The 9 Myths About Food and Fat Loss - John Assaraf

Hey, great day to you. Welcome to my Achieve Even More show every Tuesday morning right here. Having fun, learning, teaching, sharing new ideas, thoughts, tools, and resources to help you achieve your goals and dreams faster and easier than ever before. As always, if you can hear me and see me, let me know. Today I've got a special topic, the new science to losing fat and keeping it off. Question for you. Do you want to lose some fat and do you want to keep it off? We're talking about the new science. There are a lot of myths out there and especially, you know, this time of year, so many people want to fulfill their New Year's resolutions. Lose weight, keep it off, get healthy. If you can hear me and see me, all right, let me know that you can share a whole bunch of stuff for you. My team actually just put up a. A link if you want to download this. It's probably about 20 pages or so on the nine myths and some stuff that you need to know if you're serious about making this the year that you shed some of the fat and get great health and shape. So if you can hear me and see me, just let me know. Just say, john, I can hear you and see you. Tell me who you are, where you're from as well. All right? I always like to check that in the past. Believe it or not, sometimes I think you're on and my technology is not working. And I've talked for an hour without somebody listening to me. Hey there, Keith. All right, Jim. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Hit the like or the love button if you can. Let me know you can hear me and see me. Leave me a comment, would you be Even better. I can say hi to you, Shaft Garcia, good morning. Good morning. Good morning is my new look. I just came back from the gym. It's a little cold and raining here in San Diego, so I was at the gym this morning. So tell me where you're from. My team again, just. They created a great little document for you with our head neuroscientist. Not neuroscientist, neuro coach Ari Whitten. The New Science to Losing Fat and Keeping It Off. Now, why have I chosen that title, especially this part, right? There's two parts I want you to be aware of. Let's go this way. Fat. Keeping it off, right? Why fat and why keeping it off? Well, let me share with you just a little bit about what I've discovered over the years. If you, like me, want to be healthy as you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s and 90s and 100, then you have to be concerned with, you know, what's your body doing. There's nine systems that should be working synergistically in your body. And a lot of people have this misconception about dieting, weight loss, fat loss, exercise, nutrition, sleep, circadian rhythms, leptin levels, etc. Hey there, Dave. Hi there, Elizabeth. From, from Malaysia. So, yeah, tell me where you're from. So you know. So for me, many of you may or may not know this, but I'm trying to put a photo in here. It won't let me put a photo in here. Nope, I'm trying to add a photo into the chat. About 10 years ago, I was 238 pounds and I had over 30% body fat on my body. So 30% of just 200 is 60 pounds of excess fat. Now, today you don't see that, but I made a decision. I was frustrated and I wasn't healthy. I wasn't feeling well, high blood pressure, borderline diabetic, wasn't sleeping well, exhausted all the time. I made a decision to lose weight and I what had happened for a while is I lost 10, 15, 20 pounds. Then I gained it back and lost it and gained it back and lost it and gained it back. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? It's called the yo yo diet syndrome. You go on a diet and you lose weight, you gain it back. Anybody know what I'm talking about? If you do, let me know. Yes. And for those of you who just joined, I'm going through the new science to Losing Fat and Keeping it Off. It's a little ebook that my team is putting a link there for you if you want to download it. I'm going to be talking about some nine myths, but for me, even though I was exercising, I wasn't healthy. And so I hired Ari Whitten, one of the leading exercise nutritionist energy experts in the world, to help me understand what was I doing, what was going on. And he busted a bunch of myths for me. He really recalibrated my thinking and with his guidance and help and by following what he did to reset some settings in my brain. For example, a fat loss setting. We all have fat loss settings to recalibrate my insulin resistance. Things that you may or may not be aware of. But he helped me understand a deeper level of the game. And I was fascinated because I had lost over £250. It was just 10, 15, £20 at a time. But then I gained it back. Lose it, gain it back, lose it, gain it back. So if you have ever been on a diet, you know what I'm talking about, especially if you've gained it all back. And so I discovered a whole bunch of stuff around the neurology, the biology and the psychology of losing weight. But specifically what I first learned was there's a huge difference between losing weight and losing fat. So just about any diet you go on, you're going to lose weight either because you're dieting or, or you've changed what you are eating and you're exercising a little bit more. But what a lot of people don't realize is when you go on a diet, you're losing water, fiber, muscle, tissue, et cetera. So weight loss is not where you need to be focusing on. What you