Jay
Welcome to episode 12 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 three of a three part series on healthy weight loss. And today we're going to be talking about exercise, nutrition and other factors related to weight loss. And if you haven't seen part one or part two, make sure you go and check out those. In part one, we talked about why eating less and exercising more is not the answer for healthy fat loss.

And in part two, we talked about how the true cause of weight gain is actually inhibited energy production, which is an important concept to understand for for today when we talk about what we should be doing to lose fat in a healthy way. today we will be talking about exercise and movement and why we don't want to be thinking about these things in terms of burning calories and how we can mitigate the stress that's involved with exercise and movement. And then as far as nutrition goes, we'll be talking about what types of foods we want to be eating and how much we want to be eating and how we want to be eating them in order to lose weight in a healthy way. And then we'll also go through some of those other factors that affect healthy weight loss, like sleep and stress and other, other things like that. To check out the show notes for today's episode, head over to Jfeldmanwellness.com slash podcast, where I'll be linking to any of the articles or studies or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode.

And if you are struggling to put the pieces together a little bit, you're feeling a little bit lost and you're not sure which direction to go as far as weight loss goes without sacrificing your health, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com slash call and sign up for a free call and I'll help you out. talk about it and I'll help guide you through the process of losing weight in a healthy way because obviously that can be easier said than done. And with that, let's get started. We've talked about how the real issue with fat gain is actually a lack of energy, where basically the process that converts food to energy is blocked for whatever reason. We'll talk about what those reasons are. And that causes our bodies to store that food as body fat. And so in order to stop the storage of food as body fat and increase body fat loss, we need to fix those things that are blocking energy production from food. So basically as long as like if we do take away the things that are blocking energy production and increase the things that support that production from food to energy, then that will allow us to lose body fat rather than gain body fat. It'll also allow us to have proper hunger regulation. So we aren't feeling hungry all the time. We actually feel satisfied. And it's also the same solution to all sorts of other symptoms and conditions that we might be dealing with that are all related to this lack of energy.

So as far as fixing those, as far as fixing that issue goes, the issue of converting food to energy, there's, I guess we should first mention a lot of the things that are out there that don't do this. So we talked about how eating less and exercising more is one of the worst things you can do for this situation because it just leads to even less energy available, which further depresses our metabolism, keeps us hungry, you know, and then we have to live with that constant hunger and restriction and we end up with that yo-yo diet where yes, we lose some weight and then we gain it back and it causes all sorts of issues. I think it's important to know people though. When you first start doing that, you will lose weight. But the question is whether that is like a long-term healthy solution. the point is to not exercise. The point is that eating a lot less and exercising more through a calories in calories out perspective is not necessarily like a solution to the issue long term. And that's what leads to the yo-yo dieting and the binge and the like binge and then like under eating cycles and gaining weight and losing weight and gaining weight and losing weight. And it leads to these ideas of, I need to lose 10 pounds for my trip or I need to lose 10 pounds for this wedding. So I'm going to go on this cut for this extended period of time. And then after that, I'm going to do whatever I want and I'm going to put the weight back on and then more weight comes on.

And then I can't get it off and it goes back and forth like that. And I think the reason that that's become a thing and sort of like it's, I guess, very prevalent in our culture, that idea, when people talk about it, it's almost unknown. People are just like, yeah, this is, you know, I went on the cut and then after that I lost all this weight and I looked so good and now I gained all the weight back and it's so hard to lose the weight. And because the paradigm and the underlying, model or ideas behind it are faulty, you get these interesting outcomes. So will exercising, in the short term, exercising more and eating less can get you to lose weight. We're not saying that it won't because that's not true. It can. The issue is that doing something like that changes the hormonal profile in a negative direction and has a bunch of negative health effects because of its effects on energy balance, where you have basically a decreased amount of energy coming in with an increased output. then the question is, is the energy coming in, or is the food coming in even being converted to energy? And so when you start decreasing the food intake and thus the energy output, if it's even being converted well, and then or the energy conversion and then increasing the energy output, what you wind up doing is down regulating metabolism overall because the body's basically saying we have way too much energy going out and we don't have enough coming in, so we have to lower the overall body's metabolic function so that we don't burn off all of our energy stores. Because basically the stores that we have in our energy are fat tissue, our muscle tissue, and our glycogen.

To access that is catabolic. It is literally breaking down the body. The point is not to break down the body per se. The point is to get to a point where the body, and when you start to break down the body, the body slows the metabolic rate so that you don't break it down as fast, and then it starts moving into this hibernation function where it starts shoving in any sort of, any sort of slight excess of stores relative to metabolic rate that you have going on in, to stores, starts pushing the excess energy into stores because it's food or fuel. So that because it starts to say, Hey, you know, I'm essentially in famine time. It's signals that I'm in famine and I need to start storing. So, and what you'll see with a lot of people, I guess, is the easier way to show it is a lot of people will go on these cuts or they'll go on these keto diets or they'll go on these high protein, high vegetable, low fat, low carb diets and they'll lose a ton of weight. They will lose a ton of weight. But then once they try and introduce carbs or they try and introduce fats or whatever, they start to put that weight back on. And then when they put that weight back on, a lot of people overshoot with putting that weight back on and then they can't get the weight back off. And I've worked with a few people where this has happened, where they lost like 40 or 50 pounds. They dropped all that weight. They worked really hard for it.

And then when they tried to get back to normal, you know, eating a decent amount again and increasing the amount of food that they were taking in and not exercising as hard, they put on more weight than they started with. And then it became even more difficult to get off. And that's because they dropped their metabolic rate and they forced their body into a basic, basically a famine position. And so anything that they started eating again, started going directly into fat stores. The other thing that occurred to them is when they went on these, um, when they went on these extreme diets, they elevated their cortisol and some of the side effects that they got from this, a lot of them developed circles under the eyes, dark circles, they developed issues with digestion, they developed sleep problems, their libido was poor, and then their performance in exercise and in daily mental tasks decreased. Because basically their functions from a higher metabolism, since the metabolism was lowered, those functions started to decrease slowly.

