16 Reasons You're Not Burning Fat (& How To Lose Weight The Right Way)

Your lungs are the primary excretory organs for weight loss. So unless you're wanting to gain significant mass, like if you're a high school or college football player trying to get to the next level, if you've eaten at some point prior to working out, there's no need to drop everything to, you know, slug down that post workout protein drink. The number one thing that you can do if you are resistant to weight loss and you're already moving more and eating less is I have a Master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and Human Nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From Sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver deliver you this podcast Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

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Hey, that's me. My trumpet. Me and my trumpet here with you today. And that's all. No Guest 0 Guest this is just me on a solo sod about fat, about all the different reasons that people have a hard time burning fat. Sixteen reasons specifically that I'm going to get into on today's show with you and what you can do about it. I haven't done a solo sode in a little while because I just have so many amazing guests that I always want to talk to. But occasionally I have some things that I want to get off my mind and into yours. And today's episode is no exception. So if you're into burning fat or helping people burn fat, this is the episode for you. So before I talk about why people are resistant to weight loss so much, it's important to understand where fat actually goes, like how fat actually gets burnt. Because most fat loss books and so called weight loss experts and physicians and dietitians and personal trainers, they'll tell you that fat is converted to energy or is converted to heat, but that actually violates a law called the law of conservation of mass. And all that law states is that mass in an isolated system is neither created nor destroyed by chemical reactions or physical transformations. So in other words, you can't simply take fat and poop it out or turn it into muscle. Instead, the primary place that fat goes when you lose weight is your breath. You breathe away fat. Your lungs are the primary excretory organs for weight loss. So any excess calories that you eat, here's how it works, including carbohydrates, protein, and even that, you know, half stick of butter that you put into your green tea or coffee that gets converted into triglycerides, which is a type of fatty acid. Now, excess carbohydrate or protein is converted to triglyceride and stored in the lipid droplets of fat cells. Fat cells are called adipocytes. And excess dietary fat then undergoes something called lipolysis or the breakdown of fat, followed by another process called re esterification to allow that fat to be stored. So people who want to lose weight while maintaining muscle and other important tissue are, biochemically speaking, trying to burn through triglycerides that are stored in adipocytes, lipid droplets that are stored in, or triglycerides are stored in the lipid droplets of fat cells. Now, triglycerides are comprised of three types of atoms, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And they can only be broken down when these atoms are unlocked through a process called oxidation. And that requires this is where breath comes in, the inhalation of oxygen. So there was actually a research study that was, that was done. It was, when somebody loses weight, where does the fat go? Great title for a research study. And what the researchers found was that for 22 pounds of fat to be oxidized, 64 pounds of oxygen must be inhaled. And oxidation Results in about 61 pounds of carbon dioxide excreted via the lungs and about 24 pounds of water excreted via urine and feces and breath sweat. So your lungs are the primary excretory organs for fat loss. Now, stick with me here on the math. So every breath that you breathe out contains a little over 0.001 ounces of CO2 and about.003 ounces, or rather 0.0003 ounces of that is carbon. So an average total of 17,000 breaths during the day is going to get rid of around 0.32 pounds of carbon. And about a third of that fat loss is occurring when you're doing nothing at all, like when you're sleeping during the night. So how do you replace all that carbon that you breathe off? Well, unless you're eating charcoal rocks or overdosing on charcoal capsules, the only significant carbon sources that I personally know of are dietary carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. So from as simplistic a standpoint as possible, losing fat means consuming less carbon than you've exhaled. So if you were to spend a day asleep at rest and performing light activities that honestly can nearly double your resting metabolic rate, just walking around and moving, you'd exhale about 7 ounces of carbon. By substituting 1 hour of rest per day with 1 hour of moderate exercise, like going on hike, riding a bike, doing some weightlifting, your metabolic rate is increased by about seven fold. And that removes an extra ounce and a half of carbon from the body, increasing the amount of carbon you exhale by around 20%, from 7 ounces up to 8 and a half ounces. Now, the problem is all that carbon loss can of course, be offset by eating carbon molecules from carbohydrates or protein or fat. So, you know, a single hundred gram whole wheat muffin, for example, will give you about 20%, 20% of your average daily energy requirement. And that means physical activity as a weight loss strategy is foiled even by relatively small quantities of food. And. And so the most effective, albeit traditional and boring solution to this conundrum that does not sell many supplements and it doesn't sell many diet books, and it doesn't sell many biohacks or anything else is to simply move more and eat less. Now. That's it. You know more about the true mechanisms behind weight loss now than the average biochemistry student. The problem is, let's say you're already eating less and moving more. You're theoretically now engaging in enough physical activity to breathe off more than enough carbon and the scale still isn't budging.

So what gives?

