Jay
Welcome to episode 11 of the Energy Balance Podcast. I'm Jay Feldman and joining me again today is my good friend Mike Fave. And this episode is part two of a three part series on healthy weight loss. And today we'll be talking about the true cause of weight gain. So in part one, we discussed why the cause of weight gain is not eating too much or exercising too little. And today we'll talk about what the true cause is and how eating less and exercising too little really doesn't address this underlying cause. We'll also be talking about our personal experiences with eating less and exercising more and how much that advice harmed our health. We'll also be talking about why carbohydrates don't cause weight gain. And we'll also be talking about our hunger signals, basically what disrupts these signals and leads to us overeating and how this can also lead to the feeling of being physically full after we eat a lot of food or we eat a big meal, but still not actually feeling satisfied. So we'll be going through that.

Basically what causes these signals not to function properly. To check out the show notes for today's episode, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com slash podcast, where you can check out any of the links to articles or studies or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. And if you are looking to lose weight in a healthy way, maybe you're struggling with a lot of low energy symptoms like fatigue, or you're weighed down by hunger and cravings, or you're not sleeping well, or you have some gut issues.

Make sure you head over to JFeldmanWellness.com slash energy and sign up for a free mini course on energy balance where I'll walk you through the main things you'll want to do to support energy production and the things you'll want to avoid that inhibit energy production. And as we'll talk about today, this is really the key to losing fat in a healthy way. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to JFeldmanWellness.com slash energy. And with that, let's get started.

So in addition to the calories in calories out model, there's this idea in kind of the alternative health, paleo, low carb, keto community, carnivore community, that insulin is the main factor in obesity. And so it's called the carb insulin model where the idea is that when you eat carbs, they stimulate insulin and insulin is an anabolic hormone, which means that it leads to creating structure as opposed to breaking it down, which is a catabolic effect would break things down. So the idea being that when you eat a lot of carbs, it increases insulin and that causes things to be stored in the fat tissue. And so because of that, the solution is just not to eat carbs. And I don't want to spend too much time talking about this, but there's a lot of issues with this theory. So one is just that there are very clear studies
metabolic ward studies that show that in a high carb diet versus a low carb diet, as far as weight loss goes, the higher carb diet maintains muscle mass better, fat free mass better and has higher levels of insulin and has lower amounts of fat burning yet loses more body fat. It has increased insulin sensitivity. Right.

And has increased insulin sensitivity, whereas the high fat low- Like significantly increased insulin sensitivity compared to a high fat diet where you were literally insulin insensitive. Exactly, yeah. Which we'll get to as well because if you're insulin sensitive, then you also don't have that much insulin. You know, it's not this idea that carbs keep going up and insulin keeps going up because as your insulin sensitivity increases, you have less insulin being produced for the same amount of carbs. but yeah, mean, even, so even before then-

These studies have shown that then the higher fat, low carb diet, there's less insulin, there's way more fat oxidation and way more fat burning going on. And yet they don't lose as much body fat, which just that as a whole, completely negates the carb insulin theory. And the reason for that is because it's a, it's not just a matter of burning fat and B there's a lot of other factors here that are going on outside of insulin. So as far as the fat burning side, what we really need to be looking at is not just the amount of burning of fat, but also the amount of storage of fat. And so the more fat that we're eating and the more fatty acids that are circulating, the more fat that ends up getting stored as well. So we have to look at that as kind of a, if we wanted to create an equation or something out of that, it's quite literally fat storage versus fat release. And so in these higher fat, lower carb studies, there's, yes, there's more fat oxidation, there's more fat burning, but there's also a lot more fat storage.

Jay
Even though there's less insulin. And that's because, insulin does drive carbohydrates into tissues and amino acids as well, or at least help the cells. It allows the cells to take up carbohydrates and amino acids. But that doesn't mean that it's all going to body fat because all of tissues in our bodies are using these carbohydrates. So just because you have higher insulin does not mean that you have higher fat storage because
especially if you have higher insulin sensitivity, which happens when you're eating more carbs, then more of your body is using carbs as a fuel source, assuming that everything is, know, metabolically is functioning properly. And so you don't have anywhere near as much fat storage or storage of the carbohydrates as fat. Yeah. The other thing that I think is important to talk about is on the lower carbohydrate diets, there's a negative impact on metabolism in general.