And it happened very slowly until the point where people say I can't sleep. I sleep four hours a night, things like that. And I'm hungry all the time. That's another thing. I'm hungry all the time, even when I eat. And then some people after a period of time, they're just not hungry at all. they're just, eventually they crash. They're not eating, they're not doing anything. And then they come to a point where they don't have any energy whatsoever to do anything. They're just exhausted all the time, just going through the motions.

And a lot of times what I found at least is I'll have people who are morbidly obese on extremely low amounts of calories because they've dropped their metabolic rate so low. I I have one friend eating a package of oats for breakfast, Chipotle for lunch with just rice and meat and wok, that's it. And then for dinner, sometimes he wouldn't eat. And then other times he would, you know, he would eat just eggs or something like that or just

Jay
Just some sort of like packaged lean-plazine thing. And the guy is about 360 pounds. so when you start to calculate his calories out, and he's looking at some days he's under 1,000 calories, but he's maintaining his weight. And the first thing when I talk to him is you need to get your calories up, because you can't lower them any more than they are. You need to get the metabolic rate back up. So I think it's important to understand that doing that exercising more and eating less in the short run will work. In some of first circumstances, the first few times you do it, it will work. But it can eventually get progressively harder and then it will stop working. And you basically can dig yourself into a hole if you don't bring your metabolism back up. Yeah. so those sorts of, you had mentioned cuts a few times, but that's kind of like fitness industry term. But yeah, in general, as you mentioned, people going on these extreme diets for these short periods of time. And over time, again, just to kind of recap, this leads to the sort of stress, famine, starvation state where all of our functions, all of our important functions are depressed. All of the kind of higher level functions, our cognitive ability, our reproductive systems, all of that is depressed because our bodies are trying to conserve as much energy as possible. And then because they're in this starvation, famine, stress state, all of the food that is taken in that this further can further inhibits that conversion of food to energy because we're trying to conserve that energy and so more of that food gets stored as fat and so as you were saying that when you do that and then yes you lose some weight because you're doing it through this stress state your body is then trying to hold on to as much body fat as possible so because that conversion from food to energy is become so blocked because of the stress state it creates these signals that block that conversion so then you're so much more likely to gain body fat when you're eating, when you go back to eating the amount that you were eating before. And that's how you end up with people who are way overweight and eating very little is the metabolism are so depressed. And that's why they have all of those different symptoms and issues. so obviously the solution here is not eat less and exercise more, which we talked about extensively in that last, in our last episode. So instead there, I mean, there are a few other things that some people will use outside of just eating less and exercising more to try to lose weight. So people use different fat burning supplements or like keto bars or drinks or things like that. People will use like card blockers kind of again along that same idea. Agonist. Yeah, like caffeine or yeah. Things like that. Yeah, which is yeah. So those are oftentimes considered to be like fat burning supplements. But really what they're doing is they're all just driving stress and in the long term they do the same thing as eating less and exercising more, which is they end up depressing our metabolism because yeah, it's for the same reasons that you're creating this central starvation state. are directly increasing adrenaline. Some of them like coffee and some people show benefits with coffee and things like that is due to an eventual tolerance to coffee and there's other effects besides driving the adjuvnergic pathway.

And there's some studies showing that after a period of time, the adrenergic effects of coffee actually decrease, and then there's beneficial effects that it has in other areas. But a lot of these fat-burning supplements function to increase adrenaline, to increase sympathetic nervous function or tone, I guess, so that you can have a... Because the adrenergic hormones increase lipolysis or the breakdown of fat.

So they basically show this and they say, you're breaking down fat so you must be losing weight. And that's a process. And it does do that, but there's also lot of side effects that come with that. It's an artificial increase in metabolism. And that increase in lipolysis is not the thing responsible for the fat. That's a product of distress. So some people will think when we're talking about lipolysis, what that means is that you're releasing fat from the fat stores. that happens for example.

Yeah, and that happens, for example, you were just saying lipolysis, so it's lipo meaning the fat part and then lysis meaning the fat part. So yeah, and so people will say that, you know, for example, you want to be fat burning because that means that you have a lot of lipolysis going on and you're releasing a lot of fat from your stores and you don't want to be eating carbs because that inhibits that process. But just focusing on that is really more or less irrelevant. It doesn't consider that when you have a lot of, you know, when you are

Jay
in that fat burning state, you're also storing a lot more fat. It doesn't mean that it's just getting burned and then you don't have any other consequences there. And then you also end up depressing your metabolism. And we talked about that a little bit when we talked about the carb insulin theory or model of obesity, which is really not supported. One thing that we have talked about a lot though is how exercising more is not necessarily ideal. But a lot of people take this to mean that we shouldn't be exercising at all.

Because exercise can cause stress and which, and you know, if you're not supporting your body with enough food and it doesn't have enough energy, then exercise will just cause stress. And that part is true where if you're not eating enough, we don't want to want to then force exercise. But that doesn't mean that we don't want to be exercising as a whole. And in general, like in our society, exercise and like calorie burning are typically considered to be synonymous.

And exercise is kind of its own category outside of like movement and activity and like playing sports, for example. And so there, so as far as getting enough exercise goes, we do think that that's beneficial. It does seem to be beneficial just because I mean, even by looking at studies that look at what happens when we're sedentary and not moving a lot versus even exercising a little bit, there's a pretty huge difference there, which is an accountant in the sense of like we're saying exercise, but it doesn't have to be exercise in the sense that I go run on the treadmill for 60 minutes. When we're saying exercise here, I guess a better term would be any type of movement that you find enjoyable. Any type of, it could be tennis, it could be lifting weights if that's what you enjoy. It could be martial arts. It could be just going for a walk around the park once a day or a few times a day or whatever you like. It doesn't have to be, go to the gym. I'm gonna do,
I'm going to do fasted cardio for 60 minutes in the morning. And then later on in the day, I'm going to do and, and we're talking about from a perspective for general health here. If you want to be a bodybuilder stepping on stage and you want to get to extreme levels of leanness that may or may not be healthy for you, that is a different story. Right. Of course. That's an entirely different story. If your goal is that, and you want to start working on fasted cardio and running on the treadmill for 60 minutes a day and whatever you're going to do, by all means, if that's your goal and you find that that works for you, then go ahead. But from the perspective of general health and getting into a lean body physique in terms of like a health perspective, you you're not overweight, you're not obese, you're also not underweight or extremely lean, you know, you're in that happy medium range. Then in this perspective, find an activity that's enjoyable and do the activity that's enjoyable as much as you can handle it while you're doing it and work up from there. yeah, and so that's kind of what I was saying earlier as far as we just want to make sure that we're moving as opposed to being sedentary. And most people are sedentary now because we're sitting most of the most of the time at our jobs for at least 40 hours a week, which is most of the day. And we're sitting in our cars on our commute, everything like that. So we come home, we sit and we watch TV and then people sit when they play video games or they sit around when they're on social media. Right.