should be focusing on is fat loss. And so that's one of the first things that I, you know, that I discovered was I had to be focusing on fat loss. And so let me share with you some myths. And by the way, if you want to follow along, all of the myths are here. What I'm going to be talking about are here. And there's a whole bunch more in this little PDF manual for you that's been created and we'll summarize a whole bunch of stuff. But myth number one, for example, is that if I'm on a low fat diet, I will lose more fat than if I'm on a low carb diet. And guess what? All of the new research shows that's not true. What it shows, okay? And I'm going to be reading this because I'm not an expert in this, but I've been using this is dozens of studies prove that when low fat and low carb diets of equal calories, calories do matter, right? Of equal calories are compared. They provide the exact same amount of fat loss. So if you're thinking of going on this diet or that diet, calories do matter. Now how many of you knew that? If you knew that already, click on the link. What I want to do is bust some myths and you can read this. The second thing to myth that we're going to bust here is there is one optimal fat loss program to lose weight. I just have to find it. My problems will be solved. And how many of you believe that's true? That there's one optimal fat loss diet once you choose it? Is it Atkins? The Zone diet? The low fat versus the south beach diet? Ornish diets? Here's what the results are. Results show that fat Loss differences between individual diets is small. About equal amounts of fat loss occur when any low carb or low fat diet, regardless of the type, there isn't only one type of diet that works for fat loss. The key find is that fat loss diet is going to be sustainable for you. Here is something that's super, super, super important. There are people, for example, this time of year that say, I want to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds. The first thing I want you to do is shift it from I want to lose to I want to release. Now why is that important? It's important because psychologically, when you say lose, guess what your brain thinks about when you lose something, I want to find it back. But if you think a little bit deeper than that, when you say release, fat is calories, protein is calories, carbohydrates is calories, Sugar converts to glycogen, which if it's not used, converts over to fat. And if you don't use the fat, then you end up getting fatter. But when we're thinking about fat loss, if you want to release one pound of fat, it's 3,500 calories. So when you are thinking about losing weight, or releasing weight, as I prefer to call it, the thinking should be, how do I make sure that I consume what I need without slowing my metabolic rate down? Let me explain. When you and I, let's say, eat less calories than we are normally used to, do you know what your brain does? It says, uh oh, what's going on? There's a shortage of food and it goes into something called a starvation mode. Which means that even if you diet and exercise, your brain says, hold on to the fat. Why? Because fat has over two times more energy than carbohydrates or protein does. Your body doesn't use protein for energy. It uses protein for muscle building. It uses sugar, carbohydrates and fat for fuel. And we have two systems that our brain likes to use. One is it likes to use carbohydrate. And there's simple sugars and complex carbs which are a little bit more complex, which burn a little bit slower. But then you can also activate your ketones, which is a different fat using system that's produced by the liver by reducing your carbs. So when we are going on a diet, what do most people think about how do I lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds? But they don't think about, what is that going to do to my metabolic rate? What's that going to do to my brain? Thinking that I'm in starvation mode. If our brain is wired to keep us alive, survival, then anything that your brain deems might affect your survival, like a lack of food or too much expenditure of energy. Think of it as a biocomputer. It's acting automatically to keep you in the weight that has become your comfort zone. And so instead of going on a diet, all right, why not consider what food plan and sleep plan and exercise plan should I be on for the rest of my life? So that I can release weight gradually and keep it off? So that I can release weight slowly and keep it off. But not just weight. How do I use the fat for energy so that I can lose fat and keep it off? Does that make sense? It's a shift in your mindset because people will lose weight for a reason, a season or for a lifetime. Can you let me know what do you want to lose weight for? Like, is it for a reason to look better? Is it for a season because summertime is coming? Or is it for a lifetime so that you're healthy and, you know, going into your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s knees, type in below the answer. All right, let me know what your answers are. So that was, you know, number two. All right, and again, if you've just joined us, I know that people come and go during these sessions. I'm going through the new science to losing, to keeping fat off. And when you. When you get this, I'll invite you to a longer session on how to reprogram your brain for greater fat loss and maintenance. There. Let me see your