The Keys To Finally Losing Weight | Masterclass

So what type of physical activity should we be doing to lose the midsection weight?

Aerobic exercise. And aerobic means with air, which means that it's at an intensity low enough that we can breathe comfortably and supply the oxygen.

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So as soon as you start huffing and puffing, it's not a bad thing for short duration, but if you go and you do a 45 minute spin class every day and you're just huffing and puffing, you're gonna make way, way, way too much cortisol.

Really?

Yes.

So you might be hurting your chances of losing the weight. Yes. If you're doing that intense of a workout, every day.

Correct.

If you're doing a HIIT training two, three times a week for 45 minutes, is that okay? You feel like that's still intense?

If it's 45 minutes, it's not HIIT.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

HIIT, high intensity, means that it's so intense to me, my definition.

10-15 minutes.

It's like...

It's not... Well, maybe the total duration would be 10-15 minutes, but if you do interval, high intensity interval training is what HIIT is. Then the intervals should be so intense you can't even do them for more than 30 seconds. Like they should be so intense provided you're fit enough to do that of course. But if you do 30 seconds and then you do 30 second rest and then 30 seconds, you should be able to bring your heart rate up to maximum in maybe four or five intervals, that is hit. Now you're done. You've created your positive hormones.

Your growth.

Hormone to stimulate fat burning, your growth hormone to stimulate muscle building and to stimulate new brain synapses to enhance learning and focus. All the good stuff in the brain depends on hormones. Two of those hormones are human growth hormone and BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Those two hormones are necessary to make new synapses. Your brain is constantly remodeling and every time you learn something, whether you're 20 years old or 80 years old, You make new synapses, and the synapses you use, they get stronger. The ones that you don't use go away. But these two hormones, which some of the strongest ways to produce them is high intensity exercise and fasting, are pretty much required to build a brain and to learn, really.

So, what type of high intensity exercise are you doing on a weekly basis?

My favorite to really get the heart rate up is I go to my favorite mountain close to where I live where there's a trail and it's like four miles around and I walk a little bit, I jog a little bit, I walk a little bit, jog a little bit. Just kind of enjoying the movement. and my heart rate probably stays around 100 to 120, 130 maybe. And then there's some hills. And then I do some sprints up the hills. So now I push it a little bit. And 30 second push and my heart rate's 160. And then I walk a little, jog a little, there's another hill, and I push it a little bit more and my heart rate hits 165, 170. And I might do that in 30 seconds or it might take a minute to get to that heart rate. And then I'm done.

You do a few hills.

Yes.

What if you did 20 hills? Then too much, a 10 to 30 second.

That might be okay if you're 20, 25 years old, you're an elite athlete and that's part of your event. But if you're 45, 50, 60, and you just try to stay as healthy as possible, I think that's too much.

Really.

And in any event, it's unnecessary because it's not about the quantity. Quantity is good for fitness, but not necessarily for health.

Interesting. So you only need a few sprints every couple, is this every day or every few days?

I would say it's no more than twice a week.

Twice a week.

For the average person now, and we have to If you're watching this, you have to understand if you're in the elite athlete category or in the 50-year-old trying to stave off living life, degenerative disease.

Yes, yes. So if you're more of a, if you're an athlete, even in your 40s and 50s, you could push it a little farther. If you're competing in stuff or doing triathlons or marathons, Just wanting to stay lean, it's important to be doing that a little bit more.

Yeah.

So there's no doubt. I mean, I talk a lot of my videos about moderation. Like you do these HIIT exercises, you do it twice a week, you keep it short. But obviously that doesn't apply to someone who has a goal in an event. If you're going after fitness, there is no substitute for punishing yourself.

Right.

You gotta do it. Yeah.

If you're going to perform in an event, you need to do something similar to that event at that level of intensity and duration.

So fasting and high intensity exercise, but it's not doing a CrossFit every day, five days a week, because that creates too much cortisol.

Correct.

Especially if you're older, past 30 or something, it's probably not as good to do that. Is something like that, a 45 to 60 minute CrossFit type of training once a week you think okay or is it still creating too much cortisol?

I think that's I think once or twice a week for the average person if you feel good I think is fine. But again I when I have people come in to my clinic those are people who have been to 20 different doctors. They have tried vegan and carnivore and low carb and and yo-yo dieting and gluten free, they've done all that. So these are people with challenges. And now if you're a little frail, now that's where you really have to be careful and get everything right. But yeah, if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, you're feeling fine, then go for it. Do one or two of those spin classes. And what I would caution though is pay attention. Notice how your body is reacting. How do you feel after the class? Are you exhausted? Are you stiff in the morning? Do you have trouble getting out of bed? Do your joints hurt the next day? Then you're probably doing too much.

Doing too much, yeah. And what about, you know, we talked about fasting a little bit here. what are the top three benefits of intermittent fasting or longer fasting, 24 hour, 48 hour fasting that you've seen in your research?

So number one is lowering insulin.

And.

With that lowering blood sugar, losing weight, etc. The other big thing is that you induce something called autophagy. But that's with longer fasting. Autophagy is called self. Autophagy stands for self-eating. And that's where if you're putting food in your body, if you're putting especially protein in your body, there's plenty of resources. Your body knows, hey, there's some more coming. I can just use that to build tissue and to do the stuff I need. But if you stop putting it in, now it becomes a very, very scarce resource. So now your body has to figure out where else can I get this? And that's where autophagy, self-eating comes in. So now your body upregulates its recycling mechanisms.

How long does it take to fast before autophagy starts.

So again, that's what everybody asks. And it's not a black or white. It's a continuous, it's a gradient. I would say that it barely starts around 16 to 18 hours. That's where you get like a trickle. But then it increases pretty fast where there's a significant change between 18 and 24 hours. And then it sort of takes off from there. So 48 hours into it, it's very significant.

48 hours into it. So the longer you can go every extra few hours, it continues to self-eat the fat stored in your body more and more.

Yes. So the self-eating now, part of what it eats is fat, obviously, because you're not adding any fuel. But the key with autophagy is protein because you need protein to build tissue. Your cells have so much of a lifespan, they break down and then you have to make new ones and you need protein for that. So when you don't add any, now you have to go look for some and a lot of people will say, oh, well that's where fasting is dangerous. because you're going to eat up your muscles. The body is too smart for that, because you need your muscles to go on the next hunt. So we have all these mechanisms to spare muscles, and that's why growth hormone increases also exponentially along with autophagy. And growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's basically telling the body, one of the mechanisms that tell the body Don't use the muscle, go find something else. So now it gets much better at recycling these broken cells. It gets much better at finding any kind of resource like virus and bacteria and parasites that may also be made out of protein.

Really? And eating those things, the bad things first.

Correct.

Interesting. What's the longest you've gone fasting?

The longest I've done is five days.

No.

Four and a half.

No food, water only.

Just water.

Yeah.

I've done three days.

Yeah.

And you see the benefits a lot after a day and a half. You really start to see and feel the benefits.

Yeah.

By day three, I went the total right up to three. And I was like, okay, I need. I was starting to get a little tired, and I think I pushed it because I worked out twice, which.

Yeah.

Probably not supposed to do, but I. did like a, an incline walk for an hour and I, yeah, which I don't recommend, but I was trying to be extreme.

Yeah, that's, that's probably too much.

Yeah.

And this is where we come into this muscle sparing thing that I'm all in favor of doing some exercise while you're fasting because, because you're going to increase your ketones, you're going to increase your, your growth hormone, but. If you're not adding any protein and you do something intense enough to break down muscle, now your body has to sort of juggle the resources. It has to repair those muscles and where's the protein going to come from? So it might break down some other muscles to repair that.

Interesting.

Okay, I haven't seen specific research on this or anything. It's just kind of common sense, what would the body do?

Sure.

So, I would exercise, but I would keep it to purely aerobic. I wouldn't even do HIIT, not even brief HIIT during those times.

Right, right. What did you do for those four and a half, five days?

I probably didn't do much of anything. Probably just, yeah, maybe a little bit of walking, but basically just my everyday activities.

Did you feel pretty sharp after two, three days? Did you start to feel a little slower towards the end?

I don't feel as great as people tell me they feel.

I've got so much energy.

Yeah, so I do okay. I don't feel any dramatic improvement in focus, but I do know that it happens because I get the testimonials and I do know especially for people who might have insulin resistance, when they fast, they're going to increase their ketones, which becomes the alternative brain fuel.

Right.

And it also kind of helps heal certain things. If you've been driving the insulin, it's allowing that to recover more, right? Yes. Yeah.

Your whole carbohydrate processing machine is recovering because you're not you're not adding anything. And one more thing about autophagy and fasting is for brain trauma. And this, I've hardly ever heard it spoken about, that the brain is kind of its own little world up there inside the cranium. We have the blood-brain barrier and a lot of things that go on in the brain are different than the way they work in the body. The reason, for example, that spinal cord injuries are so devastating is that the nervous system is really poor at repairing itself. It's encased in bone for a reason. It's not supposed to get damaged. You're not supposed to crack your skull or break your spine. That tissue is a little different. It's sensitive. and it doesn't have the capacity to repair itself very well. But if you have a concussion, for example, you get some tissue brain trauma, you get some inflammation, and about the only way that the brain can clean that up is through autophagy, the self-eating.

Our government told us to eat 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta today. To eat a low-fat diet, and fats and oils were barring only at the top supposed to be eaten. And yet that advice led to the worst obesity epidemic and diabetes epidemic in the history of mankind.

That's like the food charts that we.

Were all saw in school, right? Completely opposite of what we should be doing. And so the science has caught up with this bad advice. And the advice, unfortunately, Lewis was based on really shoddy science, on very weak evidence, on a few population studies, not really experimental studies. In fact, all the experimental studies that told us to eat low-fat diets They actually didn't tell us that we should be doing that. They were actually contradicting the recommendations that were developed in 1980 by the UK and the USA.

Really?

So basically, if you looked at the actual randomized controlled trials, there weren't that many, but there was a few of them, they all said that eating low fat wasn't beneficial. But the... Were outside of the US trials? No, trials all over. Trials in the US. They just didn't look at that evidence. So the guideline committees who were working on it, they sort of dismissed that evidence. And they had this theory, and they went with the theory. because it made sense, right? If you look at calories, for example, fat has nine calories per gram, carbs and protein have four calories per gram. So you think, well gee, if it has more calories per gram, if you eat less of it, you're gonna lose more weight. It's logical. But unfortunately, metabolism is not a math problem. It's a metabolic problem. It's a hormonal problem. It's not energy balance. The whole idea of calories in, calories out, this is the biggest, Croak of you know what, that's been pushed on the American public because there's a message implicit in that, which is if you just told someone to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, if they don't do it, it's their fault. Just eat less, exercise more. If you don't, you're a lazy glutton. So it's your fault, you're fat. But the truth is that it's not. It's not just about calorie balance. In fact, that's what the global energy balance quote, global energy balance network, which was actually funded by Coca-Cola. And they actually funded university scientists to kind of be the front people for this nonsense that's all about calories in, calories out, has been completely discredited. The New York Times wrote a big expose of this. But what we've been taught is that all calories are the same. They're actually not. So food is not just energy, it's actually information. It gives instructions, right? So this is like a big breakthrough in science, right? So food is not just calories, it's actually information. So the information in food communicates with your body every single minute. So every bite you take, it turns on or off genes that create health or disease, they make you lose or gain weight. It turns on or off hormones that make you lose or gain weight or create health or disease.

