Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li

you hear the word diet or lose weight and you immediately like Oh and it feels like you're going to have to restrict but I love food how the hell do I lose this fat keep weird stuff out of your body let's talk about the bad stuff soda a can of regular soda contains 7 to9 teaspoons of cane sugar bottled water plastic bottles are shedding microplastics into the water we're actually pouring plastic into our bodies wao tell us about the five things that we can add in Tomatoes triggers your brown fat to burn down harmful extra

body fat pomegranates Mother Nature's Pharmacy is found in the juice of a pomegranate kiwi has a lot of dietary fiber matcha it actually shrinks your waistline matcha kiwi pomegranates and tomatoes help you burn fat that's right and so does hey it's your Budd Mel Robbins I am so fired up that you're here can you tell you know there are there are moments where you tune and you're like what oh Mel has eaten something today well I've eaten up our guest and everything he's going to share with you it is so exciting what we're about to

talk about and it is such an honor to spend time with you and to be together if you're brand new I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family I think this is going to be one of those episodes that can change the trajectory of your life and I know you're going to share it with a ton of people that you care about and I also know you're the type of person who values your time and that you're interested in learning about ways that you can improve your health I love that and I

love that for you I love that for the people that care about you and if you or anyone that you care about is interested in losing weight or burning fat or just feeling better and getting healthier holy smokes you chose the exact podcast episode to listen to at the exact moment because Dr William Lee is in our Boston Studios so let me tell you a little bit about him Dr Lee is a renowned physician scientist and the founder and president of of the angiogenesis foundation here in Boston where he's educated over 40,000 Physicians and is

currently working on cuttingedge research on blood vessels and clinical applications of angiogenesis his foundation has over a hundred scientific Publications and leading medical journals and textbooks he's also served on the faculties at tus Dartmouth and Harvard Medical Schools Dr Lee's work has impacted more than 50 million people worldwide and his work has led to effective prevention novel treatments even reversal of diseases that span cancer chronic wounds obesity heart disease diabetes and vision loss and today this New York Times best-selling author of two books eat to beat disease and eat to beat your diet is here

in our Studios to teach you the science that you need to know to unlock your body's natural ability to burn fat lose weight and be healthier so please help me welcome Dr William Lee to the Mel Robins podcast Dr Lee I'm so excited that you're here and the way that I wanted to start is could you tell the person that's listening what they might expect to change in their life if they take everything that you're about to share with us today to heart and they apply it you know what I always tell people is that

it's possible to love your food and love your health at the same time so you don't fear your food you lean into it and you get to really enjoy your life finally I actually love that you're starting there because I feel like so many of us have a very conflicted LoveHate relationship with food and I think you're about to empower us to be able to understand how to love food and also have it love your body and your health yeah and and by the way it's not about giving permission it's really about allowing our own

human nature to take over our being because we're all hardwired part of our humanity is based around food that goes back to history and you know what I try to do is to bring it right to the present because we all have it inside us wow I've never heard anyone say it like that so Dr Lee according to our research about a third of our listeners have set a goal to either lose weight or to start a new diet in the new year and I would love to have you connect the dots between metabolism and

how it functions and what your research has shown about those of us that have excess body fat and that are carrying more extra weight around yeah well look losing weight is a natural goal most of us think about losing weight in terms of the number on a scale or maybe um the size of your clothing or fitting the comfort of fitting into your clothing or maybe how you look in the mirror right it's pretty crude and it turns out that the if you're care about your health if that's really your priority for losing weight you

want to burn down the kind of fat that you can't see and fat that you can't see is not wiggly jiggly it's actually located deep inside the tube of your body our bodies are really if you stand up straight you know and you were to uh do a scan across our body it's like a tube we've got a oval our organs are inside there and the re really really harmful body fat that expands is called visceral fat and it wraps around our organs like a baseball glove and when it grows it expands everything inside the

sack of your the tube of your body which is why your waistline increases right so the more visceral fat you have the bigger your waist uh your waistline has to be the belt is just being expanded more and more and more that's different than the fat that's under your arm and I I just want to kind of unpack this a little bit because I think if you're a person that has struggled to lose weight you feel very discouraged and you feel a lot of fr frustration that the weight's not going to come off and you're

making a very big distinction between the kind of fat that might be flabby arms versus that very stubborn fat that starts to gather around the midsection of a lot of people's bodies body fat isn't all just what we think it is right so look we've all done it you're taking a shower in the morning you step out you're drying yourself off you're naked out of the corner of the eye you look in the mirror and you see a lump or a bump that you didn't like to see you like G then what's the next thing

you do you step on the scale and if that number isn't the exact number you were hoping for damn that's not what I do I put a towel on and hide from the mirror but that's and then I go eat a doughnut because I'm depressed so I'm like making all the wrong choices well but then but then you say like man I got to do something about this right like it's a realization but the fat the body fat you can see is not the part that's harmful to your overall health what okay because fat is

comes in to different types of fat you've got white fat which is what you can see and you've got brown fat which you can't see but I got to explain a little bit further okay so you know like all right the word fat immediately stimulates kind of this this like negative reaction in our minds right that's how we've been trained in society right but there is a situation where body fat is actually good and it makes everyone smile and you know when that is when babies yes that's true they're so cute when you see a

big fat baby yes pudgy cute you want to pinch its cheeks all right and big balloon like uh arms and legs everyone smiles and and that's how we know that fat can't be all bad right in fact if you saw a baby that had chisel cheeks and long thin arms and thighs like a like a runway model yeah i' I'd be like somebody call child Serv 911 right okay so the the the fact of the matter is that our body fat is is really really important it's actually releases hormones it's a it's one of the

endocrine organs our body Fat's actually an organ in our body wait your body fat is an organ body Fat's an organ it actually produces hormones and these fat produced hormones actually help our body absorb blood glucose so the fuel tank actually produces the stuff that our body needs is to run the engine glucose so we have energy that's so cool and in fact one of these uh hormones is called adiponectin all right now you might not have ever heard of a dip antin actually a lot of doctors never heard of a dipine but what have

I told you a dipine works with insulin and we know we know insulin basically helps your blood glucose takes all that energy and you know people talk about glucose spikes and high glucose and low glucose and Insulin insensitivity look insulin is the hormone that that is made by your pancreas in order to be able to draw blood glucose into into your muscle so you have energy so you can run if you've got problems with your insulin that can lead to diabetes right okay but do you know that insulin can't do the job by itself very

well no okay insulin needs a partner it's like a like two cops on a beat don't tell me it's fat it is a diine nectin is the hormone that insulin which is made by fat helps insulin do its job and dipine nectin is so important by the way Mel that if I were to take um a sample of your blood uh and send it to the lab and ask it to measure every hormone in your body everyone okay estrogen thyroid hormone you know you name it thy okay I will tell you a dipine netin your

dipine will be 1,000 Times Higher in amount than any other hormone in your body a thousand tells you it's important fat made by fat by body fat so body fat actually is good it actually helps us not surprisingly use our energy now if you have too much fat guess what happens the fat gets really really big it gets really really inflamed and now the hormone engine doesn't work anymore you're not producing the right amount of dectin now insulin is not going to work very well now you're going to have a metabolic problem okay and this

is why oving and over overeating especially lowquality fuel food is so damaging to your body but you but because it's hard wire all hardwired into us if we take the you know realize we have the agency to be able to make those choices for better quality fuel right and don't eat too much and get a little more active you know that makes me think of another question Dr Le is there a way to lose weight and still enjoy food I mean I mean how do you want us to think about this okay so I like

to think about it in a much simpler way okay metabolism is how your body gets energy and burns down energy just like if you are a car okay human metabolism is really about just putting fuel in your body right once you're done eating okay it's kind of like you've stopped filling up your tank now you're driving back on the road about your way you're burning fuel and that's what we do when we finish eating we're loading up in the fuel when we're finished now we're burning the fuel Fuel and basically that's how we live day

in and day out that's how how we work and the quality of fuel actually matters now I want to say one thing about besides quality of fuel yeah it's quantity of fuel you fill up your tank it's a metal tank all right and you fill it up when the when the gasoline reaches a certain level it'll go it'll Force the nozzle go to click and it won't no more gas will come out y I feel like I don't have a click Dr Lee okay well imagine what would happen and this is what happened used to

