The Secret to Losing Weight (And Keeping It Off)

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy. So exercise is important. It's really important for a longevity in health, but it doesn't really work alone when it comes to diet. You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. Your diet has the most important impact on your ability to maintain a healthy weight.

Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you, if you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community Hammond Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website supplement store for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Welcome to Doctors Pharmacy and another edition of Help Bites.

I am Doctor Mark Hyman. Have you noticed your scale inching up despite believing you're following a healthy diet, well, you're certainly not alone. Many people struggle to maintain a healthy weight even when they think they're making good food choices. Now is weight gain an Ozempic deficiency? Clearly not.

So what is going on here? Why does it seem so challenging to keep those unwanted pounds off? And what can you do to feel confident and comfortable in your own skin? That's exactly what we're gonna unpack in today's episode. I'll be sharing insights and strategies that have helped many of my patients not only achieve, but sustain a healthy weight.

In this episode, we're gonna dive deep into the fundamentals of nutrition and explore the profound effects our diet has on our biology. We're also gonna provide actionable tips to manage your weight effectively, all through the lens of Functional Medicine, understanding how your body works, and the reasons behind weight fluctuations is key to making empowered health decisions. Now just a quick note on weight. It's a complex field of science and the predominant focus has been on eating less and exercising more or changes in diet, which is what we're gonna talk about today. However, there are many reasons for weight gain that have nothing to do with what you eat.

Now many new discoveries have allowed us to understand the role of many other factors in weight regulation, including environmental toxins now called obesity gens mold exposure, infections such as adenovirus, food sensitivities, changes the microbiome and leaky gut, all of which drive inflammation, all of which causes weight gain. And there are other factors too, like hormone dysfunction, including thyroid, adrenal, and sex hormone, dysregulation, trauma, nutritional deficiencies, disrupted sleep, stress, and lots more. Now before we dive into why maintaining a healthy weight can be so Let's clarify what we mean by healthy weight and why it's so important for your overall well-being. Wait. It's not just about your BMI, your body mass index, or the numbers on your scale.

It's about understanding body composition and visceral fat. So the weight matters less than your body composition. And that visceral fat that type around your organs and your belly fat is the one that significantly impacts your health. How do you get a clear picture of your body composition? Well, there are a lot of tools like in body scanners, which I have in our ultra wellness center in Linux or a DEXIS scan, which is to go standard.

They give you a detailed view, and they reveal what your fat free mass is, your lean mass, and your total body fat and even what your visceral fat is and how much fat is on your arms and legs, so you get a really clear picture of what's going on. Now if you can't get access to these tests for body composition, although you should be able to, there's certain lab tests that are really important in helping identify for metabolic health and dysregulation of your biology, including fasting insulin, which is almost never measured by your doctor, your blood sugar, triglycerides, your HDL, your liver function test many other things, hormones like leptin, natapenectin can offer key insights into what's going on with your metabolic health. And in fact, that's why co founded function health. The personalized health platform that allows you access to your own lab data and puts the power back into your hands by testing over a 100 plus biomarkers for less than $500 including things that we talked about like fasting insulin, leptin, adiponectin, reactive protein and more. Now these biomarkers give us the picture, the big picture of what's going on with our not just our weight, but our overall health and our risk for chronic disease.

If you wanna learn more, just go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark. So obesity rights are climbing despite eating fewer calories. That's an interesting one. And despite eating less sugar as a global population. Now that's pretty interesting to me.

So something else is going on. Right? The world obesity Atlas protects it by 2035, Over four billion people would be considered obese. It's now over 2,000,000,000 that overweight. Why is this happening?

Well, calorie counting doesn't address the issue. Of diet composition and its effect on our hormones. As I mentioned, insulin, cortisol. I mean, by the way, if you eat sugar and starch, it's a stress for your body. This is not up for debate.

The data is really clear on this that when you eat sugar and starch, it spikes your adrenaline and your cortisol level. Cortisol is a fat storing hormone. When you have high levels of cortisol, you will literally shut down your cell's ability to burn calories. You will increase fat deposition between around the middle and you will lose muscle and you'll become diabetic and hypertensive. And this is what happens when people take prednisone or steroids when they have an autoimmune disease.

We see the exact phenomena are when someone's in the emergency room and they come in with some serious disease and they need take steroids in the hospital, they become diabetic and hypertensive. We saw this all the time in our training. It's not up for question. So the key is to focus on quality. And the problem with Americans diets, it's crappy diet quality.

60% of our calories comes from ultra processed food. People might think they're eating healthy. But most are not aware they're eating mostly ultra processed food because it's often marked as a healthy food. Right? Low carb, low sugar, all natural, gluten free.

You know, like, my joke is gluten free cake and cookies is still cake and cookies. If it's got a health claim on the label, my rule is don't eat it. It's bad for you. Things that are just food don't have labels anyway. Right?

