How to Eat to Lose Fat | Slimpod & Medicinal Chef Reveal Fat-Burning Secrets

Hello again, Sandra here. So everyone knows that SlimPod nudges you to instinctively choose healthier food, but I find there's an awful lot of confusion about exactly what is healthy and especially what food you can eat to help you lose fat. So I thought I'd give you a real treat and invite the medicinal chef himself, Dale Pinnock, to help solve the confusion and give you some really great tips on how to eat to lose fat. So over to you, Dale. Hello, how are you?

Hi, thanks for having me. I mean, it's such a huge subject, it really, really is, and I can understand why so many people do feel confused because there is so much seeming, at least, contradiction and dichotomy and conflicting advice. So for most people, they feel like they're stumbling around in the dark a lot of the time. And I think a lot of this has come from maybe the diet industry over the years and just certain bits of messaging that for whatever reason have really, really stuck. And then now, as newer evidence has started to come come into, come into the light, there's this kind of public sort of discourse and debate around what the evidence is showing and what these old ingrained beliefs have actually led most people to believe is true. I mean, one of, one of my real pet peeves, and an interesting place to start this conversation, I guess, is the whole idea of reducing calories.

Yeah, absolutely.

The whole model and idea of reducing calories is completely flawed. I mean, yes, absolutely, when you're burning body fat and losing body fat, technically you are burning more calories than you're storing. That's, that's absolutely a fact, but that's got nothing to do with the calories in. Okay, that's actually how your— how effective your body is. Tapping into its stored energy, right? And a lot of that is controlled by hormones. If you're— this, you know, let's kind of look at this logically. You need a certain amount of calories to actually run your body, you know, it's what we— to support what we call the basal metabolic rate. So it's basically the kind of energy required to run your brain, your heart, your lungs, your nervous system, the things that are vital to life. You need a certain amount of calories to do that. Now, if you're, if you're following these guidelines of eat less and move more, certain things start to go wrong. You obviously need those calories coming in to be able to support those life support systems. If you're narrowing the amount of calories that you're consuming and increasing your activity, increasing the physical demands of your body, all that's going to happen is your body's going to respond by shutting down your ability to actually function at those high levels. You're only going to be able to sustain that for maybe a week or so at most.

Yeah, and that is normal. That's when you're on a diet and you're doing that consciously. That's exactly what happens with, you know, with the SlimPod system. Your unconscious takes control, and then you are naturally, you know, not feeling hungry. So it works in that way. So if you're consciously restricting calories, then exactly that. And that's why diets don't work for 90% of people.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you, you, you start it, you kind of reduce the calories, you start punishing the treadmill. The first day, yeah, you feel okay. The next day, you know, you may be a little bit sluggish and just start going down and down because that is how your body is designed. You are designed to conserve energy necessary to support life.

Yeah.

Okay, most of what's going on in terms of body fat and body composition is controlled by hormones, right? It's like, yes, we are storing energy. So this, this, this kind of old-school mindset of like, you know, you're storing more calories— kind of technically that's true, you are storing energy, but that's got nothing to do with the numbers. It's got nothing to do with the calories that you're consuming. It's to do with the type Yeah, exactly. Where these calories come from. So if you have 100 calories of protein, 100 calories of carbohydrate, and 100 calories of fat, they would influence your internal biochemistry in completely different ways. I mean, let's look at the hormone insulin, for example. Insulin is the hormone that we release when blood sugar starts to rise. It binds to a receptor on the cell surface, virtually every single cell in the body. It lets the cell know that there's glucose available to actually use as a fuel source. It opens a little gate in the cell. The cell takes in the sugar and it uses that sugar to create adenosine triphosphate, ATP, which is the fuel source that the cell runs on. It's a really simple system that just enables our body to use the fuel that's available. Yeah, but if insulin goes too high for too long, then it actually switches us into, into a fat storage mode, because blood sugar that's too high for too long a period of time can be potentially life-threatening. So the body just flips into a survival mode and it's like, right, there's too much, too much glucose available in this one sitting. So because this has the potential to damage our health, we're just going to bung it in storage. Okay. And you could still potentially be in like following a low-calorie diet, but because of the actual macronutrient ratios, like the carbohydrates are too high or whatever, you're actually flipping yourself into that storage mode because that is your body protecting your physiology. It's protecting the cardiovascular system, the nervous system. Excuse me, a froggy throat this morning. And you think about some of the problems that diabetics have because their blood sugar is too high. They get damage to the cardiovascular system and the nervous system.