Well, that's what I want to dig into in this podcast, but I had to lay it out, beginning with this explanation of how you breathe away carbon so that you know that from a very simplistic model, the lowest hanging fruit, the bottom of the totem pole, or the top of the totem pole, depending on how you want to think about it, that you must be ruthlessly cognizant of carbons in and carbons out, how much you're moving and how much you're eating. Okay, so that is that, that's, that's the, the number one thing that you need to pay attention to. So let's say you've got that down. You've wrapped your head around that. If you're listening to this podcast, you may already have kind of started on that journey. Now, let's get into 16 of these reasons that you actually can't burn fat. Reason number one is inflammation. So there's a common belief that fat cells never actually go away, and that simply is not the case. There is something that you can do to annihilate fat cells, and that is to rid yourself of inflammation. Fat cells don't just shrink and sit there waiting for more carbon or triglycerides. As you've learned earlier, they can go away. Now, before jumping into the nitty gritty of inflammation, remember that not all inflammation is bad. Acute inflammation is a natural biological reaction to stressors. When you cut yourself, the area surrounding the cut becomes inflamed as your immune system and regenerative processes react. That prevents infection. It heals the cut. Acute inflammation also happens when your muscle fibers break down and get rebuilt after a hard workout. But when you have chronic inflammation and a constant stream of inflammatory chemicals, that becomes an issue. High levels of what's called transforming growth factor beta promote inflammation and weight Gain by causing irregular appetite and glucose regulation. And that's something that can be induced from anything from over exercise to inflammatory food. There are also things called matrix metalloproteinases. Those remodel the matrix outside of your cells. They regulate white blood cell movement. Those can also cause inflammation when their blood plasma activity gets too high. There is vascular endothelial growth factor. VG is what that's abbreviated as and that aids in the growth of new blood vessels. And those are correlated with obesity. Those can feed blood to new fat cells. Nitric oxide synthase. You may have heard that nitric oxide is good and some is good, but high nitric oxide synthase can lead to excess, no? And that's also been correlated with obesity. There's something called toll like receptor 4 that's involved in a phenomenon called meta inflammation, which is a state of low but chronic inflammation in immune and fat cells. And there genetic and epigenetic factors that can contribute to that process. It's called NOS uncoupling. So rather than making nitric oxide, NOS uncoupling results in the production of superoxide free radicals which also contribute to the destructive path of inflammation. The cool part about that is that that can be tested. So you can, you can test for that via. There's this company called Strategene and I'll link to all of anything I mentioned studies and companies in the show notes. But basically with Strategene you can test for certain dirty genes, so to speak, that could show you whether or not your nitric oxide synthase pathways are effed.

Up, so to speak.

You can also test with Strategene for a pathway called nrf2.nrf2. If nrf2 isn't working properly, your body can't handle iron properly and it can make excess free radicals, especially if you have too much iron or ferritin. And often people with variants in their NRF2 Genesis suffer from inflammatory conditions that nobody seems to be able to resolve. Again, functional genetic testing can help determine whether you have issues with your nrf2 genes. And there are some substances like you may have heard of sulforaphane from broccoli or resveratrol, which is found in the skins of grapes and in certain berries. Bacopa, milk thistle, turmeric, all of those can help to support healthy NRF2 activity. One of my upcoming podcast guests, Dr. Bob Miller, has some wonderful work on this. If you go to his website, which I'll link to in the shownotes, I don't have it on hand right Now. But the shownotes for this entire podcast will be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com FatlossPodcast. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com fatlosspodcast. You'll be able to check out Bob Miller's website. And there are a lot of other chemicals and enzymes and factors involved in inflammation, but chronic inflammation can be systemic. It can affect the entire body. And probably the biggest thing that can lead to inflammation is rancid oils, right? Oils that have been treated with high temperatures or high pressures because you get a 1, 2 whammy of inflammation and insulin resistance. So we're talking about the type of polyunsaturated fats you'd find in canola oil and safflower oil and peanut oil and sunflower oil and most processed and packaged foods, because polyunsaturated fats are highly prone to oxidation and that can promote chronic inflammation, the buildup of toxic substances, substances in the arteries. And so I think one of the number one tactics for kind of turning your body into a fat decimating factory is to cut out most PUFAs and replace them with healthy fat sources like extra virgin olive oil and fatty fish and avocado oil and macadamia nut oil and coconut oil, and to a certain extent, saturated fats. Although many people do even need to limit saturated fats because a lot of folks and studies have shown experience a deleterious inflammatory response to saturated fats once they comprise about over 10% of your total intake of fats. We're talking about fats that are solid at room temperature. You know, things like, you know, butter or cheeses, for example. So sugar can be inflammatory, but compared to rancid oils, glucose and fructose and sucrose and other sugars, those are pretty quickly metabolized, especially if you're, you're very active. So I think sugar is less of an issue for inflammation as much as vegetable oil is the primary issue. Now, another major cause of inflammation is simply chronic stress, and that's just because your limbic system can get stuck in sympathetic fight and flight mode. That's a pretty complex set of nerves and networks in the brain that control basic emotions like fear and pleasure and anger, but also basic drives like hunger and sex. So if the limbic system is overstimulated, not only does your immune system become hyperactive, resulting in this cytokine cascade and systemic inflammation, but you also see a rapid fluctuation in the hormones responsible for controlling hunger. And also no discussion of inflammation, I think would Be complete without mentioning something called cell danger response or cdr. CDR is this evolutionarily conserved metabolic response that protects cells and their hosts, including you, the human host, from harm. And it's triggered by encounters with chemical or physical or biological threats that exceed your cell's capacity to be able to keep up with that stress. And that could be emotional stress, it could be exercise stress, it could be chemical stress, it could be like mold and environmental stress. But anyways, the resulting metabolic mismatch between available resources and the functional capacity of the cell can actually change things like cellular electron flow and mitochondrial activity and oxygen consumption and cell membrane fluidity and carbon and sulfur resource allocation and a host of other important metabolic mechanisms that also influence fat loss. Now typically with cdr, there is this first wave of danger that signals the release of metabolic intermediates like ATP and ADP and oxygen and reactive oxygen species from the cells. And then after the danger or the stress is eliminated or neutralized, there's this sequence of anti inflammatory and regenerative pathways that are activated to reverse that cell danger response and heal the cell. But when the CDR persists abnormally, what happens is a state of chronic inflammation and a long term release of inflammatory cytokines. Now interestingly, cdr, like I mentioned, can be kind of in that stuck state from emotion or past trauma or from infection or from toxins. And I think probably the best book to really wrap your head around how to manage cell danger response is a book called toxic toxic by Dr. Neil Nathan. There's another doctor named Dr. Robert Navau and I'll link to both these guys website. Dr. Robert Navau has a lab at UCSD and they really get into how mold and mycotoxin occurs. Exposure, major life stressors, chemical stressors, exercise overtraining, et cetera, can leave you in fight and flight mode or increase this cell danger response. So ultimately the number one thing that you can do if you are resistant to weight loss and you're already moving more and eating less is to look for any sources of inflammation. I think the biggest is vegetable oil, but I'd also consider getting a test through Strategene for any dirty genes. I'd also consider looking into Cel danger response and reading that book Toxic by Dr. Neal Nathan. Now the second thing, the second biggest thing really in my opinion that affects also a host of chronic disease parameters like inflammation does, but also fat loss is glycemic variability. Now glycemic variability refers to your blood glucose fluctuations that occur during the day, how often Your blood sugar is rising and falling at any given point during the day. And what can happen is that if glycemic variability gets out of control and your blood sugar gets too high, your body kind of has two choices. It can shovel the sugar into your muscles and liver or store that sugar as body fat. But if your energy expenditure throughout the day isn't high enough and your muscle sugar levels, your glycogen levels in your muscle or glycogen levels in your liver are full, you're going to gain fat tissue. That's where the sugar will be partitioned. Now, there are ways that you can keep that from happening, which I'll get to in a moment, but ultimately.