be in the old days with them filling stations no click what's going to happen you're going to easily overfill your tank if you're not paying attention the Tank's going to overflow the gasoline comes right out of the car runs down the side of the car around the tires and pools around your shoes right and now you are standing in the midst of a dangerous toxic flammable mess right right okay now that's what happens at the gas station at the dinner table or the pantry or the drive by convenience store all right we if you don't

actually control the amount of fuel that you put in your body because we don't have a clicker just as you said we can keep filling it up what happens is that our fuel tanks are our fat cells our metabolism uses body fat body Fat's very very important it's healthy we want our fat cells to be what they serve as our fuel tank when you eat you you use some of the energy just to up run around but the rest of it is stored in the fuel tank which is our fat cells we call them ose

cells adapost tissue and you add up a lot of little tiny little fat cells you got a chunk of fat now because we don't have a clicker the more you eat that you're going to fill up your tank oh you're still eating let's fill up another tank fill that one up and by the way each tank car is metal and fixed it won't expand body fat fat cells can expand to three times 300% you can really blow up a fat cell with fuel meaning food that you eat up to 300% like a balloon like a

water balloon so now you're still eating let's blow up another one oh still another one one more piece of cake one more second helping another one oh and by the way once you run out of fat cells guess what your fuel text your body will look for stem cells to create brand new fat cells and now you can keep on loading them up now think about this wait so your base basically if you eat Beyond The Click in terms of what you actually just need for fuel yep your body is designed to through fat cells

to create storage tanks for all this Fuel and when you run out of the storage tanks in your fat cells your stem cells actually kick into gear and create more cells to hold this energy more fuel tanks exactly wow and and this is this can happen over the course of your whole life so the more you over eat and it's even worse if you use poor quality fuel now excess body fat in this situation is exactly the Overflow the overfilling of your fuel tanks so if you follow your hard wirring if you fill up your

tank only to what it's supposed to be and don't overflow you will actually follow those four patterns but how many people do you know who control their eating in a way that's mindful so you're not overflowing your fuel tank and the reason I'm actually saying this is that you know over the course of the year you pick the holiday all right right you could talk talk about the winter holidays you can talk about Easter you could talk about the summer Fourth of July you could talk about any holiday you want all right um uh Thanksgiving

you're talking about the experience we've all had which is sitting down with family and friends with a incredible food in front of you and what you want to do is fill that plate up and eat it and then go back for seconds right okay and how many of us have felt this you go you you have one more or two more forkfuls after that second plate and you're like wait a minute I shouldn't have done that you know that you've actually um uh overfilled your tank absolutely right that's like not the click that's the leak

you're now you're sitting in this toxic flammable mess and in fact by the way that extra fuel will indeed leak out of your fat cells eventually and when we when I use the word flammable it is very inflaming so in other words when you overeat too many calories you blow blow up your body fat it will eventually like like a water balloon like it can't hold anymore it starts to leak out and now you've got fat that leaks out all throughout your body you know the organ that actually picks up all that fat no it's

the liver so you've heard of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease uh no I hadn't that is a condition where you overeat the fat flows out of your fat cells because they can't hold anymore like you've you've strain the storage capacity to the Limit the fat leaks out into your cells gets trapped in your liver and your liver becomes replaced by liver cells become replaced by fat it is a n it used to be alcohol and hepatitis that were the biggest causes of liver transplant yeah now livers are failing all around the country because of non-alcoholic fatty

liver disease so this is the silent epidemic it's it's nasty because um uh your when your liver fails that's your detox you talk people talk about going to detox you know going to the spa for a cleanse detoxing your liver does it every single day so we need to do that the good news is all of this the extra body fat the leakiness the inflammation the the clogged up liver that's going to fail on you it's all reversible if you make good choices even if you have a lifetime Decades of making bad choices you can

actually work your swim your way back to your Baseline operating system okay I want to offer up a visual for the person listening and I want to see if this could be helpful so as you were talking about the fact that we all have that food is fuel that we have a tank for fuel inside of us and when we ovat or we just have too many calories or we're too sedentary and we're not intaking enough calories for the fuel that we need but we're taking in more it's like your body finds all these extra

fuel tanks inside your body and that's basically the purpose of fat cells storing extra energy and fuel so I all of a sudden got this visual of a pickup truck and the pickup truck is barreling down the highway and it's not just got a full tank of gas but in the back bed of the pickup truck there are all kinds of fuel cans just piled high and if I'm listening to the good news and I'm listening to your excitement about the fact that your metabolism based on Research your ability to burn the calories and burn

the fuel effectively that it's basically the same for your life no matter how many fuel tanks you got in the back of the pickup truck and that if you were to start to follow the advice slowly but surely that pickup bed would become empty because your your internal body's ability to just drive down the highway it is always there no matter how much fat is stored in your body is that true that is completely true and that means you can offload that fuel okay okay so if you if you exercise and you're burning more fuel

that's basically throwing some of the tanks off the pickup truck so you're lightening the load so to speak okay so now I want to know Dr Lee how the the hell do I lose this fat you know I see all over the place 10 days to shed 20 pounds and all these diets that you know keto this and do that over here and do this what do you actually do let me give you some really simple tools that anyone can actually use that they probably even heard about one is called intermittent fasting okay but I'm

going to debunk that too oh my God so you're telling me to do it now you're debunking it let me tell you first of all intermittent fasting is thought of as a health fad a trend that everybody does and you got to go what is it like 16 hours of not eating and squeeze everything in eight hours Hey listen that would be very hard for someone like me and probably like you running around all the time okay it does it doesn't work very well but let me tell you uh that there's more than one way

to get at it and the best way to intermittently fast is uh to take advantage of the fact that when you're sleeping when we're sleeping we're not eating okay when we're not eating we're fasting Okay so sleeping is intermittent fasting because we don't sleep all the time uh uh and when we get up and we break our fast which is called breakfast all right um and that's the best way to get intermittent fasting but I got to give you a little understanding of this okay because after you eat the last bite of food the night

before all your body is like okay is that is that it that's all that that's the last drop of fuel we're going to get tonight the moment it realizes you're not going to put any more fuel fuel in your body your body your metabolism recognizes it goes from fuel storing Mode come on give some more let me put it in my fat oh no more food let's now switch gears okay like like literally like a gearbox in a car if you're um uh if your body is a Ferrari all right and you're going you're going

to switch gears when you're no longer eating it switches into fuel burning mode from fuel storing let's load up that body fat to fuel burning so when you're sleeping and not eating your body's burning down fuel from your fat cells you're actually losing weight burning fat while you're sleeping well how long do you have to not eat for this to work so this is actually the important part we know that eight hours of sleeping is the healthy amount of sleeping for all kinds of things brain health and metabolic health and anti-aging and everything else you

want to sleep eight it's more like 7 to 9 Eight's like right in the middle 8 hours is where you're going to start to get that benefit but let me tell you how anybody can expand their body's own hardwired fat burning period okay okay so what you do is you expend it on both sides before you go to bed and when you get up in the morning let me talk about the the night before all right so like if you eat sit down and E at s and you're done at 8 when you put your

dishes away no more eating all right there's no midnight snacking don't take a bag of chips with you and sit on the couch and watch the game or whatever else you might do all right don't be nibbling no last minute before bedtime open and get that piece of pie when you're done at 8 when you put your dishes away that's it now let's say you go to bed at at 11 o' I'm just going to give an example eat dinner at 700 stop eating at 8 put your dishes away no more food until the next

day and no drinking and no drinking actually tea is okay all right as long as you milk in it no no drinking for sure anything with no more calories okay okay 8:00 let's say you go to bed at 11: okay that's 3 hours between 8 and 11:00 three hours You' just bought yourself three extra hours of fat burning time 11: to 7 in the morning that's eight hours okay so that's 3 hours plus eight hours that's 11 hours of fat burning that you've given your body just by not eating after you put the dishes away