And so, yeah, we think that having some sort of dedicated organized movement like a sport or activity or something you enjoy is definitely helpful, but also just making sure you're moving throughout the day, getting up and taking walks, especially on a lunch break, which some sun. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe moving around a little bit in the morning, trying to, there's a lot of different kind of ideas. You could try maybe a different type of commuting to work if you could walk or ride a bike or something, but
so just going for the easiest thing at least in my experience and to tell just go for a walk It doesn't have to be that long of a walk You don't have to walk for 10 miles or get your 4,000 or 10,000 steps in a day It doesn't need to do that, you know, after you eat a meal Maybe if you're with a friend or a spouse or somebody like that, you know Just go for a little walk and have a conversation on the walk something something as simple as that. It doesn't have to be extreme right, you know.

Even I'm pretty sure there's studies showing just like a few minute walks have beneficial effects on insulin sensitivity and all these different things like that. So it really doesn't have to be this entailing thing that you see or that you hear from the mainstream media or from the fitness gurus or anything like that. Even I mean, even just activity within your house, like cleaning has been shown to have benefits in the same way, like, you know, as opposed to just sitting.

Jay
Yeah, that would be kind of the biggest thing is just let's try to move throughout the day. It does really make a big difference versus being sedentary. And then as far as. And as you were saying, too, you know, most people don't enjoy walking on a treadmill inside of a gym, and you might as well go outside, go on a hike, you know, walk a dog or, you know, go on a walk with with family or friends and enjoy nature and things like that. And.

So as far as organized activity goes and amounts, you how much should we, should we be exercising? You know, a week does it have to be 30 minutes a day or an hour every other day or, or anything like that. And I would say what one thing that should be one of the biggest kind of factors here to help guide you is your resilience to that activity. So if you're performing an activity and you're finding that you're exhausted throughout the entire rest of the day, then that means that it was probably too much, too intense and causing too much stress.

We want to be able to be active in a way that really we want to have more energy when we're done than when we start. And of course it makes sense if you're doing a sport or something that's a little bit more intense, it's normal to be tired afterwards. But in general, we don't want to feel wiped out from whatever activity that we're doing. That would suggest that. It's important to self-regulate and have a self-awareness about how you feel after you're doing any type of activity. The other thing I'll say is I think enjoying the activity changes the activity. Absolutely.

Something I know for me, like a lot of people will ask, personally I like to lift weights, but they'll say, you run or anything. I hate running. I'm not going to run on a treadmill. I'm not going to go do miles in the track. I'll do some sprints or something like that if I feel like it. But as far as long as it's running and never do it, I will never do it. And why? Purely because I don't like it. And I, when I do, when I had had to do it for sports or anything like that, it was more of a drain just because it was like, I have to do this. So not only It was mentally taxing, it was also physically taxing, and the lack of enjoyment of it was like a huge issue. Whereas in a contrast, in the past playing basketball, I could play 13, 12, 13 pickup games, play for five, six hours in a day, and I won't feel anything. I'm a little tired, a little hungry after, but it was enjoyable. I wasn't even worried about being physically taxed because I was enjoying what I was doing. And I think that that component becomes really important, like having a real drive and interest

Jay
In what you're doing. And the other thing is being involved with other people, think, makes a difference. And that's why I think sports and martial arts become really enjoyable for people. Or if you're lifting, having a lifting partner or something like that, whatever it is. Because then you have, I think, tagging along with this, having a sense of community as well as having an activity that you enjoy and you consistently work at. Beyond purely the weight loss or anything like that, it's helpful for, number one, sticking to those activities.

But number two, like enhancing your life overall. Like it's not purely a weight loss pack or a health pack. Like it's a general life hack to do something that you enjoy consistently and have a community of people around you with that. think that that becomes really important in general for multiple functions and multi-physiologic levels. Yeah. And we're so used to exercise and movement being forced as you were talking about with running or so many people will go to boot camps where they'll push you as hard as you can to the so that you you're forced to do the exercise that you don't want to do. And we're basically suggesting is the opposite, that it should be something that you enjoy doing and want to do. And yeah, I think that a lot of people don't run because they enjoy it. I some people enjoy long distance running. They feel like it clears their head. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But a lot of people do it because they feel like that's what they have to do to be healthy. And it's not to say running this bad. It's just if you've yeah, if you I don't want to I'm going to keep saying the same thing over. But find something you enjoy, it's going to be too stressful. And the next big component here is going to be making sure that you're eating enough to support that activity and prevent the stress. And I'll say also that in the earlier parts of somebody's healing journey, if their metabolism is very depressed and they're really not doing too well health-wise, the very mild and gentle activity is probably best. Things more like walking, maybe some gentle yoga or something. as somebody heals them,
then more intense activity I think is perfectly healthy as well. But getting enough food is a huge component when it comes to exercise. Normally, we're thinking about exercise as far as burning off the food that we're eating. When I think a better way to think about it is that we want to make sure that we eat to make up for the food that we burn off when we exercise. Like if we're burning off 500 calories when we exercise, that means we need to get at least another 500 calories to make sure that we're supporting ourselves from the energetic standpoint.

Jay
You're going to say something, so go ahead.

Mike

No, I was just going to say make sure it's obviously the right type of food as well, not just endless amount. And obviously you can link back to other podcasts and things like that when we talk about the different foods and whatnot. But making sure that it's food that you can act, your body can actually use. I a lot of people will, I exercise now I can have my protein ice cream or my, I don't know. You've earned your crappy food. Yeah, exactly.