It'S very simple. You just are ruthlessly cognizant, again to use that term, of how often your blood sugar levels are fluctuating throughout the day. And some of my favorite ways to control the level of glycemic variability are the following six strategies. Number one is strength training. Because when you strength train, your ability to drive glucose into muscle cells increases. And strength training also decreases blood glucose levels and increases insulin sensitivity. I'm a big fan of starting or ending the day with strength training or even doing strength training prior to whatever your largest meal of the day is going to be so that you've gotten so that you have a place for storage disposal from any sugars that you eat with the meal. Another one that I like is pre breakfast fasted cardio. And there's some research studies that have shown this is a really good strategy for controlling glycemic variability. There's even a really, really good book called Change youe Schedule, Change youe Life that gets into ayurvedic strategies for fat loss. And it highlights the importance of pre breakfast fasted cardio, which is also wonderful for sleep and circadian rhythm. So strategy number three would be a postprandial walk. There was a Japanese study that took three groups of men and had them do one of three actions immediately following a meal, sitting, standing, or walking. And by the end of that study, they found that low volume, easy walking for 30 minutes after a meal kept serum fat concentrations 18% lower than sitting or standing after a meal. And personally, for me, with testing with my own continuous blood glucose monitoring, I found that as little as 10 minutes of walking seems to do a really good job controlling post exercise glucose or post meal glucose spikes. Standing would be strategy number four. And while that study I just cited did find that walking is more effective than standing after a meal, standing is still more Effective than sitting like. One study on office workers found that standing for 180 minutes after lunch, like at a standing workstation rather than a sitting workstation, reduced the post lunch blood sugar spikes by 43% compared to sitting for the same amount of time. There was another study that found that alternating between standing and sitting every 30 minutes throughout the workday reduced blood sugar spikes by 11% on average. So even during a day at the office, you don't have to feel like you need to work out to control blood sugar, but instead the trick is to not sit down for the entirety of your workday and preferably to figure out ways, especially post breakfast and post lunch and you know, if you're still working post dinner, to stand to work for the periods of time following a meal. Next are plants and herbs and spices. And there are a host of different plants and herbs and spices that can help out with blood sugar management.

Some notable examples are Ceylon cinnamon. Like working in two teaspoons of Ceylon cinnamon during the day, the supplement Gymnema Sylvestre can control carbohydrate cravings but also control glycemic variability. Bearberine is another one. Apple cider vinegar is another. Then there are Rock Lotus and Bitter Melon Extract. Those are really potent natural ingredients. Those are actually a component of a product that I have at Kion called Kion Lean. Those are the only two ingredients in it, Rock Lotus and Bitter Melon Extract. Now, I'm very, very much because I carry the genetic factors that predispose me to type 2 diabetes, cognizant of my blood sugar levels. And I realize this might sound spendy and I go through a bottle of this stuff faster than most folks. But I have two before every meal, regardless of the carbohydrate content. And it for me personally is as potent as the diabetic drug Metformin at controlling my postprandial blood glucose with potentially less of some of the metabolic blowback of using metformin. So I'm a huge fan of that supplement as an option for controlling glycemic variability, along with some of the things like Ceylon cinnamon and apple cider vinegar. And then finally the sixth strategy. In addition to strength training, pre breakfast, fasted cardio, postprandial walks, standing and some different plants, herbs and spices is fiber and dietary insoluble fiber through anaerobic bacterial fermentation breaks down into short chain fatty acids. And about 95% of the short chain fatty acids in your body are comprised of acetate or propionate or butyrate and research has shown that acetate inhibits the conversion of glucose to fatty acids in the liver and that reduces the accumulation of fat in adipose tissue and improves glucose tolerance. Propionate appears to do the same thing and also increase insulin sensitivity. And then finally, butyrate has been shown in rodent models to prevent and treat diet induced insulin resistance. So you can get your fiber from things like sweet potatoes and yams and dark leafy greens and legumes. Interestingly, for people who get irritable bowel syndrome or who have some type of deleterious response to fiber intake like bloating or gas, it appears that being in a state of ketosis or consuming ketone supplements like beta hydroxybutyrate can simulate what fiber does for the effects that I just mentioned without you needing to eat a lot of fiber. So if you're saying a carnivore diet or you're limiting vegetables for other reasons, such as your gut, you can actually just use a ketone supplement like a beta hydroxybutyrate salt or just stay in a relative state of ketosis and that can do the same thing.

