 Number one, I love this one, calories in, calories out. Now this is the second law of thermodynamics and I won't take you back to physics class but the whole idea was that if you eat calories then you're going to have to burn those calories and if you eat excess calories more than you burn then you will gain weight. It makes such tremendous sense but it's absolutely completely wrong. So how did all of this get started? Well it got started when a calorimeter was invented and a calorimeter was designed to find out how many kilojoules of, of kilocalories or kilojoules of energy any particular food contained. So what they basically did is they built a chamber and they simplistically lit the food on fire and they measured how much heat was produced as that food disintegrated into ash and that was the number of calories that that food contained. Sounds simple enough. Unfortunately inside of your intestines is not a calorimeter and what no one knew particularly until the advent of the human microbiome project where we understood that there was four to five pounds of hungry bacteria living in our intestines at any one time and that those bacteria would eat a lot of the foods that we ate and depending on the type of food that we were eating that those bacteria would gobble up a lot of those calories or as I've written about in my books we now know that a lot of these bacteria, obesogenic bacteria actually make more of these calories easier for you to absorb so that the whole idea that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie with the advent of modern learning has nothing to do with the calories in calories out so it's a it's a useless weight loss strategy sure you can go on an extremely calorie restricted diet and you will lose weight guarantee it but number one you haven't learned how to eat number two you haven't fed the gut buddies that are going to keep you lean and number three that's one of the reasons all of these delivery services for where you know I lost 30 pounds on X system or I lost 50 pounds doing this none of these people sustain that weight as you know with the biggest loser yes these people lost huge amounts of weight but a year later they had all returned actually not only to their original weight but actually rebounded above the other similar advice is eat less move more now this is just a variation of calories in calories out if you eat less but you exercise more than that's the secret unfortunately we know from looking at hunter-gatherers that the calorie expenditure by a hudza tribesman who may write walk 20 miles a day is exactly the calorie expenditure of an office worker who's sitting at the desk all day so the whole idea of eat less move more which is promulgated for the last 40 years doesn't work nor does it correlate with any scientific study on weight loss now what does work well quite frankly intermittent fasting studies show that there are incredible benefits to time-restricted eating versus a 12-hour eating window I've written in the last two books now three upcoming of the famous Italian cyclist study and just real briefly because you've heard me say it before you take two groups of cyclists you put them on a training table where they have to eat the same food for three months one group eats in a 12-hour eating window the other group eats in a compressed 7-hour eating window they have to get all their calories in in that time period they have identical performance on the exercise program the group that ate in the 12-hour eating window had no weight loss the group that ate in the 7-hour eating window even though they ate the exact same number of calories lost weight the group that had this 12-hour eating window had no change in their insulin like growth factor one which is a really good marker for longevity the group that ate in the 7-hour eating window had lowered levels of insulin like growth factor one this has been confirmed at the NIH at the National Institutes of Aging in rat studies compressing the time window has the most benefits in terms of not only weight loss but allowing you to have more calories than you normally would starve yourself number two eat multiple small meals I see people online claiming that multiple small meals a day is good for you first of all this is the opposite of what you should be doing there is no evidence from hunter-gatherer societies that hunter-gatherers eat multiple small meals throughout the day most hunter-gatherers don't eat until around 11 or noon and then they don't eat again until their main meal of the day which was dinner and that's when they brought everything they gathered or caught back to camp and cooked it or ate it so there's no evidence that hunter-gatherers are out having a granola bar while they're out gathering food or a fruit smoothie these foods did not exist and there's no evidence that we were designed to work that way also feeding studies in humans like the one I just talked to in rodents like at the NIH show that the multiple small meals actually make you gain weight rather than lose weight the other problem is that digestion in itself in absorbing food is bad for the wall of your gut and the gut needs time to repair it so so the more down time you have for your gut to repair itself the better your health and the more chance you're actually going to have for losing weight now this includes not eating before bed the more I can get you to stay at least three hours away from your last meal before you go to bed the better your deep sleep the better your sleep the better your brain is washed the brain has a brain washing cycle and I know you can't always do that but the more you shorten your last meal a day try to eat at five try to eat at six seven at the maximum and then you'll have plenty of time to clean your brain out alright number three eat more protein eat less fat there was a period of time where this was profoundly popular the second Adkins diet was a high protein not as much fat diet unfortunately I knew Dr. Adkins he died at age 72 as an obese man one of the things he didn't know was that we have no storage system for protein we do not waste energy so we convert that protein into sugar it's called gluconeogenesis so we then have a storage system for sugar it's called fat and multiple studies that I reference in all my books show that a high protein diet actually increases your risk of diabetes increases your risk of pre diabetes insulin resistance metabolic syndrome and kidney damage not exactly what I'm looking for in a long-term strategy now of course we all need protein in our diet but I agree with Dr. Walter Longo who's the head of longevity at USC that our protein requirements are vastly overrated and I spell it out he spells it out in all his books protein is not the miracle food that you need to use now not all protein has to come from animals vegetables nuts are rich sources of protein and you don't have to get your protein by eating animals in the new book gut check which will be out in January you'll see another reason why certain animal products may not be offering you the health benefits that you think you're getting but we'll save that for later number four eating more fruit will help you lose weight now many people think they should load up on fruit on a diet because fruit is loaded with fructose and fructose doesn't have any effect on your insulin and it doesn't make you a diabetic sorry about that Dr. Lustig from University of California in San Francisco Dr. Johnson from the University of Colorado have completely destroyed that myth fructose is the most obesogenic food there is fructose is the cause of fatty liver disease which is rampant in this country fructose is the driver of insulin resistance fructose is the driver of metabolic syndrome and if you want to kill off your mitochondria like I've shown in the last two books fructose is the best way to kill mitochondria and kidneys that I know of multiple times I have patients who decide to go on a high fructose diet high fruit diet they're eating fruit they're eating fruit smoothies their uric acid becomes elevated their insulin becomes elevated they become pre-diabetic their kidney function falls and they go what the heck I read this book about how good fruit is for you we see it every day in my clinics please give fruit the boom number five if you want to lose weight you got to get rid of fat you got to ditch the fat in your diet now this is a holdover from the 70s and 80s when all fat was bad in fact there are multiple fats that are incredibly good for your health you have to know which ones to eat avocados people eating an avocado a day have been shown to lose weight as compared to not eating the same calories with an avocado olive oil multiple studies show that olive oil promotes weight loss omega 3 fats like short chain omega 3 fats in flaxseed oil in perilla oil help you lose weight long chain omega 3 fats like in fish oil or algae oils help you lose weight flaxseed oil or ground-up flaxseeds are another great way to get short chain omega 3 fats in your diet and believe it or not fats from whole fat dairy contain a compound which I write about called carbon 15 that actually is now known to be an essential fatty acid it's so important that I even manufacture my own product C 15 to get carbon 15 fat into your diet in the form of a little gel cap it's that important in fact studies have shown that people who use full fat dairy actually have much better health than people who use low fat diet more amazing episodes just like this one watch now those weight loss drugs work by suppressing your appetite by stopping gastric emptying so that you always feel full and all by the way at least 40 to 45 percent of the weight loss those drugs make no mistake they do produce weight loss is from muscle loss