I think more so that you just want to be eating like decent food, pretty good food, food that doesn't irritate your intestines and then doing something that you enjoy. One of the things I think it's important to point out is that a lot of these diseases like obesity and being like extremely overweight are relatively new diseases. They're not, they haven't been around forever and people say, it's because we have so much excess food and things like that. And I don't think that that's necessarily the case. I think it's, have a lot of possibly toxic food in the current system, including things like high unsaturated fats and a lot of different refined foods in combinations with industrial ingredients and stuff like that. And I think those are more of the issue. I think that the calories in calories out is the smoke screen to cover for the fact that we have a lot of crap food in our diets right now and to like to normalize those foods and then say, it's just you.

When it's not you, it's really the food. in the 1800s, early 1900s, things like that, when you look at people's diets, mean, people were still eating cookies. Cookies aren't that new of a food. They're eating cookies, they're eating cakes, they're eating fruit, they're eating meat, they're eating all these things, they're using butter. And obesity rates were not what they are right now. And the vast majority of the country wasn't extremely overweight like it is right now.

And so I'm speaking specifically about the United States because that's where we are. So I think that, you know, it's important to realize that what's actually going on in terms of the calories in, calories out model, like that's not reality. There's other things going on behind that. And eating good food is like paramount to maintaining a decent weight, a healthy weight.

Jay
 And so before we dig into what those foods are and how we actually want to be eating for and other things we want to be doing to help us with healthy fat loss. I want to talk about how much we should be eating because we've talked about exercise and finding that kind of healthy amount and what goes into that. And as far as how much we should be eating, again, we're moving very far away from just wanting to eat less and just wanting to burn more calories or bring in less calories. In reality, we want to, you know, I would say that the general goal as far as metabolism goes is to be able to eat as much food as possible.

while maintaining your weight or losing body fat if that's something, know, have excessive body fat. on where you are, I know it's kind of hard, but as much as food as you want, because there's points where people just, like I said, they don't have appetites at all. But what I usually find is when people change up their diets and they start eating foods that aren't irritating their intestines or that aren't loaded with a bunch of garbage ingredients.

That they tend to, their hunger comes back and they start to go, wow, I'm hungry for this, I'm hungry for that. I think that that's really important. And the other thing I see sometimes in some of these communities, people overeat and they like, I need to eat this much, I need to eat that much. I think it's very stressful too, to try and clam yourself with all these, all these foods, I need to eat enough food. think that it's important to go by how much you can eat and how much, if you're just sitting down for a meal,
and you're eating and you're I just cannot eat anymore. I think it's important to take awareness of that and be like, okay, I'm not gonna eat. Now is it the food that I'm eating right now? Does this food not agree with me? Or am I just not that hungry for this food right now? I think the awareness is really important in the whole process. can't just be, I need to eat this number of calories and I'm gonna slam this number of calories and I'm just gonna do it, because that's also a problem. And I see in certain circumstances, there are people who just they have a certain number of calories that they need to meet and they will force themselves to eat it. the question, and regardless of if they don't feel good eating it or not, the question becomes like, well, why, why, why are you not hungry for the food? Have you eaten too much or is the food not agreeing with you? think that those are two of the biggest things there. Yeah. So I would say, I would say basically that we want to eat in a way we want to eat.

Jay
Our food, like eat the types of foods and eat in a way that allows us to eat as much as possible while maintaining or losing body fat. And the reason for that is because that suggests that we are converting as much, we are getting as much energy as possible from the food that we're eating. We're converting that food to energy maximally and with as much efficiency as possible so that we are able to function at our best. So that is kind of like baseline goal is rather than the goal being to eat less, the goal is not to force ourselves to eat more, but to be able to eat more.

based on our appetite and based on what our body can support so that we can increase our metabolism more or less and increase all of those functions that have been depressed. And as you're saying, if we're not eating, like if we don't have the appetite for it, then that means that either A, the types of foods we're eating or the way that we're eating or other things that might be going on are keeping our metabolism suppressed in a way that it can't support that higher amount of food or our metabolism has just not been able to catch up.

You know, and it takes time because when you've had, when you've been in the starvation type state for so long, basically what that's done is driven down a lot of the pro metabolic hormones. So thyroid hormone, reproductive hormones, and what it's also done is brought up a lot of the stress hormones and this, these, this causes kind of ingrained patterns. And so it takes a while to work our way out of that. And so, so again, there's, there are circumstances where our metabolism might be so suppressed that, again, we, If we eat too much at once, if we start eating as much food as we want, we can begin to gain weight, gain body fat. And so because of that, we want to make sure that again, we're going to go through the way we like the best way to eat and the types of foods that we should be eating to support our metabolism and to encourage healthy weight loss and fat loss. but we also want to make sure that we're doing it slowly, making these changes slowly, because as you were saying,
If the goal, you know, if we just think, okay, like green light, eat as much as we want. That can also get us into trouble because it takes a little bit for metabolism to catch up. And a lot of times there are other underlying issues going on that would prevent that from working very well. So we'll talk about our gut health in a second, because that's a pretty big one that we see when, yeah, we'll talk about in a second because that's a big one where people will start eating a lot of food and the foods might be really great. But if you, if they're being consumed by these, microbes in our gut that are producing toxins that block the conversion of food to energy, then we just end up gaining body fat from it. let's start by talking about the, before we get to the gut, let's talk about kind of what those foods are that are really ideal for supporting our metabolism and supporting energy production. We're not going to dig too deep into this because you know, we've been talking about these foods throughout the podcast. So I'll be linking to those episodes and, and to articles that are relevant, but some of the more important of principles nutritionally to support healthy fat loss would be to avoid the polyunsaturated fats which are the fats that are in vegetable oils, nuts and seeds, fatty fish and those are like the main sources so which are everywhere I mean there are all sorts of processed foods they're used in most restaurants for cooking they're also considered to be health foods in many instances so

Those are fats that we'll want to avoid and instead we'll want to favor the saturated fats which are found in ruminant animal fat so that's hoofed animals like cow and and Bison so those sorts of fats are much more saturated as well as dairy and Cook chocolate or coconut oil and cocoa butter Also adding to the polyunsaturated fats would be the fats that are found in fatty chicken and fatty pork that are fed

typical diets. So unless they're pastured eating kind of a wild diet, their fats are typically pretty polyunsaturated. And so I know I breezed through that, but we just did an episode talking about the polyunsaturated fat. So I'll link to that. If that's not something you're familiar with. Did you want to add anything there or can I keep going through these nutrients? I was just going to say that I think for a lot of people, the most easily digestible foods to start are the saturated fat sources and the different animal proteins that don't bother them.