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Okay, as I alluded to earlier with cell danger response and my explanation of that, reason number three that folks can be resistant to weight loss is cortisol and stress. When you're stressed, your body releases hormones like cortisol that turn on essential functions for your survival like higher blood pressure and rapid decision making while inhibiting non essential functions like immune function or digestion or protein synthesis. And that's helpful if you need to handle an acute stressor like a looming deadline or say like a race or a competition. But it's also why chronic stress can restrict your ability to shed extra weight. Because cortisol can suppress insulin secretion, it can inhibit glucose uptake into your cells and it can disrupt insulin signaling to muscle tissue. So chronic stress directly causes insulin resistance and that can Affect glycemic variability, cause resistance to weight loss, increase inflammation, cause dyslipidemia, which is elevated blood fat and cholesterol levels and also result in chronic hypertension. So when it comes to stress, you know, the, the daily stressors can not just be, say, the things you automatically think about, like, say, work or family or relationship issues, but it can also include excess exercise, relationship or personality conflicts that might simply be unresolved, but that you're not thinking about in the moment. Emotions like boredom and loneliness can contribute to stress. So can toxins and pollutants you might not even be aware of in your air or your water. Or say, like EMF and WI fi and electricity that are all around you. Psyching yourself up too frequently, right, like doing WIM hof fire breathing at the beginning of every decision, from waking up to working out to amping yourself up to an important call can just be constant sympathetic mode, pressure to perform, constant limelight from social media, lack of encouragement or love from others. There's a lot of this stuff that has been studied to result in the same type of chronic stress patterns as you might get from just working too much. So one of the best ways to know if you're chronically stressed, in my opinion, is to simply start measuring your heart rate variability. Get an Oura ring or a whoop.

Wristband, or use the Nature Beat app.

And you can measure your heart rate variability to see where your stress is in any given moment when you can clean up heart rate variability. And sometimes it responds to very interesting things. Like for me, when I step into my office, my HRV goes up. There's electrical stuff all over my office. It's odd because I can work just as hard outside of my office in a lower electricity format, like out in the guest house in the forest back behind my house. And I get nothing. So I have things installed in my office. You know, dirty electricity filters, like a, like a Soma Vedic and a Blue Shield and a Himalayan salt lamp. And, you know, these, these things that, that help to mitigate some of the emf. And since I started doing those things, my HRV is a lot more stable during a day of work. So again, even electrical stress can cause this type of stuff. And you can go and listen to my podcast with the guy who wrote the tinfoil hat book to learn more about that. But just understand, there are a lot of variables that can contribute to stress. And you need to be aware of how cortisol could contribute to resistance to weight loss. And as I mentioned in podcast number 397, which you could listen to at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 397. The Dutch test is probably one of the best tests. It's a 24 hour urine test for really seeing what's truly going on with cortisol. Okay, Number four is sleep deprivation. I don't need to kick this horse to death. You probably know the research that shows that getting under the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night can lead to appetite cravings, weight gain, diabetes, and what would otherwise be a healthy population. Scarier yet, is that all it takes to cause this type of damage is a single night of partial sleep. And of course, sleep deprivation is also known to raise cortisol levels and reduce glucose tolerance and increase sympathetic nervous system activity. So you can see how a lot of this stuff kind of piles up on each other as I go through these different reasons. And sleep deprivation also produces a neuroendocrine effect effect by reducing levels of the satiety inducing hormone leptin and increasing levels of the hunger stimulating hormone ghrelin. So sleep deprivation reduces your ability to metabolize glucose and also makes you want to consume more sugar or more hedonistic vegetable oil laden snack food.

That's why it's so easy to grab.