I mean, you can see that with, and it's not necessarily measured directly by the metabolic measures they talk about in studies where a number of calories consumed and things like that, but you can see it more so in lower to antigen production, and you can see that in a lot of people in the low-carb communities. And the other thing you can see in the low-carb communities is terrible thyroid function and extremely high cholesterol levels in the blood.

It's not necessarily from eating higher amounts of cholesterol. That's due from a decreased conversion of cholesterol to steroid hormones and things like that and then an elevated cholesterol production by liver and things like that. So it's not... there's a lot... again, there's a lot going on with that changing the macronutrient ratios and things like that that are signals to the body and have different metabolic effects. So that further proves the point.

Shows the importance of looking at things, not purely from calories, but like here we're showing macros and then you can go into the different effects of the different types of macros. And for this theory in general, just from personal experience, we both did a low carb, very high fat diet for a while. We both were doing, well, you were doing more keto than I was. I was eating a lot of protein. But when I went over to a very high carb, very low fat diet, my insulin sensitivity on blood tests was great. My Hb1C was below hemoglobin A1C, which is a measure of glycation of the hemoglobin molecules and it's used to look at insulin resistance to some extent or high blood sugar over an extended period of time with diabetics. And even though I was having like 400 or 500 grams of carbs a day on a low fat diet, my hemoglobin A1C was below the reference range. So there's the idea of you just eat more carbs, then you have more insulin, and then all of sudden you're just going to get that. just don't see the, I don't see, like I don't see that in practice. I haven't seen that in practice. I haven't seen that with other people either. What I can say though is depending on what carbs you eat and depending on some of the, foods you eat, you can have different effects from those foods and it's not necessarily the carbs. And in a lot of, I think a lot of where the insulin stuff causes all these issues comes from.

Is in studies where they look at people who have metabolic syndrome and they have elevated insulin levels and they're insulin resistant and things like that. And I don't think that that's because they're necessarily eating carbs. I mean, I think it's because they have a metabolic issue going on and some things that can affect, like for example, things that cause the features of metabolic syndrome include elevated cortisol, elevated endotoxin and polyunsaturated fats, induce, all three of those induce insulin resistance. They increase insulin, they increase blood, with the exception of PUFAs, they increase blood lipids. So endotoxin will increase triglycerides and cholesterol, and then cortisol will do the same. So I think it's important to really look at, you what is actually inducing the insulin in the insulin resistance. I don't think it's a blatant, it's just carbs. The other thing they like to blame it on is sugar and things like that. When you look at consumptions of sugar over periods of time, the consumption hasn't really increased that much. There have been things that have increased, and that includes polyunsaturated fatty acids, to an extremely large extent, which directly induce can cause an insulin resistance or damage to the cells in general. So I think it's more important to look at that and just say, metabolic syndrome has elevated insulin and carbs increase insulin, so therefore you shouldn't eat carbs. It's a very loosely constructed argument. And then obviously the down regulation of receptors that we were talking off air earlier is the theory is ridiculous in and of itself.

Where it's just you have way too much insulin present. So therefore the cellular insulin receptors become get down regulated. It's like, okay, why would maybe for a short period of time, maybe for that meal. Right. So we've talked about pretty extensively why insulin resistance is not caused by too many carbs or by too much insulin.

And what actually does cause it, which is really inhibited glucose oxidation, which just means that our cells are not effectively converting the carbs we're eating to energy. And that's not because of too much insulin. It's not because of too much carbs. You had mentioned a few of the possibilities that could be causing it like endotoxin, which is a metabolic toxin produced from our guts or polyunsaturated fats. We've had, we've talked about all those things pretty extensively. So I'm just going to link to the podcast where we've talked about those and articles and things. And there's some, there's some studies that we can, that I have.

