Hello Health Champions. Today I want to talk about the little things that can make the biggest difference when it comes to losing belly fat and losing weight. And once you understand how they work then you'll see that maybe they're not such little things after all.
And then you can really take it to the next level and get lasting results as well as some nice health bonuses along the way. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is to eat shorter. So I know you've heard you're supposed to eat less and we'll get to that.
And I'm also not talking about eating faster. I'm not talking about rushing through your meals. Eating shorter means that you eat your foods in a shorter time period and a shorter window of time.
And why does that matter? Well let's say that you have your first meal at seven a. m then as soon as that food hits your taste buds your insulin goes up your body has insulin just standing by ready to go and what does insulin do it is a storage hormone its purpose primarily is to take glucose blood sugar from the bloodstream and into the cell and indirectly therefore because it's pushing sugar into the cell it also promotes the conversion of glucose into fat because your body can only store a tiny amount of glucose as glycogen and then any excess is going to be turned into fat we therefore want to think of insulin as a storage hormone as a fat storing hormone even though it primarily acts on glucose and any time that insulin is high it prevents fat burning so if you're trying to lose weight you can't really do that while insulin levels stay high now let's say that you have your last meal of the day at 9 00 pm and you have several meals in between again at 9 00 pm as soon as you eat your insulin goes up a little bit but it's also going to stay up for a couple of hours until you have digested and processed through that food so from 7 to 11 or so your insulin stays mostly elevated meaning you are mostly in fat storage mode and if you have those hours for your meals that means for 16 hours you're primarily in fat storage and for only eight hours you're primarily in fat burning so that's why it's so hard to burn fat and lose weight if most of the time you're in a state in a hormonal state where your body is storing more than burning so there in this example you would be twice as long in fat storing with elevated insulin as you would be in fat burning, or 67 % of the time fat storing 33 % fat burning.
Now let's say that all you do is you skip that last evening meal you have your last meal is dinner at five or six o'clock now you're basically going to be 12 and 12. You cut four hours or so off your feeding time you extend your fasting time now that means you're in a one to one ratio. Before your two to one ratio but just skipping one meal already gets you in a one to one between fat storing and fat burning or 50 % of each and then as your body gets used to that you'll find it's pretty easy to also skip breakfast and you eat both your meals within a few hours now you have reversed that two to one ratio so now you're fasting for 16 hours you're allowing insulin to drop for a much longer period of time and you're only in fat storing about eight hours so now instead of a two to one you have a one to two you have improved the relative ratio four fold and let's say you go a little further now and you eat one meal a day and because that's a little bit bigger meal it takes you full four hours to digest it before insulin comes back down but now you're in a one to five ratio instead of the two to one you had now you have improved the ratio between fat storing and fat burning tenfold and you're in fat storing 17 and fat burning 83 percent so this is much more important in losing weight and burning belly fat than calories alone because this allows you to get on a steady state of fat burning and it will stabilize your metabolism and it will stabilize your hunger and now some people are going to say i agree with that that makes perfect sense but others are going to say i disagree i'm not sure that's how it works because i've heard other people say different things so here's the problem with humans that we pick and choose we hear something we say yeah that sounds right and then we say no that doesn't sound right and and that's still okay but most of that is based on preconceptions that we filter our new experience based on our old experiences and that keeps us from letting in new information so a lot of people say oh I agree with this and I'll do that because it makes sense but I want you to take it one step further and I don't want you to do it because you believe it.
I want you to do it because you understand it and I want you to be open-minded to listen a little bit broader to the things that you haven't adopted yet so that once you understand them maybe you'll be more apt to incorporate them. Also, a lot of people and a lot of teachers and a lot of books and a lot of videos they have a very narrow focus and that's good to a point but it's a problem to a large extent. Some people would say, I believe in nutrition.
I read a book or I heard about someone who changed something and they felt a whole lot better so that is what I'm going to do I'm going to stop eating junk food and processed food I'm going to eat better food and that'll be it. So is that person going to be better off? Absolutely.
Every time. Because if you give the body more of quality things it's looking for and you give it less of what it doesn't need and that interferes, you will always be better off. You will always be moving toward health.
If you do that would you have visible results? Well, maybe, maybe not? Maybe you haven't done enough?
