#1 Absolute Easiest Way To Burn Fat

Hello, Health Champions. Today we're going to  talk about the number one absolute easiest way to burn fat. If we want to understand how to  burn fat, we need to understand how the body ends up with fat in the first place.

The  reason is not that you eat too much fat because fat is just a form of fuel—it's a  natural fuel for the body. But so often you hear that you get fat because you eat too many  calories and that fat has the most calories, and that's why you get fat when  you eat fat. That is not how it works.

It is the excess energy from any  type of food, and here's how that works. When your body needs some resources, then you get  something called hunger. Then you can store the excess energy from that.

So, if you eat something  terribly unhealthy like a 1,000-calorie milkshake, that milkshake is going to be absorbed  and work its way through your bloodstream, into the cells, and into storage within  two to three hours. If it's 1,000 calories, but during those two to three hours  you only use up 200 or 300 calories, then you're going to have to store about 700 to  800 calories. That's what you do with the storage.

So then you would have some extra. Again,  milkshake is not your best example. I used that kind of as an extreme just to illustrate  something, but it's very practical to store excess energy because then, when you don't have  food and you go without, that's called fasting.

Now you can burn that extra energy. It's a  constant back and forth: you have hunger, you eat something, you store the excess, and then  when you go without, you can burn that. It's a beautiful system, and it's worked for as long  as any living thing has existed on the planet.

The reason we store it as fat is that fat is  the most effective way to store excess energy. It's where we can store the most energy  without weighing hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of pounds and still have enough  energy to last us for weeks or even months if we were to go without food. So, if you have a  lot of fat on your body, it is simply because you ate too much.

And don't get me wrong,  there's no judgment here. I'm not trying to say that you're a glutton or that you have no  willpower. There are many, many reasons why you would store extra fat and why you would eat too  much, and we're going to go over a lot of those.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that we  need to understand why you did that—what sort of circumstances created that behavior.  The first thing that we need to understand is that you cannot store fat; you cannot make  fat without a hormone called insulin. It's a fat-storing hormone.

If you couldn't make  it, you can't get fat. That's what happens with Type 1 diabetics—they can't make insulin.  Therefore, even though their blood sugar is through the roof, they do not gain weight and  they actually starve to death in some cases.

So we need to understand the difference between  having energy in the bloodstream and having energy in the cell. After you eat something, you absorb  food and glucose into the bloodstream. This is the bloodstream here, but over here is the cell.

The  cell is where all your metabolic activity takes place—or the vast majority. That's where your body  manufactures things, that's where you make energy, and so forth. You make tissues and proteins,  and they are going to become body parts.

This glucose needs to get into that cell, but  it can't do that without insulin. Insulin is the key that opens up that gateway.  Like I said, with Type 1 diabetics, they don't have that insulin unless we can  inject it.

Before we had insulin to inject, a lot of Type 1 diabetics—or basically  all of them—would die. They could make it for a while with certain diets, but  they could not survive in the long run without that insulin. They just need to get  the energy from the bloodstream into the cell.

If you are a diabetic, if you are insulin  resistant, or if you watch some of my videos, you've heard a lot about insulin. It's easy  to start thinking that insulin is some evil, some bad substance that we need to fight,  but it's not. Insulin is not evil; it's not bad.

It's absolutely necessary for life.  We just need to get it in the right balance, and it would never become a problem as  long as we live in balance with nature. As long as we do what all the other animals on  the planet do—which is they eat food from the planet in its original form—they eat it the way  they find it.

The second thing is that they move to get the food. They move a lot; they move all  day long. That's the purpose of movement.

That's why animals can move: so that they can go and  find food. There are living things that don't move—they're called plants—and they have  roots that they can use to extract energy, nutrients, and water from the soil. But if you  don't have roots, then you need to be moving.

Unfortunately, we have a lifestyle today  where we can get food without moving, and that's a problem. So then we need to understand  how that affects us and what we can do instead. So, as long as we eat food from the planet in its  original form and we move to get it, now there's a natural regulation—the balance between eating and  fasting, the balance between hunger and satiety.