So I think that when you first starting out, if you're having a lot of gut issues, I think a lot of people will find that they can eat different proteins and saturated fats pretty decently without getting a lot of digestive upset. And then the more difficult part is finding out which specific carbs agree with you and which specific fibers agree with you. And then eventually you start to expand from there. Yeah, that's definitely true. I should say for the most part, but I do also see a lot of people who have trouble digesting fat.

Jay (33:53.095)
or animal protein and that can be due to low stomach acid or low bile production. So those would be things to address in that case. So yeah, mean, problems digesting any of those things are possible. as far as carbs go, we would typically say, and we spent a few episodes talking about these, but we want to be eating the carbs that are easiest to digest and the carbs that have a lot of nutrients and not a lot of anti-nutrients. So we'd want to be avoiding the grains, seeds and legumes.

and favoring fruits and root vegetables that are well cooked. And I would say that's for the most part. And then some certain starches, depending on the person, some people tolerate them, some people don't. But some of the best ones are things like white rice or white potatoes or potatoes or plantains and bananas and things like that. And then I guess some people do OK with some of the some of the green starches, but

Overall, I think it's better to stick with those ones to start and and fruit and fruit juice and things like that. Yeah. And we did some episodes talking specifically about fruit and talking about starches and all of that. yeah. And then as far as protein goes, you had mentioned animal proteins being typically the best sources for protein and the ones that are that don't have the polyunsaturated fats. So that means that we're for eating pork or chicken or fish.

that we want to make sure that they're relatively lean because all of those animals will have high amounts of polyunsaturated fats if they're fatty. Although if the pork or the chicken is pasture raised, then those fats are typically better. so yeah, seafood, meat are all great options as far as protein goes. And we talked about those different macronutrient ratios as well in an episode on macronutrients. So I'll reference that. We typically talk about

40 % carbs, 40 % fats, and 20 % protein is a starting point, but all of that can vary based on individual circumstances. And the reason why these things are so important from this energy standpoint is that if we are... We mentioned with the polyunsaturated fats or PUFA that those are really effective at blocking energy production. So even if we're eating all the other... If we're eating very well and a lot of conditions are right, but we're eating a lot of PUFA,

Jay (36:14.015)
that is going to cause food to be stored as fat as opposed to being converted to energy and continue to cause that starvation state even if you're eating enough. and same thing goes with... With directly damages mitochondria and the different functions of the liver and things like that. Yeah. Like one of those direct metabolic inhibitors, one of the main ones. Yeah. And if we're not getting enough vitamins and minerals, that's another important factor here that can prevent us from converting food to energy.

And so if you're eating the high quality protein sources, maybe getting some organ meats in there as well, like liver, high quality seafood, like shellfish are very nutrient dense. If you're eating a lot of fruits and root vegetables, can maybe a little bit of cooked vegetables. Those are all, you know, and then the saturated fats too. If you're eating those things, that's typically going to give you a lot of nutrition. Your nutrients. Those, mainly those foods. Yeah. Yeah.

As far as vitamins and minerals go and carbs, fats and protein, which are all really required to support this conversion from food to energy. And they also support the hormones that help to drive that process, keep the hormones down that prevent that process. If we're not eating enough carbs, if we're not eating enough fats, those are factors that will increase stress hormone production and those are things that will over time depress our metabolism and block that conversion from food to energy and increase the conversion from food to fat and One of the next and kind of biggest factors which we already touched on is gut health because if The the metabolic toxins produced from our gut a lot of times we talk about endotoxin But there are other toxins produced from different bacteria and fungi Those are some of the strongest inhibitors of our metabolism and so if even if all those other things are great you're getting all the nutrition, but you have some sort of microbial overgrowth in the small intestine or in the large intestine, some sort of pathogenic overgrowth, those factors can cause fat gain regardless of these other things because they drive stress hormones up and they increase the conversion from food to fat as opposed to energy. Yeah, I would say that PUFA and micro-organism metabolic end products are probably two of the biggest problems that I see.

Jay
In the research and with people in general. And the thing about endotoxin that's important is that the types of foods that you are eating and whether processed foods and things like that or not, those are generally the biggest precursors or generators of endotoxin because what you eat is to a large extent what determines what's going on in your gut. different
the different polyphenols and antioxidant compounds, things like that in the fruits and root vegetables directly impact the gut. And then the saturated fats also impact the gut as well. So it's important those foods have like a dual effect to not only providing with you and nutrition, but also helping to negate or block or impede the production of these toxic compounds from gut bacteria. And the other thing is the combination of a high polyunsaturated fat diet with a lot of processed industrial foods that can induce endotoxemia is one of the main factors that are the main combination of factors that lead to the majority of the chronic diseases we have now, including weight gain and obesity. what I think's important for people or a lot of people realize is that a lot of fat tissue is created as a protective mechanism because fat is in and of itself an organ.

And I think a lot of these toxic compounds and toxic fats and different things like that serve as a store to protect the body from these toxic compounds, these toxic metabolic products and things like that. They're literally like, all right, well, we can't deal with this, so we're going to put it over here. And there's some studies showing protective effects of people being overweight. And I think that it is part may be partially due to that mechanism where when you have the fat depots in the body the fatty tissue basically serves as a sort of storage to protect the the rest of the organs tissues from some of these damaging products Yeah, yeah, it's an adaptive mechanism to the environment that you're creating for your body And so we want to create an environment that doesn't encourage that that moves you out of that stress state out of that famine state out of that state of starvation

Jay
And towards a state of abundance and high energy availability. But yeah, it's an adaptive state and so of course it has protective effects to a point. where the kind of issue is that the things that cause a lot of fat gain are typically poor environments. And so that's kind of the issue. And we've talked about this, but the issue is not necessarily the fat itself. It's the environment that's leading to an increase in body

Exactly. And that's why when we when you have when we talked to the previous podcast about body weight and shaming and things like that, it's not a question of shaming people. You know, that's not our that's not our interest here. That's not what we're trying to talk about. It's not we're not even going there. The point being is that when you're inducing that game like that, it means that you have a physiologic issue going on. And the question is what's causing that. And I think that that becomes really important because it is the fact the  body weight gain is an adaptive state to an underlying process. What is causing that? Just how with diabetes or the blood sugar dysregulation is a symptom of some sort of damaged pathophysiologic process going on in the body. So yes, you see the symptoms, the weight gain with being overweight or obesity or anything like that, or the blood sugar dysregulation in diabetes or the dysregulated brain function, Alzheimer's.

