be about the quality of your calories. We now know that there are these phenomena of obesogens that are driving some of the weight gain. 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 will be considered obese. It's now over 2 billion that are overweight over. 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 cell's ability to burn calories. You will increase fat deposition, particularly 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. Leptin also plays a role. Ghrelin or ghrelin also affects your hunger. This is the hunger and the satiety. Hormones, now they run the show, these hormones run the show of weight management, fat storage. And you really need to sort of understand how these work short term. If you actually do calorie restriction, you will lose weight. I mean, if you're in a concentration camp, you're gonna lose weight. There's no way about it. So for sure, calorie deficits work for weight loss. But over time, what happens is your metabolism will downregulate and you'll burn fewer calories. So your metabolism slows down as you start to get calorie restricted and that ends up in a vicious cycle. Also, you're then hungrier because you're starving, because you're not eating enough calories. And you're then, you know, you're kind of in a vicious cycle. So you want to, if you're calories, but then you want to, you're craving stuff, so you're probably going to binge. So you get in a whole vicious cycle and you can't white knuckle it. You just can't. You've got to use science, not willpower, to regulate your weight. So the key is to focus on diet quality. And the problem with Americans diets, it's 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. You know, like 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, right? 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. 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 mouth feel 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 tobacco companies actually bought a lot of the food companies, and then they. They realized they were losing their market share of cigarettes, so they started to go after market share of junk food, and they actually turned these junk food companies into. Into a more of a scientific approach to creating addiction. So if you want to learn more about it, I'm not making this up. You can read Michael Moore Moss's book called Salt, Sugar and Fat. He was actually my first podcast at the doctor's pharmacy. So that's great. 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 on our metabolism and overall health. We don't really know what to eat. The food industry has made us confused and confounded by their marketing and by food labeling, 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 of advocates for and calling your congressmen and senators and getting behind this, calling the FDA to kind of have comment, and 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, it sort of acknowledges the complexity of human metabolism, that humans are not living in a vacuum. And a closed, like a closed system, our diet has, has physiological effects on hormones, on insulin, on blood sugar, on inflammation. And you know, when this happens, high insulin level stores fat and blocks your ability to burn fat. The, the carbohydrate insulin model isn't the full explanation of everything related to weight. We have to look at all, all the things that might matter and, and we have to consider all the things that we talked about earlier when, which includes the toxins, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, imbalances in gut flora, sleep issues and so forth. Now one of the things I just wanna say is that in terms of calories, you know, the calories hypothesis is often put forward as a scientific fact because of what we call the first law of thermodynamics. Now this law states that energy is conserved in a closed system. So if you take a thousand calories of broccoli and a thousand calories of coca cola and you burn them in a lab, they produce the same exact amount of energy in a vacuum, right? That is a calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 liter of water 1 degree centigrade. It's just a scientific fact. But the problem with humans is they're not a closed system, they're not a vacuum, right? Just another example. If you take a pound of feathers and a pound of lead and you drop them in a vacuum, they drop at exactly the same rate because there is no air. If you drop them off a bridge, the lead's going to go boom and the feathers will flow down at a different rate even though they weigh the same amount. And the reason is air. Now the quote, air of your body is your, your metabolism, is your microbiome, is your hormones, is all of that stuff it has to go be processed through. So the idea that we have to sort of adhere to this belief that an energy balance is the only way to explain weight is just not even scientific. And it misses the whole idea that the energy balance is true, but only in a vacuum. Now let's dive into my Top tips for maintaining a healthy weight and how we can maintain a healthy weight using the principles of functional medicine. It's really a comprehensive