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The Four Fallacies of Weight Loss

It seems amazing, and it is amazing, but we still always have these nagging things in our brain, which is where the rats, the rat studies, what about with people doesn't eating less cause fat loss exercise where we know that, oh my gosh, what about all these things, these air, all counterpoints to what we just talked about? Those aren't true, and we've got data to prove it, and these are the four fallacies we alluded to earlier in the session, so eating less causes us to burn fat. We could go through this one quickly because we've already kind of covered it. Eating less causes us to slow down and burn the muscle tissue we want while worsening the clog, causing the problem. We actually haven't talked about this part yet that eating less and exercising more actually causes. Not only does it burn tissue and slow you down, but it actually breaks your metabolism or in the way we're trying to avoid so approximately seventy percent or up to seventy percent of the weight you lose non water wei...

ght when you just starve yourself. So when you just eat less of the diet that caused you to have the health outcomes you're unhappy with in the first place, up to seventy percent, your non water weight loss can be from muscle tissue and that's disturbing. And researchers tell us that again eating less does not make us lose weight by selective reduction of body fat by wasting of all body tissues. Therefore, any success obtained must be maintained by chronic undernourishment it's from dr thorpe chronic undernourishment isn't healthy nor is it easy and that's why we have a ninety four point ninety five point four percent failure rate because this is what happens for all but four point six percent of us we eat less our body thinks we're starving, our metabolism slows down then we burn muscle then we temporarily lose weight then we say okay, this isn't worth it like the pain I'm feeling and my life is just stinky so hunger wins out, then all that weight we lost comes bacchus fat so now we're fatter than ever and then we yo yo diet dr gardner over at michigan state university tells us definitively it is only the rate of weight regain not the fact of weight regain that appears open to debate, meaning you're going to gain the weight back. Some people might gain it back slower something might get back faster but it's coming back because you will not be hungry for the rest of your life that hungry for the rest your life is really important to think about and it's important thing about these side effects of any approach you take to lose weight because some some of these ads and marketing we hear is quite nefarious when it comes to weight loss, I like to think of the side effects of starvation so this is going to seem a little bit ridiculous but let's do a thought experiment imagine you're watching the evening news and you see one of these commercials for medication, right? Which is like people dancing in the meadow and it's just like, oh my god, take these pills will make you so happy and so you see the people dancing in the meadow and it's this this a new drug and the drug is like, do you struggle with poor eyesight? Okay, we'll take this new drug and if you take this drug and you sleep dramatically less while taking this drug, your eyesight will get better okay, so you're like, ok, so if I take this drug and I sleep less, my eyesight gets better I like better eyesight, but sleeping less that doesn't really seem too good and then the little small voice like this the quiet voice with the disclaimer at the end comes on and it's like warning if you ever stop sleeping less, your eyesight will get much worse than it ever was in the first place you'd be like, oh my god, I wouldn't I would never take that drug because I know I can't be sleep deprived for the rest of my life and it's something that I know I can't do long term will make me were soft long term I won't do it go home tonight and turn on the television for three hours don't watch it that whole time dear god do something else but during that three hours you'll see an ad that sounds a lot like that crazy ad we just talked about it will be for some mail and meal order program which will say is long as you eat only these foods will mail you and on lee in the quantities we mail you you will temporarily lose weight and that's true but what happens when you stop eating that twelve hundred calories of processed garbage you'll get worse for the rest of your life and you don't even have to overeat you just have to go back to eating like a normal person just like you would never take that first medication please do not fall victim to these starvation tactics they do not work and they will leave you worse off then before you began and another study that demonstrates this shockingly is a study that took place to the university of geneva again with our furry friends but I love this one because we can totally anthropomorphic size these rats into being like people so we've got normal rats we've got rats eating less and we have young naturally skinny rats so three groups of rats the normal rats again they're fully grown imagine that second group of rats these are like let's imagine a thirty five year old person who starving him or herself to fit into our high school genes and then these young naturally skinny rats you know they're they're they're sixteen year old is that just naturally can fit into that size for size six so they don't really need to try on day one we have the normal group of rats eating normally and we have the normal rats being forced to eat less that happened for ten days okay makes sense on day ten the skinny group joins in so skinny group wasn't involved up to this point and all groups are eating normally so just to summarize thirty five day study normal rats just ate normally for thirty five days a group of rats that wanted to lose weight by eating less were forced to eat less for ten days and then we're allowed to eat unrestricted finally we had naturally skinny rats with us for the last twenty five days of the study okay which group do you think was the heaviest that the end of the study was it