All of these are the manifestations of some underlying physiologic process. And the question is, what is the cause of that process? So when we try and treat things with symptoms, the way to treat it isn't to just take some sort of compound or do something like, oh, just going to eat less and exercise more to lose weight because I have too much calories coming in. No, the question is really, what is causing those calories to be stored? What is the process that is inducing the weight gain? What is the process that is inducing the blood sugar dysregulation, what is the process inducing the mentation dysfunctions in diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia? And when you start to look at those processes and you start to address the underlying cause, rather than try and fix the symptoms, the symptoms will resolve themselves. And that's why losing weight for the sake of losing weight isn't necessarily the way to go. It's why are you gaining weight in the first place? What's causing the weight gain in the first place? And how do we fix that problem from the start?

Jay
And what we're saying in this situation is it's not necessarily that you are eating too much and not exercising enough. That's not necessarily what's going on. You may be eating a lot of food that isn't necessarily good for your body, such as polyunsaturated fats, a lot of industrial processed foods. You may be not eating enough overall, forcing your body into a metabolic downregulation or a suppressed metabolic state, which causes your body to basically put push the weight on. You may not have enough cofactors of vitamins and minerals. You may not have enough carbs, all these different types of things. You may have eaten some type of toxic food or had some type of toxic exposure that affected your thyroid or anything like that, or that affected your production of the sex steroids like androgens or progesterones. So there's all these questions underlying the problem. And I think that those are really the root not just eat less, more. I think that that is basically a huge distraction for what the underlying problems are, for what's really going on under the situation. You have a thyroid dysfunction. Are you suffering from some type of hypogonadism or decreased sex steroids? Even those are symptoms still. Those are still not roots. Well, those will give us a clue as to what more is going on.

You know, like, let's look, like, let's look at what the next level is. And then for to try and guess, are you eating too much polyunsaturated fatty acids? Are you do you have way too much stress going on in your life with work and with family stuff and this and that? Are you working night shifts? That's I mean, I was working night shifts. I have to feel the stress from that. I gained a little weight doing that. Things like so all these things come into play, not just this blanket answer of calories and calories out, eat less, exercise more. It's

It just doesn't answer anything. It doesn't really help with anything. It doesn't get to the root of what's going on. And the model of you're eating too much and you're not exercising enough as the problem itself is just ridiculous when you look at physiologies. It doesn't really make any significant sense because I don't really see lot of obese people eating 10,000 calories or an extra 3,500 calories a week to induce the weight gain.

Jay (45:55.975)
And when you start to consider things like you have childhood obesity and then you want to look at calories in calories out formula, it doesn't make any sense when you have five year old kids who are extremely overweight. How are you? How can you sit there and calculate that they ate X number of calories to gain that weight over the five years of living? That doesn't make any sense. There has to be something else going on. The other thing to consider is why are we having this massive

explosion of obesity and weight gain over the past few decades. If people are just magically eating more in a few decades, that doesn't, that also doesn't make any sense. Like there has something else has to be going on. Right. And we talked about how the dysregulation of hunger is not related to all these hyper palatable foods that we have now and processed foods. It comes down to a lack of energy. When, your body's lacking energy, those hunger signals stay on. And that causes you to continue to eat, but it's not because you don't need to eat, you do need to eat. It's just if you need to eat the food that actually lead to energy production. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to reiterate that there's no moral judgment there. You know, you were saying as far as acceptance goes, there's no moral judgment. It's just that this is a symptom and we want to make sure that we're addressing the root. And it's important not to fixate on this symptom as the problem. It's just a symptom of the problem and we want to focus on the problem itself. And when you focus on treating the symptom, it leads to all sorts of things that end up coming at the cost of our health just to fix the symptom, which is what basically all of conventional medicine is built on is treating symptoms. And as far as going back to treating that root, I want to touch on blood sugar a little bit. We've had a few episodes on blood sugar, but making sure that our blood sugar is well regulated is one of the best ways to prevent stress.

And prevent those signals that lead to the conversion of food to fat. And so that means eating frequently, eating enough carbohydrates with each meal, making sure that we're getting a rounded two to one ratio of carbs to protein with each meal. For people who are finding that they aren't lasting very much between meals, you might want to have some extra fat in each meal. And of course, all of this is prefaced on making sure we're getting all those nutrients, proper gut function and things like that, because it's all pretty interrelated.

Jay
But I think it's worth mentioning that if you're fasting, if you're not eating consistently throughout the day, that's going to create stress that yes, you might lose body fat in the short term, but in the long term, you're going to end up driving these stress signals in a way that leads to a depressed metabolism and weight gain eventually. I've seen studies with fasting where it lowered thyroid function and lowered, lowered androgen production and then simultaneously increased cortisol. So yeah, you'll lose weight, but at what cost? The other thing that I want to point out here is that when somebody gets cancer, somebody gets diabetes or somebody gets, I don't know, some type of chronic disease, the question, the question is never what's wrong with you? You know, it's like the question. There's no blame. Exactly. But when somebody when somebody is carrying extra weight or gets obese, there's some sort of like moral blame as if to not recognize that as this is a disease state because it is a disease state.

It is a chronic disease status. It's not just poor moral character or some type of lack of judgment or self control on the individual's part. The question is never like, when somebody has cancer, they're like, what did you do to yourself? Like, why can't you control yourself? Yeah, you're so lazy and weak. Exactly. It's like, but when somebody gets obese, it's like, what's wrong with you? Why can't you just not eat so much?

