Lose Weight, Keep it Off, and Gain Energy

This is John Assaraf and I've got a special live session today with my amazing secret weapon. Now why do I call him my secret weapon? Not only does this lumberjack looking guy look like a Navy SEAL who could climb mountains and swim deep in the oceans and I guess slay big dragons and beasts, but about five, six years ago, when I hired Ari to be my trainer and nutritionist and energy management expert, I really didn't know what I was getting myself into. But I was 40 pounds heavier than I am now. Okay, 40 pounds. I was overweight, my blood pressure was a little too high, my blood sugar level was way too high because I was a sugar addict, I had a few issues with sleeping, etc. So why is he on here now? Because not only did he help me get an amazing routine for my physical body and my biology, what was happening on the inside, but he really helped me go from being sluggish from having to have three, four, five coffees a day, a little too much sugar to keep my energy level up, to having more than enough energy for three or four human beings. I sleep amazing. I've lost the 37 plus pounds and kept it off for over four years. And he has gone on from being my trainer and some other individuals trainers here in San Diego to being one of the leading experts in the world on fat loss. He's got two best selling books on energy management and really raising your level of energy. So I thought I'm going to bring him into the office and we're going to just do a little banter on losing weight, keeping it off and having enormous amounts of energy, which is what your hundred trillion cells in your body is. So Ari, say hi to everyone.

Hi everyone.

All right, by the way, if you want to learn more about him, just go to his website, Ari Whitten. W H I T T E N A R I so it's rewitten.com. we'll tell you that again later. Ari.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Number one, thank you for the beautiful introduction.

So let's talk first about why is it so hard for the average person to lose weight, but specifically fat, not weight? He taught me that weight is made up of water and tissue and muscle and bone and so forth. And fat is fat, weight is weight. Why is it so hard for people to lose fat, fat and keep it off?

Yeah, it's a huge question and as you know, we've talked about many times before, it's a very complex question. So the main thing, the thing that it all really comes Back to is that we live in an obesogenic environment.

Obesogenic diet. What the does that mean?

So what it means is that the environment that we're surrounded in has lots of different factors that push our physiology towards food, fat storage. And when we're trying to lose fat, it's really an uphill battle because we're surrounded with this environment that's really not conducive to us being lean. And part of the reason that we know this, and on one level, it's kind of common Sense, is that 75% of the population, soon to be 80%, is overweight right now.

Wow. 80% of the. That's unbelievable.

Yeah, so we're, we're talking about the majority of the population. It is actually more uncommon, more rare to be lean than it is to be overweight. So it's 1 in 4, 1 in 5 people is lean. Everybody else is overweight. Again, why? It's because we live in this world that is pushing our physiology towards fat gain.

So let's talk about physiology being pushed towards fat gain. How specifically?

So there's nutritional aspects of it. There's a bunch of different lifestyle factors that will drive this. But just purely talking about in nutrition, basically, we live in an environment where we have unnatural. We have foods that are not really compatible with our evolutionary design available to us at our fingertips at every moment of the day.

So fast food, processed food, things like that.

Right. And very calorie, dense processed foods that are what are called highly rewarding foods.

We like highly rewarding foods. Right?

We do. And that's part of the problem, is that when you now have unnaturally rewarding foods, it stimulates the reward center, the pleasure center of your brain, in an unnaturally intense way.

That's the dopamine, by the way. That's the stuff that makes you feel. Feel good, that you want more of it. More of it, More of it, More of it. That's what we get addicted to.

And that's what happens when we start to activate that reward center in an unnaturally intense way very frequently now, we start to rewire that system into what's called non homeostatic eating.

Okay, so we have obesogenic, non homeostatic eating. What the does that mean? So basically, I'm gonna keep making it really, really easy for me to understand.

So picture two kinds of eating behaviors. One is what's called homeostatic.

You can talk to them.