the group that did nothing was that the group that ate less and then just went back to normal or was it the group that was naturally thin for the last twenty five days involved in last twenty five days? The study everything we've been taught says it has to be the group that ate less for ten days right like cause over a thirty five day time period they dieted for ten days and dieting makes you lose weight right and again because we're using rats at school there's no like oh but what about this societal gonna know this is just mom alien brains what do mom alien brains do at the end of the thirty five day study this is what happened the eat less group on day ten did weigh the least but here's what happened over the next twenty five days their weight skyrocketed up and in fact it skyrocketed up so high that they were dramatically heavier from a latte a rat wait perspective than the group that did nothing literally doing nothing was dramatically better not only from a health perspective but from await perspective eating less is actually counterproductive this is the this is this gap right here is the side effect of eating less because it sets you up for long term weight regain in this study there's actually a term for this it's called fat super accumulation these and other studies strongly suggests that fat super accumulation after energy restriction is a major factor contributing to relapsing obesity so often observed in humans if you starve yourself you are telling your body if this ever stops if we ever stop starving do everything in your power everything to make me fatter please never starve yourself again hunger isn't healthy, you will end up worse off than if you did nothing and in fact, in fact that worse off before you did nothing by the end of this study, the metabolic systems of the rats eating less actually burn fat over five hundred percent less efficiently than the normal rats like there remember the earlier study about like obese people just struggling? The body just cannot burn fat effectively, whereas naturally thin people's bodies just like burn fat all the time dramatic reduction, the ability to burn fat and their bodies slow down their base metabolic rate slowed down by fifteen percent. The researchers concluded that these investigations provide direct evidence for the existence of a specific metabolic component that contributes to an elevated efficiency of energy utilization once eating less stops specific metabolic component translates into clogged up and slow down metabolism. That specific metabolic component is that hormonal this regulation that clogging in our metabolic sink and it's the last thing that we would ever want to do if we wanted to lose weight long term and it's the primary side effect of what we've all been taught what we've been taught to do to make us better is actually making this worse, so you might again studies studies but again doesn't our intuition just tell us there has to be a general trend we're eating less means weighing less so when we say things like general trends, we need to go to another form of study, the studies we talked about to date or clinical studies, we talked about general trends and observing populations we go into what's called epidemiological studies these air observational they never prove anything, but they show us interesting correlations. For example, is there a correlation between eating more calories and having a higher body mass index? Kind of seems like a stupid question to ask based on what we've all been taught because the answer should supposedly of course b s off course eating more calories correlates with weighing less right? Well, we've got the data harvard looked at nearly seventy thousand people and divided them into fifths according to the quantity of calories they ate. Guess what the study of nearly seventy thousand people found they found an inverse relationship between the quantities of calories consumed and body mass index. The group of people that ate the fewest calories had the highest body max index, and that trend continued until the people who had the lowest body mass index ended up eating the highest quantity of countries. Of course, that doesn't prove that if you magically just start eating more calories, you will burn body fat, but it does tell us that no, there is not even a general trend across populations that a reduction in caloric intake reduces body fat mass dr mann over the university of california again confirms we've reviewed studies on long term outcomes of calorie restricting diets to assess whether dieting is an effective treatment for obesity and some there was a little support for the notion that diet steve lead to lasting weight loss or health benefits dr wiegel energy restricted diets are a physiologically unsound means to achieve weight reduction and then finally dr bre over the pennington biomedical research center one of the premier research centers in the world the reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of weight reduction programs the results are known to be poor and not long lasting known like the actual experts know this we just haven't been told about it so moving forward doesn't exercising mohr though come on exercising more has to cause us to burn more fat like it's I'll believe you jonathan that eating less doesn't cause us to burn more fat I get that I understand it caused us to slow down we're star of starvation is clearly not bad or clearly not good but exercising more has to cause us to burn fat actually exercising more is just a time consuming way to eat less when you think about it and not only is it just a time consuming way tio eat less but it can stimulate the desire to eat the very non foods that cause metabolic dysfunction in the first place right not eating three hundred calories and trying to burn off three hundred calories is this the two sides of the same coin it's saying the problem is calorie quantity and you can either rip calories out of your body through exercise or you can starve your body of calories through eating less there's same basic approach and they saying for all the same reasons we just covered meaning that if you have a caloric deficit all the nonsense