It's like, it's such a paradoxical statement. Like, it doesn't make any sense to have this one situation, is cancer, which is essentially can be a chronic disease or depending on some rare hereditary cancer, but you have a chronic disease from a whole bunch of factors affecting metabolic function. But when somebody gets obese and you have a whole bunch of factors affecting metabolic function, the question is, there's something wrong with this obese person. It doesn't make sense to me.

A lot of that, a lot of those arguments or like with somebody with some type of mood dysfunctions, the same thing is like, why can't you control yourself? Just be happy. Yeah, just be happy. Like why? There's no such thing as depression. What's wrong? What's wrong with you? You shouldn't be depressed. Your life is great. It's like, well, there's actually a physiologic mechanism going on here. Like you look at their hormonal profile and their cortisol through the roof. They've got low end and things like that. You're just like, well, yeah, they're making X number of dollars a year.

Jay
But they're working 80 hours a week and they sleep four hours a night and they only eat two meals a day, but they're depressed, but their life is going great. It's like, no, there's a physiologic problem. It is a disease state. Yeah. And again, same thing there. Like there is no blame for that. It's expected. Like these sorts of disease states are expected in our modern environment. That doesn't mean we can't do anything about it. It means the opposite. There's a lot we can change, but it's, it's, there's It's expected for it to be that way. lot of our like between our food supply, our lack of sleep, our lack of sunlight, the amount that we have to work, there's all sorts of stress that's that's on ourselves, social media and technology. Like it's everything. It's almost as if everything was in place to create these disease states and make us unhealthy. So I want to talk about some of those other things quickly before before we wrap up that we haven't talked about yet and people don't typically consider these when they're thinking about losing weight.

You know, and when they're not thinking about it as a health problem, typically they're only thinking about nutrition and exercise, which we've talked about, but they aren't typically thinking about sleep and stress and sunlight and that kind of thing. And so there's a really great study on sleep that they looked at people who are getting, I think that it was an intervention where they had, you know, they basically did this study where some people were only allowed to get five and a half hours of sleep and others got about eight and a half. And the people with five and a half hours of sleep had less body fat loss by 55%. and there was an increased loss of fat-free mass, so muscle, by 60 % compared to the people who got 8.5 hours of sleep. So basically they lost... So both groups lost weight, but the people who had 5.5 hours of sleep lost less than half as much and lost more than half as much muscle, which is a huge amount. I mean, this is not a trivial difference. most people... I would guess that more people nowadays get closer to 5.5 hours than 8.5 hours of sleep.

And that's like normal in the modern lifestyle. I only can sleep six hours, there's too much to do. That's like a normal thing that I hear, at least especially where I work. Yeah, they get up to exercise in the morning and sacrifice sleep for it. Those things are, I mean, now you're just driving stress even further. So, yeah, I mean, for some people getting to sleep is hard.

Jay
The actual, you know, they have insomnia, they have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep. And in those cases, again, fixing a lot of these things that we're talking about will help. By the same token, making sleep a priority in the same way that we make movement a priority or healthy eating a priority is also incredibly important for maintaining our health. And if you want to relieve the symptom of gaining fat, then sleep is important in that case too. Yeah. And also stress is another huge one. A lot of people don't realize that you work a 12, 13 hour day and you don't eat regularly and things like that. That is the initiator of waking. That is a direct break on metabolism. Psychological stress directly raises cortisol. There's lots of studies to show this that impose threats or time stress. To create stress in different models, they literally impose time stress where you have too many tasks to do and you don't have enough time to do them. That is a direct model of stress. It is done on purpose in studies to induce stress. Yet that is what a lot of people's work environments look like. Too much tasks, not enough time to do the tasks, and then there's importance on getting the tasks done. And it creates psychological stress. And that's even not that bad as far as some work environments go. A lot of them are worse than that.

There's also like inability to take breaks or relax and excessive physical stress and just not enjoying what you're doing. Yeah, not well, I think not enjoying what you're doing is a huge part of most people's work needs. At least a lot of people, a lot of people when they consider what they're doing. And I mean, there's I don't really have an answer for this either. But it's a complex problem. Yeah. A lot of people when they consider what they're doing.

And they consider their job, they say, well, I have great benefits and I get paid well and at least I have, especially now, at least I have a job. But the consideration is never, well, do I like what I'm doing? Do I consider the fact that I'm doing this 40 hours a week, which is a large portion that's eight hours, five days a week for the majority of my life and I don't really like what I'm doing. And that is an element of stress. And I'm pretty sure I've seen a study where basically, before the night before people went to sleep to go to work, they had a more difficult time sleeping and then they had increases in cortisol because of the anticipation of going to work the next day. And that's not to mention waking up early for your job and the commute there and back with your job and things like that. Like there's a lot that goes with it. then depending on if your boss is good or your coworkers are good or things like that, like a lot of it can be a poor environment. really, it really depends.

And the stress has a direct, again, has a direct impact on your hormonal profile. Then elevating cortisol chronically creates these situations, creates these metabolic situations that induce weight gain. And if anybody wants to see again what the effects of excess cortisol are, look up the side effects of drugs like dexamethasone or pernicillone or prednisone or any corticosteroid.

Or look up what the symptoms are of pushing disease or pushing syndrome, is an adrenal excess production of cortisol. And you'll see abdominal obesity, sagging skin, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, blood sugar dysregulation, fat deposition in different areas, circles under the eyes, insomnia, all these different things that you see with people in general.

Yeah. And I don't want, know, obviously the, because of the way society is built, there's a lot of people who don't have better options available as far as their jobs go. They recognize this isn't what I love to do. And I think that's okay to, you know, I don't think everyone needs to be following their absolute passion for their, you know, the work that they're doing, as long as they feel like they're contributing in a positive way to society. think that that's one of the more important points as opposed to like loving what you do and having a passion for it, which I think is also great. You know, if you can.

