 The next speaker I'd like to introduce is Dr. John Briffa, MD. He's a naturally oriented medical doctor, and his work is dedicated to providing honest and trustworthy holistic health advice. He's a blogger at drbriffa.com, he has over 20 years of clinical practice, and he's an author of several books, including Escape the Diet Trap, and I always find it really awesome when doctors who have obviously gone through all the rigors of medical school and western medicine can also embrace the holistic side and, you know, can see the whole picture. So I'm really excited to hear what John has to say. So welcome him up. Afternoon everyone, afternoon. I'm going to spend about an hour and a half talking about these things here. How to get fit, how to lose weight, if that was your objective. How to feel better. I've experienced over the last 20 years lots and lots of people in my clinical practice, but also in my work in the corporate sector, with people who are basically, I suppose you could call them, not quite sick enough to be called sick, but not well enough to be called well either. I see a lot of people with, you know, fatigue related issues. A lot of people who have fluctuating energy. Some people, for example, who find it difficult to stay awake or, you know, concentrate in the middle of late afternoon. Does anyone here get a lot of energy around 3.30, 4 o'clock and find a bit of a struggle? I see individuals, for example, who say they're in meetings, you know, with valued clients and have to sort of stick sharpened pencils into their leg under the table, you know, to keep themselves awake. And if you've got to that state in your life, usually something has gone wrong. The thing is, is that the solutions to the sort of problems that I see in practice and also weight issues are usually very simple indeed. You know, when people think about, you know, getting fit, losing weight, for example, they generally think about having to do things that demand quite a lot of effort. So, you know, going hungry with your diet may be forbidding certain foods, exercising very hard. Probably a lot of you, I would imagine, do quite a lot of exercise and may like to do that and that's fine. Not everyone is like that. Some people like to do it, what I would call the easy way, okay? And what I found in practice is, is that there are very easy ways that individuals can transform their health. And as I'll explain a little bit later, that's particularly true for men. There seems to be certain nuances, differences between men and women that make it actually easier for men very often to achieve their health objectives. So over the next hour and a half, I'm going to go through this in a fair degree of depth. I'm going to speak, speaking a lot about nutrition. And the reason for that is, is that nutrition has a really fundamental role to play in how we feel and how we look. It is really key. The reason that we need to spend a fair amount of time on it is because it's a large subject, you know, you only have to pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on the radio or the TV to learn something about what we should and shouldn't be eating. But as some of you will know, not all of the information is utterly consistent, right? So you hear one thing, one moment and then a day, a week later you hear something very different. A classic example of that is the idea that our diet should be low in fat, right? Fat's fattening. So if you want to lose weight, you should eat a low fat diet, which means eating a lot of what? If you're not going to eat fat, you're going to eat what? Sugar and other forms of carbohydrate like starches, that's exactly right. So our government, most health professionals would advise us to eat a diet that's relatively low in fat, right? And relatively rich in carbohydrate, grains mainly, okay? But everyone believes that though, because some people will come along from time to time and say it's not fat that's fattening, it's actually carbohydrate. So some of you here will be familiar with the Atkins diet, do you know the Atkins diet? It's basically a low carb diet, okay, which can be quite rich in fat. And it argues a completely different point of view of the conventional wisdom around healthy eating, which is the diet should be low in fat and high in carbohydrate. Now with these very conflicting messages, it can be difficult to know who or what to believe, right? It can be very difficult. So over the course of the next hour and a half, I'm going to use a fair amount of science, I'll warn you in advance, okay? I'll use a fair amount of science to reveal to you what it really means to eat healthily. Now some of you may be interested in science, some of you not so interested in science, that's absolutely fine, because at one point I'm going to reveal to you the one single thing really you need to bear in mind to judge whether a food is healthy or not. It is just one concept to have in your head. One question you need to ask, that's it. You won't miss it by the way, because before I tell you what this concept is, I'll tell you, I'm about to tell you it, okay? And then I'll tell you, and then of course I'll tell you, I've just told you it. And then I'll tell it to you again about 10 times. So you can't miss it. There's just one very key thing around nutrition that you need to understand. Now a lot of the information in this presentation has come from a couple of books. This book was published in 2010. And I decided that I would write essentially a fat loss book for men, because my experience with health is that men are very often a bit sort of disenfranchised around this area, and health generally. Not very many men are going to pick up books with titles like Six Weeks to Your Bikini Body or whatever, okay? So it occurred to me that there's a lot of interest in this area, but also a lot of misinformation in this area, and I wanted to set the record straight and make it easy for men. Because they want to improve their health and have better bodies basically. That book was superseded this year by this one. You'll notice by the branding this isn't really about men. What this book did was bring up to date the science. So we have about two years worth of science that wasn't available in waste disposal. And I've also included a lot of techniques in here that I'm going to be discussing with you now that didn't make it into waste disposal. So let's dive in. First of all, this is what I want to talk about, this concept of weight. Now we're a very weight-focused society, generally speaking, and we as medical practitioners tend to be quite weight-focused. And what we do with weight in order to categorise someone is convert it into something called the body mass index. You'll be familiar with this probably. This is basically your weight in kilograms divided by the square of your height in metres. And then we tell people this, that if their body mass index is somewhere between 18 and a half and 25, that's normal or healthy. However, if it's crept above 25, you're now overweight and above 30 is obese. Now, we generally as health practitioners stick slavishly to this idea that there's a very strong link between our body mass index and our health. And we're often encouraging people who are overweight or obese to get their body mass index into the normal range. However, there's some fundamental problems with the body mass index in terms of its ability to determine what your likely health is. Any thoughts? What sort of limitations it has? No, it doesn't. It doesn't account for muscle mass at all. It doesn't tell you anything about your body's composition. So I don't know what your body mass index is, but I suspect it's above 30. Is that right? 35, right? So if you look here, here's two people. One that looks like you, another one that looks like someone else. They have the same body mass index. One of them is very heavy because he's very well muscled. They may be very fit and healthy, actually, and this person less so. And you see immediately just how limited the body mass index is in terms of its ability to judge our health. There's another problem with it. It also doesn't tell us about this, the distribution of weight in our body. And that's because when men tend to gain weight, it usually ends up around the middle of the body. We call this abdominal fat. I'll talk about it again in a moment. Whereas usually, this isn't exclusively true, but usually with women, when they accumulate weight, it's generally below the waist. So you get men looking more like apples and women looking more like pears. Now, this isn't just an aesthetic difference. And the reason for that is that we know that weight that accumulates around the middle, so we call this abdominal fat, is usually associated with fat that has deposited itself within the abdomen, so in the organs and around the organs. We call this visceral fat for those that like technical terms. And the relevance of this is that visceral fat and the proxy for it, if you like, fat around the middle, what you might call a spare tire, has very strong links with health issues, like heart disease and diabetes and overall risk of death. So a lot of people, for example, who will accumulate weight around the middle of their body, may not like that because it's unesthetic to them and maybe to other people. But the important thing, as well, is that it has certain health risks associated with it that are probably worth avoiding. Here's the good news about being a man, though, and I alluded to this earlier. This fat here is surplus to requirements. It really doesn't form any particular function for you. So, for example, if you're a woman and you aggregated some weight below your waist, you might be able to use that, for example, during pregnancy and breastfeeding, thinking in an evolutionary sense. This does not really do you any good at all. And it appears that this fat is particularly easy to get rid of if you know how.