approach using nutrition hormone regulation, stress regulation, sleep optimization, detoxification, microbiome normalization, doing the right diagnostic labs, and creating actionable steps that you can take to make lasting changes. So the first thing we want to do is keep our blood sugar balanced. Why? Well, when you balance your blood sugar, you're balancing the key weight regulation hormone, AKA insulin. It is a hormone that's released by the pancreas when we eat something sweet or rich in starch and sugar, like pasta, white rice, potatoes, sugar of all kinds. It's a processed food. Now, the insulin delivers a glucose to our cells to use for fuel and also fats, too. So if you're eating fat along with it, it's going to get stored. Now, cells take in what they need, and any extra is stored as glycogen in the liver and the muscle or converted to fat as a backup energy reserve. I mean, think about it from an evolutionary point of view. If you ended up on a patch of berries or some sugary thing, honey, you want to store that because you don't know when you're going to get your next meal. And so your body's designed to be very efficient when you eat anything sweet and starchy. That's why we crave it, because it allows us to protect against periods of scarcity. We store that bulk of calories from sugar and some starchy stuff because our bodies are designed to do that. It's not a bad thing from an evolutionary point of view, but the problem is, you know, we don't have periods of scarcity. We just have over an abundance of excess of food. And we have about an extra 500 calories per person in America. Now, when your blood sugar goes up, insulin can kind of go up, too, and it can overshoot, and then it causes a crash, and then you get low blood sugar, then you get tired, then you get hangry, you get cravings for carbs, and then you want sugar and stuff a couple hours later. Everybody's experienced this. When you don't eat, you get hypoglycemia sometimes. And the more sugar and carbs you eat, the more it can be worse. And it also can lead to panic attacks. In fact, severe hypoglycemia can occur when you're having very big spikes of insulin and sugar. And then you get the crashes and you end up with hyperventilation, palpitations, sweating, anxiety. It's not a Panic attack. It's a physiologic response. And the reason is it's driving you to go find food right away. Now, low blood sugar also causes a lot of other problems. It can cause a cortisol spike, which then makes you more store more fat around the midsection. So both, both too much sugar and not enough blood sugar, because it's danger, can cause you to store fat without balancing your blood sugar. You're going to be riding this roller coaster of blood sugar spikes, crashes, and cravings that you can't willpower yourself out of. You need to use science, not willpower. Now, over time, you know, reaching for carbs and sugar to keep your energy levels up can lead to a huge problem, which leads to insulin resistance. Because you're getting higher and higher levels of insulin, your cells become resistant to it, and then you end up with more weight gain, more obesity, more Type Diabe, type 2 diabetes, more cancer, more heart disease, pretty much everything. Dementia even, we now call dementia type 3 diabetes. Now, high insulin promotes fat storage. It makes it more difficult to achieve fat burning. Right? So basically it's the fat storage hormone. It locks the fat in your fat cells. We want to make sure that we are really focusing on how to make our bodies insulin sensitive and how we can keep our insulin levels low. This is a fundamental strategy not only for weight loss, not only for weight maintenance, but, but for preventing all the diseases that we're prone to as we age. Heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and dementia are all diseases of insulin resistance. So how can you know for sure that you're insulin sensitive? Well, there's some great lab tests out there. You can do that. So again, most doctors do not measure insulin. I spoke to the folks at Quest Labs and they, I said, how many of your tests come in with a fasting insulin or an insulin test? They're like less than 1%. Yet this should be the gold standard that every doctor measures, including your blood pressure, your weight, and your cholesterol. It's just so important to measure. And, and it's really important. And this is very predictive of insulin resistance. Even decades before you get pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes, fasting insulin precedes when it's elevated, precedes elevations in glucose by 13 years. So you're having 13 years of a bad physiology that's making you gain weight even before your blood sugar starts going up. That's crazy. Another study found that hyperinsulinemia predicts glycemic dysfunction 24 years in advance. So that's crazy. So 24 years before you get abnormal blood sugar. One study found that it was 24 years earlier you could detest. How do you get tested if your doctor's not worrying? Well, you can go through function health. This is a company I co founded. I'm the chief medical officer. I wanted to create a personalized health