Maybe you haven't done it long enough? Maybe it'll show up six months later. And it's kind of irrelevant if you get any results yet.
If you understand that you're doing something that your body is being helped with then you will always be better off. It's like a plant. It's always going to be better off with some water than no water, but water may not be enough because it also needs some sunshine.
So other people might say I believe in exercise that I don't buy into all this nutrition I think you can eat whatever you want I'm just gonna exercise as much as possible and is that person gonna be better off? Yes. Not if they do it to excess but in moderation.
The body has to have movement. It is not optional. It is a human requirement.
Your physiology cannot be expressed optimally without regular movement so if you move as opposed to don't move you will always be better off. You will always be moving toward health. Will you have visible results yet?
Same thing. Maybe, maybe not? Maybe it takes longer?
Maybe it'll show up down the road? Maybe you need to do something else also. And a third person might read a book on meditation and say I believe in meditation that's what I'm going to do I'm going to focus all my effort on that because I believe in mind body interactions and that's how I'm going to fix it will they be better off yes because they will help their body move toward balance and toward better health but what we have to start understanding is the difference between necessary and sufficient.
The body has emotional requirements. It has nutritional / chemical requirements. It has structural / mechanical requirements.
Those are necessary. So doing one is a good thing but doing one may not be sufficient. And you may also need to do it for a longer period of time.
This is why it's so important to understand what the body is looking for because too many people they try one thing for a week and even though they're moving in the right direction, they didn't understand why they were doing it so they lost interest before it ever had any effect. So I want to show you the bigger picture of what you can do every day that's what the video is about. Do this every day to lose weight fast and to lose belly fat fast, but then we also have to understand and remember that what does fast mean?
Well it just means faster than no change, because a lot of people have done yo-yo dieting for so many years they lost some weight they gained some weight and they've done this for 10, 20, 30 years and it worked while they were in their 30s and 40s but then their bodies just became so clogged up and so stubborn that nothing happened anymore. So in their 50s and 60s now it seems like it doesn't matter what they do. Nothing happens so any change is faster than the no change and also we want to keep in mind that we want to sustain it long term and we want the body to be healthy.
So we can always stress the body we can always do extreme things for a short period of time and there may be some reason for that like a longer fast is fine but we have to find a lifestyle that we can sustain so losing weight fast means as fast as possible to sustain long-term healthy changes. So I don't care if someone else loses 60 pounds in three months that's totally irrelevant for what's going to happen to you. You have to relate it to yourself and understand the variables and play around with them.
But what I do want to show you is how you can take it to the next level because these different aspects of health are synergistic that if someone can get benefit by meditating working on their emotional aspect and another person can get some improvement by working on their diet and another person can get improvement with exercise what if you did all of them because they are all requirements. Now here's the big one. Are you ready?
Here is the cause of everything as it relates to health. The cause of every health problem is toxicity deficiency stress and degeneration so we'll expand on those in a second here but basically whenever you suffer from some of this when some of this compromises your health you have a reduction in homeostasis you have a lessened ability of your body to process information correctly and to return all metabolic processes and every homeostatic variable back to balance right so this is homeostasis is health your body always tries to return to homeostasis and this is just another word for imbalance okay balance is good imbalance is bad harmony is good peace and harmony is good disharmony is bad function is when everything is working the way it's supposed to dysfunction means it's not working and this ease ease is when you have peace and harmony and dis-ease when you lost it so these are different words for the exact same thing but i wanted to elaborate on that to really give you an idea of what health is and then when you no longer have ease and it turns to disease now you start having symptoms and you have suffering and you have things like metabolic poor health and visceral fat as well so think about this for a second the only thing that people suffer from is that something isn't working right whether you have a shoulder pain or a headache or low energy or you can't sleep or you can't digest food it means something isn't working right and why isn't it working right because some degree of toxicity deficiency stress and degeneration toxicity means that there's too much of something your body can't handle metals chemicals pesticides sugar fructose food additives stress etc. Deficiency means that there's something your body has to have it's required for your body to function but you're not providing it in sufficient quantity so those are essential fatty acids essential amino acids vitamins minerals enzymes and so forth stress is when your body is in a different state so when you're relaxed your body is in homeostasis it's balancing its resources but when you're stressed when you have a stress