It's like a feedback for you.

It's direct instructions and it works minute by minute. It's not something that takes a long time. It regulates inflammation, it regulates Your hormones, as I said, it regulates your brain chemistry. It regulates even your gut microbiome, all the flora in your gut that we now know are linked to everything from weight gain, diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer, to autoimmune diseases, and so many other things. Even depression and ADD and autism may be linked to changes in your gut flora. So we now know that when you eat food, it's not just about the energy in it. 'Cause if that was true, then you could just survive on soda all day and it wouldn't matter as long as you only eat 1,800 calories of soda. And I had this argument with the Vice Chairman of Pepsi. We had dinner together. I'm telling you. No way. Yeah, we had dinner. And the guy in between us, because I was in here, he was sitting here, the guy was like being in the middle of a war zone. And I said to him, How can you say that eating 1,800 calories of soda is the same as having 1,800 calories of broccoli or almonds? He says, well, as long as you, have that amount of calories, it's not gonna be any different. I said, this is not how the body works. You're not getting the nutritional value from that, right?

Right.

I mean, when you, well, it's not even nutritional. So just like look at 1,000 calories, let's say, 750 calories of broccoli is 21 cups, 35 grams of fiber, half teaspoon of sugar, and tons of phytonutrients, phytochemicals that upregulate your genes that actually help you prevent cancer, that improve hormone metabolism, so many things, right? Same calories from a big gulp, 750 calories, 46 teaspoons of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, upregulates your liver to turn on a fat production factory that makes high triglycerides. Stores fat more, right? Stores fat, lowers triglycerides. I mean, raises triglycerides, lowers the good cholesterol, causes a fatty liver, raises hormones that make you, in women, make them grow hair on their face and have lost hair on their head. Men, they drop their testosterone, they have.

No sex drive and they lose their.

Hair on their bodies.

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All this from the same calories, right?

The number of calories.

Calories are the same, but the information in the food is very different. So now we have this concept that is actually really about the hormonal, I call it the hormonal hypothesis, which I talk about in Eat Fat Get Thin, which is how do you change your hormones so you're not hungry all the time.

That's the key.

The typical advice, you eat low fat and your fat actually makes you satisfied. Because if you eat fat, you're not craving all the time, you're not hungry, and it actually is a brain actually food because it actually stops the addiction center in the brain from turning on. So you never feel hungry or have any cravings. It also speeds up your metabolism. Fat speeds up your metabolism. Yeah.

So it helps you burn more fat.

It helps you burn more fat. It releases fat from the fat cells. Interesting. Right, so it makes you less hungry, it makes you burn more fat and it liberates the fat from the fat cells. So it's really a powerful whereas if you eat sugar, the opposite happens. You get hungrier because you increase insulin. I used to have so much sugar. It's terrible. I was addicted to it. All of us were. I mean, I was too. I was a vegetarian. I ate like tons of whole wheat bread and sugar and honey and everything. I mean, grape nuts and ice cream for breakfast.

That was my life, right?

So when did you stop?

When did the research become known or the facts of the data become known?

It's not even, it's honest, that's what I'm saying. Because you're a doctor and you were eating sugar.

It's not even. When did you start to realize it?

When did this information about fat become, you know? Well, it's been mounting for decades, right? So it's building on a mountain of evidence. And in the book, I reviewed over a thousand studies or 500 quoted in the book that I referenced. They wouldn't let me put more because there was no room in the back of the book. Yeah, yeah. And it's all well documented. And the science of this is very powerful. One of my colleagues, David Ludwig, He wrote a book called Always Hungry. He's a Harvard professor. He's done a lot of the research that this is based on where he, frankly, gave two groups of people same calories, same calories but changed the percents of fat and carbs. And it was a very well-controlled study. And in the first group, they had 60% carbs, 20% fat, 20% protein. The other group switched it, 60% fat, 20% carbs, 20% protein. So it's the opposite. And the group that had the high fat diet burned 300 calories more a day by doing nothing at all. Really, just by having more fat. By eating more fat, their metabolism sped up 300 calories. That's like running. Same amount of calories though. They ate the same amount of calories in. But they burned 300 calories. Right, because their metabolism sped up. Interesting. Right, so in other words, it's like.

Running an hour a day without getting off the couch. Interesting.

Right?

That's powerful. Very powerful.

Yeah, and I know for me, as I've seen myself and my patients, transformation is amazing and their cholesterol gets better. It's totally contradictory. Fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol. Eating cholesterol is supposed to raise your cholesterol. But for the first time since the Dietary Guidelines came out in 1980, the US government in 2015 completely reversed their stance on fat. There's no more restriction. like January, first week of January 2016. This year. This year. Like a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago.

They just changed this. They changed this completely. The whole guide. Completely. So they.

Really.

First time they said, forget about fat. You can use as much as you want. No, no limit on fat. This is the government. The government. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee established these recommendations. This is a scientific group that establishes guidelines for the government. helps them shape policy. And then the government makes the policy. They kind of, they kind of, around this research or this. Yeah, they said, you know, don't worry about fat, don't worry about cholesterol. Eggs are back, right? Eggs are back. You know, forget about the egg white omelets, just eat the whole egg. No way. Completely. And they said, there's, but they was, it made, it made me laugh. They said, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, quote, nutrient of concern, like Well, we got it wrong for 35 years.

No way.

It's totally different. They also said that we should, for the first time, they said we should reduce sugar. Now, the policy advisors who are the scientists said we should limit sugar-sweetened beverages because they're proven to be linked to obesity and diabetes. But the government, because of the food lobby, changed the wording to say, no, we should be restricting added sugar. So we should eat less added sugars. Now, what's an added sugar? It doesn't say added sugar on the label. So how do you know? Because the food labeling from the FDA is also influenced by the food lobby. So which is to say added sugar on the label, not just sugar. So you don't know. It's designed to totally confuse people. The truth is that this is a huge advance and now we actually have come to realize that this is not true. The science around fat and how your body burns fat and what makes you fat is all really clear now. It's all based on this hormone idea of insulin, which is a fat storage hormone. So anything you eat that increases insulin, which is sugar, refined flour, I mean white flour raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. So if you had two slices of white bread, it raises your blood sugar more than a tablespoon of table sugar. You're like, I mean, whole wheat bread, it's just as bad. Unless the bread is so dense that you can stand on it without it squishing, Then you shouldn't eat it. You shouldn't eat it. No, like the German rye bread. I love bread though. Yeah, everybody loves it. The bread we eat isn't the bread we ate, right? So our ancestors ate very different. It's not the hard bread. It was very coarse. And we only had the grain mills that started in the 1800s.

Before that, we couldn't eat refined grain.

And now even whole wheat is super refined. It's just, you know, and are all grains bad as well, in your opinion? No, I don't think all grains are bad. You know, I joke, I say, you know, in the book I talk about, you know, an induction plan, like basically a way to get quick start to change you from like just being storing fat to burning fat to eating fat to makes you thin. And that's a 21 day plan. And after that, I talk about how you transition to what I call Pegan diet. Pegan? Pegan as opposed to paleo or vegan. It was kind of a joke because one day I was sitting- In between? Yeah, I was sitting on a panel with two friends of mine. One was a vegan cardiologist and the other was like a paleo doctor.

Sure.

And I was like, well, I don't know. I guess they must be a Pegan because I'm in the middle here.

Okay.

What does a Pegan diet look like? So, Pegan diet, you know, it's amazing, Louis, is that the principles of Paleo-Vegan are often very similar. So, both groups believe that we should be eating whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods. Yes. We should get rid of food additives, hormones, everything. No antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides, no GMO. We should be having no MSG, no artificial sweeteners, no high fructose corn syrup. Everybody agrees that that's true. We also agree that everybody should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables.

Yes.

Right?

A little heavy on the plant foods. Yep. Basic principles. Both agree that we shouldn't have dairy, which is interesting.

Yes.

Right.

We'll talk about that.

Paleo, no dairy as well. No dairy, right. No dairy. I guess there's some of them that say like some specific cheeses or something. Yeah, you know, grass-fed butter. You know, like there's some things, but you know, but it's, but the, the proteins in dairy are very inflammatory and the dairy again we eat isn't the dairy we ate. We've hybridized Hybridized our cows, all fertilized by one bull. It's not organic dairy. It's not organic, it's not raw, it's not how our ancestors ate it. Even organic cows, they milk them when they're pregnant and they're full of hormones. And also, it's just not always tolerated well by many people. What else do they both have in common? Everybody agrees that we should be eating foods that are phytonutrient rich, that are nutrient dense, and we should be lots of nuts and seeds and lots of good oils like avocados and olive oil.

What's phytonutrient?

What does that mean? Phytonutrient is a chemical that's in plant foods. Phyto means plant. And it's not a vitamin or mineral. It's not a protein, fat, or carb or fiber. It's something else. So for example, like broccoli has glucosinolates, which upregulates detoxification. Catechins are in green tea, which are powerful detoxifiers of metal, powerful antioxidants. Tomatoes have lycopene, which is a powerful cancer preventer for prostate cancer. So anthocyanidins, you can have black rice, which has anthocyanidins, which are powerful antioxidants that are in black rice. It's emperor's rice. Love that. It's also very low glycemic. Sure. So I think the things that they disagree on are basically beans, grains, and meat, like where you get your protein from. Everything else is the same.

Paleo and vegan is the same except for meat.

Beans and protein. Beans, grains and protein.

Beans, grains and protein.

Okay, right. And I mean, you know, like meat. And so, you know, what I realized is that, you know, I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic, which affects a lot of people, and I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is as a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means if they eat a lot of starch, if they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans, it can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains. And non-gluten grains in particular, because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine.

But not in large amounts. And then I think, you know, meat.

Is the big issue, right? To meat is the big issue.

So should we be eating meat? We just had dinner the other night.

We both had meat, right? We had fish. We had fish, black cod.

Yes, which was awesome.

I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod, is that what it was? Yeah, I had the black cod. Yeah, I had the black cod.

The guy next to me had meatballs.

