Vishen Lakhiani explains why severe calorie restriction and long cardio sessions backfire: your brain sheds muscle instead of fat, which tanks myokine signaling and bone health. Strength training preserves muscle so the weight you lose is actually fat.
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So many of us are so obsessed with the number that we see on the scale. But sometimes losing weight doesn't really mean that you are getting healthier. It may even be the opposite. Have you thought about the intensity of things that we go through? We eat things that are closer to nothing, and we do a lot of exercise and sweat and get exhausted eating in the hopes of becoming thinner, and then we lose weight. But what is it that we are losing in this video? I wanted to talk to you about the main mistake that we make when we are trying to lose weight, and what is the way that we should do instead? To really transform your body to the best version that it can be. And it starts with these strategies that we use when we look at our bodies and we say, I want this to be smaller, I want this to be lighter. I step on a scale, and whatever I have, whatever I do, what matters to me is that this scale shows a lower weight. And then we do what is most accessible to us. First, you starve yourself. So there is a little amount of energy that comes from your food because you only have salads and you're fasting more than you should. And then you are only having a little soup here and there to make sure that you don't have much calories. And then on top of that, you're burning a lot because. Because you're going to the gym and doing cardio and then go for jogging, and then you go for cycling, and then you do this, and the body is moving all the time. This is a very common strategy that most people adopt when they have the most beautiful intentions of honoring their bodies, of transforming. They want a different life. They are willing to put in the work. They just don't realize that this strategy is probably harming more than it's doing good. I wanted to think about what is the type of message that this stimulus, this exercise, and this starvation is giving to your body. First, there's an exercise that is increasing a lot. Your rate of movement. Your heart is racing for a long time very often and is requiring a lot of energy to burn. But then you're not giving as much energy because. Because you're decreasing the amount of calories that you're giving to your body. And your brain is very smart to adapt the body in whatever way it needs so it can be more efficient, so it can survive under those circumstances. What it's thinking is, hey, we are moving a lot. We're not giving so much energy. We need to become more efficient. The way that I would do this is by releasing a lot of weight. Because if we now weight 150 pounds and we jog around and run around all the time, and from 150 we go to 100 jogging, this amount would be a lot easier. We will save energy. This increases our chance for survival. Great idea. The only thing is that if you're not doing any exercise that is showing your brain that you need your muscle mass. The brain, you go, hey, this muscle mycel, super dense and super heavy. So if I release this, it's as if I was releasing a whole bag of things from our back. And so we can survive in this starvation and long amount of cardio exercises. And this is when things start to become worse. You know, when you are in a one year journey of losing weight. Have you seen the situation when people lost weight? But at the end of one year, after a lot of sweet sweat, they achieved a body that looked exactly the same, exactly same shape. It was just a smaller body. There was no transformation. And that happens when you keep somehow the amount of fat that you have. But what you're losing is the thing that gives shape to the body, that is your muscle mass. And so you just end up with a smaller body. And even if you say, ah, yeah, I don't care about the way my body likes, I don't care about the aesthetics things, I just want to be light. Know that muscle masses is the primal part of your body that's communicating with all the other systems. When you work on your muscle mass, it sends myokines. There are little email messages to your lungs, to your heart, to your bones. One of the best ways of increasing your bone density and the health of your bones is by working on your muscle mass. Because this communication from the muscles to the bones is what helps the bones gather minerals and grow stronger. And so there's a ripple effect on growing muscle mass and there's also a negative ripple effect on losing muscle mass. And so if you're using a starvation diet plus a lot of cardio to lose weight, yes, you're losing weight, but you're losing a lot of your health spent together with it. So what should you do instead? Well, you should do things in a way that show your brain that not only your muscle mass is important, but you want to, you need to have more of that. Because if you have more of that, you first, reshape your body. Second, it communicates with your lungs, it communicates with your heart, with your bones. All these other systems are getting better as you are burning fat. So all the weight that you lose in this case is only fat weight. That's exactly what improves your health in your shape in the long term. The way of showing your brain that you need that muscle mass is by doing any type of exercise that requires that muscle to contract with a lot of tension. I'm talking about strength training. I'm talking about resistance training. That is when you are lifting weights, when you are doing body weight exercises, that you're contracting your muscles against a tight type of resistance. This type of training is the one that preserves your muscle mass. And while you lose weight, all this weight will be drawn from your fat, from your adipose tissue. And at the end, you reach the state that you want a body that is transformed and much healthier, that increases the quality of your life. This whole conversation of strength training is a long conversation. And I don't want you to fall into the trap of the traditional training that takes you into a workout of one hour and a half per day for five days in a week, six days in a week, because not everyone can do that. And there's a way of doing this in a much more efficient way. With 30 minutes per week, you can get all the results that you ever need from any type of strength training protocol. But because this is a longer conversation, the good news is that we at mindvalley prepared a whole hour plus masterclass that that explains all the principles of this training that I can watch this masterclass and figure out. Okay, this is how I change. This is the exercises that I do. This is how I move from one exercise to the other. This is how I find the weight and the load that gives my brain the signal that that muscle is needed, that I need to grow more of it. If you want to learn all the principles that make 10x Mindvalley's fitness program the most efficient, efficient strength training and fitness program that we have. Sign up to the Master class. The link will be in the description. Once you go there, you just click there. You receive all the information in your email. And then we're gonna meet there again with a whole hour ahead of us to go deep into this thing. So I can make sure that if you want to lose weight, you increase your health, you add. You lose weight, but you add years to your life and completely transform your body in this year that is coming. Go there now. Click on the link of the master class. If you have any questions in the meantime, you can leave them in the comment section below. I'll talk to you there and I'll see you in the masterclass. Video.