It's like the, like homeostasis, which is balance. Okay. And basically what this means is our bodies are Designed to eat in accordance with our actual cellular need for fuel. In other words, we're designed to feel hungry to support how much fuel we're actually burning off. If you go out and burn a bunch of fuel, you should feel hungry and want to eat. If you haven't, you shouldn't feel hungry. You should kind of lose your appetite and not eat as much. And that keeps us in balance. And we have a bunch of different hormonal systems and brain regions that are designed to regulate that and keep us in homeostatic eating. The problem is the modern world basically overrides all of those systems. Takes us out of being able to naturally regulate our body weight and our calorie consumption in accordance with our need. And then we start eating for other reasons. So we start eating because we're emotionally stressed. We start eating because we're bored. We start eating.

None of you are emotionally stressed or bored, or you just like the taste of salt and sugar and pizza and all that kind of stuff.

Or we're out with friends. And eating is now not just something that we do because we need fuel, it's something that we do to just have fun. Yeah. To entertain, to meet friends, to be social. We also consume food. We sit around a table. And there's research showing that just having the presence of other people there will cause you to eat three or 400 more calories in that meal than you would if you were eating alone.

Good. So if that's you, because that used to be me, hit the like or the love button, Hit the share button so we can get the world this information. Right. Like love, share. And leave us a little comment here as well.

Yeah. So people are eating because they're bored. They're eating cause they're stressed. They're eating because they're trying to. They're sad. They're trying to drown their sorrows in a thing of ice cream.

Or they're addicted.

Yeah, or they are addicted. They've activated this reward region too much or just because they like the taste of it. And that's one of the things is just having something in front of you that tastes incredibly good and has that ultra rewarding effect on the brain and is very calorie dense, will dramatically affect how many calories you consume in that meal. 400 or 500 calories more than, let's say, if you were not consuming that was unnaturally rewarding. Consuming more whole unprocessed foods by yourself rather than in social context. Not stressed, not in a negative emotional state. So all of those factors dramatically affect how much you eat in that given sitting. You start to have that happen very frequently. Well, that adds up.

So here's a question for you. I love crunchy. Something that's crunchy. I don't care if it's crunchy bread, crunchy corn, nuts, something crunchy that. Just something about that. What is it for you type in here? What is it that you just love? Is it ice cream, cookie, Crunchy, chewy? What is it? My wife, for example, she doesn't like sweets. She likes savory. So she likes stuff that really just tastes good. And so she'll forget the desserts and I'll eat all five or ten of them. And she's like, how could you eat all those? I said, well, how could you eat that instead of dessert? And so what is it for you? Tell us right now if you're a sweet lover, Hit the love. Because then you and I resonate for me.

It's ice cream. Like, ice cream. Milkshakes, potato chips, peanut butter.

Oh, I love peanuts. I actually just ordered on Amazon. I was at a hotel in Las Vegas, and they had these Faraday's big crispy peanuts. And it's from, I think, somewhere in Virginia. And I just ordered, like, 40 ounces of these beautifully roasted peanuts just so I can get that crunch.

Yeah.

But I'm trying to limit it to one handful instead of, like, six.

Yeah, yeah. Peanut butter. If you get a piece of bread with some peanut butter and some honey on that, oh, it's tough for me to stop.

I'm getting hungry. Just doing this little session with Ari.

Yeah. And so actually, that's interesting that you say that, because probably a lot of people hearing this are also being triggered into hunger. And so you see how some of these factors. It's not because you just burned off the fuel and you're trying to replace what you just burned off. It's because that's how easily our systems can be triggered into desiring food. Just hearing somebody talk about it or seeing a picture of it, like on a billboard or on tv.

On tv. Yeah.

That's why they use these very alluring pictures of cheeseburgers and pizza and whatever else, milkshakes. And because it works, because they know that just by exposing you to those images, it's going to trigger those. Those cravings, those desires in you and make you want to go buy that stuff.

And by the way, all of you know that, you know, the research that we do at NeuroGym is all around the brain, and this is all the neuroscience but also the neuropsychology of eating and choices and getting your brain triggered, the dopamine receptors activating and wanting you to what? To eat that food. And that is really what gets a lot of us in trouble. Especially for me. Like, late night eating and then overeating was one of the things for me that I was eating enough for two guys my size. I also became the second guy.

And.