Yeah, the guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so the issues around meat also, I think, are everybody agrees and fish, everybody agrees that if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised, it should be sustainably raised, it should be grass-fed, it should be not harming the environment, the ethical and and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and they're real. I have many Buddhist patients, I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's a diabetic and he's never going to eat an animal. So I need to help him understand how he never needs an egg, how to eat a high, higher fat protein diet which is low glycemic. So we can do that. So more nuts and seeds, less rice, more beans, there's strategies for doing that. And he did great, he lost 35 pounds, reversed his diabetes and now I have like tons of bun people, you know, praying for me. That's great. Yeah. And, and then the, the, the meat thing is tricky because, you know, it's also an environmental risk. If you're eating Factory farmed animals, there's antibiotics in that and is runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers. It damages our water supply and rivers and Lakes. There's climate change that happens from the methane produced. It's more, more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. There's so, and there's high energy use. One fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption. Our water is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals. There's basically, I think, 70% of all water use and there's basically only 5% of the world's surface is fresh water.

Usable, right?

It's fresh water. 1% is in Russia. Wow. And at least 4% for the rest of us. And 70% of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. Sure. So I think, you know, a factory farming just should be not supported in any way. And we need to change that. And that means we need to change our patterns of consumption around me. We need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having condiment. Condiment.

Condiment.

As opposed to kind of like a condiment, like condiment, you know, it should be a side dish or a dressing if you're gonna eat it.

Sure. And I Not a full plate of steak, you mean?

You know, I think there's three issues with me, right? There's environmental issues, there's moral issues, and there's health issues. So we kind of talked about the moral. I think that's people are entitled their beliefs and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy. The environmental issues are real. I think everybody would agree whether they're paleo vegan that we need to stop harming the environment. And I think even if you're not paleo vegan, everybody really releases believes that. In fact, the Dietary Advisory Committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact. Now, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably raised meat, it's not as abundant, you can't produce as much, and so we all have to eat less of it. It's more expensive. That's okay. I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in in Eat Fat Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was, I'm like, well, I don't know. You want to know for yourself, too? Yeah, I'm like, I'm recommending to my patients. I'm, you know, human too, and I want to live a long time and I don't want to be doing something stupid.

Yeah. So, I wanted to find out, what.

Does the science tell us about meat? So, you did all the research. So, I looked at all the research and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat. Wow. There's a lot of research in there. And, I address all these issues, you know, environmental, moral, and the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right?

Right.

So you want the paleo people like a meat's healthy, here's all the research. And the vegan, like, meat's gonna kill you, here's all the research. So it's like, and then you're at.

The average Joe, you're totally confused.

And your average doctor, you're totally confused because we had no training in nutrition. And they haven't done the research themselves. So they're going off of their opinion or their theory. Yeah, they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science. They don't know because it's not what we learn. Right?

I mean, I just am at Cleveland.

Clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school. They had this integrated in, which is so great. And I helped Tim Ryan, who's a congressman from Ohio, introduce Tim. You love Tim. He's great. Has he been on your show? He's been on here. Yeah, he's great. You know, introduce a bill called the Enrich Act, which was a bill that is funding $15 million to fund nutrition.

In medical schools, nutrition education for doctors. that's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients with food.

Oh my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease.

And yet doctors know nothing about food.

And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I, food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class.

Like that's what doctors should be doing. That's how I'm gonna get that. That's real medicine, right?

That's real medicine.

Now, just a Quick side note, what is your involvement with, what is functional.

Medicine and what is your involvement at the Cleveland Clinic? Can I finish my meat? Yes, go ahead. I was still rolling on the meat. And then we'll talk about functional medicine. And then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic. Perfect, perfect. Because people want to know, like they're like, well, what about meat? They're like probably listening. Yeah, let's do it. So the science, 8,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8,000 words. I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating. So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, follow them, and then they ask questions of them. What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last month? And they basically do these food frequency questionnaires, and then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And they try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death. But what else was...

They were smoking, they were drinking.

Exactly, so stressed out. So if you look at the data, they ate 800 more calories a day. They almost ate no fruits and vegetables. Tons of sugar. They had tons of sugar and processed foods. lots of fried foods, drank more, smoked more, didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals. Well, guess what? They weren't as healthy as the other people. So most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few study that were interesting. I found one was a study of 11, 000 people who shopped at health food stores, and they found there were, like, a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. Like, so who are the people who are, you know, like, healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or who? Because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on factory farm meat, right? So then again, how do you generalize that? Sure. But then there were these 11,000 people and they filed them for many years and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes. Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian.

No difference in that. And you have a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference. Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. What was the moment that was the make or break moment for you that you said enough is enough or never again or I gotta start this journey the real way? Like I'm going all in. When was that moment?

There was a period in 2002.

I.

Had fallen in love with this girl when I was 16 and we were really, really good friends. She says we were best friends. and she had zero interest in me romantically.

You were in the friend zone.

I was in the friend zone.

Yeah.

Fine. 16 years old. 16 years old.

What was your weight like then?

I was heavy, but I wasn't quite as heavy as I am now.

200, 250, 300.

You know, I wasn't-- even then, it's like I wasn't getting on scales often. I certainly wasn't 500 pounds. I actually have a picture of us from when we were 16 and we were hanging out. And I'm a heavy guy, but I'm not morbidly obese. We became romantic in 2002, and. And it. There was just a moment where I was like, oh, if I'm gonna make this work, if this really has a shot at longevity, I got to change because she likes to do stuff like take a hike and spend the day at the beach and go to museums. And I can't do that. So that was kind of it. It was like, I want to have this relationship with her, so I must change. It was a bizarre kind of counterintuitive conversation that I had with her too, because having it, I was scared like, if I have this conversation, she'll know. how that I'm overweight, like that I'm obese. As if she didn't know. As if she didn't know. It was like this thing, if I show her that this is something I want to change, not just like this masculine thing of like I'm showing weakness, it wasn't that. It was, this is the hardest, this thing is so unconfrontable, I never think about it. I push it away. It's almost become something subconscious. so if I bring it to the Forefront and I say, let's address this, that's a very scary and narrow path to walk because failure, I, I figure life is failure at that point, you know?

Yeah. So that was 2002. Did you start going all in? Was it dabbling a little bit and kind of lost weight, went back off the wagon? What was that like for the next 18 years till now?

I went. All in and I'm a sober guy too. So I went all in in a very, in a similar fashion to achieving sobriety, which was admit that I'm powerless and turn my problem over to somebody else and go like, I am incapable of figuring this out right now. I'm gonna do exactly what you say until we get to the point that I can take over. and she was like, great, here's what you're gonna do. I've went and found a guy who has a liquid diet. You can do it for up to two months. Why don't you do that? You don't have to do it for two months. You can do it for one month. You can do it for two. Let's see how this goes. And I crushed that.

Two months liquid diet.

80 pounds.

Wow.

Two months.

This is not like drinking Cokes all day. Liquid diet. This is no sugar liquid diet.

This is like, I mean, the calories were so low. It was like three weird protein shakes with some green powder and a ton of supplements that were, I think, mostly fiber and some vitamins and as much water as I could drink. And that's it.

80 pounds. Two months.

80 pounds.

But that's still in the 400 Zone. Yeah, but. But you must.

I will say this. Of all the weight I've gained and lost, I never dipped back into those 80 pounds, never once. So that, that. It was such a prize that I've never gotten close to back into that zone. And I followed that up with, I don't even know what the diet's called. It might have been a blood type diet or something. And it was kind of on that where I realized, well, I'm gonna have to try different diets. And I tried basically every diet that exists.

What worked the best for you?

The easiest thing was keto.

Yeah.

Because I just didn't have to think about anything.

You need lots of meat. It just eliminates certain things and eat as kind of as much as you want of other stuff, right?

Yeah.

And I think, and that worked to a degree. As I had less and less weight to lose, I found that I had to, like, mess around with what I was eating because I, you know, when I first started, it was like, you can eat bacon and Swiss cheese all day long. I'm like, okay, well that's easy. And I would and I'd lose weight and I'd be like, this is a magical diet. I'm putting mayonnaise on everything and I'm losing weight. How is this possible? You know, my little salad would have four cups of salad dressing on it and, you know, no sugar but like a ton of fat. And that did work and I was able to do it and it was super easy for traveling. You just rip the bread off and eat steaks. It's actually, I think, designed to be easy to get around the world and eat this way. Once I got really close to... There were two periods. There was a period in 2012 where I was super into cycling and I got really lean, much smaller than... Was.

That 190 or something?

I was just about 200. that's tiny for me. And you think about 200, that's still you're a big dude, but that was really, really small for me. And I just noticed that if I was eating only fat, I was suffering on the bicycle. I wasn't as efficient on the bicycle. So some sugars, gels, some carbs entered my diet and I would fly up hills, which was really cool. I had a bad accident. My wife told me that I wasn't ever gonna make a living riding a bike. I thought we were rich and that I could retire and just ride my bike at 35 years old forever. That was not the case. She said I had to go work again. So I went back to acting and the bike kind of fell away and I started doing CrossFit and rowing machines. I could crush a full marathon on a rowing machine, no problem. And then at some point, I was kind of having trouble finding work and kept hearing like, well, you're not the big guy, the heavy lovable guy anymore. So there was a point where I was like, okay, I'm just going to eat and lift weights and see what happens. And I ate whatever I wanted for about a year and lifted weights and got pretty near 400 pounds again.

Wow. Yeah.

So you gained 200 pounds within a year. Close.

Well, no, it was really from like 2000, three years. It was three years, yeah.

2013. How long did you pause from acting?

2010 and pause is not quite the right word. I did a few pilots that didn't get picked up.

Sure.

But I was putting no effort into it. It was like if they called me and said, Please come do our pilot, I would do it.

Right.

But I'm not going on auditions.

You're not. No, I was really just riding my bike. When you've been in, how many movies you've been in? And TV shows?

I've never counted. I actually have no idea. 50 plus you think? Yeah. At least, right? Yeah. When you've been in that many movies or shows, do you have to audition anymore?

Yeah, sure.

You still have to audition? Yeah, definitely.

Really?

Even if they've seen all your work, they know what you can do? Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's just a matter of the director wanting to see if you're exactly what he wants for this specific project or now that I'm physically different, what is that gonna look like, you know? But, yeah, yeah, I still have to audition.

What was the.

When you look back, what do you think the. The thing is that drew you to eating as a. As a. a bad habit or an addiction or a mind-numbing process that was a part of your life for so long. Was there a number of events? Was there moments? Was there something that connected you to that?

I've tried to do like self psychoanalysis on this and I get to a point where I'm five years old, I go to visit my grandparents in Vermont and their reaction to me and if I look at a picture of myself as at five years old today, I see just like a normal healthy kid with maybe some chubby cheeks, right? Their reaction to me was like, oh my God, what are your parents doing to you? You have gone to crap, right? This is out of hand. We need to get this under control. And my favorite food was lasagna, which my grandpa would always make me.

Yeah.

He had it cooking. As I arrived, I could smell it. And I'm there visiting them for the first time without my mom or dad in Vermont, like super excited. Their reaction is this. And then they basically were like, we're not, you can't have a second helping of lasagna. So in that day was the first time that I snuck food and it was clearing the table and eating food off their plate.

At the same time, like clearing it and like, yeah.