Oh, I know somebody who, um, she was on one of the these top— I'm not going to mention the name— the top diets. And she used to say she used to be addicted to Coca-Cola, and she used to save all her points, or the calories I suppose, so she could just drink Coca-Cola. And that's what she existed on. But how crazy is that?

Exactly, exactly. And that's not going to be conducive to weight loss. No, because body composition is about way more than just the numbers. So it's having the awareness of where the calories come from and how that influences your ability to use that fuel source effectively.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's a real, real, real big—

So if you were to give 3 key points on, uh, on this particular subject, uh, what would you— what would— what would What would number 1 be?

Number 1 would be, hmm, I would say get carb smart. Okay, so understand the role of carbohydrates in the body, what constitutes good or bad choices. So a good choice would be obviously whole vegetables, brown rice, those kinds of things. And a bad choice would be chocolate bars, white bread, white rice, white pasta, that kind of stuff. Understand how to compose your meal in a way where they're not the dominant factor. Because one of the big problems that we have in this part of the world particularly is over the years when we were told that saturated fat and all these kind of things were the devil, and instead we needed to build our diet around starchy foods and heart-healthy oils. That's where a lot of the issues came from, right? So number one is understand carbohydrates, understand what good choices are, and learn what what a healthy portion size would look like. Okay, that's the first thing. Second thing is definitely get protein-centric when it comes to your main macronutrient. So the macronutrients are the big 3: protein, fat, carbohydrate. Right. Protein and fat need to be your friends in this. Do not fear fat. If any of you guys are watching this and you've got that mindset which has been drummed into us for decades— Absolutely. Fat is damaging, then it's time to rethink this. Yes, there are some fats that are toxic like trans fats and things like that.

I was about to say, you know, it is—

If you're eating junk food.

It is a certain fat, you know, You know, it is, you know, the fat that comes from avocados, for example, they're good.

Yes, yeah, exactly. So proteins and fats, these are going to keep you feeling fuller for longer, they're going to balance blood sugar, they're going to lower insulin, they're going to actually get you into a state where you're revving the engine, you're stoking the fire. Protein, for example, has a thermogenic effect. You, you, it raises body temperature as you're digesting it and breaking it down, so you are inherently burning more, and at the same time you're lowering insulin. So a lot of that stored fat that's been locked in storage can actually start to come out and you've got more energy to use and you can tap into your energy stores more effectively. You could do that and be in a calorie excess and still burn body fat. And this is the thing that's quite fascinating. There was a friend of mine called Sam Feltham that did a study. He was consuming 5,000 calories a day. It was predominantly fat and his body fat just melted. It just disappeared. He completely went in the face of that old advice of eat less, move more. He was eating more, but the way that he was fueling his body made, made his body more effective at actually burning these fuel sources, right, in a more effective way.

And that's exactly it.