And I learned how to scale that back. But also something that Ari said before is choosing the right foods, which we'll get into in just a moment, by the way, for those of you that just joined John Assaraf here, but you know that Ari Witten, that's a R I W H I T T E N. We're talking about health food, weight loss and energy right now. So are you enjoying this? Come on, hit the like and love button. Give us some love here.

So the next strategy, the next layer to the story, it's not all just a food story. Food's certainly a big player in this, but there's a lot of other layers to the story, and that's why it's important to not be just focused on food. A lot of people who just go on a diet fail. Why? And, well, the reason is because there's these other layers that you're not addressing. Yes, you can go on a low calorie or low carb diet or whatever, extreme diet, and starve your body into a lot of temporary fat loss. We know that everyone can do that very reliably. That's not hard to do. But the problem is the research shows that over 95% of people who go on a diet, especially when their only strategy for losing weight is the diet.

Or diet and exercise.

Yeah. But especially when it's just the diet alone, end up regaining the weight.

Yeah. I heard it was like 99% of people who go on a diet, usually after two weeks, just lose 14 days.

Yeah.

Why? Because they regain all the weight back. In many cases more. I did that. I've lost £250, 10, 15, £20 at a time. Right. It's like, I don't know how many times I tried to diet, whether it was paleo, whether it was vegetarian, whether it was vegan, pescatarian. I tried every single one of those diets.

And.

And it just worked. And only I gained it back.

Right. And so that's, you know, one layer of the story here is kind of just a mental frame of how people approach this. People think, I'm going to go on this weight loss diet. For 30 days, for 60 days, for 90 days. And then once I've lost 20 pounds or 40 pounds, then I can stop suffering and I can go back to my normal routine. Doesn't work like that. You go back to your normal routine, you're going to get your old body back. Your body is dynamic. It's constantly a reflection of whatever your habits are right now. So this, you know, this whole frame that people approach things from of some quick fix weight loss diet, lose a bunch of weight in a short period of time, 10 day cleanse, detox, extreme diets, and then go back to your normal routine, you're just wasting your time. And you're probably not only wasting your time, you're probably doing some degree of metabolic harm that is actually making it tougher for you to lose weight in the future.

One of the things that I learned over the last several years is people go on a diet for one of three reasons. It's for a reason. Okay, I've got to go on a diet because of a medical reason or because, you know, I'm going on vacation or I'm getting married or I want to be at my son's or daughter's wedding. A reason. The other is a season. Summertime is coming. I want to fit into my clothes or there's a season that I want to look really good in for whatever reason. And then there's the people that make a decision to release weight and keep it off for a lifetime because they really want to be healthier, have more energy, feel better, look better, and just regain some of the vitality that they may have missed. Maybe a little, you know, bounce in your step needs to be added again as the people that make a decision for a lifetime that end up making the right choices. And that's the one thing he helped me with so much because I went on diets and I exercised. I was doing all the right things, but then I was gaining all the weight backs and it was because I was eating the wrong foods. I was eating too much of it. And then I had a lot of sugar in my diet, of which I am sugar free now. Again, that's been a bit of a battle. But the truth is I'm off now and I've got a year that I'm focusing on being off of sugar now. So I'm not doing it for a reason or a season for 100 days anymore. I'm doing it for a year because I know after a year I won't even have to worry about it anymore.

Yeah, yeah, Habits become automatic at that point. So one of the next layers of the story that a lot of people are unaware of, a lot of people who are again, very diet focused. One of these other factors that can push our physiology towards fat storage is circadian rhythm.

Oh, here's another one of these words. So circadian rhythm.

