PNTV: Always Hungry? by David Ludwig (#324)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, Always Hungry by Dr. David Ludwig, MD and PhD Always Hungry subtitle Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently. In our last Philosopher's Notes TV episode, we featured Food Rules by Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan, at the end of that book, the first acknowledgement he makes, the first thank you he gives, is to David Ludwig. David Ludwig is one of the world's leading nutritional scientists. He has both a PhD and an MD. He's a professor in both Harvard's medical school and in Harvard's School of Public Health in their nutrition department. He, he's written over 100 peer reviewed scientific journals. And in this book he combines a lot of the evidence based stuff, a lot of it is his research with a practical three phase plan to conquer your cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently. Philosopher's Note, Bunch of my favorite big ideas. Let's look at these five now, quickly. So one of the underlying themes we're going to start with calories. We're one of the underlying themes of the book is challenging the prevalence notion of calories in, calories out. Right? So that's all weight management is, right? If you believe this school of thought, you just need to balance how much you eat with how much you move. You need to eat less than you burn throughout the day. Calories in, calories out. It's called the energy balance hypothesis. Short story is, he basically says that is false, period. Calories are not all equal. If you go with the calories in, calories out model, you basically say, hey, a calorie is a calorie, which is true. In a vacuum, in a lab, a calorie is a calorie. You can measure the amount of energy created. Boom, they're the same. But our human bodies are not a vacuum. And when you put a calorie into your body, the quality of that calorie matters. It affects your hormones, it affects your metabolism. So there's a counter to the energy balance hypothesis, which is the hormonal or metabolic hypothesis, which says calories are not created equally. Right. And different calories have different effects on your body. And the short story there is highly processed carbs have a very significant, very negative impact on your body, which is what we talked about in Food Rules, right? This isn't even real food that we're eating these days. He says eat food, real food, not, not edible food, like substances is how Michael Pollan described it. Right? But for now, think about calories and realize that the quality of your calories matters a lot. And that leads us to, we're going to talk about low fat coffins and low fat diets. In fact, they just have not worked. And our third big idea, but the second big idea is fascinating. And I should say that David outlines the strength of that hypothesis in a number of different studies he conducted that are just truly phenomenal. One of them, he brought people into a lab and he basically, I think it was 12 men who had high BMI and he gave them two different types of milkshakes. One milkshake had a high fast acting carbohydrate in the form of corn syrup, right? Went into their system quickly, fast acting carb. And the other group got a milkshake with the same number of calories, the same breakdown of fats and proteins and carbohydrates. But rather than the fast acting carbs, they got a slow acting carb. They didn't get corn syrup. They got like corn starch or something, right? Which is assimilated more slowly. Fast forward in the study and what you find is that the individuals who drank the fast acting carbohydrates, their blood sugar rose quickly and further than the other group. But then after a few hours, it dropped and hunger became stronger. And what's fascinating is they actually were able to put people into an FMRI machine. So imagine you just took this milkshake, right? And we have all the other things we just talked about. Then they slide you into an FMRI and they look at your brain. And what they found was the individuals who had the fast acting carbs had a part of their brain connected to the reward center. An addiction called the nucleus accumbens, which light up like a laser. He said the group that had the slow acting carbs, put them in an fmri. You don't see anything in the reward center, right? But the group that had the fast acting carbs, boom, the reward center was lit up. Now, this is relevant because this is the source of cravings, this is the source of addiction. The same centers light up when we're talking about other addictive substances like alcohol, alcohol and cocaine. So not only is our blood sugar going up and then dropping when we eat highly processed carbohydrates, but we're also triggering the addiction centers and the reward centers in our brain, which makes it really difficult to sustain a healthy plan if you're consuming a ton of refined carbs. Which is why rule number one, obviously, people approach nutrition very fervently. And often dogmatically. But no one is going to say you should eat more processed carbs. It's just a universal. Everyone agrees you should eat real food and reduce the amount of processed carbs. And David's research on what it does to our bodies is absolutely fascinating. Both the reward center and then of course the metabolic consequences, etc. Third big idea, he says we need to put a nail in the low fat coffin, the low fat diet approach. And he cites two different research studies in the same prestigious journal in 2013. Very recent research. One was looking at low fat diets and trying to basically demonstrate that low fat diets are awesome, and the other was looking at Mediterranean diets vis a vis low fat diets. Long story short, both studies were canceled before they were actually completed. The low fat study that was trying to show that low fat can help people with diabetes was canceled for futility. It didn't work and it was very clear that continuing it was not going to produce any results. So they canceled that study. They reported it in this journal. Same year they report a different study. Huge number of adults In Spain, like 7,500 different people, right, who were tested on whether a low fat approach or a Mediterranean approach, either with high, high fat with olive oil or high fat