A second helping at the buffet or fail to stroll by a vending machine unscathed when you're sleep deprived. So sleep is another very, very important, important variable. Number five is snacking and post workout calories. When I was bodybuilding and doing a lot of personal training, it was well known that one of the best strategies to pile on the pounds was to arrive at work with a container of yogurt and a couple Tupperware, containers of lean chicken with rice and broccoli, a couple ziploc bags of almonds, a handful of energy bars and a pre made protein shake. And that was a really, really good way to put on size and mass, especially muscle mass if you're combining that type of frequent eating and grazing with weight training. But a lot of people caught on to that and thought, oh, I'm going to lose fat and look like a bodybuilder if I graze throughout the day. But the theory behind that is you need to eat, you know, whatever, six to eight small meals throughout the day to keep your metabolism elevated. But that's a myth. It's long since been debunked by science. Sure, digestion does produce a thermic effect that increases your metabolism, but the bump is very slight. Frequent snacking instead increases your glycemic variability and eliminates any of the gut or longevity boosting benefits of fasting or compressed feeding windows. There's no evidence that eating more than three meals per day boosts your metabolism, helps you lose weight, or aids in appetite control. But if you on the other hand, eat only two to three meals per day in that compressed feeding window, such as during the period between say 9am and 6pm, your body releases more growth hormone, it burns more fat, it releases more testosterone. And frequent feeding also keeps your blood sugar levels elevated and shifts your metabolism into more of a sugar burning mode, which doesn't allow your body to tap into its stored fats for fuel. So eating six small meals per day may be worse for your waistline than eating two or three larger meals spread throughout the day. And the belief that you'll enter into starvation mode if you don't eat frequently is also false. It takes about three days of complete fasting with no calories, or four weeks of extreme calorie restriction for your body to down regulate metabolism and thyroid activity. Short term fasts like daily overnight 12 to 16 hour fasts actually increase your metabolic rate due to an increase in norepinephrine, one of the hormones that signals fat cells to break down. You don't even have to reduce your calorie intake in a scenario like this, especially if you're a very active individual, you just eat less often, not necessarily eat less. And as long as that's combined with physical activity, it can be a good weight loss strategy. You know, another common myth is that you need to shove some protein and carbs in your mouth or grab a Jamba Juice right after workout from the, you know, from the smoothie outlet at the, at the health club as you're walking out. And the idea behind eating right after finishing a workout is to maximize muscular adaptations and repair damaged tissue and rapidly shuttle glycogen into muscle for ample anabolic growth during that limited window of maximum carbohydrate absorption, which is about 20 minutes to maximum of 2 hours after training. But in every single study that looks at the benefits of immediate post workout eating, the participants were fed after exercising, usually to exhaustion in a few fasted state. And most of us aren't jumping out of bed to exercise for 90 to 120 minutes with no fuel. So unless you're wanting to gain significant mass, like if you're a high school or college football player trying to get to the next level by putting on £20, if you've eaten at some point prior to Working out, there's no need to drop everything to slug down that post workout protein drink. Your blood levels of amino acids and stored carbohydrates are still elevated from any meal you've had to prior to the workout. So that means for a 5pm visit to the gym, your body can still easily metabolize your breakfast or lunch for a fuel. And in fact, occasionally waiting to eat a couple hours after you exercise may be beneficial for boosting growth hormone and testosterone levels. So the only exception to this would be if you're performing two a day workouts within an eight hour window each day. Because you are. If you're going to hit the gym twice, you do need to eat carbohydrates and protein within that 20 minute window, preferably if you're planning on hitting it hard again later on in the day within eight hours. But otherwise there's absolutely no need to try to replenish all your stores right after the workout. And that may actually fly in the face of hormonal adaptations that would be conducive to more fat loss. So strategy number six is reason number six you might be resistant to weight loss is you're not moving enough. Duh, you know, And I'm always at a day of work, standing and lunging and kneeling and sitting and leaning. I try to take 15,000 steps a day. I stop every 25 to 50 minutes for a pomodoro break that includes kettlebell swings or a quick stroll up the stairs or jumping jacks or a handful of burpees. I stopped 25 minutes into this podcast and I sat down and stood up 15 times. Right? Just sit down on the floor, stand up 15 times. Very funky, functional move. I do 20 air squats every time I use the bathroom on an airplane. I do 40 air squats every time I use the bathroom in a restaurant. And I don't do this because I'm a hyperactive freak who's addicted to exercise. Rather, I simply know the metabolic benefits of twitching and constantly moving and really kind of fooling your body into thinking you're in this, you know, hunter gatherer, ancestral mode of just getting stuff done during the day rather than staying sedentary for extended periods of time. And when you're, when you're sedentary, you see changes in insulin signaling and glucose transport and lower levels of lipoprotein lipase, which is the primary enzyme responsible for breaking down fat.

So the trick is to just figure.