An avocado doesn't have a label. A can of tomatoes has a label, but It doesn't have a health claim on it. Right. Just eat simple real food. Now according to a 2022 survey that was, done by the international food information Well, 76% of Americans were unfamiliar with what qualifies as an ultra processed food.

No surprise. I mean, most people, most doctors can't even define it. And this is a a a definition. There's many different kinds of definitions, but this is based on something called the NOVA classification. You can look it up.

It was developed by Brazil. By the scientists there who understood that the diet was affecting their population's health, and they came up with a classification system, which is unprocessed food, minimally processed food, ultra process So there's different categories. So, I mean, if you, for example, make soup, that's a processed food because you're chopping ingredients, you're putting the pot together, but that's fine. But if it's, if it's, you know, made from ingredients that you wouldn't have in your kitchen that you don't recognize the names of, like, in malt addiction or related hydroxy toluene or, guar gum or weird things that you don't know what they are and that you won't have in your kitchen and cook with, you probably shouldn't eat because they're basically from deconstructed ingredients from raw materials like soy, wheat, and corn that are processed in factories designed to be addictive. And have a certain mouthfeel and sort of brain activity with them.

And they've studied this with MRIs. It's pretty bad. Actually, they know exactly what they're doing these companies. The key here is it's not your fault. You cannot blame yourself if you can't lose weight.

It's just because you don't have the right information. It's an education problem. We're never taught the impact that food or food quality having a metabolism or real health. We don't really know what to eat for the the food industry has made us confused and confounded by by their marketing and by food labeling, and which I'm trying to change right now in Washington, actually working on a an effort to change the FDA food labeling Hopefully, we'll we'll win that battle, but it's tough battle because there's gonna be a lot of pushback from the food industry, which, we might need your help in being a little bit advocates for and calling your congressmen and senators and getting behind this, calling the FDA to kind of have comment, and there's gonna be a comment period. So we might call you to do that.

Now we're eating too much Bad stuff, start sugar, and refined fats, and processed ingredients, and none of the good stuff. Right? Lots of veggies, high quality protein, lots of fiber, good fats. All of this is simple. They just eat real food, get off the crap.

Now in my opinion, the carbohydrate insulin model is a little bit better explaining why often people struggle to lose weight. It it sort of acknowledges the complexity of human metabolism that humans are not living in a vacuum, and a closed, like, a closed system. Our diet has has physiological effects on hormones on insulin, on blood sugar, on inflammation. And, you know, when this happens, highest level stores fat and blocks your ability to burn that. The the carbohydrate insulin model isn't the full explanation, everything related to weight.

We have to look at all all the things that might matter. And and we have to consider all the things that we talked about earlier, which includes the toxins, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, imbalances, and gut flora, sleep issues, and so forth. Done several episodes on the impact of toxins on weight loss, but you can you can check it out on the show notes. So how much protein do you need to eat to maintain a healthy weight. Well, 25 to 30% of your total calories.

It's about 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight. About 4 to 6 ounce of protein with each meal. That's animal protein, about 30 grams, aim for about a palm sized portion. That's about the size of your palm, not somebody else's palm, protein every meal. It might be hard for you to start if you're not used to eating that much protein, but start small workout.

For example, add 1 palm sized portion of lean protein or protein, chicken, fish, meat, maybe even tempeh to one meal in addition to what they're already eating is a good idea. Gradually increase your intake once you feel Trimble, you can also front load your protein intake by eating a high protein breakfast. This makes it easier to reach your protein goals, and the research shows that it's associated with increasing lean body mass. So what type of protein should you focus on eating? Animal protein is easier to digest, absorb, and assimilate Really important nutrients and amino acids and plant protein.

The science is just clear on this. There's no argument. Fatty meats are more calorie dense, so you wanna be mindful of those hidden sorts of calories. But if it's a grass fed animal, that's fine. If fats aren't bad for you.

Planned protein, also can help. It has fiber in it. That makes you feel full, like, nuts and seeds or beans. Folks on whole food sources like plant protein lentils, legumes. If you can tolerate them, the non GMO tofu and tempeh are the most dense protein plant sources.

You can get high quality protein powder. My favorite is goat way without gums or fillers or additives or sweeteners. That makes it a lot easier to reach your goals. You can get a lot of protein and it's smoothie in the morning and don't worry about it. If you don't eat processed fake meat, it's bad.

It's ultra processed food. Beyond meat and possibly meat. It's just texturized soy protein. It's often full of junk, gluten, weird stuff. Basically, you can combine plant animal proteins and you'll get high quality protein.

So make sure you're also eating enough fiber. This is really important. 95% Americans don't eat enough fiber. Now fiber boats you feeling full. It actually activates your natural Ozempic or GLP 1 and P YY This also increases stomach distension.

It slows gastric emptying. Basically, what Ozempic does. Right? That's what Fibers does. It makes you full and slows the whole process.