Yeah, that's the second thing. The third thing, the third thing really, I, I would say is just try— and this isn't anything to do with food, it's actually get the right kind of guidance and the right kind of education to really understand how your body works. And this is a big problem that we have in, in the Western world is we're really not taught to any kind of useful level unless you actually kind of go out and do a nutrition degree or train to be a medic or whatever. We're not taught to any kind of meaningful level how our bodies work and how to look after them and how to actually treat them in a way that is conducive to long-term health. And that would be the third pillar, is actually get educated, like, learn how this stuff works so that rather than kind of being reliant on one, just like a government guideline, two, some kind of restrictive diet or set of rules, that all of a sudden you're empowered with the knowledge to understand how your body works and to be able to fuel yourself effectively for life. Not only to, you know, maintain your weight and body composition— I mean, that's a very, very important and very happy byproduct of all of this— yeah, really to safeguard your long-term health. There's very little in terms of real-life insurance, like things that you could do, that you can actively engage in, that can benefit your long-term health more than a good diet and really understanding the power of nutrition. So those, you know, those, those 3 things, even though, you know, they may seem a little bit jumbled and not connected, those are the 3 things I think could have the biggest influence for people.

Okay, so if you were— you've written about 14 books, and if you were to say suggest, you know, I want to send people away now being able to get educated and do more about this so that they can eat well and eat for— eat so they're, you know, and so they understand their body. So which one of your books, first of all, would you recommend that would help with that?

Well, in terms of the books, I mean, the books are all quite generic, so they're going to be like generic guides to healthy eating, and then some are more related to specific conditions like cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, those kind of things. All of the books really will kind of tick the boxes, but I guess that it's more the programs that are the real key.

Okay, and so tell me a little bit about the program.

Well, I mean, certainly the one in particular, it's called Diet Another Day. You know, it's got, you know, think about the Bond Bonfield and Die Another Day, Diet Another Day, because that's one of the things that I really want to give to people, is to actually enable them to have sufficient knowledge that they get out of that diet trap forever. Because so many people are stuck on that hamster wheel of—

Oh, they really are. I mean, they come to us and they've just had it, you know. So many people have done 20 years of dieting and they just don't want to see another one.

Yeah, and that knackers your metabolism as well. So I developed the program of Diet Another Day. It's built around an educational process. It's It's like a— if you can imagine combining like a really big juicy online course with group coaching and group support, it's those two worlds together. So the biggest chunk of it is an online course where you can work your way through the material and actually start to understand how your body works, how your metabolism works, how the food that you eat interacts with that and influences your biochemistry in a way that will influence your capacity to maintain your weight, to lose weight, and then we go on to like how it can actually support long-term health as well, especially with the big metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obviously the weight gain as well, cardiovascular disease. It's all related, it all slots together. So we teach you about the biochemistry, the physiology. Let me reassure everyone, It's not a level that bamboozles anyone. I mean, we've got, we've got people on the program from every conceivable background, from the age of 14 up to about 87 is our oldest one. So pitched in a way that everyone can get it. Okay. So it's not here to bamboozle, bamboozle you. What it will do is empower you. It will give you enough information so that whenever you're eating, whether you're out at a restaurant, whether whatever you're doing, preparing your lunch, you'll always be able to think around that understanding. Once you've got that understanding and got that knowledge, you've got it for life. You don't have to, you know, sit there and think, oh, have I had X amount of points or sins or calories or whatever kind of nonsense these restrictive programs give you.

Yeah, so what I'll do then, we'll put a link at the bottom of this and, uh, which will show people where to go.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you guys a special offer as well. You see the code there as well. Fantastic, well done.

Thank you very much. So there we go. Dale has given you the great advice, and you have your SlimPod nudging you to eat the healthy stuff and ignore all the unhealthy stuff— well, the carbs and the stuff that you know is unhealthy. And so I think this—

they interact so, so well together. So if they absolutely do The mindset with the SlimPod and like, you know, that kind of whole mental attitude combined with the knowledge and the science, you put those two things together and it's a very, very powerful position to be in for long-term, lifelong change.

Absolute dynamite. Yeah, no excuses.

Exactly, yeah.

Anyway, look, I'll thank you so much, Dale. Pleasure. Really, really appreciate it. And thank you, everybody, for watching. And yeah, we'll crack this and give you lasting weight loss. And that's it from me today, and talk to you soon.