response your body focuses less on your vital organs and more on the external environment so when you're focusing your resources on vital organs now you can work on digestion and immune function and reproduction and DNA repair and healing but when you have a stress response your body shifts its priorities it shifts the resources away from those vital organs and it puts it on the outside world to defend you against a real or imagined danger that's why stress is so devastating because you no longer have access to your healing power and degeneration simply means use it or lose it every cell in your body is there for a reason it has a purpose if you do something that puts that cell to work you're fulfilling the purpose of that cell and the cell lives another day and when it wears out the body makes another one but if you don't use it there's no reason for the body to make another one and that cell is going to wear out and not be replaced that's called degeneration or atrophy so most of the questions I get is for people asking can you do a video on turmeric or can you do a video on ashwagandha or is garlic good for this those are the wrong questions because what we need to ask is questions about toxicity are we toxic with something are we deficient in something are we stressed are we degenerating so when people ask about turmeric or ashwagandha they're asking can I take this for something and there are some benefits to thousands of different substances but the question to ask is does this provide something that my body needs to have in the long run or in the short term can it help maybe dampen some inflammation or something like that but in that sense it's more of a safe drug it's not really a nutrient it's not something the body is looking for so we want to focus more and more on the basics of handling the root cause so what do we need to do to lose that belly fat and that weight once and for all what is it so we need to reduce insulin resistance and cortisol and fatty liver we need to reduce stress and we need to increase brain activation because a strong brain makes everything work better so basically we want to stack the deck just like i hinted before you don't want to do just one thing you want to address the problem you want to hit the issue with as many things as you have in your artillery so you want to eat better feel better and move better not one or the other and this is how your body can get to homeostasis can get to health and harmony in the long run and most people just ask the question what do I need to do give me the quick list and that list is useless because if you don't understand what it means if you don't own the concept and the context to put that in it is useless because in five minutes you're going to find someone who says something different and now you're all confused and you do nothing so first we want to ask what but then we want to understand the mechanism and get the why and the how and once we're armed with all of those that's when we're going to make some changes and stick to them so first you want to eat shorter and then you want to eat less now here's the problem people focus on this only and they associate it with deprivation and when they hear eat less now they think oh I'm going on a diet I'm going to do something for 30 days or 60 days or six months and they think their meals are going to look like this and this is called deprivation it's called suffering it's not sustainable in the long run and that's why people fail so yes you absolutely have to eat less but it doesn't have to feel like you're eating less and there are macros that stands for macronutrients that's where you get your calories the fat protein and carbohydrate and assuming you get about 20 percent from protein because they're going to serve mostly as building blocks then the rest is 80 that means the fuel from fat and carbohydrate should make up 80 percent now some people think that you should eat low fat other people say you should eat low carb and here's the interesting thing either way works pretty well at least short term here's the problem if you eat low fat that means you're going to eat high carb so if you eat 10 calories from fat you're going to eat 70 percent from carbohydrate and then what happens is you're going to have very high insulin levels you're going to have chronically high insulin levels and you get hungry because insulin is a storage hormone and as soon as the insulin is done stashing away the food now you're ready to eat again whereas if you eat 10 percent carb and 70 fat you get the same 80 for fuel but the fat does not trigger insulin so now you have a much more even blood sugar level you have a much more even fuel supply it's like you throw a log on the fire instead of throwing gasoline on the fire it burns slower and it lasts longer as a result you have less hunger so it's your choice right you have to eat less but do you want to be more hungry or less hungry the other thing a lot of these low-fat proponents don't realize is that carbohydrates turn to fat they have a fat phobia they've heard all these things about fat that it's bad in some way and they look at their bodies and they don't want the fat on their bodies and they hear about blood fats and they don't want it in their blood but they don't realize that when you eat carbohydrate you can store a little bit and all the rest has to be turned into fat because it can't stay in the bloodstream blood sugar is dangerous and you can only store so much so if you keep piling on the carbohydrates it will turn to fat but before it turns to fat it has triggered a bunch of insulin that makes you hungry and creates all sorts of metabolic health issues so if you do the low carb high fat also called LCHF and the strictest version of that is called keto where you eat very very low carbohydrates so low carb to me is maybe 10 - 15 percent of calories from carbohydrates and with keto you