There's a beautiful system in the body that is  so sensitive and tells us exactly how much we need to eat and when we're done. But when we start  breaking those rules, when we move outside of that natural lifestyle and we start eating unnatural  foods, now we bypass this beautiful system. We bypass that regulation, and we change those set  points, and we get what's called dysregulation.

This is where we can't tell when we're hungry,  we eat for the wrong reasons, we eat too much, and we don't have those natural boundaries.  Normally, that balance helps us survive. This whole system is there for survival, but when  we bypass it, now we create something that's counterproductive, that acts opposite to that  survival, and we could call that counter-survival.

So when we talk about natural and  unnatural regulation and natural foods, then what is that compared to?  We need to have a reference, and my reference is the early humans—our  ancestors. So, I went to the encyclopedia to figure out what that means, and it's Homo  sapiens.

That's modern humans. Homo sapiens, the species that includes all modern humans,  evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. The reason we compare ourselves to them is that  their DNA is 99.

9% or more identical to our DNA, and that's the DNA that codes for all the enzymes  that are going to help break down the food. So when you put food in your body, you can't  digest that without enzymes. You can't use that food without enzymes.

And if you have the same  DNA, then you have the same enzymes, and you're supposed to eat the same type of food that they  ate. Those are the systems that developed for millions of years prior to Homo sapiens and that  have stayed the same for about 300,000 years. So, what does that mean in terms of tolerating  modern food?

Well, any food introduced in the last 300,000 years that they did not have  is basically an experiment. We don't know. It's possible that we could tolerate  it, that it could even be good for us, but it's not very likely because these changes  occur so slowly.

And 300,000 years is thousands of generations, and most of this modern food has been  introduced in the last two or three generations. So when we start living differently  than what our DNA is asking for, what our DNA is designed for and accustomed  to, that's when we get this dysregulation, this lack of balance. There are two main causes  for that.

The first one is the timing of food—are we eating more frequently or less often than our  ancestors? —and the second is the type of food. So let's talk about the first one.

The natural  patterns for how often we should eat is that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and they  could go around, and they could pick some things. They could pick some berries, some  nuts, and whatever edible plants they could find. But for the most part, the vast majority  of their calories probably came from hunting.

That means they did not eat very often. And here,  as an example, I've just put in two meals a day and what might happen to their blood sugar.  But maybe they just ate once a day, or maybe they grazed a little bit, and then every other  day they had a huge meal when they slaughtered a woolly mammoth or something.

We don't know for  sure, but one thing is fairly certain: they did not wake up to breakfast, and they did not have  snacks throughout the day. They were probably very metabolically healthy, which means that  their blood sugar stayed in a very narrow range, probably somewhere between 80 and 120, possibly  even a good bit lower—like maybe 65 to 100 or 110 or something. But they didn't have these  huge spikes of blood sugar that we have today.

If we compare that with what we do today,  I'm going to call that an unnatural pattern. That's when, if we look at the starting point as  midnight, we sleep for several hours, but then as soon as we get up, we have breakfast, whether  that's at 6:00 or 8:00. For a lot of people, for most people probably, it doesn't pass very  many hours.

So maybe a couple of hours later, we have a mid-morning snack before lunch, and then an  afternoon snack before dinner, and then an evening snack. So we eat throughout the day, and we're  told to eat throughout the day because we believe that blood sugar is what gives us energy and that  carbohydrate gives us energy, which is a fallacy. Your body is made to store energy and  then to slowly retrieve that energy from a few meals.

When we do that, then we have  something called insulin, like I said. So every time that you eat something and your blood sugar  goes up, we're going to release a little bit of insulin to bring that foodstuff—the glucose—from  the bloodstream into the cell. But if we have very slow and very few blood sugar swings, then we're  going to have very few and very slight insulin swings as well.

They're going to be triggered by  the food, so they're going to be just a little bit behind the glucose curve. Then, in between the  meals, assuming that we had two meals in a day, it's going to go down, but it's not going  to go all the way down to the baseline because insulin takes a while to get back. But overall, by eating whole foods and fewer meals, they never leave that average  baseline.