Just stuffing in a few bites because I was not allowed to like I reached for a second helping and got my hand patted like.

At five.

Yeah, that's off limits. You eat what we tell you to do and then the next day they weighed me first thing in the morning, which I had never been on a scale before and I'm being weighed and then it was like, okay, we're going on a one mile walk that is for your benefit. this did a number of things. It developed the sneaking food habit. It developed the habit of wanting to eat privately and the idea that people witnessing me eating was not good. And it also created a weird barrier to me just naturally wanting to be outside and active because at five, I was very active running around but when it was enforced, when it was this point of like... A punishment almost.

Yeah.

We're not consulting how willing you are to do this. We're not saying, is there something you'd like to do outside? We're saying, you must go march on this. It was like a mile to their mailbox and a mile back. And like, this is not for fun. This is for because you have gotten so overweight. That really pushed the idea of physical activity into another punishment type thing where I just didn't want to do it anymore. So it was kind of this wild confluence of new mental structures that I built where it was like, well, I'm gonna sneak food now and I'm gonna not do activities.

How insecure were you about your weight when you got older and started recognizing it or seeing maybe someone make fun of you or realizing, oh, I can't go on a hike with my girlfriend or my friends and do these certain activities. Did you feel insecure about it ever? Or was it more of just, this is who you are?

I definitely felt insecure about it. I also got into a lot of fights as a kid and was like, you know, there were a few times in elementary school where some preschooler would say, Wow, look how fatty is. And that obviously wasn't gonna fight a little preschooler. And you come to learn like, well, avoid little kids at all costs because they just say, they see something and they just talk about it. And that made me terribly uncomfortable. But if like another 10-year-old said something like that to me, we would just have a fight. And then people would know like, oh, he's not a nice guy. in that circumstance, we're not gonna say that to him, you know?

Yeah. So how did you get into acting and being such a successful actor while also having this kind of insecurity or knew that you stood out in a different way than most the other actors in Hollywood?

There was like.

I.

In school, there were. I. I didn't really like school either. I didn't. I. I grew to really. dislike anything done from a point of authoritarianism. It just was not for me. So, if it's like you're going on a diet or you have to do sports or you have to study, I was not into it. Which is really bizarre because now I love nothing more than a diet I find for myself and studying something I'm interested in and finding a sport to be interested. Like, I can become obsessive about these things and do them 110% percent if it's my own determination. But from a point of authority, it just didn't fly. And I noticed a couple of things. I was never like a class clown, but we had an actor in my school, and so much more attention was paid to the fact that he was an actor than any of his physical attributes, any of his other accomplishments in school. It was like this. this distraction, this like, here's who this person is, but like, here's this weird identity that actually has nothing to do with him, that we're all gonna focus on that. And there was something kind of magical about that, like, I can't, like, kill people with jokes. That's just not what I do. But what if I had that too?

You're not super sexy and attractive. I'm not gonna explain. Yeah, yeah.

But I could, Create this other identity that would distract people from how fat I am and talking about that or poking fun at me or even wanting to talk to me about it. Because like, I'll just show them this. What if I do this? So there was, and it got you out of school. Because this dude would leave school for weeks at a time and go hang out on sets and like, guess what's on a set? Craft services on a set. Free food all day. And you got a trailer. Like, you can fill your pockets with food and go back to your trailer and eat it. It's this wonderful place. It was like-- Unlimited food supply. Oh my God. And then there was also always gonna be some grip who had a prescription to Percocet that you could give away to. And by the way, it always started legitimately. My feet hurt, my ankles and my knees hurt. These are real things.

You're on set 18 hours a day.

None of it is just irrational.

How many calories should we be eating a day? What's like a healthy range?

You know what's funny about this? Your body is actually pretty good at telling you how much to eat. The problem is, we eat, I know your people watching right now are probably like, what are you talking about? That's not true. It is. The problem is we eat foods, about 70% of our diets are made up of foods that have been engineered carefully engineered to make us overeat. And, there's a lot of money and science that goes into doing this. Ultra processed foods are very powerful at making us overeat.

Snack foods with salt and sugar and yeah.

Just a combination of things that, I mean everything from the texture to the mouth feel.

Tastes so good.

Yes, just how it affects your body. So, they've done some really good studies on this. They've done studies where they'll take groups of people in not too many controlled studies in diet, so these are really good. They actually put them in a lab and they say, you guys over here, eat as much as you want. You guys over here, eat as much as you want. This group over here has whole natural foods. This group over here has ultra processed foods. And they even control for the macros, so proteins, fats, and carbs are pretty similar. Then they take the groups and they switch them. Okay? On average, and now we have multiple studies to show this, people will eat about 600 more calories a day from eating ultra processed foods. So to give another example, if I were to put five or six plain boiled potatoes, no salt, no butter, nothing, just plain boiled potatoes in front of you, and I told you to eat them in 30 minutes, it'd be really hard for you. After the second or third potato, you'd be gagging. You'd hit paleo potatoes? Yes, just plain, right? But if they gave you a family.

Size bag of potato chips, which has.

Crushed the whole bag with like 2000 calories or something, which has similar amounts of food in it, actually more calories because of the oil, you'd be able to eat them. That's the power of ultra processed foods and how palatable they are. So, I used to do this with my clients, simply telling people the following, eat as much as you want, just avoid ultra processed foods. You would typically see a 10 to 15 pound weight loss.

Wow.

Just from that.

If you're eating whole foods, there's only so much you can eat.

You hit palate fatigue faster. It's far more satiating. You just eat more appropriately. Our bodies. There's this myth that we're wired to overeat. We're just wired to just eat like. Like crazy and just become obese. That's not true. We're not wired to do that. Overeating was just as bad for us thousands of years ago as it was today. I mean, you could have digestive issues. You could have died from that. Our bodies are pretty good at regulating. This is more complex than what I'm saying, but. these particular foods make you overeat. Simply avoiding them and even telling yourself, I'll eat as much as I want, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, foods that have one or two ingredients, right? You'll find that your average calorie intake will probably decrease by about 500 to 600, some people even more.

A day.

A day. On average.

And that's it. You lose weight.

That's it. And then if you want to take it even a step further, if you add to that, here's a couple behavioral things that you could do that make that even more effective. Whole natural foods, I'm not going to limit myself, and I like saying this because when we're in the mindset of limiting ourselves, it plays a lot of tricks on us and it's really hard. So don't limit yourself to see all natural foods. And then here's the second one. Don't eat while distracted. In other words, when you eat, don't be on your phone. Don't watch TV. Just sit down and eat your meal. Why? that results in about 10% reduction in caloric intake just from doing that alone.

Why is that?

We're not in tune with our body's signals of satiety.

We're not focused and present on the food. Correct. So, we're distracted and we just keep.

Eating and eating and eating. Yes, we actually eat faster doing it that way as well. So, what happens is the signal of satiety doesn't get registered quite as quickly when we're distracted. Also, being distracted could cause emotional changes, stress, anxiety, whatever, which also can create bad relationships with nutrition. One of the worst things you could do is eat while watching stressful news or something like that.

You're gonna eat more, you'll be stressed out.

Absolutely, right? So that's the second one. And they sound so simple, but they make such a huge impact on people. A third one you could do even, and this is another really easy one, is when you eat your meals, eat the protein first.

Over the vegetables? Everything.

Just eat the protein first, then eat everything else. Why is that? Protein is in comparison to carbohydrates and fats, very satiating. So it produces a lot of satiety, right? It satisfies you. And the second reason is, and we now have what are called CGMs, right? Continual glucose monitors. The data on them is coming back and it's pretty clear that if you eat protein first, the spike in blood sugar-- in our blood sugar. Yeah, it's blunted. Now, why is that important? A spike and then subsequent drop in blood sugar tends to promote cravings. It tends to make us want to eat more to get that blood sugar back up. So, eating the protein first tends to result in through satiety and through the blunting effects of blood sugar tends to produce better satiety and make us eat less. So, those are three things right there, Lou, that if people just did those three things and didn't say to themselves, I got to restrict, I got to cut, I got to whatever. They would find over time that they would just start to lose weight and they would eat more appropriately.

Wow. That's not working out more, that's not moving your body more, that's just through nutritional eating.

Yes. And to speak about moving more, the burning calories approach to weight loss is a losing total losing strategy. Oh yeah, the data on that's very clear. Burning calories manually, our bodies do a terrific job of adapting and of storing fat, you're saying. And slowing down its calorie burn. We have a range within our current lean body mass, okay? We have a range of calories our bodies can burn. So there's like more efficient, less efficient. And burning calories manually, at first your body's burning more calories, but eventually your body knows how to make up for that and make you burn less calories. So the studies on tons of exercise for weight loss are pretty clear. It's a terrible approach. Really? Now it's not to say you don't get health benefits. from moving more, you still get health benefits, but from a weight loss perspective, it's a terrible strategy. Now, there are some forms of exercise, one in particular, that can boost metabolic rate. What's that?

Strength training. Lifting, yeah.

Strength training is very effective. There was a study done with modern hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. So they live the way that humans lived thousands of years ago, right? So they don't have electronics, they hunt, they gather, in comparison to the average Westerner, they're very active. Scientists went and studied them and through some pretty sophisticated testing, tested their metabolic rates. How many calories are they burning every single day? And what they found was they were burning generally the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. Really? Yeah. And now you think at first, well, that's crazy. They're moving so much. But actually it makes sense. Our bodies would not have, if we burned 6,000 calories a day as hunter-gatherers, we wouldn't be here. 6,000 calories in a hunter-gatherer society is hard to come by. So, our bodies learn to adapt. Now, strength training, on the other hand, tends to have a different effect. The main adaptation with strength training is to build muscle, the side effect of which is, and if you fuel it, you have to also feed your body appropriately to do this, but if you feed your body properly and strength train, the tendency is for the metabolism to boost or to go up. So you can see through this process, and I've done this many, many times with people, where they'll come and hire me, we'll lose 30 pounds and we can eat more at the end of this process than we did before the process. More calories or just more food? All of it.

Yeah. Which...

They lose fat. Oh, yeah.

They're leaner. They're leaner.

They have a little bit more lean body mass, five to ten pounds, depending on male or female. But they're burning more calories than they went into. Now, why is this important? Well, it's a great buffer. If you have a fast metabolism today, this is a wonderful buffer against the challenges of modern living, which is sedentary and food everywhere, super accessible. So fast metabolism today is an asset, whereas 10,000 years ago it might have been a liability. So strength training does that. Now, strength training doesn't burn as many calories as running, but remember I said that really doesn't make a big difference because your body learns to adapt to that anyway. But the strength training does contribute to a faster metabolism over time or at the very least help prevent or mitigate the metabolic adaptation or slow down that tends to happen when we reduce calories to lose weight. And then there's more to that. Because of the muscle building process, you see the balancing of hormones that we're all kind of looking for, like in men you see more testosterone, higher androgen receptor density. This is what testosterone attaches to. You see more appropriate levels of cortisol, balancing of estrogen and progesterone. In women, growth hormone tends to be more youthful because when I tell my body to build muscle, my body organizes its hormones in a way to do so. And the hormone profile that contributes to muscle building just so happens to be the youthful hormone profile that we're looking for. Interesting. So I tend to, when I recommend exercise to people, average person, who I know, like, okay, maybe we'll get them to do this two days a week, you know, if we do a good job. I tell them, if you're going to pick just one form, do strength training. That's going to be the most effective one. And then if you add something else, then it'd be great if you added.