probably want to get down to like five percent of calories from carbohydrate but what that does like we said is fat does not trigger insulin so if you eat 10% carbs and 70% fat there's very little in that food to trigger insulin and if insulin stays down your energy production is much much more steady and you don't get hungry that is the difference too many people focus on eating less and the calories and how many meals and all that but what really matters is what is your feeding window and how much insulin are you producing because long term that's going to determine your hunger levels so you do have to eat less there is no argument there but you want to make it easy for yourself because the easier it is the more sustainable it is and that is like improving the odds in your favor I even have people telling me that no you're wrong you don't have to eat less because I don't think I do I'm eating keto and I'm losing all this weight and I'm always full but the whole point is that they are eating less but it's so easy because they're stabilizing their whole metabolism that it's so easy they don't even realize they're eating less and that is how it's sustainable now as humans we like to label things we like to categorize things we like to put some things in the emotional box and some in the structural box and some in the chemical but that's just for us to be able to converse about it to have a conversation in reality there is so much overlap that all of these affect each other that we can't really separate them out that's in stark contrast to when they do research when they do research they have kind of a sequential linear way of thinking and what they're thinking is let's try to change one variable let's try to control as much as we can of the variables and change one and that's the one that we're studying and that makes sense in that kind of thinking and I'm not opposed to that that's great however when it comes to you when it comes to your reality and how things work in biology in living systems then things are different because we are multi-factorial there's nothing about us that's linear you can change the emotional in a thousand different ways and that's going to affect the structural and that's going to affect the chemical so these are all interrelated and that's why you want to let the researchers change one variable at a time but if you want the most and the best possible impact on your situation then you do it all you start working on the emotional the structural and the chemical all together that's how you're going to get out of that plateau and that's how you're going to start moving your body toward homeostasis in every way next thing you want to do every day to lose belly fat and weight is exercise and it's not what you hear all the time it's not about burning calories so let's talk about this does exercise help with insulin resistance it is pretty effective in preventing type 2 diabetes from developing it is not very effective in reversing it once it's established and here's why most of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance is about the liver and a fatty liver so NAFLD stands for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease because traditionally most fatty liver was caused by alcohol but in recent years and especially in young people the vast majority of fatty liver is from sugar and fructose so they call that non-alcoholic fatty liver so when you exercise you're not really going to affect that fatty liver because you have two compartments where you store energy in the body you have the liver that has its stores of fat and glucose and you have the muscles that has its stores of fat and glucose and then of course you have all the fat the adipose tissue in the body but when you exercise you primarily start using up the glucose and the fat in the muscle you're not really going to touch the fat or glucose in the liver and the liver is holding on it's ear marking this glucose primarily for the brain because the brain has to have a certain amount of glucose when we fast and go keto it can use a lot of ketones but it always has to have some glucose and when that runs low then it's the liver that disperses that blood sugar on a regular basis so exercise is not very powerful in reversing a fatty liver but it's not completely useless either because it will use up some energy so you're using up some substrate from the energy pool in the body if you will and if you're activating the muscles and they use up some of the glucose and fat then the muscles will be available to absorb some of the fuel from the rest of the body and that will make it less likely that the things you eat turn into fat in the liver but it's not going to do much to reverse it and when you do exercise you want to make sure that it burns as much fat as possible and as little carbohydrate as possible so how do you do that it's called aerobic exercise aerobic means with air and then you're going to keep your cortisol levels low cortisol is a stress hormone that raises blood sugar and therefore also raises insulin so cortisol promotes insulin resistance and belly fat and a fatty liver so we want to burn fat and we want to keep cortisol to a minimum any time that we get into an aerobic meaning without air now cortisol goes up and why is this because just like a fire when you're burning logs in a fire it's the oxygen that's fueling that fire and if you can get more oxygen into the fire it's going to burn hotter your cells are the same way you have your bloodstream deliver oxygen to the cells and in the cells you have mitochondria that fully burn that fuel the fat and the carbohydrate into energy and water and carbon dioxide and as you breathe and as you breathe a little faster you're providing more oxygen for the fire in your cells and you still breathe nice and calm you breathe slow steady breaths and they go a little bit faster up to your aerobic threshold