They have slight fluctuations, but they still stay metabolically healthy at a  very low and balanced amount of insulin. But now, if we look at the modern way of eating, where we  have large blood sugar spikes many, many times a day, then the corresponding insulin spikes are  going to be very large and very frequent also. The biggest problem here is that, over time,  if we have our insulin spikes so frequent, then insulin is never really allowed  to drop.

So for most of the day, we have an elevated level of insulin. What's  going to happen now is that, over time, insulin baselines are going to go up. This  is what creates insulin resistance.

So, instead of having a level of maybe three, now,  over time—5, 10, 15 years later—our baseline never goes below maybe 15. This is where we start  getting metabolic disease and insulin resistance. Here's why this is so critically important  to understand: because high insulin leads to insulin resistance.

Whenever something is really  high chronically, your cells start resisting it. Your body adapts by creating insulin resistance.  One thing that happens now is you get hungry—and we'll talk a little bit more about that.

Also,  high insulin blocks fat burning because insulin is a fat-storing hormone. If there's no way for  us to burn fat while insulin is really high, then in order to burn fat, we  must break that insulin cycle. Here's what's happened with this dysregulation: if  we are insulin sensitive, if we're metabolically healthy, now we can store fat—we can store excess  energy.

That happens at a certain amount; there's a certain momentum to do that. Then there's an  equal momentum in the other direction for how much our bodies have a tendency to burn this fat again.  So, it's like a revolving door—that's the way it's supposed to happen.

We eat, we store some, and  then we burn it, and we're back to square one. But if we drive insulin up over time and we become  insulin resistant, now this tendency to store is many, many times higher, and our tendency  to burn is almost non-existent. Because, remember, we cannot burn fat when insulin  levels are high.

High levels of insulin lock in the fat. It pushes this equation—this  equilibrium—in one direction only. So, it's not about eating fewer calories per se.

It's  about eating fewer things that stimulate insulin. So we drop carbs because fat has a very,  very slight insulin response. If you can see that tiny, tiny area—you might have to  zoom in.

Because if we compare by numbers, then fat—the insulin response of fat—is in single  digits. With protein, it's in double digits, and with carbohydrates, it's in triple  digits. So if carbohydrates are 100, protein is about 10, 15, 20.

Fat is  single digits, like two or three or four. The second way to reduce insulin is to eat fewer  meals—reduce the number of meals. Because every time you eat, you spike insulin.

So if you  eat fewer meals, then there's fewer spikes. And if you eat your meals in a shorter period of  time—if you only eat one meal a day—then there's 24 hours to the next one. If you eat two meals  and you put them in a six- to eight-hour period, now there are longer periods of no food.

That  means during that time, we allow insulin to drop. That simply means that your body  knows how to use fat for energy, for fuel. So there's basically two types of  fuel.

Your body can use protein, but there are so many mechanisms in  place to prevent that from happening. So, as long as there's carbs and fat available, your  body is going to burn that for fuel. Your body is very, very adaptive.

So, simply put, if you  reduce one—like carbs—then your body will tend to increase the dependence on others. You're  more likely to burn fat if you reduce carbs. But there's a couple of points here because it  doesn't work exactly the same way the other way.

For example, if you ate 50% of your calories  from carbs and 50% of your calories from fat, would that mean that you were balanced? That  you were 50/50 on carb versus fat adaptation? That your body was equally likely to use both  types of fuel?

And the answer is absolutely not. The reason is that carbs raise blood sugar.  Carbohydrates become blood glucose, and therefore, they must be processed first.

Your body is  not in a hurry to get rid of the fat. If you eat 50/50 and you have half the calories in  the bloodstream as fat and half as glucose, your body is in no hurry to get rid of the  fat. But it has to get rid of the glucose very, very quickly because it's so important  to keep that glucose in a very narrow range.

High glucose and very low  glucose are extremely dangerous. The second reason is that the carbohydrates  you eat not only have to be processed first, but they also stimulate insulin. And insulin  blocks fat burning.

Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. So, because carbs increase insulin, now  carbs are also going to block the usage of fat. And here's another key that  most people don't realize: because high insulin levels block  fat burning, that means you can't retrieve those calories—that energy—from fat  as readily.

This is going to make you very hungry because if you store all that fat but your  body can't get to it, now you have to eat more. So the solution, therefore, would be to reduce  the amount of carbohydrate, which will reduce the amount of insulin. This is how you break that  vicious cycle.

With less insulin, now you can access the fat, and you can start returning to  balance. This is what's called fat adaptation, and it simply means that if you don't eat  so many carbs all the time that have to be processed first, now your body returns, the  metabolic pathways upregulate, and the enzymes and pathways to use the fat kick in. That  lower insulin allows you to access the fat.

So fat-adapted simply means that your body  knows how to use fat for fuel again. The reason this works so well is that once  you're fat-adapted, and you can use fat, and you keep the carbohydrates low enough  for this to happen, now you have long-lasting fuel. Carbohydrates bounce up and down every  couple of hours; fat doesn’t do that.

And if you have a reserve of fat on the body, now  you can eat some of your food off the plate, and you can eat the rest of the food, in terms  of energy, from the body. Because it doesn't fluctuate all the time, it gives you stable  energy, and you therefore have less hunger. If your energy is stable, you don't need  to run and look for food to stimulate your blood sugar and raise your blood sugar  all the time.

As a result, obviously, now you can go longer between meals, and this  helps you eat less and burn fat. It helps you eat less because now you have a resource on your  body that can provide energy. So the number one absolute easiest way to burn fat is simply  to work with your body—to allow the body to do what it's supposed to do and to provide  the resources that it's supposed to have.

That simply means to get healthy, and that's  the beauty of this. It's not a short-term fix, it's not a magic pill, and it's not something  that's going to rebound three weeks later when you get tired of it. It means that you get  healthy by providing the natural conditions, circumstances, and resources that your  body is designed to have by natural law.

I often call that the Triad of Health, and we  illustrate that with a triangle. It simply means eat better, which is the chemical aspect—the  nutritional aspect. It means move better, which is the structural or mechanical aspect,  meaning we need movement.

And then it means think better—that's the emotional or  the stress reduction aspect of it. So then, what is the best diet to accomplish all  of this? It's not a single diet, it's not a label, it's not a program.

It is any type of food—whole  food—that provides nutrients, that gives us the resources we need: the building blocks and the  energy, the essential amino acids, the essential fatty acids, the vitamins, and the minerals. But  at the same time, it doesn't cause a bunch of blood sugar swings to upset our metabolic balance.  It's something that satisfies you, something that gets you full with less amount of food than you  have been eating if you want to lose weight, and something that normalizes the regulation that  we talked about and therefore prevents overeating.

I mentioned this a number of times, and  obviously, we're talking about real food—whole food—the way it came off the planet, with minimal  processing. Now, if we compare to our ancestors, should it be ketogenic? Should it be so  low that our body generates ketones?

Well, not necessarily. But for sure, our ancestors  were in a state of ketosis for long periods during the year. During the winter, they probably  didn't have many plant foods unless they lived on the equator.

So humans, for sure, have been  keto-adapted for a large part of our existence. But it doesn't mean that you have to  be ketogenic all the time. Some of the time would be okay.

A little less strict  than a ketogenic diet would be a low-carb, high-fat diet. This is typically  where you eat probably less than 50, maybe less than 30 grams of net carbohydrates per  day. You eat moderate protein, and the rest of it is fat.

This works for most people because  this creates a lot of satiety, especially for people who have become insulin resistant and  already sort of moved out of that balanced state. But it's not a one-size-fits-all because we  respond differently to different things. We get satiated and full from different  things.

So don't feel like you have to just try one thing and that's it, because  some people respond better to a moderate amount of carbs. They might eat  70, 80, up to 100 grams of carbs, and that might work better for them.  But the majority, I believe—from what I get reported back, testimonials, etc.