So we can put in the show notes. And so, yeah, and so that's just, you know, it's helpful just to kind of mention that as far as the whole carb insulin theory. And there's studies dealing specifically with that too. So I'll link to those. There's, so there's two other things I want to talk about right now, which one was you had mentioned our experience with low carb and we kind of very, we very lightly glossed over our experiences just with.

eat less and exercise more and low carb. And I wanted to touch on that a little bit because I'll speak more for myself, but I know that you had similar experiences. So I'll let you speak after, but I, this whole idea of eat less, exercise more is what led to me being interested in health in the first place. Because when I was young and I was in middle school, I wanted to have the abs that you would see on, you know, from all the models and whatever else, actors and the bodybuilders and fitness models and, o I, you know, and I was taught in my health class that you just eat less and exercise more calories or all that matter. And did, you know, I worked out four days or more a week and ate a lot less, like a lot less than I should have been. And that really went on for a pretty extended period of time. And I think was, was definitely damaging to my health. It didn't work. It wasn't successful. And that's part of what, what's led to where I am today because it led
to me continuing to research and figure out, you know, why wasn't this working?

And like, why was I feeling worse? And, it took a long time before I was eating an amount that I should have been eating for my body weight and age and for my metabolism and was actually able to raise it up. And just to kind of touch on that, mean, I remember in high school when I decided that I wanted to put on some muscle. And so I created this diet where I was eating a ton of food to me. Like it was so much food and I was really, really full when I was eating all this. And when I looked at it, it ended up being a 2000 calorie diet. the male who's over six feet. Right, right. Yeah. And yeah. And I was also in sports and yeah, so I was very, very much under eating and that continued for a while after as well. mean, once even as I was older and when we were on our low carb keto phase, I was pretty lean and I weighed about the same as what I do now, but I was eating about 2,400 calories a day at that time. And now I eat between like 3,500 and 4,200 calories at the exact same weight, basically the same leanness. so I mean, that's almost an extra 2,000 calories, an extra 1,500. And you know, and even that 2,400 was not a little to me. I that was, that was, you know, a lot at the time, more or less. mean, it was, was a decent amount, but at that time, which we both went through that together, we were both starving. Like we were both always hungry, always wanting carbs. And we've experienced that in all different capacities for the rest, like for our entire lives, really. And that restriction defined my life for so long, having that feeling of constant hunger, regardless of how much you.

Jay
You eat even when you're feeling full, but you're still hungry and just never being satisfied and always restricting as well because you don't want to gain weight. So, you know, I've lived that since I was in middle school, basically. And it's such a weight psychologically and physically, of course, of just always being hungry and always avoiding food and always using that willpower to not eat all of this food that I wanted to eat, whether it was at a family event or an event with friends or something.

business related, whatever it was, it just dictates your whole life and it's no way to live. It's terrible. And so that's also why I feel so strongly about this whole idea that eating less and exercising more is probably one of the worst things that has ever come about as far as our health goes.

We're gonna in a minute. I'll let you talk a little bit about your experiences, but in a minute we'll talk about what to do instead and like the alternative model as far as why calories in calories out doesn't work and why eating less exercising more doesn't work and why you can actually live without that constant hunger and restriction you can actually feel satisfied and not have this desire for food run your entire life and not also feel so weighed down by that sort of restriction both psychologically as far as that willpower goes but also just physically

and you can have that energy and want to move around, want to work out in whatever capacity, whatever that looks like for you. yeah, we'll get to that in a second.