that is when you're supplying as much oxygen as your cells can use to fully oxidize the fuel the carb and the fat but once you go a little bit higher once your energy requirements are just a little bit higher than that aerobic threshold now you've moved into an aerobic so that means your body is demanding more energy than you can provide oxygen for and now what happens is you go into air hunger you start huffing and puffing you start panting you start breathing significantly faster it's not a controlled steady breath anymore and now once you start huffing and puffing once you have air hunger now your cortisol levels go up why is that because the only thing that you can derive energy from without oxygen is glucose so now you start splitting glucose molecules straight down the middle to get some emergency energy as long as you're breathing nice and slow even if they're deep breaths you are in aerobic metabolism and you can burn fat or carbohydrate but once you start huffing and puffing you can only burn carbohydrate so what that means is you want to spend as much time as you can in aerobic training because not only are you burning mostly fat there but what happens once you go into anaerobic and your muscles use up all that glucose now you get a shortage of glucose you used it all up and what happens is you're going to have to replace those lost carbs later on because if you used up a bunch of carbs and you're trying to eat low carb then you're actually going to get cravings and you get more hunger to make up for it but even though exercise has a limited benefit for reversing fatty liver I am still 100% for exercise you have to do it on a regular basis several times a week because exercise does so much more and here's what it really does exercise activates the brain exercise when you move you are stretching muscles and you're moving mechanoreceptors in your joints and those two pieces of information is the vast majority of signals that stimulate the brain that basically keep the brain alive when you go to the gym and you work with a dumbbell you're putting tension on a muscle so you're stimulating that muscle to stay healthy and to grow the brain gets stimulated by signals from muscle spindles and joint mechanoreceptors so just like you work out a muscle you work out your brain by moving your body through three dimensions against gravity and why is that so significant because when you increase your brain activity it's like you're turning up the dimmer on a light bulb and the brighter your brain burns the more it can inhibit things the more it can control and balance out things that needs dampening so there's something called the IML which stands for intermediolateral cell column.
Don't worry about the name I just put this in here so you don't think I'm making this stuff up there is this is your spinal cord and this is half of your spinal cord right here in the green area is called the lateral horn and this is where your stress response cell bodies live so anytime you have a stress response then this area reacts before that information even gets to the brain because you have to have a split second reaction time whenever something endangers you in your environment you have to have a stress response first and then your brain is informed to see if it's a real threat or if it's something that we can dampen a little bit so that's a lot of what the brain does is to dampen to inhibit those stress responses and once we understand all the steps we can see how important this would be because the IML is responsible for stress responses for adrenal activation your adrenal glands make the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol but it also helps regulate minerals and things like that so as you your adrenals get tired then you lose some of your ability to regulate minerals as well your adrenals are responsible for cortisol and when cortisol goes up blood sugar goes up when blood sugar goes up insulin goes up so simply by improving brain activation not burning calories not any other aspect of exercise just the movement to activate the brain we are improving all of these different aspects so that's a huge influence on stress responses on health and insulin resistance now if we're dealing with belly fat we need to understand a few things it is strongly associated with a fatty liver they pretty much go hand in hand and they also relate to insulin and cortisol chronic elevated levels of insulin and cortisol and the reason that situation developed in the first place is that we placed too much of a burden on the liver the liver is supposed to handle certain things but excess of other things is just too much and these things are glucose fructose and alcohol in that order alcohol is the worst so glucose is not nearly as terrible as the other two glucose that's rice and potatoes and grain and so forth starchy things and the reason it's not so bad is that glucose can be metabolized by every cell in the body so only about 15 20 percent or so goes through the liver when it comes to glucose and that's why you could eat rice and bread if you're reasonably active and you only eat three meals a day and you have an active lifestyle then you can probably go 30 40 50 years and never develop any metabolic problems some people would but most would not however once you add fructose or alcohol to the equation fructose and alcohol can only be processed through the liver so instead of 20 now we're talking a hundred percent basically goes through the liver so a small amount still has the potential of overwhelming the liver and that's why a lot of traditional populations who lived off a lot of rice and grain did well as long as they stuck with starch with glucose but as soon as they added sugar as long as they added glucose and fructose which is table sugar now those problems the diabetes the metabolic problems started skyrocketing and most people know not to overdo alcohol we don't