answers there. To be healthy, right? So somebody's there for a season. So if you're getting. If you're trying to lose weight for a reason or a season, 99% chance you will gain all the weight back. And so if you're doing all of the work, why not sustain it, right? A lifetime of health and beauty. Right? There you go for health lifetime. Awesome. So let's go to. I went a little too far. So myth number three is carbs are the reason people are. And there's the answer, by the way. So I'm going to give you a high level. That's what this document is. It'll show you all the answers to these myths. So it says carbs are the reason people are getting sick and fat. Eating carbs does not make you any fatter than eating equal amounts of calories of fat. And a lot of the diet gurus tell you that that's the case. But according to all of the latest research, and many of you know that the stuff that we do at Neurogym is we work with some of the leading experts who research the research. So everybody's got a book out there. At last check, I think there were 66,000 different books on dieting. Now, if you're eating a lot of refined carbohydrates, if you're not eating a lot of whole foods, if you're eating specifically a lot of refined carbohydrates and high sugary food to convert to glycogen, you don't use it, then you are going to get sicker and fatter. And so the key is this. I'm going to read this to you. Studies have shown diets rich in whole food carbohydrates, blueberries, carrots and beans, are just as effective for fat loss as low carb diets. Avoiding the refined carbohydrates and added sugars is certainly a smart idea, but don't expect any magic from avoiding whole food carbohydrates. So the key, okay, and this is what I started to do is I started to focus on how can I eat whole foods if I was going to have sugar? The sugar had to be in the whole food or the fruit. But numerous recent scientific studies that compare high carb and low carb diets of equal calories show exactly equal rates of fat loss. And so there's a whole new education right now. We live in this obesogenic environment where all of the choices around us are geared. Scientists are in their laboratories for all these companies. They're geared towards getting us to take immediate action, just like, you know, with our cell phones. And we're tapping and looking at everything every nanosecond. All of the foods that are engineered right now, except for the whole foods, are geared towards getting us to be addicted to those foods. All right, so there's your myth number three. Number four is fat loss is just a simple matter of calories in, calories out. How many of you believe that fat loss is just a matter of calories in, calories out? All right, let me know if you agree with that. Hit the like or the love button here. I'm reading your comments right now. There we go. All right, so while calories do absolutely matter, most studies indicate that constantly trying to starve the body of calories by force yourself to eat less has abysmal long term success. Now, I'm not about short term success and then reverting back to your old self. I'm about long term success that you can sustain and here's what happens when you start to develop the habits, the mental, emotional and the physical habits and that's when you end up being the healthiest. Right. So a recent comprehensive analysis on the long term diet studies was conducted UCLA and found that all diets fail over 95% of the time to achieve long term fat loss. 95% to achieve long term fat loss. While calorie restriction does work very well at the beginning to achieve plenty of fat loss, after a while your body initiates a whole set of hormonal and metabolic responses to being deprived of that drives your biology to pile all the weight back and more. This is one of the key reasons of the yo yo diet. So it's what I mentioned a little bit earlier is we are biologically wired for survival and the maintenance of homeostasis. And Brent says hormones is the controlling factor releasing fats. Yeah, specifically your leptin levels and ghrelin. Brent is what you are referring to. Circadian rhythm and sleep will affect leptin levels and ghrelin which will determine whether you will use fat for burning for fuel as well. Let's go to number five and again this is chock full of killer information that's in here as well that you can get. Let me go to number five. Is this helpful to you? I had to hire an expert to help me understand this because I had a misunderstanding. I thought I was eating. I was eating a lot, but I thought I was eating healthy. One of my biggest challenges was portion and sugar. So number five is I can eat whatever foods I want while losing fat. I can even eat donuts or ice cream if at the end of the day I control my portion size and overall calorie intake. It boggles my mind how many infomercials I'm seeing says eat what you want. It doesn't matter what you eat, you'll lose weight. It just. It's ridiculous. So let me share with you what the. What the. This is a myth that is debunked as well. While many people use this strategy successfully for short term results in bodybuilding and physique competitions, it tends not to be very effective for long term fat loss. And this is because we tend to negatively impact our health. Energy levels, key brain centers involved in appetite regulation, gut health and hormones in ways that cumulative work to drive fat gain over time. Hopefully