So circadian rhythm is our biological clock. And this is a concept that a lot of people haven't heard of before, but you're actually more familiar with it than you realize, because guess what you do every day? You wake up in the morning and you go to sleep at night. That is actually controlled by this circadian clock in the brain. And it really is like our biological clock. It's a 24 hour clock. It's tied to the 24 hour rise and fall of the sun every day. And this is what basically orchestrates a whole symphony of different hormones and neurotransmitters that make us awake, that make us energetic, that it drives things that are related to our appetite, stress hormones, it drives our desire to move our bodies and burn off energy. Basically all, almost every hormonal system is tied to the circadian rhythm. Well, it turns out that our modern world is almost perfectly built to disrupt this circadian clock in our brain. So basically it works like this. So if you think of like a waveform, you have a peak and you have a valley and you have this rhythm up and down, up and down. So the peak is we're awake, it's daytime. We want to be alert, active, energetic. And then the valley is it's darkness. We want to go into sleep and regeneration mode. So to have a healthy circadian rhythm means you have a big amplitude, you have a big peak, things are working really well. You're really alert, active, energetic. And then at night you go into sleep very easily and you sleep very restfully. That's what a healthy circadian rhythm does. The problem is our modern world disrupts that and it flows, flattens out these curves, it decreases the amplitude, so it goes a little bit up and a little bit down. So basically what that means is we're not awake and energetic when we should be during the daytime. And we're more awake, we're too active and our brains are going too strong at night when we should be sleeping. So we have two basic issues. We have insomnia problems that are widespread now that have become epidemic.

I sleep like a moose.

And we have daytime fatigue, daytime sleepiness fatigue has become an epidemic.

And that's where people drink too much coffee. People drink, you know, Too many soda pops, you have too many candy bars and stuff with sugar, which has an initial, maybe good effect short term, but then the system crashes on itself.

Yeah, yeah. So basically this. So one of the other things that disrupted circadian rhythm will do, in addition to affecting your energy and your mood and how well you sleep, is it will also impact hormones that are directly tied to your body fat. So it will affect your leptin levels. This is the main hormone that actually regulates our body fat. It'll affect your thyroid hormones, which regulate the speed of your metabolism. It'll affect cortisol and basically kind of be almost a chronic. On a physiological level, it's like a form of chronic stress.

Chronic stress.

So you chronically over secrete stress hormones and you disrupt what's called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. A lot of people watching this have probably heard of or been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. Well, disrupted circadian rhythm is one of the big contributors to this, and it's not being addressed when, when the medical practitioners you're seeing is just handing you 10 different supplements and herbs to take. You need to also correct your circadian rhythm. This is a big piece of the puzzle.

Something I want to point out to all of you highly successful people, whether it's in their weight, energy, finances, relationship, they go below the surface of information that the general population buys into. One of the things that I can share with all of you has made a huge difference in my life. And being able to achieve goals at a better than average rate is not that I'm any smarter than anybody else, but I seek out the best information, the best what to do, why to do it, how to do it, so that I can achieve the results that I want. And that just takes a mindset of not playing on the surface of where most people want to play at. So you're hearing some concepts, you know, whether it's around food or around leptin levels, or around obesogenic environment or circadian rhythms, they might be new to you, maybe it's new for you. But if you're serious about being healthy, being vibrant, having energy, looking great, feeling amazing, then go beneath the level of your typical individual, challenge yourself to go deeper and seek out this type of information. Because that's where your success is either made or broken. When 99% of people lose weight and gain it back and a huge majority of people have low energy, they're just like, I'm tired, I'm so tired, I'm So tired. I'm so tired. I'm so tired. Those are symptoms. These are the causes that you're in control of. If you don't know it, then you're ignorant. Now I know that as soon as I said that some of you think that I called you stupid and I didn't. Ignorance just means not knowing. And the truth is we are all ignorant. I'm ignorant, he's ignorant in certain things. One of the things that I love to do is help raise your knowledge and your skills and your awareness so you make better decisions and choices to so you achieve even more in your life. So for somebody who is watching right now, I want to make sure that we don't go too overboard. What are a few things they could do? So maybe you look right at the camera and tell them what are a few things they could do too. Maybe let go of some of the weight that they want so they have more energy. And we'll wrap it up for today. We'll bring you back if they like you. If you like him and you want me to bring him back for a few more sessions, hit the like. Love and share, share, share, share.