give alcohol to our toddlers we restrict it in many different ways but we haven't really restricted fructose we've had all sorts of warnings about fat but fructose is the real killer and it really hurts me when i see pictures like this because it is so common today with type 2 diabetes in preteens that used to be a disease called adult onset type 2 diabetes or adult-onset diabetes and kids never got it because it took 40 50 60 years to develop but when you feed them like this now you can have a type 2 diabetic as a five-year-old another thing worth mentioning is sleep because if you sleep well then you have less stress and it's also associated with lower levels of cortisol when you don't sleep enough when you have poor quality sleep you only sleep a few hours then stress levels go up and cortisol levels go up and again that has a detrimental effect on your metabolic health and now for the emotional aspects I think a lot of people sort of start with changing the way they eat and then some people add some exercise to it but very few people I think do enough consistently or understand how profound the emotional aspects can be and the best way that I know to create relaxation and peace is called meditation you can start with a breathing exercise and then sort of learn how to get a little bit deeper and deeper but there's nothing strange or spiritual about it meditation is just a way to start going deeper inside and turning off all that noise in the background finding a deeper level within yourself and when you do that now you're activating your frontal lobe because in order to get some peace in your head you have to turn off all of the distracting thoughts so you're actually increasing frontal lobe activity when you meditate and what that does it reduces stress it increases relaxation it can help improve sleep and it improves healing so we talked about stress and a stress response being a sympathetic activation so your body tries to get balanced between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic but anytime you have stress now you have the stress response your sympathetic reallocates your resources so it takes them away from your healing organs and it defends you against the outside world so the inside that's the parasympathetic and that's things like digestion and immune system and reproductive function and healing so basically anytime you have stress responses whether you're aware of them or whether it's against something real or imagined anytime you have a stress response you get tense of course you lose some relaxation but you're also interfering with digestion and healing and immune function so by learning a method just to balance out your stress responses if that's all you do you've already improved all of these different things and one more thing that can create a stubborn weight situation is if you have a hypothyroid if you have a slow thyroid and most thyroid problems especially in the western world are an autoimmune condition an autoimmune has to do a lot with digestion and if your digestion is off that is usually because your stress levels are too high so again we see the loop closing there's so many different things that are related that these are all these bonuses that you get you're just setting out to lose some belly fat and some weight but if you do it right and you do it long term and you address the root causes you'll find all these different things get better along the way and then of course I wanted to mention again the exercise because when you exercise you improve your brain function which can help reduce stress so again we separate out the emotional and the chemical and the structural but there's so much overlap and there's also obviously good nutrition if you stabilize your blood sugar if you get enough essential fatty acids and good minerals that is also going to help your brain function and your emotional state and therefore every day or at least most days you want to do some movement and it doesn't have to be exercise or go into the gym you just have to move your body and create some signals to stimulate your brain you also want to restrict your feeding window you want to eat shorter also known as intermittent fasting so that you can be more in fat burning and less in fat storing that also stabilizes your hunger and it has much greater impact on weight loss than just counting calories you want to do some form of meditation and again there's nothing mystical about it it's just finding a place or a situation or a breathing pattern that gives you some peace because when you practice that now you're reinforcing those pathways and your nervous system gets better and better at automatically finding those relaxed states you want to get some exercise which means that in addition to just moving you do something to get your heart rate up a little bit and the higher you get your heart rate up the shorter the duration so that you don't create excess stress next you want to eliminate processed foods up to 70 percent of the calories consumed in the united states are white flour white sugar and processed seed oils you want to turn that down to zero or at least under 10 percent because it's garbage and you want to get 90 percent or more from real food from unprocessed things of a variety i recommend you stay away from grains as much as possible so meat fish vegetables nuts and seeds are your your go-to and you want to allocate enough time to get some proper sleep some people have trouble sleeping because they're stressed they're inflamed for whatever reason but if you start applying all of these different things if you do the movement if you stabilize your blood sugar if you reduce the stress if you eat real food then you'll find that there's a trickle down effect also to sleep so if you just allocate enough time then you'll probably find that you start sleeping better as well. 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