the first five myths I've got four more are going to help you understand is the first thing that's most critical is your psychology around releasing weight and keeping it off. And I'M going to go back to, are you going to do it for a reason, a season, or are you going to do the work and then be able to ustain? Takes between 66 days and 365 days to recalibrate the neural networks, the biological systems, to create a new set point. There's a few different set points that you want to create, but if you're doing, if you're dieting for a week or two or three or four, and you're using willpower and persistence, it's one of the weakest of our neuromuscles. By the time four or five o' clock comes around, many of us have used up our attention units and our willpower muscle. And if we are in front of whether it's sugar, carbohydrates, fats, flour, sugar, salt, even in those combinations, then our dopamine system in our brain gets activated and the anticipation of eating those foods is almost unbearable for most people. So we have to do more than just go on a food diet or maybe even exercise. All right? And again, if you want the, you know, the manual that I'm reading off of, it's about 20, 25 pages of killer, killer content for you and what to do as well. So here's another. I'm going to go to number six. The number six myth is I can eat foods high in fat and sugar, and with my willpower, I can say no to these foods I want. Whenever you eat these high rewarding, sugary foods, which I used to be addicted to, you're activating neural circuit in the brain that is the same circuit as what is activated inheritance. Heroin addicts, cocaine addicts, alcoholics, it's sugar addiction, the same type of sugar addiction, and sugar to the brain is more addictive than cocaine by seven to eight times, according to the latest research. And if you think about it, it makes total sense, right? Your brain wants sugar to operate as quickly as possible. So in the old days when we were still living in caves, we'd be picking these berries to be able to eat so we can have quick energy, so we can fuel our muscles to get away from any predators. And so our brain is an extremely efficient tool. It likes to use, you know, simple sugars, complex carbohydrates which are broken down to sugars. Just a more complex molecule, protein is used for muscle growth. And then fat is another fuel system that the brain actually likes to use. But the key is, is how do you get the right proportions of good, healthy fats, the right amount of protein and the right Amount of complex carbohydrate that will have some sugar in there so that you have almost like the kindling wood, the gunpowder to kick things off, but then you shift over into more complex, sustained energy. A lot of people don't realize this, but if you lack energy, the question is why? You're made up of energy. You have a hundred trillion cells that are all vibrating at certain frequencies. And when you take foods in that burn the sugar quickly, you start using your insulin response way too fast, and then your pancreas trying to make more insulin. You've got this catch up game all the time, over and over and over again. And so you should have energy from the time you wake up all the way to the time it's time to go to bed. But if the systems aren't working well, if you're not taking care of mitochondrial health, like the little engine inside your cells, and feeding it the right amount of food so it can operate well and it's sluggish and you don't have enough fluids in you for elimination. All these processes work synergistically together. When they don't work synergistically together, yes, you can override them short term by using willpower, persistence and goal setting to lose weight. You're not gonna keep it off. And for me, that's. It was insanity for me because I didn't know this stuff and I thought I was pretty smart, you know, as an athlete when I was a kid, you know, ate well, drank well, had lots of fun. But I, you know, as I got into my 40s, my mid-40s, I started to pack on the weight. I was like a little, you know, sea lion. And so I wanted to understand, okay, I don't mind doing the work, but I want to do the work one time and keep it off. So I worked on the mental game, the emot emotional game, and the physical game. Does that make sense? So that was number six. Let's go to number seven. If I eat my fill, I will get fatter and fatter. Many studies have found that just by changing the types and quality of food we eat, we will spontaneously reduce calorie intake and lose weight. And this is even true while allowing people to eat fullness to fullness. Now, here's the thing. You've got to remember what you eat actually matters and the quality of the calories actually matter. So for example, you know, if you eat, you know, 10 ounces of chicken or fish and 3 ounces of vegetables, if you shifted, you know, from eating 10 ounces of chicken, meat, fish, pork, whatever the case is, to 4 or 5 ounces and doubled or tripled the amount of fiber you got. And some good healthy fat like olive oil, coconut oil, which is a medium chain triglyceride which your brain loves. You can actually eat more, feel more full, have more energy and lose weight. So what you eat does matter. And I used to eat a lot of the wrong foods. Are you ready for number eight and nine? We have five minutes left. Let me know if you're enjoying this. If you do, hit the like or the love button