Out ways to move more. You know, most people who are pretty successful at weight loss, they're taken anywhere from 10 to 15,000 steps a day and they rarely, you know, a ring like the OURA ring for example, or self quantification application device can tell you this. They rarely have a one hour period of time during the day where they're inactive. Right, even one hour. Meaning that if you have a one hour work project to do, you stop at the 25 minute mark, you do some jumping jacks and you keep going. I mean, it's that simple. Now reason number seven is just the opposite. Too much exercise. This is, you know, the hardcore crossfitter trying to stay in the whiteboard or the, you know, the housewife who's been inspired by the Navy SEAL on social media to get up at 4am to go crush the day and go to the pain cave and the physical culture all about zero days off and no pain, no gain and balls to the wall and going hard as a mother effer. And don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to going to the pain cave if you're trying to climb your own Mount Everest, like training for a triathlon or a Spartan race or the CrossFit games. But sometimes it's not conducive to weight loss. Excessive exercise, especially in the presence of other lifestyle stressors, can lead to elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation. And we now live in an era of overtrained, over inflamed folks with hormonal dysregulation and cortisol bleeding out their ears. That's what my entire last book, Beyond Training, is all about. It's about how athletes run into all these different health issues with overtraining or what's called non functional overreaching, just training in a state that leaves you non functional. So the idea is that in many cases, if you're resistant to weight loss, typically what I see is it's too much of the same exercise over and over again, Too much hard exercise, not enough variability in activity and not enough just easier days where you're walking in the sunshine or doing yoga or gardening. You know, I think the sweet spot is two to three days of the week. You're lifting heavy stuff, you're doing a brief spurt of high intensity interval training, again two to three days a week. You have a couple of days where you're going on a longer walk or a longer hike. And aside from that, you just have low level physical activity spread throughout the day. And you know, the only exception to that is I am a huge fan of most folks going on like an easy aerobic walk before breakfast when they're in a fasted state in the morning. But you know, that's something that can easily be woven into a routine and you don't need a lot more than that. So over exercising can lead a lot of people into kind of that skinny fat syndrome. Similarly, reason number eight is chronic cardio, right? Not the chronic heavy weight training or high intensity interval training, but just this idea of long marathon training, death marches or multi hour cycling sessions, or the excessive draining slog on the lineup of cardio machines at the gym. And not only can chronic cardio lead to some cardiomyopathy issues like dilation of the right atrium and ventricle of the heart, and elevation of cardiac troponin and other things called natriuretic peptides and little patches of cardiac fibrosis. And I'm not talking about like walking or gardening or mowing the lawn. I'm talking about like pounding the pavement and training for an ironman triathlon or marathon in a traditional voluminous sense. And again, like, you do need to train with volume in many cases for those type of events. But don't fool yourself into thinking, thinking it's a good way to lose weight or to maximize longevity or health. So the idea is that excessive chronic cardio will catabolize muscle, and a wonderful stored usable energy for cardio is body fat. And so your body essentially gets rid of muscle and learns how to store fat pretty easily to prepare for each bout of cardio while simultaneously down regulating anabolic hormones like testosterone and growth hormone. And so that's one of the issues is that you simply put your body into a state where you're catabolizing muscle and getting very good at storing fat. So if you're already training, a better bet is short, high intensity interval cardio sessions, again two to three days of the week. And there was one study that found that after 20 weeks of training, participants that performed high intensity interval training had a greater reduction in subcutaneous adiposity or body fat than those that engage in a far more voluminous amount of endurance training, like long, slow treadmill runs. And of course, HIIT is also effective at the management of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. And most HIIT sessions last like 20 to 30 minutes at the most. So you're getting a lot more bang for your buck from a time standpoint. So again, if you're having difficulty with losing weight and you're spending a lot of time on the gym, cardio machines or, you know, doing Ironman esque Training sessions, you may want to reconsider or lower the cardio and replace it with high intensity interval training and weight training. Next is the SED principle. Reason number nine. The SED principle stands for specific adaptation to impose demands, meaning your body will eventually adapt to the demands that you place on it. Like if you're only running for your cardio, or if you're only doing push ups and overhead presses and pull ups as your only form of upper body training. Your body gets very efficient at those movements and it adapts to those demands by burning fewer calories, as in response to those exercises. It's just a cool element of the human body. We learn how to move very efficiently with things that we do quite often, but it also means that we burn a lower number of calories. And this means that sometimes the best workout plan is the one you're not currently doing. Most of my clients who I coach and I write out their training plans and workouts they know at least every four weeks there's some pretty serious curve balls thrown into their weight training routine, their high intensity interval training routine, their cardio routine. You know, some days they're on the rowing machine, some days they're outside on the bike, some days they're using the kettlebell, some days they're using dumbbells and barbells, some days they're doing 10 reps, some days they're doing 20 reps. You know, it varies widely, especially for those folks whose primary goal is aesthetic because I am keeping their body constantly kind of guessing. So the idea behind this is that I would say there's five different modifications that can help out quite a bit. One is to combine exercise, like do a lot of complex movements. You can look up a whole bunch of complex lifts. I have a whole article@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that I'll link to in the show notes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

On complex exercises like squats to overhead presses, lunges with curls, vertical jumps, push ups with a burpee, medicine ball lift, and throws, a lot of things that combine different exercises, those can be very difficult for your body to metabolically adapt to. Next are active rest periods. So if you're doing a routine and it says rest 30 seconds, rest 60 seconds, rest 90 seconds, rest, use that time to do mobility work like foam rolling, or opposite arm, opposite leg extensions, or light and easy walking. I see so many people slumped over on the bench at the gym reading their cell phones or magazine, and I think that time could be much better used to Keep the metabolic rate elevated and squeeze more volume into a training session. Training outside can also be good. If you're used to training indoors, you know, the unpredictability and undulating terrain that you'll experience outside. And of course, there's a host of other reasons that it's beneficial to train outside can really, really help. You know, I have a formal gym at my home, but I also have kind of a garage gym and also a trail through the forest. So I've kind of got like three different locales. And I can tell you right now if you know, running outside down the trail is far different than running on the treadmill in terms of metabolic cost. Next is to change the center of gravity, meaning if you usually use a barbell for lunges, switch it up, use dumbbells, use a medicine ball, use a kettlebell in a goblet squat position, don a weighted vest or a weighted backpack. When you're walking for cable exercises, you know, move the cable up or down a few notches and come at the movement from a new angle. Because altered weight positions and angles force your body into an entirely new metabolic situation. You can also work out at a different time of day. So if you've been working out in the morning for the past few years, you can throw your body for a loop and hit the gym an hour before dinner. And it'll feel far different.