we talked about continues to happen and the research consistently shows this that exercise by itself has not been shown to be highly effective in treating obesity because increased energy use from exercise is generally offset by increased caloric intake if you knew that like you needed to build up an appetite you would just eat less and exercise more to do that like the two most effective ways to make yourself want to eat more food is to eat less and exercise more right if you exercise more you sweat more which just makes you want to drink more and if you exercise more you will burn more which will just make you want to eat more because your body wants to balance you out automatically so that's what I want okay so it's starting to come together start to come together but it gets even worse because obviously when we burn more calories we eat more calories but it's way easier to eat calories and it is to burn calories so you know you might have this like little sense of hunger after going for that thirty minute jog but in reality that thirty minute dog may have burned maybe one hundred fifty hundred seventy calories maybe I guarantee you that you will eat more than one hundred fifty or one hundred seventy calories as a result to address that hunger and that's just calorie quantity most people low quality calories like if you look at the average american diet right it's it's it's the insane diet which we'll talk about here shortly it's heavy in starches and sweets and processed foods so you exercise more then you end up eating more calories than you exercise off and you're eating the foods that actually cause the metabolic clog in the first place so not only are you neutral or worse off from a caloric perspective but from a metabolic and hormonal perspective you're way worse off a relatively high dose of exercise results in compensatory mechanisms consistently that offsets weight loss we covered this already and pennington biomedical research center again overweight women were divided into four groups I love this study no change in exercise exercise mohr exercise even mohr and just like exercise the most the change in body fat was not statistically different across the groups are finding are important because most exercise guidelines for weight loss recommended two hundred to three hundred minutes per week and we provide evidence that this amount of exercise induces compensation that results in significantly less weight loss than predicted you eat less, you burn less if you eat more you burn more if you burn mohr you eat more bodies always working to balance you out so again what we talked about thirty minute jog let's say you just drink like twelve ounces of milk afterwards you're still at net positive thirteen calories but what do we normally do when we exercise more? We go for a thirty minute job and we drink a twenty four round sports drink then we need an extra serving of fettuccini alfredo a dinner because we deserve it right? We exercised that that right there like I've been doing this for fifteen years I cannot free myself of that when I exercise I still think I deserve teo eat differently than when I don't exercise and when you realize that it's the quality of food that's really at the heart of this anything that makes you crave the low quality foods that caused this problem should be avoided like it's imagine if exercising mohr made someone who's trying to but smoking want to smoke more well then we'd say I know like don't exercise more exercise smarter we're not saying don't exercise we're saying exercise smarter back to that pennington biomedical research study in fact, that study went on for eighteen months and exercise training that achieved two thousand calories they burned two thousand calories per week through exercise ah, thirty minute dog burns about one hundred seventy calories. To put that in perspective, college aged women's, these women that like at their hormonal prime everything's good no weight loss? None again, we talked about way not only have to eat more, but of course, then we need to buy more of these. These edible products and justin interesting anecdote will get more much more into this and later sessions, but so the american council of fitness and nutrition is one of the primary proponents of just just globally exercise more without thinking about the quality of the exercise we're doing guess who's on the executive board, it's the people who produce the things that we crave upon exercising more but like they're literally think about the advertising campaigns you see out there, right, you've got you've got ah, tiger telling you two to fuel yourself, to go play like, eat more of this kids so you can go play and recharge your energy. Actually, there is a the most recent advertising campaign for one of the most popular candy bars in the world is now basically around it being a good source of energy to keep you active, right? Telling people that you could just exercise off the quality of food that causes your metabolism to break is like telling people that you can exercise off smoking cigarettes you can't there is more than just calories at play here and that's why those that calorie quantity myth is so dangerous and in fact the national soft drink association tells us that we should drink plenty of fluids consume at least eight glasses of fluids daily even more when you exercise and that a variety of beverages including soft drinks can contribute to proper hydration that's why we have to understand the science because we get information like this otherwise so if we're not exercising more what we gained fat doesn't in activity lied to fat game so no it doesn't and um the fact is that we used to exercise away way way less and we were way, way, way thinner in fact again, if we look at the actual experts they tell us dr at the northern arizona university tells us that in the thirties and forties it was believed that weight training would slow an athlete and that mostest athletic coaches banned weight training and again she tells us that in the thirties and forties high volume endurance training was thought to be bad for the heart and through the fifties and sixties exercise was not thought to