now when you get up in the morning this is like a super little easy tip that I tell anybody I do I practice it myself get up in the morning don't do what your mom told you to do right so when we were growing up get out of bed get down to that breakfast table eat something quickly so you can actually go to school and learn something don't be hungry no we're adults and it turns out you don't need to eat right in right away in the morning get up in the morning take your time

getting ready and for me I will before I eat anything I will go for a walk I'll open the door get some fresh air uh maybe read a book check my email whatever wait at least an hour from the time you wake up until the time that you put the first thing in your mouth now that's one extra hour so three hours the night before bed eight hours that's 11 total of fasting meaning fat burning time now add one more hour okay by not eating right away and you've got 11+ 1 is 12 hours 12

out of 24 hours 50% of your day you've had your body burning down harmful body fat extra body fat that's the simplest way to use intermittent fasting 12 hours now you might say is 12 hours enough yeah because eight hours is enough 12 hours is a little bit better clinical Studies have shown that 12 hours of fasting much in the way that I've told you actually is plenty of time to actually lose weight over time so are you saying that this is a tool that you that based on the research anybody can use to eat

in an 8 Hour window from like noon to 8:00 p.m. yep and that will help you no matter what your health looks like that will help you kick into fuel burning and fat burning mode without really having to even worry about the food yet you don't have to break into a sweat doing that because it's all very easy I mean plenty of people are already doing this but the key thing Mel is that you want to make sure that when you finally do eat whether it's breakfast or lunch you don't over over fill your tank

well how do you know when you're full I know this is a kind of an odd question to ask but I love food espe like especially if I've got something in front of me that I'm really love like a big juicy burger that you know that kind you squeeze to try to get in your mouth and some of the juice is coming down there is no way I need to eat that entire thing especially if it's a Smash Burger with a couple patties and so yet I like how do you know when enough is enough

and the click has happened right so it's all hardwired inside us and the problem why we miss the cues that our body sends us that we have actually filled up our tank is because we eat too fast oh all right so when you eat quickly right busy people tend to eat really quickly distracted people tend to eat quickly if you're just checking out social media you're not paying attention and you're eating by yourself you're just shoveling food in your mouth you're paying attention to something else that is a common mistake that we all make is

that we're distracted and we're used to just shoveling all the Abundant food that's placed in front of us okay let me just tell you something that I learned before I went to medical school to be a doctor I did a gap year and uh in my Gap year I went to Italy and Greece the Mediterranean and what I was interested in studying there was the connections between food culture and health in those places now this was long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet I came from America I landed in Italy I was staying

with a host family uh within a day or two I began realizing wow the way that people eat in the Mediterranean is completely different than what I grew up and what I'm used to we in America sit down and we're gobbling food we're we're we're complaining about things we're eating with somebody else uh we're ing about you know some problems going on we're eating fast there's way too much food in front of us and um uh or we're eating alone yeah and you're eating alone you're doing you're distracted by something else and before long you

know you've cleaned the whole plate all right and you don't you don't even realize what you've eaten it might taste good but you're not thinking about in the Mediterranean in Italy specifically and it's as clear as day for me you'd sit down for food you would never eat by yourself you would always eat with a friend or a family member or co-worker all right you you would take the time to order the food and when the food comes you're not you're not ketching or complaining about your boss or you know the family or the weather

or the sports team you are sitting when the food arrives with full of gratitude and talking about the joy of the food man this pasta was just like my mother made is this the right season for it yeah you should see the mushrooms that we have how do you how do you make it people would talk about their food okay the food that was not just something that was shoved in front you would engage with the food and when you're eating the food you would taste the food and talk about the food and people would

enjoy the actual part of eating the enjoyment of the food the mindfulness was completely different and by the way they never Ser over serve you all right more so do you have a rule for that like would you use like a sandwich plate instead of a dinner plate if you're trying so here's what I always tell people whatever your eye wants to actually put onto your plate right so think about a this is the classic meal I always talk about this Thanksgiving meal like you're all getting together maybe have eaten all day and now it's

all this great food that reminds you of your all the happy times you got to load your plate up right what I tell people that's a mistake whatever your whatever your eyes tell you you want to put in only to take 2third of that plate okay okay two leave a third leave a third back okay never go for seconds all right you will actually and just eat those 2/3 and really enjoy the taste Savor the taste you know if you're a foodie like me you enjoy great tasting food all right doesn't have to be fancy

it could be super simple uh it could be comfort food eat it slowly to savor it okay that savoring the food is something I noticed is always done in the Mediterranean and also in Asia you know two of the healthiest in the world and it slows you down you know Dr Lee you have a four-week meal plan that you've designed based on almost 30 years of experience can you break down some of the key features for me and the person listening yeah okay so wherever wherever your starting point is this is the key thing you

can always begin a healthier uh uh life and get over your own body fat like like you can win that battle easily by doing a couple of things I tell the first thing you do is to um do an assessment a food diary is what I call it okay don't try anything yet just do what you're going to do for a couple of weeks take out a piece of paper or maybe even notes on your mobile device and just record what you're eating and how much you're eating every single meal why is that important because

a lot of us don't realize what we're eating and how much we're eating every time you snack pop out that piece of paper or your your notes section and and write it down no guilt no shame uh this is all about just recording it okay now after 2 weeks go back and look at it and most of us will be surprised at what we ate how often we ate and how much we actually ate all right by having that self-realization by documenting it you know it's kind of like you're trying to develop an allowance you're

teaching children how to spend money responsibly write down what you spent and then add it up at the end of a couple of weeks and then you'll know exactly what you did and after recommending this to patients and researching this what might the person who does this find or have a realization other than got to eat a lot well I would say first um the amount of food that they ate and how frequently they ate man I had no idea that I ate that much and that often all right so the second Epiphany is by

by identifying what kind of food most people go gez I kind of eat I kind of eat junky food all right just documenting that for yourself again no judgment this is just so you can see where you are and that's the first phase I think then you go on to the swap in Phase what SW call swap in not swap out swap in oh swap in I thought you said swap I'm like swamp like I'm like that doesn't sound good swap swap in right because basically people like go oh so now the part now's a

part where I actually have to deprive myself right nope I'm saying listen you know when you're not eating good stuff let's talk about swapping in take something that you love to eat that's healthy and swap it in okay and there's all kinds of things that we uh love to eat that is healthy and that's in my book Eat to beat your diet I I give lists of 200 different food items ingredients that are all delicious that you can swap in the reason I call it swap in is because when you're eating something you're displacing something

that is not so good for you the more good stuff that you swap in less room you're just going to have in your life for the stuff that's not so good for you well what I love about that is because you hear the word dire or lose weight and you immediate like Oh and it feels like you're going to have to restrict and your swap in like methodology it makes a lot of sense because if I think about it I could eat a bag of chips and not even think about it I'm not going to

eat a bushel of apples no so if I'm adding in something healthy I'm probably not going to overe eat it anyway exactly that's that's the other thing but you might also find you know you'll be a little bit more mindful of so do an assessment step one number two swap in okay number three is then do the intermittent fasting part that I told you now the key though with this don't overeat when it is time to eat that's the two-thirds rule okay two-thirds Rule and one one thing I'll tell you that's a Japanese saying that

comes came from confucious is called stop when you're 80% full now I'm going to tell you how you know this um but there's a the Japanese saying is called Hara Hai bunme Hara Hai bunm uh really means just listen to your body when you're about 80% full how do you know when you're 80% full well I have to unbutton my pants usually well okay by the time you feel full yes you've already passed 80% it's true you know like I just I kind of just feel that that sense that oh but I just there's just

one more bite and it's not ever as good as the one that came before here's here's an example Mel you know like when you're parking a car like in a in a parking lot and there's like those little cement things in front right yes like you're pulling it up a little bit further a little bit further you know like when you start hitting that when you see that grading sound in your car you've gone too far that's what happens when you have to unbutton your your pants so but if you eat slowly and then listen

this this is a very important point you want to stop eating when you're satisfied not when you're full when you feel oh that was pretty good not when you're full we we're so trained to look at the volume of our stomach the pouching we're looking for we're trained to unbutton our pants okay but really if you eat slowly and mindfully and take your time and Savor your food at some point when you put your fork down you're going to go that was pretty good I like that that's 80% I love that what are the top

five foods that we should add in to boost our natural metabolism and lose weight okay so a lot of people don't know this but there are certain foods that will fire up your body's extra fat burning uh uh Machinery now we didn't talk about this yet so I'm going to quickly slide this in please do you got white fat which I told you is the wiggly jiggly kind you see in the mirror y uh um it's under your chin it's under your arm you're looking at me when you say this like are you saying that