platform that gives people access to their lab testing. Something that, you know, before you had to go to the doctor, go through insurance, hope they'd order the right thing. Oh, you don't need your insulin, you don't need this, you don't need that. But you can get a really solid picture of what's going on with your metabolic health. And that's one of the key deep dives we do on the function Health lab testing that you get with your membership every year, 499 for over $15,000 worth of lab tests. So you get fasting glucose, which most Doctors check, your A1C something. Again, most doctors won't check unless you actually already have diabetes. It'll look also at the right cholesterol test called a cardio iq, which measures something called lipoprotein fractionation. This is the measurement of not just the total cholesterol or the weight of your cholesterol, but the quality of your cholesterol. What's the size and number of cholesterol particles, hdl, ldl, triglycerides, super important. Also, we look at other markers like uric acid, we look at liver function tests, we look at other indicators, adiponectin, leptin, that can help you identify problems with your metabolic health. The other thing you can just kind of do is do the mirror test, which is look at the mirror. If you have a belly, that is a sign that you probably have some degree of insulin resistance. But you don't have to. You can be a skinny fat person because, for example, if you have replaced muscle with fat and you're not overweight, you can be under lean and you'd be metabolically healthy. It's called skinny fat or metabolically obese normal weight. So given all that, how do we make sure our blood sugar is balanced? Well, if we eat something with carbs like fruit, then we should add protein and fat to and fiber to slow the spike of your blood sugar. Such like, for example, a handful of almonds, a tablespoon of nut butter, for example, with your apple. And now don't, don't overdo it. You don't obviously want to overdo it, but it's possible to overeat carbs and fat and Creates a calorie surplus. So you have to be careful of that. But make sure that you're balancing your appetite by eating protein, fat and fiber and veggies as the antidote to the carbohydrates. Think of em as like an antidote. And key is also do not have sugar for breakfast. It is the biggest thing I go crazy about and it's one of the reasons why we're seeing such an epidemic of obesity. We start our days with muffins, croissants, bagels, cereal, pancakes, French toast, and also the hidden sugar in our lattes and our sweetened teas. Those are terrible. So you want to start with eating Even oatmeal is not good for you, by the way. Steel kid oats with some fat and fiber, extra fiber in there and maybe some nuts and seeds. Fine, but probably not the best for you. So what do you want to eat for breakfast? Protein for breakfast. The best thing you can do. If you, for example, eat protein for breakfast, you're gonna be full till lunch. But if you eat cereal for breakfast, you're gonna be starving around 10 or 11 o'. Clock. So eggs are great. Avocados with eggs is my favorite. Leftover protein from dinner. You can have a protein shake. This is gonna help you feel full and your blood sugar stable for the whole day. And then when I have my protein shake, I'm like, barely need lunch, I'm so full. You also obviously wanna avoid all ultra processed food. You know, basically if it comes in a package, has a label and you don't recognize the ingredients, you probably don't eat it. Avoid refined grains occasionally, fine, but flour, refined grains, added sugar, sugar, sweetened beverages, not something you want to be consuming. Now sometimes it's kind of hard to cut out all this stuff called turkey. But there's some baby steps that you can do. Now the next step is just to make it simpler. So how do you do that? Well, make sure you eat protein every meal. It makes you feel full. It also burns more calories than sugar or fat, which is great. And make sure you have protein for breakfast. Now, compared to lower protein diets, higher protein diets led to greater weight loss to the maintenance of lean muscle mass, which is important because as you lose weight, you lose muscle. And if you eat protein, you can avoid a lot of that. It also improves cardiometabolic risk factors. So not only does the protein help you lose weight, but it actually helps your blood sugar, your A1C, your blood pressure, your triglycerides. It makes you feel full it controls your appetite. So eating good portion of protein every meal makes overeating a lot harder. Why? Because protein rich foods make you feel full, they're satiating. And people generally eat less calories on a higher protein diet. In fact, it's one of the key strategies is to actually build muscle, lose fat by eating more protein. It also increases something called peptide YY and GLP1. Yes, you heard about that Ozempic. These make you feel full. So protein actually is like taking a GLP1 natural OIC, right? Protein leverage hypothesis is a way of thinking about this and suggests a really compelling explanation for rising obesity rates and the trouble