I mean to my my you don't have to talk about your experience if it's not like relevant but no just it was similar to yours just account is like Restricting calories for an extended period of time and then not feeling good after that and going on a binge and basically just be like, right I'm just gonna do whatever I want. it was all it was all in faint when I was young doing it It was faint. It was very big. How I like I looked how I looked I was so you know, have my apps and everything like that, but I was didn't want to lose them. I had to make sure I didn't lose them. I had to make sure I always had enough protein in that I wasn't eating too much carbs with that. As long as I ate enough protein, I wasn't going lose my lean mass and all that stuff. Then we went into the whole low carb thing, the whole keto thing. It was essentially starving for carbs all the time, even though we're eating tons of food and trying to get workouts in, but saying we're only going to have one fourth of a cup of rice dry a day because then it's going to be too much glucose and it has to be after we worked out and then we have to do a day of intermittent fasting after to recover from. And it was just like this insane, it was literally like, it's just an insane approach to things. It was almost like a psychosis about it. And I just remember having a lot of like, just being ridiculously hungry for carbohydrate all the time. And I remember you were better at it than me at keeping it. And now I just binge.

I would literally just, it would either be on protein or carbs. So I would have like 300 grams of protein in a day because I was basically making up for my lack of carbohydrates by eating a ton of protein and converting that protein to carbohydrate through gluconeogenesis. And part of being keto is you're not supposed to eat a certain amount of protein because that process occurs and then you produce glucose. As far as I remember, I mean, I haven't looked into doing any keto things recently.

But yeah, I just remember being so hungry all the time for carbohydrate, literally starving for it and still eating like 3000 something calories just worth of fat and meat and vegetables and things like that. yeah, I definitely, and then I think with this, the biggest thing was all the cravings went away once I started actually eating from my body required. So, yeah. And just being a lot of mood issues.

I remember a lot of, lot of mood issues with not having enough carbs and, so yeah, that's the end. Just work out performance, not being very great. Yeah. yeah. And this is again, what, what so many people live their entire lives doing this. And oftentimes that leads to that yo-yo dieting up and down. Yeah. It's, it's so like, yeah, it's, it hurts us to see people doing that because we've been there and it's not a comfortable way to live and it doesn't have to be that way, it can be so much better. So one other thing I want to talk about before we talk about how this all comes down to energy and what we can do to lose weight without stress, starving ourselves, all of that. So one is this, again, kind of talking about the carb insulin theory, there's this other theory that that's pretty, you know, has some popularity in the alternative communities, which is that it's either carbs or fat. You can either have one or the other. So you either have to be on a low fat diet, you know, very low fat, 10 % or less, or you have to be on a very low carb diet, know, 10 % or less because of the Randall cycle or because of some other. Are we missing this before? We've talked a little bit about the Randall cycle, but I just wanted to touch on it again because both

What we talked about before how there are needs, there are requirements for both carbs or fat and when we don't eat enough of either of them, we end up with less than what we need for optimal function and we have to create that amount through stress. So if you're not eating enough carbs, we end up trying, you know, our bodies have all these adaptive mechanisms to get by on less carbs and use more fat, use more ketones if we're in that state and then they'll produce the carbs that we do need through stress.

And the same thing happens through fat where if we're not getting enough fat as structural components of ourselves or to produce the protective hormones, then our bodies will produce that fat through again, stress. And so yes, either of these do result in a lot of weight loss, but it's basically mimicking caloric restriction where you're doing it through stress essentially.

it ends up being very similar to the calories in calories out. And there are certain contexts where each of these are helpful. So low carb can especially be helpful if somebody has gut issues and low fat can be helpful for somebody who is maybe very insulin resistant. there are the vast majority of times there are better ways to accomplish fixing your gut or fixing the insulin resistance without needing to go through these pathways that also cause a lot of stress. you don't have to be so extreme about it. I mean, there's great age..

Jay
There's no point in going so extreme in most cases. Well, yeah, there's a cost there and it's not just how extreme it is. It's just that this is simply not optimal. And so it has to go through stress as opposed to this kind of opposing idea that if you, again, give your body what it needs, nutrients, macronutrients, all sorts of other factors and take away the things that block energy production, then you don't have that sort of stress isn't required for weight loss. Things will adjust back to normal over time.