I have white fat under my chin the wiggly jiggly the muffin top the thigh the butt that's oh my God have you seen me naked Dr Lee you're describing me I'm sorry and it's also in the tube of your body the visceral fat that your your body look body is a tube right think about it right and inside the tube of our body it's our organs but our fat can grow inside there got it our guts are called our viscera so visceral fats the fat that grows around our guts the more you load up that

extra fuel the more that fat grows starts to strangle your organs and when it becomes inflamed it's really dangerous that's the dangerous kind of fat so you want to burn that fat down okay now it's called Brown fat okay Brown fat is not wiggly jiggly we love Brown fat okay Brown fat is close to the Bone it's not even near the surface it's around our necks plastered around our necks under our breast bone a little bit between our shoulder blades and it's scattered in our belly a little bit Brown fat is not white fat Brown

fat is a kind of fat that when you activate Brown fat it fires it up like uh a space heater actually another analogy I get that's even clearer is that if you got a gas cooking range in your kitchen and you want to heat up some water to make some soup or some tea what do you do you go to the gas range you turn the knob click click click whoosh that's what brown fat does okay it burns the jiggly fat bur it burns away the jiggly fat when you turn on Brown fat you burn

down the white fat so how the heck do I turn on the brown fat okay so we originally evolved Brown fat for hibernation cold temperatures trigger Brown fat and the brown fat burns down the white fat to give energy and heat it's a process called thermogenesis so when you hear about cold plunges being good for your metab indeed it does indeed it does it because cold temperatures in our body will trigger on our BR fat well well now I'm motivated so how long do I have to stand in a cold shower in order to like

ignite my brown fat to burn the jiggly white fat so listen I'm a medical doctor so I very careful to tell people that before you do something that could create a shock to your system like cold plunge or super cold shower you should probably talk to your doctor about it or a healthcare provider to make sure that you're not making a move that's not good for you you might have high blood pressure you might have a heart rhythm issue so please don't just like solo this on your own all right you really need to be

able to do this but if you want to actually if you get into a warm shower turn that temperature down until it's cooler all right so now you're not endangering yourself yep you know I think if you're in there for 10 minutes Co cool I'm not saying freezing okay turn it down cool then turn it to to so so it is hard to stand it okay and you'll start feeling it like you start feeling it like look go out to the winter without a coat on you can go out there for a little while pick

up your mail at the end of the snowy driveway all right and at some point you're like oh man this is getting a little bit when you start feeling this is getting a little bit too stop okay okay and that's why it's true like some people get these like ice are going to do their cold plunges in the morning please when you start feeling like you're you know uh going down with a Titanic like you better get out of there all right but the brown fat turns on now here's the cool thing besides cold temperatures

it turns out that certain foods that you can eat will trigger your brown fat to turn on into start burning down fat food eating foods can turn on your good fat to fight bad fat to burn down excess fat and lose weight all right talk to me Doc so what are the top Foods we need to eat to turn on the brown fat to burn the jiggly fat so I can lose weight you can find this in any grocery store in the produce section in the middle aisle let's go to the produce section take a

look all right so apples it turns out that apples have something called chlorogenic acid inside the Flesh of the apple right um and that chlorogenic acid turns on your brown fat wow and it'll start to burn down your white fat okay what what else uh is in there what about broccoli or kale or bok choy I love bok choy I like to cook you know you cut off the bottoms you wash the leaves take a walk or a skillet little extra virgin olive oil little garlic saut tie that up little oyster sauce boom that's a

two-minute meal the the sulforaphan in Your Greens trigger your brown fat to burn down extra body fat now obviously how you cook makes a difference right I I said olive oil I didn't say butter okay because if you actually use olive oil guess what olive oil which you find in the middle aisle extra virgin olive oil has bioactives like people like me who study this so I tell people please don't try to memorize all these terms just trust that people like me who do the research we know what they are an extra virgin olive oil

you've got hydroxy tyrosol and ooc canol these are two Mother Nature's natural Brown fat triggering metabolism activating fat burning substances you saw tight without without with olive oil now you actually have the greens and the olive oil that trigger your brown fat to turn it down you must be really fun to go grocery shopping with I could see you in the AL oh look at the Olive you know what by the way if you check out uh my YouTube channel I actually did a video where I went to markets all around the world uh New

York and I went to one in France to show people what I'm looking at and why I'm looking at it when I'm actually shopping but it's easy to do the things that you think are going to be healthy for you tend to be healthy and then sometimes there are things that you're not sure would be healthy that actually turns out to trigger Brown fat like a can of beans can actually do that as well well let's talk about the five things that you recommend that everybody add because the team went to the grocery store and

we have here on the table some of the things that you mentioned and so I would love for you to just kind of point out some of the stuff on this plate tell us about the five things that we can add in or things that are really important to add in and why okay so let's just Dive Right In one of my favorite alltime foods are tomatoes okay and I think most people like tomatoes you know uh not just in a garden salad but think about your grandmother's tomato sauce or you go out to Italy

and you're eating some pasta or Italian restaurant who doesn't like uh some tomato sauce well it turns out Tomatoes contain a natural bioactive called lopine lycopene is found in uh uh nature it triggers your brown fat to burn down harmful extra body fat and a study in Portugal showed this in a totally clear way they took young healthy women who were grad students okay normal body size okay and uh they told them just go eat and exercise the way you normally do don't do anything special for This research study the only thing they did is

they gave them one Ripe Tomato to eat an hour before lunch every single day that's it okay and they measured their body composition so they put them under a scanner to look at how much visceral fat they measured their waist line they measured their blood cholesterol and their blood sugars and all the parameters inflammatory markers and they found after a month of eating just one tomato a day that that this is the only thing they were able to lose one pound with just one tomato one hour before lunch that's the power of the lycopene in

the Tomato you don't have to do extra exercise you don't have to limit your calories just to eat the way you want that just shows you how powerful a food actually is now lopine is what's doing this if you want the lycopene to really fire up now lycopene pick a tomato off a Vine and eat it like an apple it's going to be good for you it's going to do its thing if you want the lopine to be supercharged I do what you want to do is you want to heat it up sauté it okay

190 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes okay well amp will amp up the power of that lopine by 250% because the heat will change the chemistry of the lopine into a form your body loves to absorb so this is why Mediterranean food whether you're talking about Spain Greece Italy heating up cooking up that tomato sauce simmering it gently right okay um oh by the way lopine likes to dissolve in body fat in fact this has been studied at tus University you actually feed some young young people uh tomato with lopine or foods that contain lopine they

are able to track where that lopine goes you know where it goes and it goes they found it it goes right to your butt right to your thigh it goes homes in dude I'm having a tomato right into the body fat where it triggers your brown fat to fight that fat this is amazing okay well you know what's so cool about this is you're using the research and the science which you are clearly so passion about to truly teach us about the extraordinary power of your metabolism and how it's designed to work correctly and if

you feed it what it needs the proper fuel yeah it like turns on for you there are some other things that we have on the tray here what what what else do these magical things do pomegranates okay pomegranates you can have the pomegranate seeds on a salad you could have a pure pomegranate juice okay um and pomegranates they're pretty sweet so you got to not eat too much of the or not drink too much of the juice um actually you just need about eight fluid ounces one cup all right contains a natural substance called Elija

tannins again don't worry about trying to spell check it out it's it's complicated word elij tannin Mother Nature's Pharmacy is found in the juice of a pomegranate and what that does is it activates your gut uh to secrete mucus healthy mucus but how do you move stool how do you get regular you want to keep it all moving right so you need mucus mucus slip slides the thing all the way down um your uh your other end mucus that healthy mucus will grow a bacteria a healthy gut bacteria called acrania mucin mucin means it loves