Some cardiovascular and some Mobility or flexibility training.

Wow.

So if you can only choose one, strength training or cardio, you're saying strength training all day. 100. 100. Building muscle.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's far more protective. It's going to boost your metabolism, which will make being obese harder. It balances out your hormones better. Muscle sticks around longer than the calorie burning effects of whatever you're getting from the form of exercise. Once you stop your workout, there's the calorie burn, which like I said earlier, your body adapts to anyway. But when you build muscle, it sticks around for a little while before you start to lose it and you develop something called muscle memory, which I know you understand as an athlete, right? If you Have you ever broken a bone or anything like that? Okay. You know, you take the cast off, muscle super or your arms. But very quickly it bounces back. There's something called muscle memory. So if you build muscle and let's say you stop for whatever reason exercising and then you go back to working out, you'll gain that muscle back in a small fraction of the time. So it's a more, for lack of a better term, because there's no permanence when it comes to this, but it's a more permanent form of results or fitness, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the challenges of modern life. When you look at the average person and you're saying, okay, what are the challenges that are preventing them from being healthier? It's okay, I'm surrounded by tons of food. I'm inactive. Is there something that can protect me against inactivity, which muscle does very well? Hormone imbalance is now rampant. And there's going to be times when even the most consistent average person, not fitness fanatic, is going to not work out for a month or two, is there something that'll help them bounce back faster? Strength training just tends to do that.

What about training where it's half strength training and half cardio? It's like an orange theory or something like this where you're doing 20-30 minutes of lifting in between different sets, maybe not to failure of fatigue, but intense lifting and then some 2-3 miles of running with intervals. What does that do for the body, for weight loss, for metabolism?

Yeah, so I want to be clear, all forms of exercise so long as they're applied appropriately are going to benefit you. So all forms of exercise have benefit so long as they're not overdone or inappropriate for the individual. So that being said, strength training needs to be, in order to reap the real benefits of strength training, it has to be applied in a particular way. Otherwise it ends up becoming cardio with weights.

Mm-.

So if I did like a bunch of circuits, even though I'm doing curls and presses and rows, really what I'm doing is just a lot of cardio. I'm just using weights. Okay. So if you really want to reap the benefits of strength training, you want to train in the way that builds strength and muscle. Now, I do want to be careful because I'm probably invoking images of bodybuilders with veins coming out of their neck. And they're, you mentioned it, right? Intensity, failure, lifting, whatever. That's not what most people need to do. Okay? Most people would derive tremendous benefits if they went to the gym and strength trained and they did traditional do a set, rest for a minute, do a set, rest for a minute. But the way that they did their set was practice. So the exercise as a skill, that's what we're gonna look at. So rather than I'm gonna go in here to beat up my legs, I'm gonna go practice squats. Rather than I'm gonna go hammer my shoulders, I'm gonna practice overhead presses. This tends to lead to more appropriate applications of exercise and you see a more consistent, you know, strength gains, more consistent muscle gains and far less risk injury. So intensity, although it's an important factor to manipulate, people over apply it. They think that, you know, failure on everything. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

That's not the case.

Like I said earlier, you need to have more energy at the end of your workout. and you probably shouldn't feel sore or if you do feel a little sore the day after. And so for most people that's just like go in and get really good and practice these exercises that we know to be very effective. Squatting, you're deadlifting, you're rowing, you're pressing, maybe some kind of a split stance exercise like a lunge, some kind of rotation, and just practice them and get good at them. And naturally over time, people will apply more intensity, add more load, and they'll see the results that come from that. But that's a very, very, it's a much more effective long-term approach versus the go to the gym, beat myself up attitude.

What about, I'm sure you've answered this, I don't know, a thousand times, but belly fat seems to be the thing a lot of people want to eliminate, right? Is there a formula for eliminating belly fat?

Yeah, so, or can you do it.

Lots of different ways or what's the best approach to doing it?

Yeah, so for the most part, where we store or lose body fat is determined by our genetics. So a good rule of thumb is the first place that I store it is probably going to be the last place that I lose it. Now that being said, hormonal changes can change the distribution of body fat on your body. So if you see like women with very, very high cortisol, estrogen, progesterone imbalances, they'll start to notice more belly fat than they normally would. Men who's let's say testosterone is low, estrogen levels may be too high, they'll see more body fat level, more body fat storage in maybe the upper body, back of the arms, maybe in the lower body. So you'll start to see different patterns. But that's really a small percentage of where we tend to store body fat. It's largely determined by genetics. So the question is, how do I get rid of body fat? It's the same way that you get rid of any body fat. you have to create an energy imbalance, which to put it simply, and again, it's more complex than this, but to put it simply, you have to be able to burn more calories than you take in. And there's, there's, and we already talked about some of the effective ways of that, but if you can burn more than you take in, then you'll see body fat loss as a result. And building muscle is a great way to make that formula work for you. Because if you don't, what ends up happening is you cut calories, you do tons and tons of cardio, you cut calories, you lose 15 pounds, you're stuck. Okay, I guess I cut calories more.

And you lose muscle too.

Well, that's what happens, right? Your body's adapting, so you end up losing some muscle. So now you got to cut even more to lose that next 10 pounds. And then at the end of it, it's like, okay, I'm eating 1300 calories a day to maintain this 25 pound weight loss. This is unsustainable. And then you gain it back. what you want to do is you want to say, okay, I definitely want to eat healthier, but not so little that I can't fuel muscle growth. And I want to strength train so that I can get my metabolism to learn how to burn more calories on its own. And then the process looks more like a snowball effect rather than this quick plat, you know, weight loss with Plateau. So you start to see the scale move a little bit, and then it happens faster and faster and faster, and then you feel better. And, you know, I like to communicate this as well, which is especially to women, muscle is a lot more dense than body fat. So don't get too obsessed with the scale. If I could have everybody watching this lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, their weight on the scale wouldn't change, but everybody would be smaller.

And their body composition would look a lot better, too.

Oh, you're gonna look different, but you're gonna be smaller because body fat just takes up more space. I used to have this trainer that worked for me. I used to love this. This is a great sales technique when I was a general manager, I'd have, if I had a new member, especially a woman who, you know, was apprehensive to lifting weights, I would invite my, this trainer that worked for me. And I'd say, if you could guess her body weight within 10 pounds, I'll give you a free membership for a month.

Wow.

And they would, she was very petite. She was like 5'1 or whatever. And they would always guess, like, oh, she's 100 pounds. She's 110 pounds. And I'd get her on the scale, and she was 130 pounds. and it would prove my point. She has a lot of muscle, but she's small because muscle is very dense.

What is the main cause in your mind to why it's so hard for people to get rid of that extra 20 or 30 pounds of belly back fat?

So when you think about fat burning, there's two different phenomenon at play. One is thermodynamics, so there's more calories in than calories out. and then the other is lipolysis. So if you're going to restructure or recomp a building or your body, you have to remove blocks in some places and then put blocks in other places. So a lot of fat burners help with lipolysis. So they break fat molecules down and they increase, for example, mitochondrial beta oxidation, which is basically just you're metabolizing fats and then using them in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. the details don't really matter, but that's essentially the Powerhouse of your cell. And you can do that all you want, but if you're still, you know, in at caloric maintenance or even excess Surplus, then you're just going to take all those blocks and then put them right back into fat cells.

Gotcha. So you need a caloric deficit. It sounds like somewhere at some point in order to remove, you need to be. exercising more than you're consuming and burning more calories than you're consuming or consuming less than you normally would.

There's many tools and ways to achieve this, of course.

Sure. What ways?

So the OG way is just counting calories. And even if you look at doctors and dieticians, we usually underestimate the amount of calories that we consume, I believe, by at least 10%.

Wow.

And we overestimate the amount of calories that we burn by about 10%. We think we're burning more. Correct.

We're not.

Even doctors and dietitians.

Really? Yeah. And we think we're eating less, but there's always hidden calories in something, right? Or you maybe didn't weigh it perfectly or it was a bigger size or something, right? Okay, so that's the original ways to count calories.

Do you recommend that strategy? For some individuals, it's particularly helpful. Most of the time, that I see a patient in my clinic and a lot of what I do is obesity medicine. I am board certified in obesity medicine. They have already done that and many of the time they say it doesn't work and I eat like a bird and there is nothing, there's nothing quite as powerful to destroy a physician-patient relationship than to just tell the patient that they're lying or that they don't know what they're talking about.

Right.

So it's not helpful to push that angle of vector. That's just a tool. And there's many tools in the toolbox for some people, whether it's genetic or epigenetic or just their situation that they're in in life or their mental health or their hormone health. It makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, almost like it's more difficult for someone in quicksand to get out. So you can teach a person how to dig. That's your lifestyle. interventions, but you should also give them a shovel to help out. It doesn't necessarily mean that you throw a shovel at them, but that's where medications and supplements come in to address whether it's insulin resistance or whether it's their mental health or their hormone health to help give them the tool to do it themselves.

Okay, so the counting the calories works for some, doesn't work for everyone. What else would you suggest they do then? What have you seen has been really effective consistently for people you've worked with?

When I write a prescription for this, I have several different areas or boxes that I can circle. And one of them is number of meals per day. One of them is macronutrients, for example, carbohydrates. One of them is timing of meals. One of them is eating speed. So there's a lot of strategies to develop good eating speed habits. For example, split your meal into three different portions, consume one, wait 10 minutes, consume the next one if you would like, wait 10 minutes, and then consume the last one if you would like.

So don't just put it all in your mouth in 10 seconds, is what I'm hearing you say, which is kind of my whole childhood. Just like eat as fast as you can, not know that you're full and.

Just keep eating more, right? These are extremely powerful for pediatric patients for childhood obesity. I believe in the New England Journal of Medicine did a study and it was called the Turtle Bite Study where every five or 10 bites at some interval, the kids took one bite that was extremely slow and it was helpful for recomposition of those kids.

Really?

You mean recomposition of their bodies?

When you're in the field of pediatric obesity medicine, you're not really going, your end target's not weight loss.

Sure.

It's usually weight gain but a body recomposition.

So less fat weight gain but more like you're growing as a child either way. But it's diversifying the weight gain, I guess, right?

Correct.

Directing it in another place. Interesting. Okay, so we have meals per day, timing of meals, eating speed. I think you said one or two others.

Timing of meals, that would kind of incorporate intermittent fasting, which is not it's more of a health tool. rather than a weight loss tool.

Meals per day, eating speed, timing.

I'm sure there are other tools. Sure.