maintaining weight loss. Humans eat until their protein needs are met, right? So if you're eating a low protein diet and you're eating starch and sugar, you're gonna keep eating, right? And the foods are most likely to overeat, they're ultra processed foods, they're high in calorie than starch, sugar and refined oils. These tend to be low in protein, right? I mean you don't, when you're eating chips and junk food, they ain't much protein in there. And think about it, if you're full, you don't wanna reach for any more protein, but there's always room for dessert, right? Think about it, you might not wanna eat a 20 ounce steak, but if there's ice cream, you're gonna probably want that at the end of dinner. A couple of scientists, Robinheimer and Simpson, first proposed this idea in their 2005 paper, the Protein Leverage Hypothesis. Now the hypothesis suggests that our appetite response to protein, fat and carbs has evolutionary roots. Foods rich in fat have been relatively rare throughout most of human history. And the availability of carbohydrates in fruits and root vegetables is typically seasonal. Now, when our ancestors encountered those foods, they eat as much as possible because our bodies are programmed to store a surplus of calories consumed. Unfortunately, this trait doesn't quite match our modern environment where ultra processed foods are always available. Now, despite the hypothesis appeal, the research outcomes sort of been mixed, right? This was an idea, but they had a study. One 2011 study assigned participants to meals with three different concentrations of protein, 10%, 15% or 25% of their total calories. Now, when the diet's protein content was lowered from 15 to 10%, subjects consumed about 12% more calories, mainly from savory snacks between meals. However, despite eating more overall, the subjects did not consume enough to maintain a constant protein intake, indicating that people might still eat more calories than needed without satisfying their protein requirements. Now, Kevin hall from the NIH reports an interesting paradox in his paper, the potential role of Protein leverage in the US obesity epidemic. Now, the total amount of protein in the US food chain has increased since the 1970s, but the availability of fat and carbs has increased even more. So the amount of calories from protein has actually declined by about 1%. So even a small decrease in protein can potentially increase energy intake because you're not as satisfied, because that's basically the thesis of the protein leverage hypothesis. Undereating protein may not be able to explain the obesity epidemic, but we can't ignore that it affects our eating behavior. How else does protein intake help maintain a healthy weight? It burns more calories during digestion. This is called the thermic effect of food. A thermic effect of protein is about 20 to 30%. If you eat something with 100 calories from protein, digesting those calories might burn off 30 of those calories. So the net effect is 70 calories. The thermic effect of carbohydrates is 5 to 10% and that of fat is 0 to 3%. So it's substantial. Now, this prevents a decline in resting metabolic rate or resting energy expenditure. This is the biggest issue with calories in, calories out, and the whole energy balance hypothesis. Your metabolism slows to conserve energy, which will lead to a weight loss plateau. This is really pretty standard. People know this like they lose weight and they stop. Now, a 2012 meta analysis of 24 randomized controlled trials is the highest level of evidence. Over a thousand participants, they compared the effects of a high protein diet versus a low protein diet when both are in a calorie deficit. So you're having a calorie restricted diet, one's low protein, one's high protein. They found that although both diets reduced the resting energy expenditure, the high protein diets better preserved it. So if you do calorie restrict, you're going to lower your metabolic rate, but if you eat protein, you're going to keep your metabolic rate higher. That's a good thing. That means you burn more calories doing nothing. Now, people on high protein diets had an average of 142more calories burned per day at rest than those on lower protein diets. And if you do the math, over the course of a year, that extra 142 calories translates into a 14 pound protein weight loss eating the same amount of calories. Now, high protein diets likely help maintain your resting metabolic rate by preserving what we call fat free Mass. This is your muscle mass even when restricting calories. Right? And here's the other thing. Muscle burns more calories than fat. Muscle burns about seven times the calories as fat. That's huge, right? So maintaining muscle helps maintain your body's calorie burning rate even when you're doing nothing. So increasing protein intake can have a beneficial effect on your energy metabolism, especially when you calorie restrict. 