mucus acromania this is the name of a gut bacteria that everyone who's listening to this and watching this should pay attention to AK k r m ANS I a acromania turns out acromania is a guardian of our metabolism acromania um activates our immune system lowers inflammation and this is smoking hot research Mel all right I'm just telling you I love how you talk about this a piece of acromania so think about acromania like uh you know an armadillo it's got kind of a hard shell on the outside little pieces on it on the outside one

piece has just been discovered it's called P9 p is in P Dirt N that fragment of acrania whether the bacteria is alive or blown into 100 pieces that bacteria that piece of that bacteria causes your body to produce its own glp1 which is exactly what OIC and these prescription drugs are trying to do so pomegranates grow acromania acromania will cause your body to create glp1 and what is gp1 one done lows lowers your blood sugar it helps you lose body fat wow okay that's actually these discoveries that are being made food is medicine right like

that's what I do it's super cool um but if you're going to drink pomegranate juice be very careful here's a practical tip go to the grocery store look for pomegranate juice I I tell people don't make sure it's pure pomegranate juice always always always check the ingredient label to make sure it's not really apple juice it's got a little squirt of pomegranate in it and red food coloring don't do that get the real deal or just buy the pomegranate you know why because when you have the whole pomegranate you're going to get the dietary fiber

from the seeds and those seeds that dietary fiber feature gut microbiome making the acromania even happier that's incredible okay that's incredible what does a kiwi do because I see kiwi kiwi is amazing because number one kiwi is a great source of vitamin C C is in Charlie all right what does that do that lowers inflammation now if you've got a lot of if you're carrying around extra body fat you're inflamed no doubt about it so just having a kiwi one kiwi a day gives you a big dose of vitamin C to lower that inflammation and

you will feel the difference all right you feel just less uh razed up inside now the other thing is kiwi has is uh has a lot of dietary fiber and that dietary fiber can change your Healthy gut bacteria if it's not so healthy it'll start to grow the healthy stuff in 24 hours a kiwi a day in the next day you will start seeing those beneficial effects what wait the next day 24 hours so I eat one kiwi one kiwi We Begin you you'll start seeing the you'll start feeling the beneficial effects it'll take an

unhealthy back gut back gut bacteria Colony start to make it a little healthier just in one day after four days you're going to get even more all right so this is the this is why it's so important to think about this the Kiwi a day for breakfast is super easy uh I love kiwi uh it's it's really easy oh by the way the skin of the Kiwi amazing source of dietary fiber but you eat that who would eat that I don't know I'll tell you I wouldn't do it either but you know how you do

it make a smoothie oh okay uh eat the kiwi with a spoon toss the skin into a blender to make the Smoothie it'll disappear and you'll get a huge amount of dietary fiber what what a great tip you should have a cooking show I really think you should have a cooking show talk to me about m ma matcha all right matcha is one of my favorite ways of having green tea now we know green tea it looks like you're drinking some green tea in front of you right now you know you have it in a

tea bag so the tea leaves are steeped in the hot water and the polyphenols the cakin come dissolving out of that into the water and you sip it and you get the good stuff the kakin which by the way turn on your brown fat to trigger down and burn harmful white fat all right watch me drink my tea now have a sep have a sip all right right now but I got to tell you matcha matcha is a a heck of a lot more powerful than tea in a bag because matcha is the entire Tea

Leaf ground into a powder now you get 100% of the polyphenols there's nothing left inside a tea bag the whole shebang is in there and the dietary fiber good for your gut microbiome so you want a dose of the polyphenol from tea drink matcha you get the fiber you get 100% of the poly it's super super powerful and that's been shown to burn down harmful body fat how do we know it burns down harmful body fat is because it actually shrinks your waistline you can actually lose an inch of a belt drinking matcha by drinking

matcha that's been studied uh by researchers in Japan in clinical research all the foods we're talking about now I need to clarify though because matcha tastes like dirty Grass at times so if I want to add in a little sugar or a little something am I killing I would not I would not I would not listen if you have a if you um are struggling with the taste of matcha which is listen the reason it tastes like grass is because it's a whole damn Leaf in there okay here's what you do make a smoothie or

a shake with it and just pour it in there and it'll disappear right in the background all right Dr Lee you're a genius it's it's the simplest way okay now uh so matcha is really good all right um dark chocolate dark chocolate who doesn't like dark chocolate who doesn't like chocolate all right right well it turns out a lot of people get confused they're like Dr Lee you're telling people to eat chocolate yes I am and the reason is because chocolate is actually a plant-based food what well chocolate is made with what makes chocolate chocolate

is Cacao okay and cacao comes from the cocoa uh bean pod that is growing from a tree and you take these uh pods which are shaped like a football they're heavy all right you cut them open you peel off the outer skin you dry it you ferment it you crush it up into a powder and now you mix it into make chocolate so chocolate is a confection but it's made with a plant-based food what's in that seed pod polyphenols up the yinyang one of them is called proanthocyanidin let me just tell you the more cacao

you have in your chocolate the higher percent cacao right you've heard about this 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% right so the higher the percent and you what you want to look for is 80% or higher you're getting a ton of these polyphenols in your chocolate all right and those polyphenols trigger Brown fat to fire off and burn down your harmful white fat all right dark chocolate does it now the darker the more bitter it's going to be so what I like to do what I tell people like just get a little square of it and

have it with coffee you've created mocha bite of chocolate sip of coffee you've created your own Mocha and guess what coffee has coffee also has polyphenols chlorogenic acid oh didn't you hear me say this before with apples that's right coffee has chlorogenic acid so coffee a cup of coffee will fire up your brown fat to burn down the harmful white fat every single morning wait so coffee with chocolate helps you burn fat yep that's a double barreled approach matcha kiwi pomegranates and tomatoes help you burn fat that's right and so does edamame you have a

little thing of edamame on this plate here uh edamame soybeans it turns out that um soybeans have been shown to trigger on the burning of harmful body fat by triggering your brown fat and so this is actually if you think about the foods we talked about these are not like uh crazy things you got to spend a lot of money ordering on the internet from some you know crazy supplement producer you don't have to be a bodybuilder you don't have to be a fitness champ all right the foods that we love to eat can be

really healthy for us as long as you don't overeat don't overfill the fuel tank as long as you're keeping on moving around so you're burning some of the fuel all right uh and when you're not actually overe eting the bad stuff now we haven't spent time talking about the bad stuff because let's talk about the bad stuff listen my whole philosophy is that if you spend more time putting good things in your body you're just not going to have as much room for the bad stuff but let's talk about the bad stuff look we all

know that there are foods that are very common that we've all grown up eating that aren't so good for us right and you know one of the things that I got to say upfront is I don't do what a lot of social influencers do I don't food bash brand bash um I don't try to shame people for what they eat listen I I love some snacks every now and then as much as the next person and it's totally fine because if you spend most of the time activating your body's healthy systems the hard wirring you

can afford take a hit every now and then it's like just putting some of that crappy gas in your tank every now and then you're going to bounce right back we're very very resilient that said I do think it's important for people to understand that you know we're beginning to understand why certain foods uh that are not so good are really bad for you okay and a great one that I always pick up with is soda okay uh whether you get the blue can or the red can or whether you have the regular soda or

diet soda any soda is really not healthy for you in the long run even the zeros and the diets especially those what do you mean especially especially the diets the history of soda goes I think back to France where they were serving fruit juices and somebody came up with this entrepreneurial idea let's bubble some things into the fruit juice and see if we can actually uh have a crowd pleaser all right and I think that was the birth of soda all right the soda fountain and everything else right you got to actually put the ju

you got to put the gas in there fast forward 20th century now you've actually got mass production of these sodas turns out that regular soda regardless of what what kind of what brand it is actually contains a kind of regular soda contains seven to nine teaspoons of cane sugar wow you come to my house and I offer you a glass and and I put nine teaspoons of sugar in it and say here have this smell you'd go that's disgusting I'm not going to do that that's what's happening when you're actually drinking soda wow now that