—low-carb,  high-fat seems to work the best for most. But if that doesn't seem to work for you,  try different things. One thing we know for sure that our ancestors did not have is  they did not get 65% of their calories from carbohydrates.

That means you eat 250, 300, 400  grams of carbohydrates, and that means you have to eat typically a lot of grain and a lot of  processed foods. Our ancestors had none of that. Now, I know some of you are thinking that you  thought this video was the number one absolute easiest way, and you thought that you were going  to get something super easy, and you're thinking, "This doesn't sound all that easy.

That seems like  a lot of work for a long time. I have to change a lot of things. " Well, that's just the thing. 

Whatever you've been doing, if it's not working, you have to change it. There is no magic bullet;  there is no quick fix. Because there is something called natural law.

It's like gravity—it's  there whether you want it or not. Our bodies respond to natural law. There are principles and  mechanisms built in that have been ingrained for hundreds of thousands of years.

And if we start  breaking those rules, then there are consequences. But it's not as complicated as people think. It's  just step by step, learning to eat the foods that work and doing simple things in your lifestyle  that align more with what your body wants.

And it does not mean that you have to eat sawdust and  boring things. You can have meat, fish, poultry, wild game, etc. You can have leafy greens.

You can  have non-starchy vegetables. You can have tubers, and you can have a lot of these. You  can have nuts and seeds, and you can cook these things with butter and olive oil. 

You do not have to be afraid of fat either. What you need to start moving away from,  though, are the unnatural foods—or non-foods, as I like to call them—because they're  not food. We talk about them as food; we call it fast food, but it isn't food.

It's  destroyed garbage, with white flour, sugar, and seed oils in it. They have nothing  that your body needs, but they upset your metabolic health. They upset your equilibrium  and cause overeating.

Virtually all processed foods and packaged foods are going to be based  primarily on white flour, sugar, and seed oils. So now, if we compare to our ancestors,  what our DNA is designed for, 100% of what they ate came from this group  because there was nothing else. They didn't even have the option.

So that's how I  like to think about it a lot of times: that this stuff doesn't exist to me because  our ancestors didn't have it. They couldn't miss it. They couldn't have a longing for  something that never existed.

But today, as much as 60 to 70% of our calories come from this  category that has nothing that the body needs. And then there's a couple of things in a  category I call questionable. What I've described up here is basically a paleo  diet, a caveman diet, the ancestral diet, and I think that's a great starting point. 

But I'm not a stickler. I don't think that you have to be a purist and that there is no  possibility of any other food being okay for us. So, legumes and dairy are a couple of things  that some people need to stay away from, but for others, it could be okay.

Legumes are things  like peas, black beans, and other forms of beans as well. Our ancestors didn't have them, but there  are cultures who have done extremely well with them for hundreds of years. In terms of microbiome  health and different types of fiber, there are beans that provide a tremendous benefit as long as  you can tolerate them.

If you don't have the biome to tolerate them, then you need to make very  slow changes. So, I think beans can be okay. Now, remember though, that they're not extremely  high or very low carb—they're kind of in between.

So if you need to keep your carbs very, very low,  then you want to keep beans to a minimum also. And then the other thing is dairy because  that's only been around for about 10,000 years, and our ancestors didn't have it. But we have  done well with it for thousands of years in some areas of the world.

Scandinavians,  for example, tend to do relatively well, whereas Asians tend to do quite poorly. But  there's a difference also between different types of dairy. So if you eat it, I would  strongly recommend that you eat it either raw or fermented.

The problem for most people comes  from the pasteurized and low-fat versions. The skim milk that has been pasteurized creates  the biggest amount of problems. But if you eat yogurt or kefir, or if you eat raw milk,  then those are generally very well tolerated.

I want to compare a couple more things  to our ancestors. One thing, of course, is that they moved a lot. They moved constantly  throughout the day.

They took a lot of steps, which was aerobic activity, meaning very low  intensity. You're not huffing and puffing, and you are burning primarily fat with  that aerobic activity. A lot of people ask how many steps should you take.