with nuts, would reduce their cardiovascular risk profile. Right? Long story short on that is that study was canceled because the results were so exceedingly clear and exceeding their expectations that the high fat diets were outperforming the low fat diets, that it was unethical to continue the experiments. He says, look, these two studies in prestigious journals in the same year should seal the coffin on the low fat diet myth that as we talked about in the last episode, over the last 40 years, as we've adopted this low fat approach and demonized fat, we've seen our weight in the US go up by 17 pounds or something like that for the average man, 19 pounds for the average woman. Not working. The research shows we want to seal the coffin. David tells us, fourth big idea. Now we start moving into first half of the book is science. Second second half of the book is a three phase plan to conquer your cravings, which is part phase one, right? And then the second part is to retrain your fat cells, phase two. And the phase three is to keep your weight off permanently. Right? So in phase one, well, the whole process here, as I mentioned before, is you want to reduce your processed carbs, reduce them in phase one to zero. Reduce basically all of your, not all of your carbs. It's Not a very, very low carb diet, but you remove grains in the first phase and of course, all the other processed carbohydrates. Then in phase two, after a couple weeks, you can reintegrate or re welcome, whatever the word is, the grains, etc. And you kind of test that over two to six months. And then you adopt your own little bio individual plan. But basically you swap out your processed carbs for healthy fats. What are healthy fats? Healthy fats, according to David's plan, are things like olive oil, avocado, nuts, etc. Healthy fats. Swap them out with the processed carbs and you'll find a pleasant level of satiety. Satiety, interesting word that you don't get when you're eating highly processed carbs. Highly processed carbs are stimulating your reward center. They're making you crave more and more and they're making you hungrier. They're not satisfying you the way that fats do. So his whole point throughout this book, and he's got dozens and dozens of testimonials that are super inspiring sprinkled throughout from the people who have gone through his clinical pilot study, is this is shocking. First of all, I never thought I could eat fat and lose weight. A and B, I'm not hungry. I feel good, which most people don't feel on most of the programs that restrict calories, which is another reason why it doesn't work. You restrict calories to lose weight. Sure, you'll lose weight quickly, but then what happens is your hunger increases while your metabolism slows when you're doing the calories in and out approach and restricting calories, which is not a winning combination because then you're going to eat more with a slower metabolism and put on more weight. Much better to think about an approach like this. Fifth big idea. Passeggiata. Passeggiata, right. The word for just kind of a leisurely, awesome walk that many Italians do. Right. He says, and this is in the context of what he calls life supports. So in addition to changing your nutrition, you want to also make sure you're managing your stress well, you're moving consistently and you're sleeping well. And then he's got some other ideas, like creating a big why? Why do you want to do this? And then if. Then planning, which we talk about all the time. Right. So he kind of walks you through these life support tools while sharing with you what your new diet should look like. All kinds of recipes, et cetera, as you'd expect. But this is an idea I love. So the idea of going for a pastegiata, right, Going for a leisurely walk after your dinner. Research shows that something like adults, older adults who were at risk for diabetes, right, went on three 15 minute walks after their meals. They'd go on a 15 minute walk and research showed that it helped them with their insulin and with their overall metabolism. Something as simple as going for a walk after having your meal. And we've been talking about this a lot in our movement series, right? We've got Katie Bowman who's talking about the fact that 31 mile walks better than 13 mile walk, which is echoed in this wisdom, right? And finding the time to move your DNA helps not only your optimizing of your genetic expression, but also your insulin and everything else. So I've been having fun integrating more walks into my life. My new target is 5 mini walks a day can be as short as 3 minutes or 5 minutes or 10 minutes, then some longer ones. But have fun getting your walk on after your meals. Particularly good time. Reduce your processed carbs, increase your healthy fats, phase one, two and three. And then we want to put the final nail in the low fat diet coffin. It just didn't work. Remember, futility was why they shut down the one low fat study and the other exceeded their expectations. So they shut it down. It was unethical to have the people in the low fat condition continue because they knew it wasn't working. The other one was working so much better. You don't want to stimulate your nucleus accumbens by eating highly processed carbs. Turn off that addiction center by no longer doing that. And then remember our differentiation between the calories in calories out approach and the. What do they call it, energy balance hypothesis vis a vis our hormonal and metabolic hypothesis. What you eat, the calories you meet, eat matter. It's not just about the quantity, the number of calories you're having, the types of calories you eat, matter, period. Reduce the processed carbs, increase the healthy fats and you will no longer be hungry. That is the always hungry solution. At least a quick look at it. I hope you enjoyed. I'm looking forward to interviewing David and getting this wisdom out there. As with everything, be willing to experiment. Open up. What experiment can you run? What idea landed? Have fun seeing if you can integrate a little more into your life today and make today another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live for some wacky reason optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient Wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.