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 1 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 sized 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. And 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. You don't have 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 boats. You're feeling full. It actually activates your Natural Ozempic or GLP1 and PYY. This also increases stomach distension and slows gastric emptying. Basically what ozempic does, right? That's what fibers 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 cognac root, a Japanese tuber super high in fiber, absorb 50 times its weight in water. And so basically, it fills up your stomach when you eat it. And then people will lose tens of pounds on one patient even lost 40 pounds just taking that a few minutes before each meal. Now, the other good thing about fiber is that it helps you improve your microbiome. It helps bring your bowel movements. It promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria, helps them produce short chain fatty acids, which is important in energy metabolism, and that improves insulin sensitivity and burning of calories. So the, the, the good bugs in the gut will produce compounds like these short chain fats that are really good for you and that 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. 8 to 10 servings. Even more. Not 5 to 9. Probably more like 9 to 20 if you could do it. There's never too much veggies. You got unlit refills. So basically a serving is a half a cup of cooked, 1 cup raw. 75% of your plate should be non starchy veggies. Meeting the dietary fiber needs is really one of the strongest predictors of weight. If you want to lose weight, make sure you got to jack up your fiber. There's a study called the Pounds Loss Study. So it stands for preventing overweight using novel dietary strategies. Uh, that's a great acronym, right? Pounds. Uh, and they used data from the study of overweight and obese adults who met their daily fiber intake goals. And they found that they had higher compliance and greater weight loss independent of the macronutrients. So f. Focusing on fiber alone can help 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, purple sweet potato, asparagus, mushrooms. You know, 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 what we eat in America. It's bad. I encourage you to think about it. Maybe you could think about how many different plant foods you eat per week. You know, 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 another probably nine plants comprise the rest, like tomatoes or onions. But when you see 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, it's fine, learn how to make it. And 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 and 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 the 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. There's another important bacteria that can help with weight regulation, metabolism. It's called Akkermansia. It's a new one that we've been talking about lately. It feeds on all kinds of polyphenols like pomegranate, cranberry, green tea. And why it's important is it protects against leaky gut. The full name is Akkermansia. Mucinophilia means mucus loving. And, and we like a thick layer of mucus on the lining of our Gut so we don't get a leaky gut and then get inflammation from the leaking of bacterial toxins and proteins and food proteins into our system. And this will promote insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing. 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 Thin 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 serum pasta day and eat low fat foods and low fat snackle 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 of our way. 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. Uh, so again, if you want to learn more, I published this in 2016. But e fat Get Thin is a great summary of this. And I basically 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 and vibrant. 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 100 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? Because 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 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 3, Omega 6s in some amounts. But eat them from good sources, from whole foods, from even expeller pressed or organic forms of these. These oils can be fine in small amounts. Our diet has way too many Omega 6. It's 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 or the FDA, but they're still out there in the food. Margarine, vegan butters, microwave pizza, popcorn, desserts, all that stuff. And they make your cell walls rigid. In other words, Crisco or shortening. You know they call it shortening because it shortens your life. It makes your, 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, Monounsaturated 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. Saturated fats also can be helpful if they're the right ones. In fact, not all saturated fats are the same. Saturated fats is like saying humans. There's so many different types and kinds. They all have different effects and they're different. So some saturated fats are good. Bacteric acid can reduce inflammation. Another one's called conjugated linoleic acid is found in grass fed meats and dairy. And that can reduce weight by reducing inflammation, improving energy metabolism, lipid