And it does take time, and I think that's important to point out. It does take time to make these changes for people. And for a lot of people, the biggest thing that I find with working with people with this type of stuff is the first week or so to get used to slowly transitioning into eating a little bit differently is probably, the first, I guess, week or two weeks is probably the most difficult. And then once you're in it for a while, it doesn't require necessarily

The willpower that is required for the program is to make sure that you're eating enough most times. Make sure that you're eating enough and eating regularly. And besides that, most people that I've worked with or I've talked about or have read some of the stuff that I've posted before on different forums and stuff like that have basically said that I don't have any cravings anymore. This diet's really easy to maintain. It's just...

The thing is, it's not like we have any diet. It's more like just principles, but I usually lay out the principles and then some people will follow and say, it's very easy to maintain, all my cravings are met, it doesn't require a lot of willpower, I'm actually hungry for the foods now that I'm eating, things like that. So the goal is to meet your needs and then have the body adjust and figure itself out going forward and not put into these extreme circumstances that aren't really necessary for what the ultimate goal is.

I mean, just takes the big thing is that it just takes time. Like you can't spend years doing extreme dietary approaches to yourself and causing X number of damage and things like that. And I expect to have a complete turnaround in like two weeks. I mean, in two weeks you will start to feel better for sure. But at the same time, like there is a bit of a, it's gonna take a little bit of time to get back on track.


And to have some of the direct effects to slowly dissipate out from themselves. So, just something to keep in mind with this type of stuff. Yeah, well, and that goes along with what we were saying earlier as far as the goal being health as opposed to the goal being weight loss. And, I need to lose 10 pounds in the next two weeks or in the month because I have this event coming up, my wedding or something, or just because it's summer soon and I want to look good in a bathing suit as opposed to just doing things in general to improve our health, will then lead to being leaner as a whole. But the reason why that happens, the reason why we want this short-term result, we just want this magic pill is because what we're doing day to day typically is already not giving our bodies what they need. They're already in that stress restriction state.

And so like you're not naturally at, you know, what is optimal or healthy as far as body fat goes. And so then, and then you know that you're just going to be driving that for a period of time and it's going to be so uncomfortable. So you just want to make sure it happens fast because it's not sustainable as opposed to what we're going to talk about in a second, which is something that actually fixes the root of the issue so that it is, and it is something that's sustainable because it doesn't leave you feeling hungry all the time.

It improves both your health, but also your your leanness and body fat. So so in contrast to all of the you know, this the carb insulin theory and the calories and calories out, eat less, exercise more. Let's talk about what the actual issue is in obesity and body fat gain and and what that means as far as the solution. And so as you know, we've talked about throughout the previous podcast episodes, it really comes down to energy and In the case, you know, I think a really helpful way to depict this or think about this is when we take food in and it's digested and absorbed, we have this substrate, we have this precursor. So we have this food that is already in our bodies and there are basically two paths. It's either used as a fuel to produce energy or it's stored. And then as far as where it's stored, it can be stored for muscle, it can be stored for other structure, or it can be stored as body fat. And the assumption with the calories in calories out model is that when were topped off on energy, then the food has to get stored. But in reality, what happens, what the evidence shows, is that when the ability to produce energy from that food is blocked, when that process of the engine running and turning that gasoline to power, so when our cells are not able to use the fuel to produce energy, when that process is blocked, then that food gets stored as fuel.

And so, What that actually means is that in this situation of obesity or body weight, or like excess body fat, the issue is actually a lack of energy because what's happening is you have this, the ability to convert that food to energy is blocked. So you don't have very much energy available and then you're storing a lot of it, a lot of the food you take in as body fat. So you're not, it's not a lack of availability of fuel. It's a lack of availability of energy.