The only folks for whom kind of like changing up the scenario by working out a different time of day are people who have poor sleep or disrupted circadian rhythms. Exercising at a regular time during the day has been shown to be beneficial for sleep. But if your primary goal is weight loss, just. Just try to keep throwing curve balls at your body. That's kind of the big message. Don't go for more than four weeks without significantly changing some specific staple of your exercise program. So next is cold. So most of the people I train for fat loss and I stay pretty lean year round. I Average about 4 to 7% body fat Year round every single day without fail. Not only do I do an easy fasted cardio session before breakfast, like a 20 minute walk in the sunshine or, or 30 minutes in the sauna, but I also get in two to five minutes of cold. Because cold can be such a potent metabolic stimulus. It converts white adipose tissue into metabolically active brown fat. And brown adipose tissue or brown fat. It's primarily located around your sternum and your clavicle and your rib cage. It generates heat by mobilizing the energy that's stored in white Fat that's known as non shivering thermogenesis or cold thermogenesis. And it occurs in brown adipose tissue mitochondria when protons are forced across the inner membrane to be turned into heat instead of ATP. Now, when this occurs, you can see a significant increase in metabolic rate and a conversion of a lot of adipose tissue. There's another type of fat called beige fat. Beige adipose tissue is very similar to brown adipose tissue. And what happens is it doesn't get moved into the clavicle area or the rib cage or the sternal area. It stays in the same general area, but it's far more metabolically active and far less inflammatory. So again, most of the folks I coach and myself, every single day, without fail, there's at least two to five minutes of cold exposure via a cold shower or a cold soak. Usually once a week there's a longer cold training session where I'll have people be doing like, you know, three minutes in a cold bath or cold river or cold lake or cold shower followed by three minutes of breathwork. I call this the 3x3 cold. Back into the cold for three minutes, back into the breathwork for three minutes, three times through. And in the people who can handle it from a, you know, because I track everyone's hrv, but the people who don't respond deleteriously to this from a nervous system standpoint, every week I'll have them do a longer session that leaves them shivering for a considerable period of time, like a 10 to 20 minute cold bath. Now, another option, if that's uncomfortable for you, is there's a company called Cool Fat Burner. You can check them out@coolfatburner.com and I'll put links in the show notes that sell vests and waste packs that just pack your body with cold. And those can be really effective if you're just, you know, you got to be at your computer working during the day, you can't be sitting in an ice bath and it allows you to stay cold. So get cold. Number 11 is hormone. And there are a lot of hormonal imbalances that can occur as young as your early 20s caused by everything from stress to pesticides to plasticizers to phytoestrogens to dietary contaminants to lack of sleep to poor digestive health. And when it comes to hormones, I really like that Dutch steroid profile that I mentioned earlier because it'll tell you what's going on with your testosterone, with your estrogen, with your cortisol with your cortisone with your metabolites. It's something that you can order online. I'll be sure to add links to to it for you in the show. Notes but women, for example, naturally produce progesterone and that protects against excess fast growth or excess fat growth. And progesterone production declines much faster with age than estrogen. So by the time a woman reaches 30 to 50 years old she can develop estrogen dominance and at that point fat rapidly accumulates and becomes much harder to lose. And men can experience similar age related issues as their testosterone folly and their estrogen rises. But you may simply be a candidate if you get tested for either adjustments to the diet or to the environment that would be influencing your hormonal panel or even bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. I did a whole podcast with Jay Campbell on this and we talked a lot about testosterone replacement and hormone replacement and the safety profile of it and some of the myths about it. And if you're not comparing competing in a sport like Ironman or something like that, that would cause this to be banned. It can be a potent strategy. But before you even jump into something like that, I mean, you can eat more cruciferous vegetables which contain Indole 3 Carbinol, which is an antioxidant that metabolizes excess estrogen in the body. You can filter your water of things like fluoride and chlorine. You can use glass or stainless steel products instead of of plastic. Go read a book that my friend Anthony J. Wrote called Estrogeneration that specifically addresses all of these hormonal disruptors in our environment and minimize them in your environment. And I think that hormones are another really, really important thing, especially when people are eating less and moving more and still resistant to weight loss, especially if they're about 35 to 40 years old or higher. Now related to that would be number 12, which is toxin and chemical exposure. You know, three letter acronyms like PCBs and DDT and DDE and BPA. Those have been found in extremely high concentrations in human fat tissue and can cause significant metabolic damage and hormone imbalances and propensity to fat storage, because toxins can be shoveled into adipose tissue to protect other functional tissue and internal organs. That's why a rapid fat loss regimen can often result in skin rashes and zits and diarrhea. Because as you mobilize fat, you also mobilize many of the toxins that that fat contain. And those can cause other symptoms if they're not dealt with via a wise detoxification protocol. So the part about balancing your hormones can really help out with minimizing or sopping up, you know, toxin and chemical damage. Some of those tips that I gave earlier, but you must be, again, I'm going to use this term for a third time, ruthlessly cognizant of any sources of toxins and chemicals in your environment. And it just drives me nuts when I see some woman at the gym exercising her ass off, dieting like hell and then walking into the locker room. I'm not watching her in the locker room. You can smell the women when you walk past them, just wearing these endocrine disrupting perfumes and non organic or non natural makeup. And I mean, you know, all these things that are just seeping into their bodies, getting their house cleaned with normal household cleaning chemicals and you know, driving around a car with that toxic little green, you know, tree freshener. There's just so many things, it sounds silly, but if you're constantly bombarding your body with that stuff, it really can cause your body to want to create new fat cells to store those toxins. Now number 13 is food allergies or food intolerances. And the problem with this is it can result in a lot of times that same sympathetic inflammatory response I was describing earlier that can result in either cell danger response or resistance to fat loss. Now in many cases, this is very simply elucidated with a good food allergy test. I'm a huge fan of Cyrex Laboratories because they test for reactivity to cooked and modified and raw foods. They test for over 180 different food antigens. They test different protein structures of the food. They test, again, like I mentioned, raw chicken versus cooked chicken. And the white blood cell response is going to be far different to raw versus cooked.

So you're going to get fewer false.

Positives in response to common foods. It's one that a doctor would need.

To order for you.