So let's just wrap up two of the ideas we talked about today. So we talked about non homeostatic eating and nutrition. Certain factors in the nutritional environment tell them drive this non homeostatic eating. We talked about highly rewarding foods and we talked about circadian rhythm. One of the last pieces that I'll mention on circadian rhythm is it also disrupts appetite regulating hormones and metabolism regulating hormones. So it will increase how many calories you start eating. Not, not because you're trying to eat more calories, but it's sort of like getting the munchies and you just start consuming more because your biology is driving you to consume more. And it's also decreasing your metabolic rate and your energy level so you have less desire to burn off energy. So that's shifting the calories in, calories out equation towards fat storage. So basically, two practical recommendations is one, address your food environment. Meaning don't just say I'm gonna go on a diet. Make the physical environment in your house one that is conducive to making good choices. So in other words, don't have lots of processed junk food around your house. That will even give you the opportunity to wire your brain into this. Non homeostatic eating and fat gain. Create the physical environment that supports your decision making. And then now once you've done that, now you have a lot more willpower to succeed in Making smart choices. You don't have such a willpower depleting environment where you're constantly straining not to do those bad things that you want, but you know you shouldn't do. Okay. So that's one thing. Get rid of the highly rewarding foods. Don't eat.

What are the highly rewarding foods?

Ultra processed foods. Processed foods. In general. You want to shift towards whole foods. Okay. And shift towards non calorie dense whole foods. The biggest thing that will wire your brain into this mode is processed foods that are rich in sugar and fat together. Or flour and fat together.

So sugar, fat and flour. Kind of like a pizza.

Exactly. So what are the most addictive foods? The foods that people rate the highest on?

Potato chips. Pizza. Ice cream.

Exactly. You nail it.

Cookies.

Yeah. Usually it's not pure sugar foods and usually it's not pure fats.

It's a combination.

Yeah. So there are some pure sugar foods that will rank highly. Some people will go crazy on Skittles, for example. Generally you don't see people taking their spoon and dipping it into a teaspoon, a bag of pure white sugar, and just spooning that into their mouth. It becomes much more sort of addictive, if you want to use that word. It inspires cravings in you a lot more when it's combined with something else, like either sugar or flour. So pizza ice cream is a combination of cream and sugar. Those are the things that become really, really addictive.

Potato chips. Fat crunch, Salt.

Yeah, exactly.

Flavor.

Yeah. So those foods are the ones to watch out for and get out of your immediate food environment. The second thing, as far as circadian rhythm.

Hold on. When you say get out of your food environment, you mean change your environment at home so you have healthy choices to make. And then when you're at a restaurant, what do you do?

Well, one of the things with restaurants is they're going to. You're necessarily putting yourself into a willpower depleting environment where you have all these tempting, amazing things on the menu. And now you're forced with. You're set up with the task of, okay, can you resist all of these different amazing, delicious things? And the truth is, we're all human. We all, by virtue of being human, we have limited willpower. And unless you want to be taxing that willpower system every moment of every day, then a big part of success is creating the right environment around you that supports you making good decisions, that actually makes the good decision, the default decision that doesn't require any willpower because it's the only Decision available to you.

I love it. I was in Vegas just this past weekend and I actually went to a buffet. It was $42 per person. I was with a buddy of mine and so we ordered some coffees, I had some guava juice. Then I went to the buffet and there were 12 different stations. There was pork, there was ribs, there were meatloaf, there was chicken, there was fish, there was sushi, there was desserts, there were salads. There was, I mean, an enormous amount, hundreds of people. And I had made a decision to just stick with my diet, which I'm vegan. I just had some amazing salads. And I could tell you that initially my brain was just going crazy because of all of these choices. But because I had put myself in a mental environment of knowing what I'm going to choose ahead of time, I stayed away from the mega amazing dessert line and all the other foods. And so. But I've made a decision for a lifetime, not for a season or a reason. So environment in here and pre committing to what you're going to do ahead of time will help, but then making sure that the environment you put yourself in doesn't taxis all. Ari said, the willpower muscle, which is limited for all of us.

Yeah. And actually that's a great example of this buffet. We know from research that just putting people in that food environment will about double their calorie consumption of what they would eat normally. In a non buffet, non all, you can eat high food variety environment where you have so many different delicious options. Just being in that environment dramatically changes how much you feel compelled to eat again, it's driving that non homeostatic eating.