Ones that I remember off the top of my head. If you were just saying, hey, listen, I don't want to count calories. You know, I'm probably not going to do the intermittent fasting thing. I'm not going to eat slower or, like, split it up into three things. That seems like too much work for me. But I will eat one less meal a day, right? Or I'll only eat a certain amount of meals, and then I'll essentially be intermittent fasting in that process. But if I looked at it as okay, what would my meals per day look like? If I wanted to consume a little less calories, obviously I'm gonna feel hungry, but when can I do it where I'm not gonna want to munch on extra calories? What would that be? Skip dinner?

Is that, you know, what does that look like? I would say skip eating after dinner and don't even worry about taking away a meal. No eating after 7:00 p.m. That being said, if you do remove one meal, whether it's breakfast or lunch or dinner, it is not helpful at all for weight loss or body composition.

To remove one meal, it's not helpful.

Correct. So in isolation, removing one meal is not helpful at all for weight loss.

Really?

It's truly an intervention for health reasons if you would benefit from that. Less mTOR signaling, less growth signaling in cells in general, or more of a reprieve where your body's immune system has a chance to go throughout the rest of your cells and see if there is abnormal ones.

Okay.

For most individuals, unless they like doing that for mental clarity or whatever benefit, some people really like skipping breakfast. But many people, especially those that struggle with metabolic syndrome, have other pathologies. There's several new ones. There is sleep eating syndrome where you eat, you're sleeping, you wake up, and then you eat and you don't even realize it.

Really?

See that there's a bag of chips and you literally don't even remember it, almost like sleepwalking. And there's also night eating where you consume almost all of your calories between dinner and bedtime. Often these individuals also stay up late at night.

Those are chips, snacks, and other kind of emptier calories, right?

Correct.

But they don't eat breakfast. Really? Ice cream cookies or whatever it might be.

Yeah.

So, that's the time where you could really, if you just stop eating after dinner, you'll eat less calories. That sounds like you're still at the even maintenance. You're not a caloric deficit, correct? Unless you eat less in each meal.

Correct. And obviously it's possible to be in a deficit and do that as well. But that's your biggest bang for the buck is not eating anything after dinner. Because society values family dinners and also social dinners with colleagues and whatnot, it would be very difficult to tell everybody to stop eating dinner. But if you wanted to design the perfect, like in a lab, Truman Show style, whatever you want to call it, not eating after about 3:00 p.m. would be even more beneficial.

For weight loss.

For health reasons.

Well, not weight loss.

I don't think it would have any effect with weight loss. Maybe it would. but that I know of it has not been studied.

Gotcha. So, it's truly because you could still consume all your calories in the morning and in the afternoon before 3:00 for the day. You could still consume a lot of calories, is what you're saying. So, you'd still have to cut the amount of calories in that timing window and then you'd just be intermittent fasting longer, which would help for health benefits and maybe you would, I guess, help cleanse some of the dead cells and kind of like regenerate new cells, that type of thing, but not necessarily for weight loss. So what I'm hearing you say. But at the end of the day, it sounds like it's a caloric deficit.

Yeah.

And it's just a matter of helping provide individuals with the tools that will work best for them. So for some, they might need a shovel, and for some, they might want to want and or need a backhoe.

Sure, sure. What it doesn't seem like you've ever been out of shape. Have you ever been overweight?

When I had my first child, I was about 40 pounds overweight.

Really?

Yeah.

And I could hardly tell because I'm so tall.

Yeah, it's hard to tell.

It's kind of like the fat just a little bit everywhere, right?

Yeah.

So, how did you burn that 40 pounds? What did you do?

I eliminated all liquid calories.

Yeah.

I ate foods of low caloric density but high nutrient density.

Like what? These five types of food groups or.

Yeah, a lot of salmon. I love spinach. I had a lot of spinach that would kind of go under the fiber category. I love carrots. Although carrots don't have a lot of dietary fiber, they're just kind of empty, insoluble fiber, if you will. Not totally, of course.

It's not. Not many calories.

Yeah. Yeah.

And a few months later, I was kind of back at my Baseline.

Really? 40 pounds just like that in a few months. just by changing the way you ate.

My biggest intervention was I eliminated all liquid calories and I did not have any more than two caloric beverages, whether it was a, you know, like a coffee with a bunch of cream in it. I did learn to like black coffee during that time, and I still do, but no more than two beverages with calories in them per month.

Interesting, because, like, something like a bulletproof coffee, which is, you know, a lot of people talk about intermittent fasting with a bulletproof that still has a lot of calories. doesn't it?

I don't know the macronutrient profile on Bulletproof offhand, but I believe it's mostly protein.

Okay.

So if it's the one exception to that for some individuals could be a protein shake. And you would probably want to consume this in the morning rather than the evening. That way you can have the benefit of some degree of appetite suppression. Some protein shakes like casein, which is an interesting one to talk about because it can also affect prolactin. and some people negatively, if their prolactin is too high, casein can increase it. But casein is also digested very slowly and it has a lot of amino acids in it that will activate mTOR. So during your eating window through the day, if you consume your casein at the beginning of the eating window, then it could be helpful to provide satiety and also help with anabolism. But if you consume it at the end of your day, then it's gonna essentially cut short your fasting period.

So if you have a protein shake after 8 o'clock, right? Say someone's working out consistently and they're doing a workout in the morning or the afternoon, they eat their dinner, but then they're still hungry and they say, well, let me just do a protein shake, right? It's 150-200 calories, but it's 20-40 grams of protein. Are you saying having that because it's got the calories, it's extending the eating window? So, it's not allowing you to burn off those calories more or what are you saying there?

That would be more for health reasons. For example, let's take an intermittent faster that right before bed every night they have a shake of 50 grams of casein. So, that's essentially making their intermittent fasting for health reasons worthless because their mTOR is still very active for many hours at night. However, if you are looking at the satiety benefit of specifically protein, if your shake has just protein in it, then that's going to help provide some degree of satiety.

Well, you're not hungry. So you mean, yeah.

And there's obviously a lot of factors to this. One that has received a lot of press recently is called GLP-1. There's all these different drugs like semaglutide that are GLP-1 agonists. And if you look at carbs, carbs spike up GLP-1 very quickly. GLP-1 is produced in a lot of areas, a lot of it is the gut and also the pancreas. And then fat will increase very, very slowly, but it will increase GLP-1 for a long time and protein is somewhere in between.

What was the biggest aha when you learned this thing? It changed everything for you.

You know, there have been so many instances of that. Like, the scientists on seeing new things, literally on a weekly basis, things are like my jaw drops virtually. You know, like last week, Louis, I read about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human cell in our heart last week. Like, you know, like that. That's like, I hit my head like, oh, my God, really?

We.

A couple years ago, we discovered a new brain cell. called the rose hip neuron. Okay? And it seems to be linked to depression. So I'm always amazed. I mean, as a scientist, I'm amazed by the, by the marvelousness of the body and how much we don't know about it. And still, so we have to respect it. Did you know, by the way, that we had it also, this is just this past year, 2021, there was a landmark discovery. that changed everything we knew about our metabolism. What is that? Well, so everybody says that, you know, like when you're a teenager, you're growing.

Tall, you got high metabolism. You just burn calories, right?

Okay. Totally wrong. Metabolism's going down when you're teen. Okay. And then people say when you're in your 20s or 30s, you know, and you're starting to gain weight and getting out of shape. And they're like, man, my metabolism is slowing down. And then some people basically say that, you know, I was unlucky because I was born with a bad metabolism. Look at my sister or look at my cousin. She's rail thin. She's so lucky she's got a fast metabolism, right? All that has been turned up ended completely. It turns out that all humans. go through only four phases of metabolism in their whole life. Tell me. Okay, I'm actually, I'm going to show you this because it's actually right here in my desk.

Got a chart. You gotta. You got a graph.

You got a chart. No, no, I got. I got this baby right here. It's in a journal of science. Okay? This is how researchers do it. Like, I. All around my office, man. Like, I am reading this stuff. And this paper, I tell you, I gotta look at this.

It. It's studied like eight.

000 people from like 30 countries. And it studied people from eight days old to 90 years old across 20 different countries. All right. This is the largest study of human metabolism ever undertaken. And here's what they found, that if you subtracted out body fat, which is different for everybody, okay? and you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism. Energy usage, energy generation are here are the four phases. When we're born, we got the same metabolism as our mother. Makes sense. Synchronized. Okay. From zero or from the day you're born to one year old, your metabolism skyrockets. In fact, it's twice high when you're one year old as when you're 20 years old.

Wow.

Okay. So, from one year old down to throughout your teenage years in puberty, at time you think that you're eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high, it's actually coming down from its peak.

Interesting. Why does it seem like you're burning so many calories?

Well, you just, you're more active and you're growing. so you may be burning more calories per turn. Your metabolism as a changing. This is the key thing. We are hardwired to go through these phases. Now it's going down to 20 years old, from 20 years old to 60 years old. Okay. From college to retirement, it doesn't change. It is rock stable. All right, so it's our. And then after 60, it starts to diminish, but not as fast as you think. It's a slow decrease. it's a slow grade down. Okay. Four phases of human metabolism. We never knew this before this year. All right? This is how it new it is. So here's the key thing. What makes all the difference between people? Like how? Why is your metabolism different than mine? And why is somebody. Why is a Sumo wrestler's metabolism different than, you know, somebody who's on a Runway in Milan? Okay. And it has to do with the fact that our metabolisms are all the same, but the lifestyle choices that we make. can actually push our metabolism one way or the other. So it, our metabolism doesn't cause us to be fat. Our fat slows down our metabolism. It's the other way around.

Interesting.

Completely the other way around.

So what, so how do we burn more fat then to eat up my metabolism?

That's what I'm working on right now. And that's, that's, that is the topic of my next book, by the way, which I'm writing right now.

Yeah.

So, so stay tuned for that answer, because I, I'm on to something really hot on that. And I will give you a little bit of a, of a sneak peek.

What's that early?

Yes.

Well, you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down. So, so while, while caloric restriction and fasting can actually also do it, It turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat that will trigger it.

Ooh, give me some of those.

I don't want to give you a too much, I don't want to give your viewers a spoiler because I'll have you come, I'll have you invited back on the show.

We'll have you back on for sure. We'll have you back on for sure. You can give us the whole debrief. But what would you see are a.

Couple of these foods at least that.

You think that are now researched and proven to be powerful fat burning.

Well, I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you one that's actually just a surprise is seafood.

Actually, seafood.

Yeah.

Helps burn fat.

Yep.

Is it help burn fat or it starts to trigger and activate the fat burning process?

It's, it triggers. So there are, there are certain elements in food that are newly discovered in research. Like, I just told you, I just told you some new stuff out that's coming out of the hot off the presses. But I can tell you, like, this is where, this is what I do. The research that if I told you about research about biotech developments, it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years, maybe ever, never. Okay. But when there's, when there's research about food or about your health, a lot of times there's stuff that you, that has immediacy. You can put it to use right away. so cancer starving foods, regenerative foods, gut health foods that can also help your brain, foods that slow down cellular aging, foods that lower inflammation and boost your immune system at the same time. You know, that's what I'm talking about, because the power of healing rests inside our body. And health care is not something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor's office, right? every year you go once. Healthcare is everything in between that we do for ourselves, and food is a medicine that we take.