So basically the fuel is the food, but your body is unable to convert that food into energy. Right. And the assumption is that it's supposed to be excess energy. Like they've got all this energy, they're topped off on energy as far as that goes. So they're just storing all this extra food as fat and they're eating so much extra. But in reality, they're eating so much extra because their bodies don't have enough energy. And that's what dictates our hunger signals. So part of the whole idea behind overeating and needing to use willpower is that you know, these hunger signals are always going to be there and they're always going to tell you to eat. So you just have to resist them. So you don't eat too much. But in reality, these hunger signals are dictated by our energy, by our cellular energy availability. So when our bodies have enough energy, they stop being hungry. So this is what we talked about earlier where you can be full physically and you can have eaten a whole meal. But if your body is not converting that food to energy, you're still going to be starving. Like you're still going to have those same hunger signals.

You're still going to feel like you want to eat 10 more plates of whatever food you ate, you know, you were eating. And so the, and along with that is this idea of hyper palatability where the foods that we have available now, they just taste so good. And they'll talk about this with a Randall cycle too. And you have to eat too. You have to either eat low carb or low fat because if you eat both, it tastes too good. And so you're going to eat too much.

Jay
That's not the case because those hunger signals are determined by our energy availability. So if you're effectively converting the food that you're eating to energy, then what will happen is that process will be very efficient. So you won't be storing any food as fat or very little as fat because it's all going to be used to produce energy. And then when you have the energy you need, your body turns off its hunger signals. Even if it's a really tasty food, they'll turn off those hunger signals and you won't want to eat it, which is such a foreign concept, especially to even talk any younger versions of ourselves to say that.

You know, at any point you wouldn't want to eat that cupcake that's on the table or whatever it is. know, I do think that there with a lot of processed foods though, they do mix and it's not just having sugar and fats and stuff together. They do like they do mix a lot of different things together to create a certain taste and flavor and things like that. And it doesn't come with nutrients. And so a lot of stuff that the hyper palatable foods come with now is a lot of toxins.

When you wind up eating that cupcake that's loaded with corn oil and has a whole bunch of other ingredients besides white flour, sugar, and butter, and eggs, you wind up developing number one nutrient deficiencies, but you also have a lot of metabolic inhibitors there. So do these hyperpalatable processed foods cause weight gain and can lead to obesity and issues? Yes, of course they can, but it's not just because they're very tasty.

It's not at all because they're very tasty. They're very tasty and they have a lot of metabolic inhibitors and a lack of nutrients and things like that that are that are causing problems not only directly to your body when you ingest them but also by manipulating like what your bacterial flora is and creating endotoxemia and things like that. So there's a lot of there's a lot of factors in play with those foods. Does that mean you should never have a cupcake? No. Does it mean that if you word to have a cupcake, it'd probably be better if you ate a cupcake made with specific ingredients or things like that, yes, in conjunction with having other foods that are also nutrient dense. That have some nutrients. And it's not just like, the nutrient density becomes important because the nutrients are what allows you or optimizes or assists your body in turning that food into fuel or into energy, turning that fuel of the food into energy.

Jay
If you don't have some of these nutrients like vitamins and minerals, that process cannot occur. And you develop similar issues. So it's important that your diet isn't only cupcakes and pizza and white bread and things like that. There needs to be nutrient-dense foods there because you need these co-factors in order to function properly. Now, can you have some cookies or cupcakes with your meals? Sure. It's not going to kill you.

But the issue isn't necessarily the hyper-pollutability of them. There's way more to it than that. Right. Yeah. And so that's exactly the point is that it's not that you need to be eating foods that don't taste too good so you don't eat too much. It's just it's another offshoot of the same idea of all of us being gluttonous and lazy and overeating and we just need to eat less when that's not the case. The issue if and this is what you were alluding to is basically we need to be focusing on the conversion of that food to energy.

And if we're doing those things, which we'll talk about some of those factors now, if we're doing the things that support that conversion, then the food that we take in will be converted to energy and used properly. And then if there is extra, it doesn't even happen when there's extra. It depends on what we're eating as we were talking about earlier with different macronutrients and the different kind of hormonal profiles that result. But the foods that we're eating that need to be used as precursors for hormones or to build muscle, whatever, that will happen. And then the fuel...