be useful on older people and endurance exercise was thought to be harmful tau women and for any of our listeners who were alive in the fifties and sixties my mother for example tells me that she was not actually allowed in her universities jim they did not even allow women in the gymnasiums because exercise was thought to be detrimental, so exercise is a new concept in fact, the idea of aerobics right, like cardio didn't even exist until nineteen sixty eight it was this book by dr kenneth cooper that brought the term aerobics into the mainstream. Today, nearly fifty percent of americans exercise for at least thirty minutes, three days per week. How could like? I mean, this is what exercise was right? It was this weird thing that no one really did this is how we thought of exercise before this problem existed. Exercise is a very new phenomenon, so is rampant obese d how could doing less of something we did even less of before the problem existed? Be the cause of the problem, right? Like think about the difference between like causes here we didn't used to exercise, we have an obesity problem, something other than a lack of exercise has to be the cause because the lack of exercise existed prior to the problem happening. And in fact, like again, we are exercising way, way, way more like if you look at the rate of gym membership purchases, which of course doesn't actually mean all these people are actually exercising, but again, we're trying like we're buying gym memberships are right in line with our overweight rates going up it's reasonable to assume that person's with relatively high daily expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time compared with those who have low energy expenditures reasonable to assume that that's true. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling from the american heart association, the american heart association. This is reasonable it's reasonable to say, exercise more, but we have no data to support that. Why are they saying it? Actually, most study showed that obese to about the same amount of physical activity is the lean. The actual data show that individuals who struggle with their weight are no less active than individuals who do not struggle with their weight. We're not just it's, not like seventy percent of the population just spontaneously became lazy and stupid, right? Like that is a very demeaning thing to say and it's, just false and in fact, dr blundell over the university of leeds shows us that a recent review of over three hundred or of three hundred nineteen study suggests that obese people's energy expenditure is actually higher than that of non obese populations. So there's this lazy myth that what we're just, we're just more were just lazy. We just sit around too much, much if you look at actual studies done that look at this. During the past twenty years, physical activity and leisure time has increased. We've never been as active in our leisure time as we are now ever. What about the tv myth isn't just cause we're watching too much television tv watching skyrocketed it went up forty five percent between nineteen, sixty five in nineteen seventy five, yet the obesity rates didn't rise from nineteen, seventy five to nineteen, ninety five when obesity skyrocketed. The rates of tv watching were basically steady state, so we have tv watching skyrocketing obesity stays, constant tv watching rate stays constant, obesity skyrockets. How could tv watching then b? Because it's not in activity it's not the quantity ofthe exercise it's the quality of food and quality of exercise, but aren't we generally less active? So we're gonna make general statements like we're just generally less active think about people who the most active people in the world are people with manual labor jobs right there, literally on their feet, listing and moving for forty to eighty hours a week. Unless you're michael phelps, you cannot come close to being as active as those people are, and we know generally that if we look at, for example, the centers of disease control and we look at our population statistics in the us, generally speaking, manual laborers earn less than people who have inactive desk jobs makes sense, so you've got really inactive desk jockeys let's call them who spend forty to eighty hours per week seated and then you have incredibly active individuals who are are not making his much money but are incredibly active for forty to eighty hours per week, so if you think about it that way, shouldn't shouldn't these more sedentary, higher income positions be related to higher rates of obesity? Whereas these much more active, much more active like eighty hours a week of activity but lower paying jobs be related to lower rates of obesity? The exact opposite is true. The income the obesity rates is inversely proportional to income levels in our country, and you might be thinking, well, wait a minute that's, because individuals who arnt is economically fortunate live in areas where they don't have access to like vegetables and fresh meats. That's right? It's a food quality problem it's not because they're not active enough and they should just get up off the couch that's demeaning and degrading and it's a moralistic argument, not a scientific argument and that's, what we're here to do is bring common sense and science back to this equation, saying that obesity rises income falls is ridiculous like it's just confusing causes its like saying your alarm clock going off makes the sun rise it doesn't write like your were confusing it causes here but eating mohr eating more has got to cause that game right? Like if you just eat more food, you have to gain fat. No many studies have failed to show a correlation between individual energy and taken obesity. The best data available suggests that the obese eat no more than the lean eating. More low quality food absolutely caused us the game fat, and if we stuff ourselves with food like we intentionally over, eat broccoli and we just jam ten thousand calories of broccoli into our mouth. Well, first our stomach will explode, but after our stomach explodes, we would gain weight. But nobody does that you will not overeat high quality food