metabolism. They inhibit the development of Fat cells, they increase fat burning. They actually cause your fat cells to have more mitochondria and they help with insulin regulation. They have anti diabetic effects. And people who have more conjugated linoleic acid have less risk of developing diabetes. So all great. And also it may be anti cancer. Another type of fat is MCT oil. It can boost your metabolic rate. It's got a thermogenic effect. Coconut oil. But be careful. Some people don't tolerate saturated fats. You have to watch out. MCTL actually has fewer calories per teaspoon than fat. It's absorbed easier. It has a thermogenic effect. But 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 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 at an intuitive basis. Animals are like this. But we've lost that because we've come completely disregulated. 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 enchilado and I overeat and I drink wine, I'll come back heavier, but. 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 you always 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 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 150 pound person, you know you're, 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 3pm 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 melting, tracking or monitoring by listening to your body. Basically, a serving of protein is the palm sized 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. Now there's a lot of other tips for maintaining a healthy weight is get your kitchen and pantry sorted. You need to do a makeover, improve your food environment by cleaning out all the garbage in your fridge, in your freezer. And I sometimes at night I'm like, had a long day, I'm tired or whatever stress, like I want a pint of ice cream, but if it ain't there, I ain't going to eat it. And I'm not likely to get in the car and drive for 15 minutes to go get it one way and another 15 minutes drive back. I'm going to probably stay in home and just deal with it. Get rid of all the junk food in the house. It should be a safe zone. There's a lot of danger zones out there. We live in a toxic food landscape. Just make your home a safe zone. Get rid of all the processed flour, the sugar, ultra processed food, the chips, frozen bagels, pizza, whatever, you know, convenience food, just get rid of it. You're going to eat what you keep in your pantry. Just do that. And that's why if you want to improve your diet and your health, limiting your exposure is going to help you avoid being tempted by these foods. So it doesn't mean you can't have them ever again. It just means that you limit your exposure to outside the house, like a restaurant or maybe a friend's house. Also here's a big one. Don't drink liquid sugar calories. Say it again. Do not drink liquid sugar calories. These are dangerous and they're the worst thing you can do for your weight metabolism. Sugar, sweetened beverages, sodas, juices, teas, sweetened coffees, you name it. Energy drinks, I mean there's one after the other that are out there. Also, you might want to avoid gluten in dairy products, conventional dairy particularly, because they can be inflammatory, they can lead to weight gain. Gluten is usually a form of flour. It can be problematic, stay away from artificial sweeteners. There's a lot of debate about this. You know, they, they're not, they're not good for you, they have other adverse effects even if they don't affect your weight, like damaging your microbiome. Also, get rid of all the added sugar in your food. Right there's great. Basically more than five grams of sugar per serving is a problem. Five grams is more, a little more than a teaspoon. So if it says more than 5 grams per serving, if it's a yogurt, a box, cereal, crackers, that should be your thing. Just look at the label. If it says, you know, over 4 or 5 grams per serving, don't eat it. 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. Uh, frozen fruit and veggies are fine, they last longer, they don't take 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, butcherbox, force of nature, seatopia. Fish are all great sources of healthy, clean and often regenerative protein. You know, 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. You want to experiment on the weekends, go ahead but just get stuff that you're, you're comfortable with that's quick. Fermented foods are great too. They help your microbiome. Goat or sheep, yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi. Get your pantry full of the right stuff like extra virgin olive oil, MCT oil, grass fed butter, clarified butter, ghee, lots of anti inflammatory herbs and spices like ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne, thyme, rosemary, cumin, sage. Basically spices that make your food taste good. Have some beans in there, black beans, lupini, beans are great. Green, yellow, red, lentils, nuts are great. Walnuts, pecans, almonds macadamia nuts, lots of seeds. Hemp, chia flax, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds are all great to add your diet. 