Absolutely. I've talked about this many times on, on my show before that I grew up in a specific religion called Christian science, where it was more the practice of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas and, and less on using medicine to heal, but more using the mind and awareness to heal. you know, thought, which would then heal the physical body. So medicine was never a really thing I studied or really took growing up. It was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened, we used thought, prayer, spiritual prayer, to kind of remind ourselves of who we are. But the. I'm curious. Do you think that people could live without modern medicine if they eat properly? Like all the things that you talk about in your book?

Eat to beat disease?

Do you think we could live longer lives, healthier lives without the need of certain medicines? Or are you saying we should be using food and eating food when we need them?

Well, we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time we're young all the way until our last breath. and that should actually be able to tackle about two-thirds of all the chronic diseases. And by the way, about a third of all cancers are thought to be due to diet and lifestyle, one-third of cancers, all right? We ought to be able to dodge, but you got to start early, right? I mean, this is not one of these things where I've been smoking my whole life and now I'm going to actually turn over a new leaf. It's never too late to quit, by the way. However, the fact of the matter is that, you know, like, so you grew up, you know, in Christian, in the Christian Science framework, which you're in, you're.

In the Boston area.

So you.

Yeah, that's where the Hub is.

The mother church is in. Yeah, is in Boston.

Yes.

It's amazing. It's an amazing place, a really a spectacular place to visit and, and a very special place, actually. But I will tell you that the idea of having formative years groomed in a healthy mindset, which is, I think, what you're talking about, is so important. So that if you've got kids and if you're involved in teaching and if you're involved in the business where you can actually impact on kids, think about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health 30, 40, 50, 60 years from now. And that to me is big responsibility. It's a giant opportunity to make a better society.

That's beautiful. I'm curious, we've got a few more minutes left. What do you think? You're telling me that every week you're essentially finding these aha moments based on the research papers you're finding and things that you're discovering yourself. And What do you think in your mind if you could predict the future 10 years out, 5-10 years out, what are going to be the groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next 5 to 10 years that is going to transform our health?

Wow.

Based on what you've seen in the last 5 to 10 years and we're like, these are unbelievable. Every one of your findings, what do you think is on the horizon for us?

Well, one thing that I think is most, one of the big aha jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that I've actually had in my career is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves. Okay. And I never thought that was even possible. I had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine, and, you know, it's a real struggle. It's an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate the heart or the brain or nerves. And yet the body does it every single day. And when I discovered that, you know, you could regenerate tissue by barley, you know, eating barley, which is beta-D-glucan, or with chocolate, as I mentioned to cacao polyphenols, or even olive oil. There's something called hydroxytyrosol. It's a natural chemical and extra virgin olive oil. It helps to kind of make that distinctive olive oily taste that that can actually help to protect your stem cell. Or if you are not a vegan, but you eat seafood and you're really adventurous, you know that black pasta squid ink that they have sometimes on menus. I happen to I, you know, I like to explore different kinds of food. Squid ink actually protects your stem cells. It's like a shield. Okay. And so the fact that you, we can actually eat to regenerate. So I'm very excited by this idea that we can eat foods, and we're still discovering what foods can help our Propel our body's regenerative capacity. I think that's going to actually be groundbreaking. And then something that I'm actually Working on that is really future forward, right? So you're asking what's going to be mind-blowing in the future?

Yes.

All right. Well, look, I'm kind of like a pretty down-to-earth guy. I believe that we should be protecting our planet, doing everything we can to take care of, nurture this ball that we live on, and we should be doing better for our community. but I also, I think from the time I was a kid, I appreciated and I was excited by this idea of space travel, which is now happening more often.

Right.

All right. So here's something I think is going to happen over the next decade. As humans become extraterrestrial, we're going to be the first extraterrestrials are ever going to meet is ourselves. And we get Beyond near Earth orbit, we're going to be our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and have the effects of negative gravity changing our body. We got to find out what kinds of foods or supplements we got to eat to protect ourselves.

That's crazy.

So I'm working on that.

That's cool.

So I've been meeting with astronauts. I've been talking to people in the space program, flight surgeons. And what I'm figuring is that if we can figure out what we're going to need in the future. So that we could probably bring that right down to earth right now.

You had like a formula in there that you said about two minutes ago. You said no snacking and you said a few other things. Can you share that formula again?

Yeah. Yeah.

So one, you want to cut down the sugar because sugar is not good. And I think everybody agrees on that, right? Cut down the refined foods. So this actually applies mostly to carbohydrates, but refined other stuff is not good either. So refined fats, for example, are not good for you. So fans fats were pretty clearly bad. Refined meat like baloney and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either. So you want to eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you want to eat no sugar, you want to eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you want to make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of and that really just gets you back to 1970 where people were still eating white bread, right? White bread. I know I grew up in that period, nobody ate whole wheat bread, nobody ate whole wheat pasta. It was white bread, it was white pasta, right? But you didn't eat all the time. That was the big difference, right? And it was the same everywhere you went. You know, the Irish were eating potatoes, the Chinese were eating rice, the Japanese were eating rice, you know, those are all carbs, refined carbs, right? Bread, rice, potatoes, But they were doing okay because they weren't eating all the time. They'd give their bodies a break from eating, right? Where now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat. We've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating. Like, why wouldn't you think that that's important to balance everything else in life, right? Why wouldn't you want to balance eating and not eating?

Right?

Don't you think that's like fundamentally important? Like I think it is, but up until sort of I wrote the obesity code, people just thought fasting was really bad for you, which is sort of odd, you know, because it's like up until then they're everybody's like, oh, fasting so bad for you, right? You're going to do so bad. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for a long time.

So I'm curious then what effect does fasting have on reducing our chances of getting life-threatening diseases? and also which diseases are most people at risk if they don't fast and improve their diet?

Type 2 diabetes is probably the biggest one. And the reason is that it's a huge one, it's become an epidemic. So lots of people have it. If you look at pre-diabetes and diabetes, which is sort of, and you do big surveys, it's actually about 50% of adult Americans, right? So it's very common to have pre-diabetes and diabetes. And the problem with it is that it causes all kinds of other problems. It increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, it's leading cause of blindness, leading cause of non-traumatic amputations, leading cause of kidney disease, all of those things. And, you know, in trying to understand type 2 diabetes, You just have to understand that basically your body has too much sugar. That's it. So if you have too much sugar, remember, excuse me, your body really has two sources of energy it can use. It can use sugar, which is mostly glucose, and it can use fat. And when your body stores energy, it stores it as sugar or it stores it as fat. Makes sense, right? So if you have too much fat, then you have obesity. If you have too much sugar, you have type 2 diabetes.

Interesting.

But the situation, the solution is the same. So think about it. Your body has too much energy in both situations. Obesity, you have too much energy stored away. In type 2 diabetes, you have too much sugar, which is also too much energy stored away because both fat and sugar are sources of energy for the body. So, if you think about trying to reverse type 2 diabetes, because again, I wrote about this in the diabetes code, and I said it's a reversible disease because your body doesn't have too little energy. It has too much energy. So, think about this situation. Think about your car. Suppose you go to the gas station three times a day, you fill up. Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas in, right? So, it's spilling out. It's spilling into your back seat, and it's now making you sick. Well, what are you going to do? Well, here's what you wouldn't do is keep going to that gas station three times a day, right? It's ridiculous. You do two things. One, stop putting gas in. And two, drive that car around so that you use the gas that's there. That's what you would do. Now think about the gas.

Burn the gas. Burn the gas.

Exactly. Think about your body. Your body has too much energy. what are you going to do? One, stop putting it in. Two, let it run without putting it in for a while. Let's intervene and fasting. That's all you have to do. And think about the situation. You've got a disease state which has become an epidemic, which contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer. But you have a solution which is completely free and has been used for thousands of years, which is not anything more complicated than let your body run off of the fuel that's already sitting on there. Is it fun? No, it's not fun. Is it healthy? Yes, it is in those situations. Very healthy. And people used to say, well, people won't do it. It's like, my job as a doctor. is not to tell people what they will and won't do. My job is to tell them how they should get healthy and I'll help them, right? So if fasting is a good solution, which I believe it is, then I'll help them. Whether they do it or not is up to them, right? But the point is that it's free, it's simple, it's been used for thousands of years, it's available to everybody. You don't need special equipment, you don't need a special diet, you don't need a special anything. Everybody in the world can do this at any time, like literally like today, tomorrow, any time they could do it. It's not like, you know, I have this great drug for people. Yeah, but except it costs $500,000, right? That's crazy. No, fasting is not to do that. You're going to save time, you're going to save money, and you're going to get healthier. So what could be better than that? Like it's a crazy situation where we have this huge healthcare issue. But the solution is completely free, which explains why there's so few people telling you to do it, because who's going to make money on it, right? And that's not my concern. My concern is telling people what they need to do to get healthy, right?

Yeah.

What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to fasting then?

I think the single biggest mistake is sort of overeating afterwards. so you fast for a period of time, then you say, oh, well, I deserve that ice cream. It's like you, you could do it, but you're going to sort of get a lot less benefit. You're going, like, you got a great benefit from the fasting. Now, you know, you're, you're losing some of that because you're eating the foods that you didn't eat. And that, that really is a Temptation for people to do. And I think it's natural, and we've all done it. And, you know, but the point is that after you fast, you should really just eat. as normally as possible. So if you eat, you know, a normal breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner, the next day is your fasting day. You don't eat breakfast, you don't eat lunch. You should eat a normal dinner. Don't try to eat all three meals crammed into one, right? That's not the point. Like, the point is to drop those meals and let your body take the energy from your body fat. So you drop breakfast, your body normally gets 500 calories from there. You want to take it out of your body fat. same thing for lunch. If at dinner, instead of taking a thousand calories, you decide to stick in 2000 calories, well, you've negated a lot of the benefits that you should have gotten because that energy is going to go in. So the good thing is that it's hard to do that. So when you restrict the time and you don't tell people what to eat or how much to eat, they actually naturally eat less. So it's actually an interesting thing because this gets to the question of hunger. So, there's, you know, in terms of weight, weight loss, there's sort of two big issues that trip people up. One is metabolic rate and two is hunger. So, hunger, people think that hunger will just go up like this with fasting. It's actually not true. So, you can actually measure the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which is basically, it goes up high and you get hungry. So, when you fast, Ghrelin is high. So if you normally eat lunch, you're hungry. So ghrelin is high. What happens when you don't eat lunch? You skip your lunch. Well, a couple hours later, your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline.

So you don't feel hungry anymore?