because it's painful to do so, eating more low quality food causes weight gain, eating more high quality food causes metabolic healing, which causes your set point to fall, which causes weight loss. And in fact, dr kean, who was actually the father of dr mike keane, who will be joining us live via satellite of today or tomorrow. Oh, found highly significant inverse correlations between food intake and body fat, meaning the more food people ate the west they laid, the less they wait. Eating more doesn't cause fat game. The easiest way to see this is to look at the data so dr greene in obesity research had a study where one group of people at a higher quality of food which of course will cover in a second eight twenty five thousand more calories over the course of the study without gaining any additional weight study at the university of pennsylvania university of pennsylvania, individuals who ate a total of nine thousand five hundred more calories over the course of the study lost two hundred percent more weight they ate more and they lost more again. Journal of adolescent health this was an amazing study where they actually took children and they let them eat on unlimited quality of ah higher protein and higher natural fat diet and they died that contained less processed starches and sweets those children eight more calories they ate sixty five thousand more calories over the course of the study than the children in the standard american diet group while losing one hundred and forty one percent more weight. How is this possible like, doesn't this violate the law of thermodynamics? The law of thermodynamics says they heard about earlier it doesn't once we understand the science because a unclogged metabolic system has all sorts of ways of dealing with excess calories other than storing them, for example again maurin equals more out my favorite study demonstrating this wasn't the mayo clinic mayo clinic get it okay, so uh all right folks are fed a thousand extra calories per day, so they figured out how many calories each participant needed. Fed him a thousand more than they needed for fifty six days. So, people, eh? Fifty six thousand. Too many calories. Right. So everyone gained sixteen pounds of fatness. Study? No, not at all. Not at all. What happened, that's? What calorie math tells us what should happen. But those are calorie myths, it's? Not at all. What happened? The most clogged individuals or most metabolically, dis regulated individuals in this study gained a little over half that they gain around eight pounds and the least clogged or morse naturally thin people gained basically nothing in the face of fifty six thousand surplus calories. They gained less than a pound that it was actually not even statistically significant. So how can fifty six thousand extra calories turn into nothing? They can't that would violate the laws of thermodynamics, but they can turn into heat. You, khun, burn them off as we've talked about dr lion over the medical journal que j m tells us food in excess of immediate requirements can easily be disposed of being burnt up and dissipated as heat did this capacity not exist, obesity would be almost universal again. Our body has mechanisms to counter balance anything we do that's why our bodies were brilliant and beautiful and not broken by default dr levine at the mayo clinic who was the individual who conducted this study as humans eat more the activation of non exercise activity thermo genesis dissipates excess energy to preserve leanness basically storage a k a body fat is only one of many options that are metabolism has when we do happen to eat too many calories there's many things that could do three of them were measured in this mayo clinic study and that's increased the rate that we burn calories daily a care base metabolic rate our body could automatically increase the amount of calories you burn digesting food called dietary induced thermo genesis or it could increase the amount of calories we burn via unconscious activity that's that neat or non activity exercise thermo genesis we talked about earlier what they actually found in this study was that if you looked at individuals who struggled with their weight rate struggled with their weight given a thousand extra calories per day their base metabolic rate fell whereas for some people it increased dramatically for some people the calories they burnt digesting food increased slightly for others it increased dramatically calories burnt the unconscious activity actually decreased in some people but increased dramatically and others what is going on in these people and how do we make these people again work more like these people versus telling them to starve themselves so eating less doesn't cause fat loss exercising more doesn't cause fat loss eating less doesn't cause fat gain and eating more doesn't necessarily cause that game that's pretty surprising. No so what do we do? We clear our clog, we drop our set point and we get our body to do automatically. What is nearly impossible to do manually makes sense I would love it if you could before we move on there's some people who are a little bit confused I know these air like kind of new things and we're going contrary to everything that we've been taught. So what you're saying is that activity is bad and everyone should sit down. No, I just want to make sure that we clarify that activity is still a good thing absolutely it's just not by itself going to cause you to lose weight. Is that what you're saying? You'd absolutely yes, so there's a big difference between what you do to just be healthy and what you do to make lasting metabolic change in your body right? Being active is the research is unambiguous, correlated with longer lifespan, increased health rates it's wonderful to be active moving, playing, taking the stairs brilliant for your health, brilliant, just horribly ineffective at unclogging your metabolic system, there's another form of exercise that is really good at that, but just like, for example a football player trains differently than a marathon runner. Like the things you do for just general health are different than the things you would do for metabolic unclogging.