There's a lot of  step counters that people have on their phones and on their watches, and some people aim  for 10,000—that's a number we hear a lot. I think that's a great number if you can get  to it. It's a whole lot better than 500 steps.

But our ancestors and most animals that  move to get their food probably get in the neighborhood of 30,000 steps a day. Now,  it doesn't mean that you have to do that, but just realize our ancestors moved a lot. And then they also performed something called very  brief periods of high-intensity interval training.

Of course, they didn't call it that—that's  a modern concept. But if you're a hunter, then there's going to be brief periods  where you do an intense burst of movement, like a sprint running after something,  or maybe running away from something. So that's part of our normal movement  pattern.

But we also need to understand that high intensity is very stressful, but  it's a very short-term stress that is a good contrast for the body. When we experience  high stress and then we get to relax after, that's very healthy because it helps the  body stay sharp, and it helps the body adapt. In contrast, we have what's called chronic  stress.

We don't have these high ups and downs; we have a little bit of stress all the time. That  does several things to the body. For one thing, it tends to break us down in so many ways.

It  raises blood sugar, it breaks down immunity, it breaks down tissues. But one more thing  that it does is it reduces the amount of hydrochloric acid, so our digestive systems  don't work as well when we have chronic stress. So, one thing that you can try to compensate  is called apple cider vinegar.

It's a very, very nice tool; it's incredibly inexpensive.  You take a tablespoon or two every day. You could take it in the morning, you can take it  before a meal, and that's going to help replace that acidity in your stomach that is reduced by  that chronic stress.

Another thing that you might want to try is some kind of stress management,  like breathing exercises or meditation—whatever you want to call it. It's just a way of getting  away from that chronic stress, of breaking that pattern where your thoughts won't stop, and  you always feel like you're under pressure. Another thing you have probably noticed is that  as long as you stay active, as long as you do something—if you're out hiking or if you're super  busy with something that you're focused on—then you tend to not be so hungry.

But if you're just  kind of going through the motions and you're sitting at your desk, or you're sitting around,  then you tend to develop cravings. You tend to want to eat something just to have something  to do. And once we get used to it, humans have a tendency to always want to sip on something  or bite on something or snack on something.

So, a lot of that is just a habit from being bored.  The more active you can stay, the better. But if you can't do that and you  feel this need to eat, now you can do things like coffee and tea because that  still gives you something to sip on, but it's not going to change your metabolism. 

It's not going to change your insulin or your blood sugar. And if you feel like you really  need something, you can try about a teaspoon of MCT oil—medium-chain triglycerides—because  they're a source of fast energy, but they don't raise blood sugar. It's a short-chain fat  that gets absorbed and metabolized differently, so it can give you that little energy  burst without really messing with anything.

And one more thing to understand is about  electrolytes and insulin resistance. Your ancestors were never insulin resistant; it  wasn't possible with their lifestyle. But if you have been insulin resistant and you  start correcting it, now your insulin levels are going to drop.

When insulin was too high,  then you tended to reabsorb too much sodium and electrolytes, and that's where we get the  high blood pressure with insulin resistance. But once you start correcting it and  insulin drops, now you're going to lose some electrolytes that were sort  of artificially maintained in the body. So for a period of time, you're going to  be losing electrolytes.

In the long run, it's a good thing because your blood pressure  is going to go down. But before the body has a chance to find that balance again,  you might be missing some electrolytes, and you might have some symptoms like  lightheadedness, nausea, fatigue, or brain fog. So during the time that you're fixing  this problem, you probably want to supplement with some electrolytes. 

Especially if you do a longer fast, like over 24 hours, now you want to double up on  those electrolytes because you're not getting any through the food, and your insulin is  dropping even faster because you're fasting. I created a product called euLyte. It's an  electrolyte powder specifically for that purpose, to help support fasting.

But it's a  good product for everyday usage as well. I'll put a link down below if you want  to check it out. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one.

And  if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works,  make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so  you never miss a life-saving video.