amount of sugar overload carb overload we talked about carb overload earlier all right now you're like really flushing out your that Tank's filling up real fast now and spilling over but on top of that you're overloading your metabolism because remember those hormones that have to collaborate to be able to really bring in the blood sugar to make sure you got enough energy when you flood that system all right uh your s your system doesn't go so well it doesn't function so well it starts to derail a little bit listen a single can even two every

now and then you're going to be just fine all right your s your body's not going to love you for it but it'll get back to itself pretty quickly but you know when I was in medical school I remember distinctly there was a classmate of mine so future doctor at the time uh who was bragging that he would have two sixpacks of soap soda every single day to get through the day I mean you know that's 12 cans of soda jeez think about the amount of sugar that that person was actually putting into a system

every day it's like8 tspoons yeah right I mean just think about think about the big pile um now I will tell you that the reason that the zero version the sugar-free version was developed is because well in the 1970s and ' 80s we started realizing that Sugar caes didn't gain weight so let's come up with something else well classic to the um industrial food uh uh mindset let's go invent something let's go invent artificial sweeteners right non-caloric sweeteners you can eat them they taste sweet but they don't actually add any calories that must be better

right well we thought so except that research has shown that people who drink a lot of diet soda they actually gain weight too huh they also gain weight all right even without sugar hold on because I thought that we talked earlier about the fact that calories are fuel and there's less calories exactly you're right about that however we also talked about the fact your gut microbiome helps you have good metabolism and burn fuel and turns out and Mel this is pretty new like within just the last few years the discovery that our gut bacteria is

very sensitive to artificial sweeteners and so artificial sweeteners actually kill off some of the good healthy gut bacteria so something that's well-intentioned non-caloric sweetener goes right down we don't absorb any of it because it's not a calorie goes down and feeds our gut microbiome remember and so what happens is the gut bacteria start to revolt they don't do so well some of the got die off and now guess what your metabolism isn't functioning normally you're derailed from that hard wiring and now you start to gain weight so food number one that I think that you

should stay away from our sodas regular or Diet um uh that's that that's just a that's one of the ones that you want to stay away from all right second food that I tell people to try to stay away from are these um packaged Health Foods now you go to the airport and you go to uh you know you see the the bar and it looks like it's got granola and all that kind of stuff in it it seems like it'd be a healthy bar yes take a look at the ingredient label okay and you

will find that there are all these emulsifiers the glue that holds the things together sometimes artificial flavorings that are actually in there because you know the healthy stuff doesn't have enough sweet hit for you um uh sometimes artificial coloring so it doesn't look so it looks a little bit nicer or here's another one besides the bar uh you you know like tree nuts are healthy right so you like uh almonds magania pistachios cashews right you go to the airport you go to the the the the convenience store part oh let me go look for something

in the health food section there's nuts in a bag all right and they're barbecued flavored well there's no such thing as called barbecued flavored take a look at the ingredient label art those are red food coloring yellow food coloring they've got artificial seasonings it's not even real Chelly pepper it's like artificial stuff it's decid to light it up anything that's manufactured like that to be healthy please read the ingredient label if it's if it seems like it's Greek or Latin or you can't pronounce it quickly it's probably an ultr processed ingredient that's going to harm

your health it's going to increase oxidative stress it's going to stress out your body it's going to cause inflammation maybe damage your gut microbiome so again you know I think stay away from that Ultra processed stuff that's got if it looks like it might be nuclear colored all right that's probably not good nuclear for your gut nuclear for your gut don't nuke your gut don't n don't nuke your gut what else should we avoid all right another thing that you want to actually be really really mindful of are processed Meats now look we all grew

up with process meets I can remember you know one of my earliest memories is like going to school with a with a paper bag with a sandwich my mom made with processed meats you go to the deli you know what by the way do you know what the why they call them a delicatess in our Deli no it's short for delicious and it was actually coming from the people that were trying to figure out how how to actually uh sell leftover meat products in a way that would be delicious so a lot of these um

salamis balnis all the stuff that you would actually see um in a deli yeah are all put together from Little scraps of meat that come as byproducts of the food industry first I'm going to come back to that but first let's talk about why it's not so good for you that's disgusting that's what's in the that's what that's what you're getting when you get sliced meat that's right no yeah real yeah do you think that a turkey comes in a square well it kind of looks like a breast I don't know like I like I

I and I see organic on the pass package because as you're saying processed meat you're talking about like sliced Meats yeah I'm talking about the kind that you know like the at the deli they move them back and forth they slice the things well it turns out that the World Health Organization has identified that these processed Meats all right and we're not talking about like freshly butchered you know prepared at home uh or restaurant but these processed Meats contain all kinds of chemicals to be able to actually get them to where they are and they

have been classified as a class one carcinogen by the World Health Organization all right we're talking about baloney salami pepperoni and by the way uh I remember I had a patient once who was a former USDA inspector okay and he was retired by then and I would love to talk to my patients about their jobs like things that I didn't know like the Lobster guy would what happens in a lobster but well this guy usdaa inspector I would say um tell me spare no details tell me everything about the inspection Meat Inspection he's like well

you know let me just tell you I had to change my boots my rubber boots um every four months because the stuff on the floor the liquid from the of the places that made processed Meats would dissolve my boots oh my God and so that made me that that that kind of queued me in that there's probably in the meats that are not so good for you and it's not just the nitrates I mean it's like the synthetic nitrates and that they put in there other preserves and coloring but class one carcinogen uh abundant evidence

that it likely to increase a risk for cancer especially colon cancer not surprisingly right you're eating a lot of this stuff and it goes down to your gut but I learned something recently that you know when you go to the deli uh and let's say you're ordering baloney or salami right it's in a it's a it's a meat in a cylinder and animals don't come in cylinders like that but again this is the meat scraps and I learned about this by the way from a um podcast called science versus it's a really good podcast and

uh what I found out because I'm I'm learning about this is that it's originally the meat scraps are all put together and then the US military invented a meat glue glue that would take scraps that you could pulverize and and and stick in there you know like the the particle board that we actually have wood like you you go to go to the big box stores these these deli meats are basically um the particles are meat particles that are glued together and then mold it into a cylinder well it's true it does come in a

tube wrapped in plastic I just assumed that was a part of an animal's body that's been wow so so if I buy though sliced meats and it says organic still I I would just say okay look listen I'm a I'm by the way I'm a reasonable list so if you if you if your favorite thing is a baloney sandwich knock yourself out enjoy it but just take the time to really savor it and don't do it very often all right you know that it's not good listen we are you know not to speed on the

highway but we all do it every now and then but it don't speed all the time because that's what's going to lead to car crash so I'm not endorsing people to go out to eat deli meat what I'm saying is that just like the soda just like you know the nuclear snack foods processed meat ain't good for you all right tastes tastes good we grew up with it but it's not good for you what else should we avoid all right I'm going to tell you something you're going to be surprised by and this is new

research and that's bottled water why do we avoid bottle water the the water isn't the problem it's the bottle bottle and we're beginning to realize that these bottled waters I mean come on like I I I I used to carry around bottled water all the time with me all right you're supposed to stay hydrated right right okay any vacation you go to you're getting a bottle of water in your hotel room turns out that now we realize that the bottled water the bottles of plastic bottles are shedding microplastics into the water so while we don't

taste it we're actually pouring plastic into our bodies all right little tiny particles plastic particles and you know how much plastic we are ingesting on average every week no a credit card's worth of plastic really every week we're ingesting it now listen we've known this for some years but and I used to be asked this all the time you know what's the consequence of the plastic and I used to I mean just only a few years ago say we don't really know it seems like it's probably okay our body must get rid of it somehow

now we know just in the last 24 months so this is new all right I'm telling you a bunch of new stuff uh that microplastics are detectable in the human body and they're associated with Badness let me tell you it was a study that came out of Italy uh with neurologists and cardiologists uh uh that looked at uh people with clogged blood vessels cardiovascular disease uh in the large vessels that feed their brain and they were narrowed down and what they found is that when they took out the the pl the clog right so it's