No, your hunger goes back to baseline level. So if you eat lunch at 12, you're hungry at 12. Now you skip lunch, you're hungry at 12, you're hungry at 1, buy 4, it's no different than if you ate or didn't eat. so people are like, what happened? Well, your body took the energy from your body fat stores. It took the 500 calories from body fat. You basically defend yourself off of that body fat. So why would you be hungry? The answer is you're not. And that's why it goes right back to Baseline. Same thing happens at dinner. If you do multiple day fasts, it's actually even more interesting because Corallen actually, after day one to two, it actually starts to go down and down.

Down.

So your hunger actually disappears by like day three, day four. People just aren't hungry anymore because they're fueling themselves on the body fat. And I think it was a, I think it was actually a sort of protective mechanism because if there is a prolonged period where you aren't eating, I think the body evolves so that you wouldn't be constantly distracted. So people on these long fasts do very well because they've gone into the stage of fat burning because they're fueling themselves purely on the fat and their hunger is gone. So they're actually feeling pretty good and they're losing weight.

They feel productive, they have more energy. Yeah. Yeah. There comes a point where. There comes a point where I feel like I did a three-day fast. I think maybe I did three and a half days. And I remember thinking, okay, I'm kind of feeling a little bit tired. Like, I could use some food now. Yeah, maybe it's just because I you know, push it beyond that before. So it's just every day I have to learn how to manage it.

But it's, it's, it takes a bit of getting used to because most of us are not used to it. And that's, that's more, that's probably the biggest obstacle because we're in a culture where the norm is not sort of 14 hours of fasting. The norm is like, eat until you go to sleep and eat as soon as you wake up.

Right.

And that was one of those big destructive myths, which was that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. which is fine. If you like breakfast, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the problem was when people took that to mean that if you weren't hungry in the morning and you didn't really like breakfast because you weren't a breakfast person, you should still eat like fruit loops, right? Because you had breakfast. Okay, now that's not the point. Eating sugar and refined carbs is not a good strategy. you're better off not eating.

Let's say that you were able to give a five step process for someone who's 30 pounds of belly fat or around there, 20 to 30 pounds belly fat. And they were like, you know what, for once in my life, I want to get like at least a flat stomach. Yeah, maybe it's not going to be super defined and under 8% body fat, but 12% body fat, roughly 10% and I could get close.

Sure.

Everything we talked about from sleep to emotional stress to nutrition to, we haven't talked about calories in calories out or lifting and things like that yet, but from everything we've talked about, if you had to give a five, you know, bullet point process of like, this would be the foundational steps to get you started on losing that 30 pounds of belly fat. What would you say?

Yeah, I'd say, and I've talked about this before, Step one, very clear and defined breaks between meals. Whether you are snacking or not, what I mean by that is rather than grazing throughout the day and constantly keeping insulin levels high, I find it much, people have much more success by having very clear defined gaps. So I don't care if you're fasting or not, but eat breakfast and have a very clear and defined break, until lunch. Have a very clear and defined break until dinner. Allow yourself the ability for insulin levels to come back down, glucagon levels to come up so that you're actually getting into a fat burning process between these meals. Every time you're consuming something, you're kind of stopping that process for a little bit. Even if your calories are, yes, that comes into equation, but you need to have these peaks and valleys, breaks between consumption.

Yes.

Now, can you consume water, teas, coffees, anything like that?

For sure, anything zero calorie. I mean, it's, I think once you, and that's, people will naturally eat less doing that too. But I do think that we have to take little bits from the calories equation and little bits from the carb-insulin model and meld them together instead of having these two camps that are largely opposed. And that's where I say, hey, this seems like an equal, delicate, thoughtful acknowledgement of both sides. You're probably going to eat less by having these clear defined meals, but you're also taking into account letting insulin levels come back down nice and low and you're not keeping them chronically elevated, which we know is not good either. So that's usually rule number one.

Okay, step one.

Step number two is very similar, but I say have a minimum 12-hour break between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the day.

So 12-hour fasting minimum.

It's not really a fast, right?

Sleep and don't eat after 8.

Exactly. I feel like there's a reason why you get your blood work done after a 12-hour fast. Things tend to come back down to homeostasis. Give yourself a chance to get back down to this balance. There's a multitude of different reasons why that's beneficial. Insulin levels getting lower, insulin sensitivity getting much better, so the food that you do eat with breakfast is going to be much more able to be taken up and utilized, which leads into step three, breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper. So you're kind of tapering as the day goes on. So larger meals in the morning, if you're not fasting, which we'll talk about here later, if you're not fasting, having a larger meal in the morning is generally going to be better. And if you look at the research, it's very, very clear that people that have a larger breakfast, just end up eating smaller lunches and smaller dinners naturally.

Because they feel satiated, right?

That doesn't mean that you go eat a box of Froot Loops or Cheerios for breakfast. With that, I'll dovetail into a slightly different piece that coincides with that. There was a BMC Medical Genomics study that's probably one of my favorite studies that demonstrated that you can have higher fat content in the morning because you end starting the day with more insulin sensitive muscles and less insulin sensitive fat cells. What that means is you have less likelihood of storing fat as fat in the morning and that way you start your day with higher fat, higher calorically dense meals. So maybe steak and eggs, something like that, without a bunch of hyperpalatable carbs, right? Something that's calorically dense and then as the day goes on, taper calories. carbohydrates are lower calorie than fats, even though they do spike your glucose and spike your insulin. It's okay to have those at night if you're not overdoing it. So a lot of times what I will do is I will have a higher fat breakfast. I will have something like steak and eggs for breakfast or usually steak and ground beef. I'm a big fan of that Joe's Scramble kind of thing that you do, right? With a little bit of goat cheese, a little bit of feta, maybe some lox make it very Mediterranean. that's pretty high fat, so it's calorically dense, right? It ends up being like 800 calories, right? Then as the day goes on, like a slightly smaller lunch, and if I am having carbohydrates, they're usually allocated to the evening time. That doesn't mean I'm having cakes and pies. It means maybe I'll have some lentils, maybe I'll have some, you know, something Mediterranean, right?

Then, you know, that's going to naturally be lower calorie because there's not as many fats in it, right? So your day is just kind of going like this. Before the interview continues, if feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset, and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. What's the breakfast? Like a king lunch? Like a prince dinner?

Like a popper. Like a popper. Gotcha.

Yep. So you just.

And that's a, you know, just age-old wisdom, right? That's like, that's small dinner. I remember my, you know, I'm largely, like, Mediterranean. I'm mostly Italian. So it's like, I look back at that, and, like, my grandmother was always kind of saying, like, she always had these. diet dinners, these little teeny dinners, right? It was just like, and you look at a lot of the Mediterranean cultures and with the exception of when they're having big feasts and stuff for special events, like a lot of times they are having really small dinners, right? And they're like shutting it down right after dinner. It's like maybe they'll have a little bit of coffee or whatever it is they're having and then, you know, go right to sleep.

Yeah.

Which, and then you go into step four is, you know, your diet should optimize your sleep, right? That's something that we kind of talked about in the beginning, but the best way that you can optimize your sleep without really digging super deep into what is stressing you out and causing these sort of internal battles that might be keeping you up, cutting your food out a few hours before bed is usually very, very powerful for people. And that, again, it nicely coincides with everything I'm talking about. If you're having those 12-hour breaks between dinner and breakfast, well, then the earlier you eat your dinner and cut it down, shut it down, the earlier you can eat breakfast the next day, right? If you stop eating dinner at 6:00 p.m., you're done eating, then by 6:00 a.m. you're good to eat again. And chances are you're not going to roll out of bed at 5:59 and immediately go eat at 6:00. You're probably going to naturally end up fasting longer and you don't have to be a quote-unquote intermittent faster. You're naturally kind of, you know, getting into that category, right? Okay.

And number five.

And number five, and this is something that you pull the throttle on or hit the throttle on occasionally, right? You want to temporarily, like when it's time to really pull that lever, temporarily reduce fats and then bring them back up, right? So that's sort of my lever, right? If I'm following all four of these lifestyle principles and things are working but not working as fast as I want, what I will temporarily do is reduce fats out of the diet, even if I'm low carb. this sounds crazy, right? But then bring them back in once weight has started to come off. People forget that even if you're doing, and I'm largely a low carb guy, so I catch heat for saying this sometimes, but fats are still calorically dense. So it's the easiest lever to pull from a food volume standpoint to dramatically reduce calories really quick and then be able to bring them back. Because what you don't want to do is you don't want to have just this point where you're chronically restricting calories forever and ever and ever, and then the moment that you do come back up, your body's like, oh shoot, put.

The weight back on.

Yeah, that's not fun. I actually think, and there's recent research to back this up, that keeping calories moderately high and then having aggressive short-term drops, like reducing fats and bringing calories low for a couple of days and then back up, can actually be very, very effective, which is probably why fasting works so well for a lot of people that just do it at random.

Yeah.

Like they'll just be like, I'm eating six days per week normal and then I do a 24-hour fast once per week. It's great because you're never letting your body get accustomed to this decline in calories. You're just like status quo, status quo.

Whoa, what's going on? And back up to normal.

Who do you recommend fasting for and who do you not recommend it for? I don't think there's many people that shouldn't do fasting to a certain degree, right? But there's a large degree of different kinds of fasting. There's 24-hour fasting, there's 16-hour fasting. Exactly. And like a 16-hour fast, if you want to put the label on it, you can call yourself intermittent fasting, but there's a lot of people out there that are probably intermittent fasting that don't know they're intermittent fasting. So 16 hours is pretty, I think the benefits start at 16 hours. So someone doing a 16:8 fasting, that usually works, but the reason that that's working is for two simple reasons, caloric restriction and insulin being lower. nothing magical is happening with a 16 hour fast. But when you start creeping over that 16 hour mark is when the benefits start to kick in. So I personally, I fast usually three days per week with like a 20 or 21 hour fast. So I'm still eating like two meals and I just do it three days per week so it's kind of intermittent. I can't think of a lot of people that wouldn't have success doing that because almost everyone that even thinks they wouldn't be able to do it, they might get hungry the first couple of times and then after that it's cavewalk. You know, it's not now people that have serious hypoglycemia issues, they should probably be conscious of it. That being said, and full disclaimer, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a dietitian, but even people that are dealing with hypoglycemia, a lot of times getting their bodies adjusted to periods of time without food is actually a good thing because it teaches their body to be able to utilize alternative fuel sources so they're not reliant on this undulation and glucose. You know, there's certain people that, you know, if you're very, very, very, very active, then, yeah, it might not work for you. Like someone that's working crazy manual labor construction. I'm sure there's different situations, clinical conditions that people shouldn't fast. And those, yeah, defer to your doctor. But as far as general people, I can't really think of anyone that wouldn't get some benefit out of it, even if it's just mental.

This is they sell their products. They sell you food with excitement and, you know, beer commercials and they show you the girls and the beach and, you know, eat this. Look, we crave popcorn when we go to the movies. They've already created that Association. We probably already have foods that we have emotional connections to.