But I'll link to some helpful resources for Cyrex Laboratories in the show notes because that's one that I think can really, really elucidate anything in your diet that you really should eliminate. And it varies widely from person to person. One person can be green beans, another person can be cashews. But what you don't get is a huge laundry list of false positives in most cases from a Cyrex food allergy panel. Number 14 is micronutrient deficiencies. So there are studies that have shown that specific micronutrient deficiencies are associated with weight gain and obesity. The most significant of these micronutrients are vitamin D, chromium, biotin, thiamine, and antioxidants. And deficiencies in these specific nutrients can prevent fat loss via mechanisms that include altered insulin gene transcription, amplification of intracellular insulin signaling, and changes to glucose and amino acid metabolism. A few others that are less common but still related to resistance to weight loss are magnesium and boron and vitamin A, vitamin K2, and choline. Now, there are tests like the Genova Ion panel or the Genova Nutrival, and both of those can identify these micronutrient deficiencies that can be causing resistance to weight loss. And a lot of these aren't tested for on an average common blood panel. So that's another one that I would consider is your micronutrient status. I'm not saying everybody needs to go out and take a multivitamin. I don't think that's wise. But I do think it's wise to test and see if there are specific vitamins and micronutrients and minerals you're deficient in that you need to replace. Number 15 is your thyroid. Now, the thyroid gland, as you're no doubt aware, produces hormones that regulate metabolism. It secretes thyroxine, or T3. And triiodothyronine or thyroxine is actually T4, triiodothyronine is T3. But those influence the metabolic rate of lipids and cholesterol and glucose and protein. And when the thyroid becomes underactive and results in hypothyroidism, that can result in weight gain. So can any type of autoimmune issues that could inhibit the conversion of T4 to the more active T3, as can gut issues. And so there are a lot of things that can influence thyroid activity. If you're going to test for thyroid, I would get a comprehensive blood test for thyroid activity that includes things like TSH, T3, T4, free T3, free T4, reverse T3. Don't just look at TSH, because even if TSH is high, and I would consider high to be anything above about 2, especially if you're. If you're looking less for absence of disease and more for variables that might contribute to resistance to weight loss, you don't know why the TSH is high unless you test some of these other variables, too. And that will allow you to figure out, okay, whatever, I'm making more than enough T4, but it's not getting converted into T3. Maybe I'm not eating enough carbohydrates, or maybe I'm too stressed, or maybe I have some gut dysfunction, or I'm making adequate T4 and T3, but I've got a bunch of thyroid antibodies. And so, you know, I have some thyroid autoimmune conditions, or I need to analyze my diet for anything that could be causing, you know, food allergies or food intolerances. And you can also, you know, consume plenty of seaweed and sea vegetables and dulce and brazil nuts and shellfish and oysters and even coconut oil, because a lot of those are the type of foods that can allow for proper thyroid conversion and metabolism in the gut. So thyroid would be number 15, and then we get to number 16, which is disordered eating. And for a lot of people, and research suggests this, maintaining a regular eating schedule can improve significantly the metabolic response to meals. So if you're having trouble losing weight, rather than haphazardly skipping breakfast some days and eating it on others, having dinner late some nights and early the other nights, or shifting from restaurant to restaurant for your lunch choices, you should simply establish far more consistent meal patterns. And I've had some clients shed significant number of pounds by not changing anything except just having the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A smoothie for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and then meat or fish and vegetables for dinner at the same time, day in, day out, for a few months. Women, interestingly, seem to benefit most from this type of regularity. They did a study of healthy, lean women, and they found that an irregular meal pattern resulted in lower postprandial energy expenditure than a regular meal pattern. There was another study where lean women who ate meals on a regular schedule had much better insulin sensitivity and improved blood fat levels. And there was another study of obese women in that they found that regular meal times increased postprandial thermogenesis and insulin sensitivity and blood lipids, which put the woman, the women, into a state that was more receptive to weight loss. Now, some folks, especially very active folks, can thrive on an erratic eating schedule. But for many people, irregular mealtimes depress metabolism because their bodies expect food at specific times. And the result can be dysregulated appetite and altered metabolism. And I just think if you're eating the same thing at similar times of day, it's far easier to just be cognizant of how many calories you're consuming. You know, once you begin to mix things up a whole lot, it can get really difficult. And I personally have nearly the same thing for breakfast. The same thing for lunch and the same thing for dinner.

Granted, there are some benefits to seasonal eating. Like sometimes it's, you know, my smoothie is more of like a hot bowl in the winter or my lunchtime salad is more of a stir fry in the winter. And dinner might be a little bit more of a heftier, heavier meat meat in for dinner in the winter. But it's kind of the same general composition year in and year out, month in and month out. So disordered eating is the 16th. So the last thing I want to finish with today is, well, first of all, everything I've mentioned, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com FatlossPodcast and I'll have plenty of helpful links and resources for everything I've been talking about.

But you've learned about different factors that can prevent you from losing weight today. You've learned how to reverse a lot of those negative effects to get the body that you desire. But please also understand that everybody is different and so is every body. So if you aren't satisfied with your physique according to what societally subjective beauty standards thrown at you in grocery store magazines and from pop culture are, it may be the case that your body has reached its. Its ideal weight. You may not like to hear that, and it may not seem fair, but you can reach a state of healthy homeostasis even if you have higher than desired body fat percentage. If you're doing everything right, if you nailed every element in this podcast and you still can't seem to lose more weight, you might need to accept the fact that you've reached healthy homeostasis and you weren't just designed to have veins in your abs or striated lats or skinny calves. And that's okay. Own your thick calves, you know, own the extra little bit of fat up around your neck that you don't like, because that's how you were built, right? Excessive exercising and dieting with an orthorexic approach to life while beating your body's smithereens with fat loss biohacks. It's not going to shift you into maximum fat burning zone or shrink your waistline. And it's more likely to down regulate vital components of life like fertility and satisfaction and happiness. So accept the fact that you have a unique body. You know, inject light levels of physical activity or mild discomfort throughout the day and stand while you work and take cold showers and avoid sitting for long periods of time and engage in deep breathing to control stress and implement intermittent fasting and use all the other techniques that I've talked about and then simply be satisfied and happy with the body that you've been blessed with. So I hope this has been helpful for you. And if you have questions, if you have comments, if you have feedback, just go over to the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com FatlossPodcast and I'll be happy to help. And in the meantime, have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the Show Notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.