I want to share something else. Somebody asked me, you know, how I felt about spending $42 for a buffet that had all these choices, but I could only, you know, eat vegetables and protein and stuff like that that fit my diet plan. And I said, well, first of all, I paid a little bit of money for the food and I had one plate, but I paid for the chance to practice. And they go, what do you mean you paid for the chance to practice? I want to put myself in the environment where I can have all of these choices and practice my muscle building ability. So I paid that amount of money. I could have had vegetables and stuff somewhere else and some protein tofu somewhere else. But I wanted to pay for that environment to test my resolve and to test my goals and commitments against my temptations. So what I came up with was make your goals and commitments bigger than your temptations. And when you do that, you'll be able to create that mental environment that'll make it easy for you in any environment to succeed.

I love that. That's good stuff. So the next thing, the second take home from this is change your circadian rhythm habits. So one of the most important things that you can do is start minimizing or eliminating blue light exposure at night. So blue light is. That's specifically the wavelength that enters our eyes and triggers this circadian clock in the brain to tell it that it's daytime again. The time to be awake. Alert, active, energetic. The problem in the modern world is we now have something called electricity. And we have TVs and computers and cell phones blaring light, blue light into our eyes at all times of the day, not just from sun up to sundown, but from sundown to 10 or 11pm at night, we're having these electronic devices emit blue light into our eyes, triggering our brains into thinking it's daytime. The time to be awake. Alert, active, energetic. Now, even if you sleep through the night, this is still blunting your circadian rhythm. It's flattening it out. And again, what that's going to do is it's going to negatively affect all these different neurotransmitters and hormones that are tied to the health of your metabolism, your appetite regulation, leptin and thyroid hormones, which are regulating our body fat and our metabolism, as well as neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate our energy levels and our mental and physical performance. So if you can minimize or eliminate blue light exposure after sunset, you're gonna do something. It's gonna be subtle at first. You're not gonna just wake up the next day and go, wow, this is an amazing difference. But you're talking about something that over time, this will add up to way better energy levels, it will add up to fat loss, and it will help prevent numerous different diseases. There's a ton of different diseases that are associated with disrupted circadian rhythm. So how do you do that? One potential option is you can potentially just decide, I'm gonna get rid of electronic devices for an hour or two prior to bed. Most people are probably not gonna do that. So a couple other options is if you wanna use electronic devices, you can get software on your devices that minimizes the blue light exposure. So for computers, there's a software called F Lux. You can get it@justgetflux.com and this is not a company I'm affiliated with. Anyway, it's a free software. You're free to Use it. And the other thing is to use blue blocker glasses, which will block the blue light from getting into your eyes. And, and then you can use the electronic devices essentially all you want without disrupting your circadian rhythm. And there are absolutely studies that have shown that these things work and they do improve your energy, your health, and help support fat loss by affecting your metabolism and your appetite in a very, very positive way.

Love it. All right, everyone, so if you like this two things, hit the share button so we spread the love. And then as well just go to his website, check a look at what he's got. He's got some great articles, some videos, he does some amazing training. It's Re A R I Witten W H I t t e n.com actually.

The best website to go to now is theenergyblueprint.com if you want fat loss, rewitten.com if you want energy, which all my latest stuff is around energy and this program called the Energy Blueprint. There's tons of great articles on theenergyblueprint.com awesome.

He has amazing content, a great way of teaching it and amazing tools and resources. So I hope you like this. Hit the like button, hit the love button. Leave me your comments. Just remember this goes to the top of the page, so if you miss something, you may want to watch it again, download it and really dive deep. If you are serious about your health and you're committed to having more energy, looking better, feeling better, having vitality, I can tell. I feel 10 years younger now than I did when I was 45. So actually I feel like in my early 40s now versus the 55 that I am. And I intend to get healthier, faster, better, more in shape than ever before. So thank you so much, Ari. High five. I'll give him a hug for you. I hope you enjoy this. I'm going to bring you a whole bunch of friends and experts that guide me and what I do right here on Facebook Live. And again, we'll do these on a regular basis. Be good, have fun. Like love you back. And hit the share button so we spread the love. Bye, everyone.

Bye.