Accomplish that. But so a lot of people, you know, it's very hard to get to a position where you can do something where you feel like you're even contributing in a beneficial way. And I would think that I would encourage that to be a goal. But I also say that that's not this isn't a death sentence if you're stressed out by your job, because the best way to increase stress resilience is to increase the energy that that we're producing. So if your nutrition is is pretty good and your sleep is pretty good and you're moving well you're doing the best, you you're getting sunlight throughout the day, you're taking breaks, you're making the best of that situation, you can mitigate a lot of that stress and become a lot more resilient to it. but so, so it's not like a death sentence by any means. doesn't mean that there's nothing you can, like if you're stuck in that job that you can't get back, you know, you can't still be healthy, but it's just something to consider as another factor of our environment that affects all these things. Yeah. I think the important thing is to, is how you frame it in your mind. So I think

framing of the situation of. And I think that's why a lot of people look at the benefits of the job. I'm not saying it's bad. mean, because I do the same thing. I personally do the same thing. And I just, I tend to try and frame the situation in my jobs as challenges rather than, I don't know. It's sort of like you're meeting a challenge. Like it's something that you have to overcome and something that you have to overcome. And I think that that helps a lot. And I don't think the mindset should be, I'm just going to avoid all stress.

I don't think that that's an optimal mindset. think that mitigating some stressful areas where you can like taking care of diet and making sure you sleep and stuff like that is important. But I also think it's important to adjust your reframe your mindset around things when say some nights you just can't sleep. You have a hard time sleeping and you got to go to work the next day and you just you say I'm just going to do it and I'll get through this like I'm just going to get through it and it just is what it is. I don't think that sitting there and getting angry about is it's helpful either. I mean

At that point, like this is what the situation is. You got to get to work or any depending on what your circumstances and it's just, you just have to do it and it's just going to get through it and that's it. So I think that keeping that in mind is that having the mindset to say I'm going to, I'll be able to handle the stress. I can get through it is important, but it's also important to temper that with the idea of like, you want to make sure that you lower the stress in different areas. So making sure that you're sleeping, making sure that you're eating, making sure that you have time for some of your hobbies and time to spend with loved ones and time to get some exercise and some sunlight. Those are, think, really important. I think in our modern life, we're very skewed as thinking that to being put in this picture where, we should be working X number of hours. And the more you work, the better you are and things like that. And I don't think that it's a natural disposition of how wet how we did things or evolved to do things or anything like that. So I think it's important to keep in mind that getting adequate sun exposure, spending time with loved ones, having some hobbies that you like to do, getting outside in the sun and being outside in general. think that those are all valuable parts of life, very valuable parts of life. And that having time to relax and some leisure time is really important as well. It's not all just work, work, work, work, work. I think a lot of people get it.

Can get caught into that. think a lot of circumstances also put us into that. So especially current circumstances and different things like that. I it's, think to large extent, as you said, it's almost as if things are manufactured to be putting us under a lot of stress. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously there's so many factors that go into that. think that one that was, that you mentioned that's really important to touch on is, is the shifting of the perspective. And what you're kind of alluding to is essentially mindfulness where when we're faced with a difficult situation, we're able to accept it, relieve ourselves of any of that blame or guilt or any sorts of, instead of adding to it and becoming angry about it or feel fearful about the consequences and the stress that it causes, you know, we're able to accept it and exist in the present and move forward. that really, you know, we can, our experience in that way, the way that we view our experience,
can very much change how stressful it is. As you were saying, if you can't sleep one night and you get really upset about it, that's going to make it lot more stressful anyways. taking that approach of working on mindfulness a little bit, meditation, things like that can help to change the way that we interpret those situations and allow us to move through them without as much stress and saving with relationships and anything else where, as you were saying, stress is unavoidable, but that doesn't mean that

But A, we can increase our resilience to it and B, we can still minimize it and mitigate it. you had also mentioned... We're talking about how to minimize your stress and possibly how to deal with your stress overall in the podcast in general. Yeah, exactly. And you touched on a bunch of other great factors there too. Of course, if we were to dig into everything from sunlight and nature to all these different aspects of our society.

Jay
It would take the rest of the podcast, all the rest of the episodes, which is basically what we do. So I think I'll leave it there. We definitely touched on, think, the more important points as far as healthy weight loss goes and how it all basically comes back to increasing our energy availability by increasing the conversion of the food that we're taking into energy, which in turn reduces that symptom of body fat gain because it reduces the conversion of that food to fat. So I think that we covered the main things there. That's going to wrap up part three of this three part series on healthy weight loss. But I do want to mention a couple of things that we missed today or forgot to mention today. And one was as far as drinking water goes, where drinking a lot of water is one of the main things that's recommended as far as weight loss goes. And in reality, drinking too much water can actually inhibit proper digestion, which can impede weight loss. And it can also suppress our appetite or be something that replaces food that we really want to be eating, nutrition that we need to be getting in order to lose weight in a healthy way. So I didn't want to mention that and I will link to an article that I wrote regarding how much water we should be drinking. And then I'd also like to mention that one thing that I see pretty commonly when people find the more bio-energetic view of health is that they'll start drinking a lot of milk or having a lot of dairy.

And also adding in a lot of starch as far as their carbohydrates go. And I think that these are, this is one of the biggest things that I think leads to weight gain when people do try to improve their health and optimize their cellular energy availability. And the main reason for that is because most people don't digest those foods that well, especially when their metabolism has been so heavily suppressed. if that is something that you've found, would recommend maybe experimenting a little bit with removing dairy and starch. I would also reference back to some of the episodes on digestion and our gut and how you can restore healthy gut function so that you can digest those foods well. So I just felt like that was something that was important to mention because I do see that pretty often. If you did enjoy this series on healthy weight loss, if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review or a like or a comment wherever you're listening.

Jay
Really does a lot to help out the podcast to check out the show notes for today's episode. Head over to Jfeldmanwellness.com slash podcast where I'll be linking to any of the articles or studies or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. And if you are having trouble putting all these different factors together, if you're feeling a little bit lost, you're not sure what exactly you should be doing to lose weight or you've tried some of these different ideas and you're not having as much success as you'd like head over to jfeldmanwellness.com/ call and sign up for a free call where we can talk about what you've tried so far, what's working, what isn't working, and I can share some suggestions with you so that you can lose weight in a healthy way. And I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode and I will see you in the next one.