Needs will be satisfied by these foods and will effectively convert them to energy as opposed to storing them to fat or storing them as fat. yeah, so eating carbs and fats together is actually a really good way to make sure that you're getting some of the nutrients needed to support this energy production and to actually turn off the hunger signals as opposed to avoiding one of them, which actually just leaves you way hungrier. So the some of those main factors that determine

that conversion of food to energy. mean, first off, I'll just kind of preface this by saying that all of the episodes we've been doing on this podcast all talk about, they're all centered around this conversion of food to energy because when we optimize it, it's, this is really the solution to virtually all of our health issues because they all result from this lack of energy. so just to talk about a few of them, you had mentioned endotoxin a few times. And so endotoxin is a metabolic toxin that's produced from our gut. So for a lot of people, bacteria, by bacteria. There's not only endotoxin, there's other toxins produced by bacteria and fungi and everything like that. Endotoxin is the main one looked at in studies, but there's different types of endotoxin, different types of bacterial toxins. So for the purpose of us talking when we say endotoxin, we're talking about any type of damaging metabolic products produced by the gut from your flora. Exactly, should even have taken a step back further. So we want to make sure that we are avoiding the things that block the conversion of food to energy and making sure that we get the things that support the conversion of fuel to energy. So as far as the things that block that conversion toxins from the gut, like endotoxin, also stress hormones, there's, and then I would also, know, polyunsaturated fats, PUFA. So which are all things that we've talked about before.

And then some of the main things that support the conversion of fuel to energy would be nutrients as you talked about. this would be especially micronutrients, B vitamins, magnesium, zinc, all sorts of different vitamins and minerals. As you had also mentioned, different hormones. So the proper reproductive hormones, testosterone-based hormones, progesterone, as well as thyroid hormone is one of the main drivers of that conversion from fuel to energy. And then there's all sorts of other factors too that play into this conversion. everything again from sleep to exercise, exposure. Exactly. But, the main point being that rather than just eating less and bringing in less fuel, which leaves us with less energy anyways, what we actually want to be doing is taking away the things that block the conversion of food to energy, taking in the things that support the conversion of food to energy. And then we want to be producing as much energy as possible because that's what's going to improve.

Things like our hormonal state, it's going to increase our, you know, the pro metabolic hormones, thyroid and reproductive hormones and keep the stress hormones down cortisol, adrenaline, glucagon. And it's going to keep our hunger well regulated so that when we, when we eat foods that satisfy our energy requirements, then we aren't hungry anymore. And just kind of as a side note here, something that's talked about a lot is leptin resistance and not in, which is just a hormone that is supposed to dictate our hunger. And what's actually found there is that leptin resistance occurs when there's too little energy. So basically leptin is saying, we don't need to eat anymore, you have enough food, but that signal doesn't work when our bodies don't have enough energy. So that it's just kind of another way that we need to make sure that we're converting that food to energy. Otherwise our hunger signals will continue even if we have enough food, even if we're storing a lot of body fat.

Yeah. All your functions in your body, like your mood and libido and mental function, athletic performance, things like that, are all dependent upon energy. And so when you start to decrease energy function overall, or energy production overall, then you start to lose different functions. And we didn't talk about it, but I think tying in the fact of the loss of function scene in the Minnesota starvation experiment is important because you start to see what happens when you lower your caloric intake drastically. And in this study, it was 1,800 calories. mean, most people shoot for 2,000 calories a day now, which is sort of insane that 1,800 calories was considered starvation at this point in time. People had tons and tons of issues. And now the vast majority of the population is supposed to be satisfied with 2,000 calories a day.

And I think that's a testament to the current metabolic state of most people and you know what's going on in metabolic food and the fact that they can get by at 2,000 calories. So, I don't think that's a good thing. Right, no, not at all. The whole 2,000 calorie a day diet is based on no evidence really. yeah, mean... It's a big opportunity number. Right, and yeah, and it's a really dangerous number to have just programmed into our minds because that's really very little food. There's very few people who...