kind of like calling a plumber into to clean the drain when they clean the drain and remove the plaque the clogging of the blood vessels they found that they could detect plastic embedded in the narrowing of blood vessels that would be feeding the brain more importantly they found a correlation the people who had Plastics embedded in their blood vessels had a four-fold increase four times increase in having a fatal heart attack or stroke whoa okay that's serious stuff subsequently we've actually discovered you can actually find plastic in the brain in fact you can take a

kitchen scale and measure two human brains and you know which one's got more plastic and it's heavier you can measure it like you know like you're measuring flour for making cookies or whatever you can actually measure the amount of plastic in the human brain and we found plastic in the blood circulation we never looked at it before but in a blood vile blood in a doctor's office if you look for it you can actually find plastic circulating in it and we've actually found uh plastic in human testicles we found it in human semen don't ask

me how it gets down there and it's also found by urologists who are actually doing surgery they've actually found it in the flesh of the penis embedded in there probably from years and years and years of being exposed to plastic now is that M like I I I don't mean to like it sounds terrifying but if you what should you be drinking your water out of class okay so number one this is let me let me just give you some real pra practical stuff all right water if if you want water drink put it in

a glass container okay not a plastic container and for those of you who are bringing your uh bottles to the water bottles to the gym get a metal one or get one that's GL lined with glass on the inside take the plastic ones toss them out immediately and when you go back to the kitchen go root around your drawers and your cabinets and anything that you might have once used to store leftovers the plastic stuff plastic containers with a plastic top out it goes all right replace it with ceramic or glass okay um cups in

your cupboard uh you've got you know the ceramic mugs you've got the glasses for you you know your guests uh you might some plastic ones that out there you know you got it at a ball game or whatever out throw it out and now I feel like an idiot because I've handed you a silicone glass so it doesn't make don't drink out of it Dr Le don't listen I mean I'm telling you pla microplastics are a big deal now I'll tell you it's almost impossible to get away from microplastics they're everywhere in the environment you

know they're they're in the they're in the new carpets they're in uh the the HVAC systems of our house different than actually ingesting it in your food we we breathe it in and it gets into our body as well but you're right what I'm trying to say is that for foods that you want to avoid okay you don't you want you want to stay away from Plastics whenever you can that means don't microwave something with a plastic top or with a Saran wrap on top that means don't buy food that's packed prepacked in plastic you

know those kinds of quick meals that you could actually have all right it's got a big plastic you nuke in a microwave and you put a fork to let the steam out all that stuff is just coating it with plastic and obviously impacting our metabolism and we believe that those you know by the way there's people have been talking about this for years like maybe these microplastics are endocrine disruptors and that's why we're actually having problems with our hormones I don't know I haven't seen enough data on that I mean listen I'm a scientist so

here's the thing about scientists like a real scientist and I know you've talked to a bunch of them um a real scientist will tell you what they know but they'll also tell you when they don't know something and I don't know enough information about hormone disruptors and microplastics but I do know because I'm a vascular guy study blood vessels I do know that the little particle bits that are stuck in your blood vessels are linked to real serious health outcomes and Badness and so for me one of the things besides processed meats and you know

nuclear foods and uh you know and sodas I would say stay away from water in a bottle that's or water in in a container that's plastic because you have a choice you can get one out of glass you have very strong opinions about uh what we do on airplanes on an airplane yes what not to drink or eat okay well listen I to do my research and to work with my colleagues I do travel quite a bit so I know a lot as I'm sure you do about sitting on a plane and one of the

things about planes that's that's kind of crazy is that you know we're instinctively served Beverages and foods and you know if you're like me I'm working on my laptop and somebody comes by and hands me something my instinct is they take it right I mean and you know it's free kind of think well n you paid for it but it it seems like it's something that I should eat well there's a couple of things that I don't do I don't drink coffee or tea on an airplane and the reason I don't is because a lot

of people don't know this but the water from your coffee or tea comes from a tank in the airplane right and they they don't clean that tank but once or twice a year e and so you know what happens when you actually have a container you don't clean very often it's pretty disgusting and I don't even want to go into the uh the the the chassis of an airplane to take a look at the rusty old tank with all the crud that's in the bottom that they are actually using and pouring out listen the the

place where the flight attendants are actually making the coffee looks pretty clean you know um coffee looks okay I can't taste anything but I you know I'm somebody that I know enough that I care about what I put into my body and I would rather get a glass container of water or coffee or bring better yet bring your own thermos metal thermos or glass thermos fill up your own coffee all right obviously after security and bring it on and now you know you actually have something reliable that doesn't have weird stuff and I listen a

rule of thumb for anybody listening to this keep weird stuff out of your body any chemicals anything you can't pronounce anything you have no idea why it's there now that I told you about meat glue you know like it's it's stuff that you just kind of don't really want Even if we grow up with it listen there's so many things that you know we're getting smarter about things that are good for us but we're also getting a little smarter about things that are not good for us well you know Dr Lee I think one of

the things that's really confusing is that there's just so much information where I want to go next is since there's a lot of people around the world that may live in a place where it's really hard to find local produce or they can't grow it themselves you know what is the optimal place where you should be grocery shopping and is there a difference between farmers market and going to your local market or grocery store yeah you know it's that's a big question um I would sort of I'm I'm a pragmatic person practical person so I

say you know if you're going to buy food buy the best quality food you can within the most convenient place that you you can as well like whatever makes whatever you're able to get access to you know like again I try to be very careful not to make people feel bad that they can't go shop at a fancy organic farmers market a lot of people can't so let's say you can't you're listening to this you can't how do you do Lee go into a grocery store like what have you discovered based on your research if

you're going into a grocery store how do you shop okay so when I go to the grocery store I go to the produce section first it's usually in front of the store and I'm looking at the stuff that they put closer to the entrance which happens to be if you read this little signs that they put near the foods if it's grown locally like local apples or local strawberries whatever it's seasonal that's the seasonal stuff that hasn't taken an airplane ride from South America been sitting in the back for you know in a box for

you know a couple of days that's the stuff that's more a little fresher coming in and local when the when food doesn't have to travel it's it's going to be fresher I mean think about when you get on a plane you fly someplace far away you know you're not fresh that same day you got to take a shower get a good night's sleep same thing with the food so local your fresher so I look for that even in a regular grocery store usually the stuff they put closer to you if you read the signs is

going to be closer but that doesn't mean that the other foods that they have aren't so good for you a lot of greens are grown in places where you can get you know uh produced Gran and farmed and picked all year round um that's fine um uh I go I go to the middle aisle by the way um and you're supposed to stay out of the middle aisle that's also a myth I will tell you the middle aisle has some really really amazing healthy foods like what okay you got to actually put your filter on

so you're not looking at the chips and the candy and all the ultr processed stuff that you might snacks you might get there but you think about it you get um uh extra virgin olive oil is there lentils and legumes are there cans of beans are on there you know one of my favorite beans are actually simple can of white Navy beans all right I love them I don't know why when I was a kid I I must have had a nice soup or stew with them are they gonna help me burn fat they are

how so Studies have been done by the University of Toronto looking at people that have metabolic syndrome so they already had a little too much body fat and it turns out that um by giving people the equivalent of one can of uh beans to eat five times a week so not every day five times the week they could actually shrink the waistline of people by shrinking body fat in the tube of the body visceral fat by an inch over the course of a month now how does that work well it turns out that there's fiber

dietary fiber in beans and now how you cook them matters obviously how you serve it matters um you know use a traditional recipe um and and you get like bean stew with rosemary and olive oil and chopped shallots or onions in there I mean it's going to taste really good all right um trust me on this because I I I can make that myself and what it does is that that dietary fiber feed your gut microbiome you're a healthy gut bacteria thank you for doing it and they release um substances that help to streamline your

metabolism so you use your energy more efficiently all right so middle aisle oh another place in another group of foods in the middle aisle that get bypassed obviously dried fruits you can actually get cranberries blueberries apricots you can get in the middle aisle but here's something that a lot of people don't pay any attention to and that is tinned seafood what tinned Seafood okay okay what doing with tin now follow me on this right when I was a kid and I saw a a round can of tuna fish yep now I've been to my friend's