and share it as well. Here is another monstrous myth. Grazing throughout the day will speed up my metabolism and help me lose weight. Is that true or is that a myth? Everything I've shared with you is a myth. So several recent studies have compared people who consume five to six meals throughout the day. I used to think that as well, I used to eat a little bit every two or three hours. So several studies have compared consuming five to six meals a day. Hold on to people eating only three meals a day. The studies show that there is no increase in metabolism or fat loss by grazing throughout the day. In addition, there are some studies that show that in overweight people, eating more frequently can actually lead to eating more overall. More fat, gain, worse health. And so there's so much bullshit out there. What I've done at Neurogym is I've hired the researchers that actually research all the studies. I can't tell you how many articles I read a day or videos that I watch where it sounds great and I send it to one of my researchers and they go, that's bullshit. There's five other studies that don't agree with that, that have proven that is wrong. And so keep one thing in mind. When you're reading stuff or watching stuff, whatever you're reading or watching does not, okay, make the 20 other studies obsolete. A lot of times when I'm reading stuff or you're reading stuff on a lot of different magazines or channels, we're getting the cherry picked information to substantiate the viewpoint that the author or book writer or researcher wants you to see. So the key is to research the research. And so that's number eight. And again, if you want all of this and then a whole bunch more, just download this. I'll also give you access to a higher training on brain training to reset some of your internal mechanisms that I did. I just recorded it. It's about an hour and 15 minutes. Number nine is this. And I used to do this all the time. If I go on a juice cleanse, I will cleanse myself of toxins and reset my metabolism and able to eat whatever I want. Toxins make people fat, so there is actually some evidence that suggests that certain specific toxins can contribute to fat gain. But the vast majority of detox therapies have no proven effect on ridding the body of these toxins. It's true that in general, many people in the Western world consume nutrient poor processed foods, breathe in smog over overused medications, ingest foods that contain toxins like pesticides, and don't sleep enough. However, taking some detox pills, doing a colonic every few months, or doing a three day detox isn't going to do nearly as much for you as optimizing your body's own ability to eliminate toxins every single day. This means you should focus less about what a three day detox program does and goes on to do, and more about optimizing your nutrition and lifestyle for the other 362 days. And the way to do that goes back to where I started this 30 minutes ago is you've got to ask yourself a question. What is the reason that you want to release weight? Is it for a reason? A season or a lifetime? If you are like me and you want to be healthy with energy and look great and feel great and do the things that we're supposed to be doing in our 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, I'm a year and a half away from being 60 and I am in better shape now than I was in my 30s, 40s, and even in my early 50s. But I started the process a while ago. My goal was to slowly change over time. When I was younger, I used to focus on, you know, what can I do in two weeks or three weeks? And although that's maybe a good strategy for some people, once I started to understand the neuroscience, what happens within my brain and the circuits and how they fight to get you back to homeostasis, I said, okay, why not take a slower path where I can still get great results to see the fruits of my labor, no pun intended, but I could sustain it for the rest of my life. And so if you want to release weight, if you want to have more energy, if you want to look and feel your best, if you want to have wonderful relationships with yourself, your significant other, your children, your grandchildren, then, you know, learn what it takes. I'm giving you this for free. We've done all the research for you. It's outstanding. There's a lot more pages. Share it please if you hit the share button My goal as you probably know right help you achieve your goals and dreams faster and easier than ever before. For me, I want to go deeper into the science, the neuroscience, the biology and the psychology. Those are the three things I focus on all the time. I'm interested in knowing why do you do what you do, but why don't you do the things you know you should do? Why are habits hard to break? Why are they easier to make if you do the right things? So when you understand how your brain works, it's the center of everything that you do. Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you do or don't do. So I hope you enjoyed this. Hit the Share button Download the new science to Losing Fat and Keeping it off Watch my other training if you like on how to reset the self image and the body fat set point that you'll be invited to if you like and release weight. Keep it off feel amazing. That's my hope for you. Have an awesome day. If you enjoyed this Share It Hit the Like button, the love button. High five to you and we'll see you next Tuesday.