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. Also, how you eat matters, right? Mindful eating is key, and that has a big role in your metabolism. So I encourage to take five practice, which is basically breathe in through your nose, do a count of five. Wait, count out through your mouth to a count of five, and do that five times, and you'll be relaxed and ready to eat. And the reason is when you eat under stress, you will slow your metabolism and your body won't process the food. If you want to put your head on your belly, it'll help you connect to better belly breathing, maybe offer gratitude before the meal. It's been done for thousands of years. Good way to sort of reset your nervous system. Before eating, make sure you chew your food thoroughly. You can put down your utensils between each bite or, you know, just kind of chill. Don't take another bite of food while you're still chewing your food. That's gonna help you slow down and slow down your eating so you can better gauge when you're full. It takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that you're full. So if you eat fast, you're gonna miss on that signal. Then eating slower is associated with eating less. Eat until you're 80% full. That's a Japanese philosophy of Hari Hachi Bu, inspired by the Okinawans, one of the blue zones where they live a long time. That makes you stop eating when your stomach's 80% full, you know, and try not to eat three hours before bed. That's a sumo wrestler diet. If you eat and go to bed, you're gonna gain weight. The body won't burn the fat, it's gonna store it. And while your insulin levels are high, and also make sure you get your sleep sorted. It's a really underrated component of weight loss and weight management. If you look at healthy subjects, even a partial night of poor sleep can cause insulin resistance, can make you crave carbs and sugar, and chronic sleep loss can disrupt the balance of your appetite and satiety hormones, making you more tired and more hungry, which makes you overeat and make poor food choices. So none of that's good for you. Now give yourself at least seven, eight hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep. You know, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Go to bed. To avoid late night snacking, you can go to bed earlier. One study found that adults who slept less than six and a half hours a night could increase their sleep duration by an average of 1.2 hours a night. And by doing that, they reduce their overall calorie intake by an average of 270 calories a day. That's an enormous amount of calories. In fact, that's the equivalent to about 30 pounds of weight gain a day. If you didn't do that and if you slept a little more, you're going to do 30 pounds of weight loss. So that's, that's the reason for sleeping. Also stay hydrated. Really important. Some people eat when they're thirsty, but drink a glass of water before you go to eat something. You might be thirsty, not hungry. Water and electrolytes are great. Help curb cravings. Exercise obviously is great, but it's less about weight and more about maintaining your physical health. Your insulin sensitivity wards off chronic disease. It actually regulates your appetite, helps maintain a healthy body composition. Something called zone two. Aerobic exercise is important. That's 150 minutes a week or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, like resistance training, more intense running or biking. Make sure you do something you love. It has to be something you like. Not just cardio is important. Also, strength and resistance training is important. Why this is so important, particularly in the era of Ozempic. There's so many people who are doing Ozempic or Mounjaro who are not strength training, and it's a disaster because they're gonna lose muscle, they're not eating a protein. And then if you're gonna take those drugs, and I don't think most people need them, there's a way around it. But some people do. You if you eat extra protein and strength train, you're gonna do way better and lo actually lose more weight. And skeletal muscle is really an important organ. It's the, it's an active organization. It burns more calories than any other organ. It helps soak up sugar from the bloodstream. It's basically the biggest sink for your fuel. It helps your blood sugar balance. Okay, so you've done all the right things around food. What else can you do? Certain supplements can be very helpful. And nutritional deficiencies can lead to weight issues. So make sure you take a good multivitamin, an omega 3, about 2 grams a day. Vitamin D between 2 to 5,000, which helps insulin function. You might want nutrients that have energy metabolism like carnitine, which can help you transport fat into your cells to burn more fat effectively. Also, magnesium is important. It helps with ATP production, improves the insulin sensitivity, sleep. You can do about 4 or 500 milligrams a day of magnesium glycinate electrolytes. My favorite is Elyte Element is another one that people like. 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. And we 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. Share who might 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 Hacks.