houses long often enough when I was a kid when when those one of those things get opened up it smells fishy and it' smell just like wet cat food yes all right so i' I'd stay away from that stuff like my whole life then when I was doing my research I realized that I was wrong and that tin sea food is a delicacy in the Mediterranean with really healthy uh uh diets and they call them conservice like they're conserving it they're preserving it they catch fish on a boat it could be squid it could be

mackerel it could be sardines it could be tuna could be a whole bunch of different kinds of fish um they cook it right away they steam it and then they pack it in extra virgin olive oil so now the fish has got omega-3 healthy Omega-3s good for your metabolism helps you burn harmful body fat now they're packing in olive oil now it's got now it's nice and moist and it and olive oil's got the hydroxy tyrosol and ooc canthal that helps to activate your brown fat then they chop up little herbs and flavoring seasoning and

they put it into a tin and the reason they did that in the Mediterranean is because in the months they couldn't go out fishing all right they would actually want to have omega-3s they now they didn't call them Omega-3s they just call them protein and they call them delicious Local Foods but if you go to Spain Portugal south of France Italy Greece and you go look at you know some of their little food stores by the by the water you know by the shore they will actually you'll have stores packed with these um conservas and

they are delicious fastest lunch I've ever had okay is you get a hunk of sourdough bread sourdough because it's a it's a fermented probiotic food the sourness of of sourdough bread comes from a um bacteria called lactobacillus makes lactic acid which gives you the Tangy sour of sourdough bread it's great for you hunk a sourdough bread reach into my pantry pull out a tin of conservice pop it open with a fork you know and I've got myself a really deliciously when I open some uh some pickles or something now you get some more fermented foods

that's a way of getting a really tasty mouthwatering lunch and what I do by the way for at night if I um so busy I don't have time to cook dinner um but I'm hungry right and it's and and I'm like oh I got to eat something but I didn't plan dinner or I missed dinner what do I do I will take um uh I'll take a a pot boil some water I'll look for some you know good pasta ideally organic pasta I'll boil it up okay I take a a stainless steel pan and you

know what I do I I heat it up with a little extra virgin olive oil and I will crack open a tinned seafood thing might be mackerel sardines could be anything okay muscles clams a squid and I will just cut those up real briefly and I'll slop throw them right into the cooked pasta heat it up take a little tube of of double concentrated tomato sa uh tomato paste little squirt in there flip it around a couple of times and man my whole house smells great and now I've gotten like a gourmet meal I just

made myself with conservative you find in the middle AIS of the grocery store and more importantly all of those things help me lose weight and they're not expensive yes okay so this is Dr Lee that's the trifecta that's right so again middle aisle it's got lots of good stuff you got to filter out all the bad stuff but go for the good stuff um that you can actually find that that to me is really the important thing is that uh I my message is that you should really try to align the foods that you love

to eat that research has discovered can help you burn body fat improve your metabolism help you stay healthier get to that next level of health and eat reasonable amounts of it prepare it with other ingredients that are actually going to light up your health and just enjoy I love that Dr Lee you have been so generous and so passionate and I feel unbelievably empowered by everything that you've shared with us and I know that the person that's listening is like okay what do I do what do I do there's a lot what do I do

so for the person listening who wants to lose weight who would like to really focus on simple steps to take to unlocking the power of your metabolism and losing some weight this year and just generally being healthier what are the top three things that you would recommend the person listening do immediately starting today in order to achieve those goals using your research it's going to be a lot easier than you think great first thing is for your beverages don't drink anything except for um coffee tea or water okay now I drink coffee all day long

don't put dairy milk in it you can use nut milk okay is fine um uh Dairy contains saturated fats but more importantly those saturated fats bind to the good bioactives in coffee and tea and then you don't actually absorb them they just kind of like go get flushed down your system so for beverages all right eliminate all the beverag EX for water coffee and tea all right that's one thing that you can do immediately the second thing that I would actually say is um uh cut down or cut out on ultr processed foods now ultr

processed foods basically foods made by a factory containing you know 20 or more ingredients most of which you can't pronounce and you don't know why they're in there it's you know that old saying that your grandmother wouldn't recognize them as food all right and they don't look like the original food that they were it you know it sounds like it's not punitive it's just that if it comes in a box or a can and it's got to read the ingredient label if if it seems like it's like not the kind of food that you'd recognize

you couldn't make it yourself you know you can't make animal crackers yourself at home you know most people can't um that's an ultra processed food cut down or cut out those all right and instead swap them in with what I would say plant-based Foods I'm not telling you to be a vegan I'm saying just start adding some things uh that are that are uh more in the veggie side of things and it doesn't have to be even green Green's good definitely eat green but you know it could be colorful red eat the rainbow as I

say um that's that's good that's a swap in that is that is actually in with the in with the good stuff and then you know cut down or cut out the other stuff that's a second thing and the third thing I would actually say is um don't eat too much all right eat slowly so you can actually pay attention to your body's signals eat what you eat what tastes good to you like your preferences but don't eat too fast let your body signal to you when you're satisfied but before you're full I'm good you know

like we we've had that right I mean you're you're eating with friends and they want you to keep on eating and you're like no no I'm good I'm good that's what you want to aim for not that I'm full I'm full I'm good thanks I'm good aim for that all right because that actually limiting the volume that you eat is going to be a big start um for helping your own hard wirring start to burn down that extra body fat along with the plant-based Foods along with the coffee and a tea and by the way

even water cold water can actually help you burn down body fat by increasing your metabolism you know why because cold water in the core of your stomach the cor core temperature guess what triggers your brown fat oh it's cold that must be hibernating let's go ahead and fire up that brown fat so you'll start to burn down some extra body fat just by drinking cold water so those are good food related things and then I would say and this is the topic for a whole other conversation is like get in motion I'm not telling you

don't have to hire a trainer you don't have to you know go to an expensive gym you don't have to buy workout equipment for your you know basement when you've got other things to do with your money but stay in motion go for a walk got a bike go for a ride you got a friend go out and gossip with your friend and go for a walk Outdoors that's the thing you want to do those things burn down energy they take energy they they consume your fuel food by alone is very very helpful Food Plus

movement exercise really good that's sort of like the those are two things is a double bared approach that anybody can do very very easily how can following your advice about the food to add into your diet this year improve the quality of your life ah listen if you felt that some of the foods I was talking about major mouth water then you know that following this kind of advice is going to make you appreciate your food so okay here's here's a and by the way by when you appreciate your food your quality of life automatically

increases right so this is what I always tell people like uh oh man I don't know if I could eat healthy food and what I tell people is go to your local Mediterranean or Asian restaurant and just get the menu come back home with a magic marker and probably don't steal the menu ask if you could borrow one at home and just circle the foods that you actually like and then I will tell you it's very easy to find the ingredients in those foods that light up your metabolism that can help you burn down body

fat and don't eat too much of it just savor it Dr Lee what are your parting words uh the same words I started with love your food to love your health that's my big belief like I think that everyone can have joyful eating if you follow your preferences and just be mindful that you should just really enjoy and Savor the healthy food that you already love I I'm G to tell you what I love I love you Dr Lee I know the audience is just going to go crazy over everything you just taught us and

so I absolutely have to have you come back and talk about metabolism and if you love spending time with Dr Lee I'm G to tell you something I want you to send your questions in just go to melrobbins.com or put them in the comments below but melrobbins.com is the best place to put him because I know that you are going to want more from him so Dr Lee we are going to have you back I'll make sure that we bring the audience questions but I just cannot thank you enough for spending some time with us

here in our Boston Studios and really truly empowering us with everything that you just shared thanks for having me Dr Lee thank you thank you thank you and I also want to thank you I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to something that is going to improve your health and I wanted to be sure to tell you in case nobody else does today that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life and there is zero doubt in my mind that if

you take everything to heart that Dr Lee shared with both you and me and you try it you're not only going to feel better you're going to get healthier and that is going to help you live a better life all righty I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode and I want to thank you for being here and listening and watching all the way to the end here on YouTube and didn't you just love him I loved him so much and you know what I I would love I would love it if you

would hit subscribe because it really supports me and I know you're the kind of person that loves supporting the people that support you and it tells us that you love these videos and if you want another one I'll be waiting for you in this one as soon as you hit play