 The top three foods for weight loss. All right, still struggling to lose weight. I get it. I was 70 pounds overweight for years and no amount of exercise or healthy eating helped until I discovered that weight loss comes down to what you eat and what you don't eat. So today I'm sharing my top three foods you should be eating to help you shed the pounds and live your happiest, healthiest life. Number one, and I can't say this enough, prebiotic rich foods. Now, there's always some confusion about a probiotic, a prebiotic, and now a postbiotic. So real quick, probiotics are friendly bacteria and probiotics have to eat something and the foods that they have to eat are called prebiotics. Now prebiotics most of us associate with fiber, but a lot of prebiotics really aren't fibers. For instance, in my new book, Unlocking the Keto Code, I introduced you to the fact that polyphenols, which are plant compounds that give plants their colorful, are actually prebiotics for the bacteria in our gut. And with each passing year, evidence is accumulating that these polyphenols may in fact be the most important part of prebiotics that we've neglected over fiber per se. Now don't get me wrong, fiber that is edible by our gut bacteria is equally important because gut bacteria use fiber, use prebiotic fiber, and use prebiotics to make chemicals called postbiotics. And this is where it gets really confusing. Postbiotics simplistically are the byproducts of bacteria, probiotics, eating prebiotics. And these postbiotics are signaling compounds. And as you've heard me talk before, signaling compounds tell our mitochondria what to do, tell our genes what to do, tell our cells what to do. And the exciting thing about these signaling molecules in terms of weight loss is they actually promote weight loss by having your mitochondria literally waste calories to do a caloric bypass on the food you eat. And that's actually exciting news because it means that a calorie in equals a calorie out is not true. And in fact, many of the calories that you eat, which are prebiotics, whether they're fiber, whether they're polyphenols, will actually make you lose weight more than the amount of food that you're eating, which is really, really exciting. This was brought home to me years ago, and it's worth retelling. There's a group of islanders in Pepe, New Guinea, called the Katavans. And the Katavans are well known for their long-jeving and they're well known for never having heart disease or cancer, despite the fact that they smoke like fiends. And the Katavans eat actually a very high fiber diet. About 60% of the foods they are fibrous tubers and coconut meat and fruits and vegetables. They're very skinny. And for years, they were the real achilles heel of the ketogenic diet, the low-carbohydrate diet. Because here were these skinny people who were eating a lot of carbohydrates, and I was one of the people who used to poo poo the Katavans as well, they're skinny because they don't eat very much. You know, they're starving to death on that island. Well, it wasn't until the work of Dr. Stefan Lindberg, who spent his life studying the Katavans, we learned, in fact, the Katavans eat a lot of food. And the Katavans don't exercise like fiends. And it wasn't until we realized that was the types of foods that they were eating that was promoting mitochondrial uncoupling and weight loss, that it all came together. So even though they ate a lot of food, the food that they were eating were feeding their gut bacteria. Their gut bacteria was, were eating a lot of the calories that they were eating and keeping it from themselves. And then they were making more compounds that additionally help people lose weight. So long story short, the more fiber-rich foods you get in your diet, the more polyphenols you get in your diet by eating brightly dark colored vegetables, by using spices. Spices are dense in polyphenols. And so any time you could add fiber and polyphenols, you're going to have a weight loss benefit. You can use spices in everything. One of the easy ways to get these compounds into your diet is to make a smoothie. It's really easy to get fiber tasty in smoothies. Now, there are a lot of fiber supplements out there, but beware, a number of fiber supplements, like metamucil, for instance, are loaded with sugar, or if they're low calorie or no sugar added, they use sucralose, which is Splenda, or any of the other artificial sweeteners, which believe it or not, kill off your friendly bacteria. So please be careful about fiber supplements. It's much easier to add fiber to your diet. One of the easiest fibers that to add to your diet is inulin. An inulin is present as a powder. It has a slightly sweet taste. You can put it in your smoothies. You can add it to your vegetables. There are inulin-rich vegetables, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, sometimes called sun chokes, the chicory family, like radicchio, like Belgian endive, like frisag, rich in inulin. So the more of these sorts of vegetables you get in your diet, easier it is to do this. Second best food to add to your diet is avocados. I can't say this enough. Do not be afraid of fat. Contrary to popular belief, eating an avocado a day does not make you fat. In fact, avocados do exactly the opposite. I have an entire video entitled, Does This Food Make You Fat About Avocados Here On YouTube? Avocados actually help you burn calories. Avocados help you absorb the nutrients in food. In fact, there's a very famous study of having people eat salads with and without an avocado. And it was found that the addition of the avocado made people absorb the nutrients, the vitamins and minerals, in that salad much better than if the avocado wasn't there in the first place. Avocados have great monounsaturated fat. It's called a lake acid. It's the same fat in olive oil. And avocados are rich in prebiotic fiber. And so these compounds actually help you lose weight. How many should you eat a day? Well, there is a human study that shows the addition of one avocado a day actually improved weight loss over not having the avocado a day. So what the heck? Have an avocado a day? Have some guacamole? Please don't put tomatoes in guacamole. That's not supposed to be in guacamole. Have an avocado. Take the pit out. Put an egg yolk in each hole. Put it in the broiler. It's a phenomenal breakfast. It's a phenomenal snack. You can find the recipe in my cookbooks. What can you substitute if you're sensitive to avocado? Well, we have a few people who do react to avocados. It's unusual, but it does happen. In that case, don't have an avocado. Instead, use other sources of fiber rather than an avocado. The number three thing that you should add to your diet to help you lose weight is MCT rich foods. Now, most people have heard of MCT oil, medium chain triglycerides. It's becoming easy to find Costco even as MCT oil. If you can find C8 MCT oil, that's the one you're looking for. A lot of them will be C8 and C10, or those are okay. Coconut oil does not have the same benefits as MCT oil. Studies that I talk about in unlocking the keto code show that people who asked to have MCT oil as part of their diet versus people who did not have MCT oil as part of their diet lost three to five kilograms of weight in six weeks just by adding MCT oil to their diet. We're not talking about a lot. Probably three tablespoons a day will do it for most people. Now, the other great news is that MCT oil is present in goat and sheep products. So, goat yogurt, sheep yogurt, goat kefir, sheep kefir, goat cheese, sheep cheese, 30% of the fats in these products are medium chain triglycerides. When an easy way to add MCT to your program without the oil, just have some goat products. And what a wonderful way to lose weight by having yogurts and cheeses from goats and sheep. This next one is sure to surprise you. If you eat the right kinds of fat and if you eat them during the right times and you don't eat fats with refined carbohydrates, fats can actually help you lose weight.