The First Thing You Should Do To Lose Fat | Just For The Health Of It | Ronan Oliveira

If you want to lose body fat, what is the easiest but also most effective thing you can do? I am Ronan. I am the head of the health and fitness department at Mindvalley. And in the beginning of 2019, we asked ourselves this question. So we made an experiment. We got around 10,000 people in a Facebook group and we said, what is the biggest or the best cost benefit in terms of something that is easy, something that is effective, that we can do together with this, 10,000 people that will help them burn body fat. And the results were amazing. After a whole month, there were people losing more than £20. And up to this day, I still receive messages from that people who started back then in 2019 saying, Hey, I actually now I'm on 60 pounds and counting. Before I tell you exactly what this strategy is, I want you to imagine, imagine something, something different. Imagine that you go grocery shopping and you just arrived home and you are full of bags full of food. There are three things that you can do with the food that you just bought. There's a small little portion that you put on top of the table because this is what you're gonna eat right now, the biggest majority you put inside the fridge, because maybe this is what you eat tomorrow or later on when the fridge is full. Then the food you put in the freezer, these are the things that you only are going to eat if you empty the fridge. And so the body works in a similar way. We have storage systems for nutrients. So let's say that you have a meal right now. There are three things that can happen to the nutrients of that meal or the energy that comes from it. There is a small portion that is going to be burnt right now for you to live and experience this moment, then there is a majority of that that is going to be stored. And you have one storage system called your glycogen storages. This is where most of the carbohydrates go, either inside of the liver, but the liver is a small little organ. So when the liver is full, the rest of the glycogen goes to your muscle mass, but when the muscle mass is full of glycogen, then the remaining energy goes to your fat cells. So it's more or less if your glycogen storage inside your muscles in your liver works as the fridge in the kitchen analogy, and your fat, your adipose tissue, works more or less like the freezer. And so a meal to your body is more or less like grocery shopping is to your kitchen analogy. Now think about this. If you do grocery Shopping very often, it's very unlikely that you empty the fridge. And if you don't empty the fridge, it's very unlikely that you start to empty the freezer. And the body works more or less in a similar way. If you're always eating, you don't get to empty your glycogen storage. So it's a lot harder to start pulling energy from a fat, from your adipose tissue. And so one of the strategies that you use here is intermittent fasting, when you spend more or less 12 to 16 hours on a fasting state, so you can empty the fridge and start pulling more energy from the freezer. There's a group of scientists from the University of North Carolina, and what they did is that they grouped most of these studies on intermittent fasting and created a mathematical model to simulate what happens inside our bodies as we start fasting. And this is the chart that they published in this study. In this chart, you will see that on the left side, this is. This is when you just finished a meal. And as you go to the right, this is the hours that pass after you finish a meal. When you are fasting, one of the things that you see is this orange line. This is your insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone that helps you put things inside the fridge. Imagine that you got home with all the bags from the grocery shop, but you know, you're tired, you don't do it yourself. You call your helper and say, hey, you know, get the things from the plastic bags and put them inside the fridge or inside the freezer. This is what insulin, insulin does. So you get all the nutrients and start organizing inside the fridge. When the fridge is then full, it starts putting things inside the freezer. And you see that insulin is higher right after the meal. That means that you just arrived from the grocery shop and you got the help from your helper. But it starts to decrease over time. In around 12 hours to 16 hours, you see that it gets very low. That means that there's no activity of someone getting nutrients and putting either in your glycogen storages or in your fat tissue. And then there's another thing that is interesting in this chart. That is this dotted blue line. This is another hormone called glucagon. And glucagon does the opposite job of what insulin does. Whenever you need energy, but you're not eating at the moment, glucagon is the guy who opens the fridge or the freezer and start getting food from there to give you energy, and you see that it starts to increase More or less, especially after 12 to 16 hours. And that means that the activity of pulling energy from your storages is increasing at the same time. You see this black line going down. This is your glycogen levels, and you see how fast it goes down. Glycogen is mainly the food from the fridge. So after you had a meal, it increases because you just stored something. But then if you spend a couple of hours fasting, you see how the body's emptying the fridge and using the food that is there to give yourself energy. After more or less 12 to 16 hours, you see another black line, a dotted black line now increasing. And that's the free fatty acids. Free fatty acids is the energy that you get from inside your adipose tissue. So that means that is all the food that is inside the freezer now being taken out and defrosted. So now you're really getting energy from your fat storages. And intermittent fasting helps you get to this state that you are increasing the amount of energy that you use from your fat tissues. And you also see that it usually starts to increase from 12 hours of fasting, and it peaks at around 16 hours. So that's why we say that usually when you're doing a daily fasting product protocol, it's a very sweet spot to be between 12 and 16 hours of fast. But pay attention to something here. This is a mathematical model, is a simulation based on the averages of many people. That means that for each one of us, it will be a little different. Maybe if you already have a low carbohydrate diet, or if you move a lot throughout the day, you start emptying your freezer earlier. Or for someone who has a more sedentary lifestyle or has a diet that is fuller in carbohydrates, it may take even longer than 16 hours to start emptying your fat storages. But then the next question that comes is, all right, if these are mathematical models, do we see this in real life? And this is when we have different scientific studies that show this happening in real situations. One of them was made by the University of Illinois. What they did is that they got 23 obese participants and got these people to fast for. Oops, sorry. God, I'm too excited there. One of them was made by the University of Illinois. And what they did is that they got 23 obese participants, got these people to fast for 16 hours per day for 12 weeks. And after those 12 weeks, all these participants, they lost more or less 3% of their body weight in fat and not Only that they saw improvements in their LDL cholesterol, that's what's commonly called the bad cholesterol. They saw improvements in their blood glucose control and decrease in their insulin levels. And then there's another study by the University of Surrey that they got participants and asked these guys, alright, when you have breakfast, just have breakfast 90 minutes later than you usually have. And when you have dinner, just pull this dinner 90 minutes earlier than you usually have. And they compared with a group that didn't change their eating schedule. And the group who did a breakfast later and dinner a bit earlier burned twice as much fat as the group who didn't change their meals schedule. So this is why intermittent fasting is really a strategy to give it a try. It's not the only thing that you can do to burn fat, but it's one of the easiest ones and one of the most convenient ones that is also effective. And that's because you don't need to think about what you should eat. You know, when you think about burning fat or going on a diet or something like that, the first question that comes is, what should I remove? What should I eat more Interpreting the intermittent fasting is only asking you to change. When you eat, you don't really change, you don't really add things to your diet, you don't really remove things, you just change the timing of each meal. Of course, you can improve the quality of intermittent fasting by having a more nutritious diet. But the basic version that helps you burn fat, the way that all these studies are done are just by condensing your meals in a 12 to 16, 16 hour window. And it's also really convenient because it is a strategy that you can combine with other tools. You know, if you're in a low carbohydrate diet, or if you are vegan, or if you're paleo, or whatever you are doing, you can combine this in a intermittent fasting protocol. If you want to give intermittent fasting a try, here's an Overview. Start by 12 hours. You don't need to go all the way to 16 because it's not only a physiological change, but it's also a habit change. So take it slow and improve it. Increase it more or less one to two hours every one to two weeks. And if you really want the details on how to get started on intermittent fasting in the right way, then make sure that you subscribe to this channel because next week I'm gonna send you a video that is a whole guide on how to start intermittent fasting with all the details that they need to plan to do it the right way. And if you have any questions on how to burn body fat or how to do intermittent fasting, put them in the comments below so that I can see them and in the future I can make videos based on your questions and I'll see you in the next video. It.