Who would have a healthy metabolism and wouldn't be eating that much food. Unless they were really small. Right, exactly. Yeah, which is very few people. Or maybe like smaller women, shorter, lighter women. Right, exactly. It's just a small portion for the vast majority of the population. 2000 calories a day is not enough. And we shouldn't be basing anything on that. And yeah, so we talked a little bit about the Minnesota starvation experiment before and I'll link to some articles on it. But yeah, I mean, they took average built men around like 150 to 160 pounds and they were originally maintaining a weight on 3300 calories. They dropped them down to 1800 calories to see what would happen in starvation, which as you were saying, so many people will eat about that much when they're trying to lose body fat. And I know people who are twice who weigh twice as much as that subsisting on less calories. Yeah. Yeah. And, and

Most people who are weighing between 150 and 160 pounds are not eating 3,300 calories and maintaining their weight. And that's because there are so many factors going on that we talked about that are inhibiting that conversion of food to energy based on our modern food supply and all these other factors. when they took these people who were doing, who had a metabolism that was able to use 3,300 calories worth of food a day and put them on 1,800, which is just a way to show what happens when we eat less and exercise more, it destroyed them. they had, they had, other thing we didn't mention was they had them exercise hard every day as well. So they had to like walk a certain number of miles. Yeah. Yeah. So they dropped their caloric intake and then they had them exercise as well. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. And they were, it, caused all sorts of psychological symptoms. They just were not the same people. Things like sense of humor were gone and any interest in opposite sex, the libido was gone, they could not focus in classes, some people had kind of like psychotic breaks, they were physically experiencing all sorts of symptoms, were very weak and fatigued. obsessions with food. That was one of the biggest things that they talked about, which I think you can see in a lot of the fitness culture now, different weird obsessions with food and things like that.

Yeah. they were, and they were, some of them were so weak that they couldn't walk up a flight or two of stairs. said like, they said that they felt like old men. one, one anecdote, they were saying that they, had a buddy system to make sure that they stuck to the diet because people were not able to stick to it. People were eating gum. They were eating food out of garbage cans. One person stole raw rutabagas from a grocery store and ate them raw, which is rutabagas are like a root vegetable, kind like some of it, like a potato or a turnip, which you wouldn't want to eat.

Jay
Raw and that was just how starved they were and so one person was saying that it was good that I had a buddy because I couldn't open the door to the library myself. Like I needed somebody else to help me open that door because I was not strong enough to do it. you know and so many people are walking around in that sort of state like they've depressed their metabolism so much that they are eating 1800 calories or less. They just don't have the symptoms because their metabolic function is so low. Yeah.

It doesn't have to be the case if you fix the factors, if you address the factors that block that conversion, know, affect the factors that affect the conversion from food to energy. So you can have greater energy and lose body fat as opposed to the assumption that if you have more body fat, you have more energy physiologically, which is not the case. Yeah. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. That was part two of a three part series on healthy weight loss.

And in part three, we're going to be talking about exactly what we should be doing as far as nutrition and lifestyle and exercise go in order to lose weight in a healthy way without also experiencing fatigue and low libido and constant hunger and restriction and all of those other low energy symptoms. If you did enjoy today's episode, please leave a review or a like or comment wherever you're listening. It really does a lot to help support the podcast.

And to check out the show notes for today's podcast, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com slash podcast where you can find the links to any of the articles or studies or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. And if you are looking to lose weight in a healthy way, if you are dealing with any of those low energy symptoms that I just mentioned, whether that's fatigue or an inability to sleep well, or a lack of libido or constant hunger and restriction.

Those aren't things that we need to be experiencing in order to lose weight. So if you are dealing with any of those symptoms and you're struggling to lose weight in a healthy way, head over to Jfeldmanwellness.com slash energy and sign up for a free mini course on energy balance. And I'll walk you through the things that will help to support your energy production and the things that we'll want to avoid that inhibit energy production. And as we talked about today, this is really the key to losing fat in a healthy way. So to sign up for that energy balance mini course, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com/energy and I'll see you in the next episode.