In fact, one of the things I do is I have my patients take something called PGX, which is polyaglenecoplex from cognac root, a Japanese tuber, super high, and fiber absorb fifty times of weight in water. So, basically, it fills up your stomach when you eat it, and then people will lose tens of pounds. I'm one patient who lost £40 just taking that a few minutes before each meal. Now it you have the good thing about fibroids, and it helps you improve your microbiome. It helps bring your bowel movements.

It promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria. Helps them produce short chain fatty acids, which is important in energy metabolism, and that improves insulin sensitivity and burning a calorie. So the the the good bugs in the gut will produce compounds like these short chain fats that are really good for you and that help bring calories They also produce hormones. He's got bacteria and they produce neurotransmitters. They can influence our appetite and our satiety signals.

Next, you wanna eat the rainbow. Lots of veggies. 8 to 10 servings, even more, not 5 to 9, probably more like 9 to 20 if you could do it. There's there's no one ever too much bed. You just got unlit refills.

So, basically, a servings that have a cup of, cooked, one cup raw. Also focus on color. The color reflects something called the phytochemical richness of a food, and this has medicinal benefits. These are the medicines in food. They're anti aging.

They're anti inflammatory. And, basically, how how my plate looks is basically a piece of protein, which is 25% of my plate, up to three or four veggies, side of broccoli, purple sweet potato, asparagus, mushrooms, you know, I I basically make the meat a side dish, and the majority of my volume of food is veggies. Not like a giant piece of meat, 3 asparagus, and a potato. That's the way we eat in America. It's bad.

I encourage you to think about what maybe you can think about how many different plants did you eat per week? You know? Probably not that many. The average person most of our, food is based on 3 crops, corn, wheat, and soy. And then that's probably 60% of our diet and another probably 9 plants comprise the rest like tomatoes or onions.

But, you know, when you see, you know, 800 different species of plants, we need up our game a little bit. Go to the farmers park and eat bird food, you know. Like, that's fine. Learn how to make it. And the good news is the more diverse your fiber intake, the more diverse your microbiome.

So eat a lot of different sorts of fiber. When you look at the data on obesity and weight gain, What they find is that there's less microbiome diversity, that your gut floor isn't healthy. And that when you have high levels of diversity and complex and your gut microbiome, it's more associated with a healthy weight. Each gut bacteria feeds and thrives on different foods. It likes prebiotic fibers.

It likes polyphenols. So for example, bifidobacterium, which is the key key species in your gut feeds on prebiotic fiber rich foods like green bananas, traditional artichokes, leeks, garlic onions. You can eat probiotic rich foods like fermented. Foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, and these leads to an increase in the production of these short chain fatty acids, which provides good fuel for the colon cells and the intestinal cells, strengthens the gut barrier, and anti inflammatory. Also, you wanna eat enough healthy fats.

Fat does not make you fat. It just doesn't. We've looked for decades, at this, and we've demonized dietary fat. I wrote a whole book called eat fat, get if you wanna look at the science and the history of this, but it's pretty bad. The problem is we listen.

When the government told us to eat 6 to 11 servings of bread rise, Sierra, and eat low fat foods and low fat snackled cookies and low fat yogurt with lots of sugar. We did it. And what happened? Where are we at now? We have 42% of the population of our way.

We've had doubling and tripling of diabetes rates. You know, we've seen staggering rates of obesity in children, and we see 92% of us are metabolic and healthy. It's not an accident. It's clearly a result of this. We followed those.

And when we followed those low fat diets, it was basically more starch, more sugar, and and we got fatter and sicker. If so, again, if you wanna learn more, I published this in 2016, but he fat gets in as a great summary of this. And I basically have combined the latest research at the time with my personal experience and decades of evidence working with patients to prove what I've known a long time, the right fats actually help you leak, become lean, healthy environment. They make you feel full too. In fact, the average person's made up between 15 to 30% body fat.

Your body has more than a 100,000,000,000,000 cells and every cell wall is made of fat. And fat is one of the most important building blocks of the body and the brain. In fact, your brain is 60% fat. The key is fat quality. The better the quality fat, the better your body is gonna function.

Why are healthy fats important? Cause they make you feel full, fat for satiety, you learn that medical school. That's probably the only thing we learned in medical school of nutrition, or maybe I maybe I learned it after I get rid of her. It helps stabilize your blood sugar. It provides a source of energy.

It balances hormones, which are important for appetite regulation like leptin and ghaline. It can reduce inflammation if you eat the right fats like the omega threes. It can help the body's ability to burn other fats and increase the absorption of fat soluble vitamins like vitamin a and b and k and e. The industrialized seed oils and bean oils in ultra processed food are generally low quality fats. They're vegetable oil, soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, sunflower cotton seeds.

Stay away from those. Some of these are fine. You need to make it these in some omega sixes in some amounts, but eat them from good sources, from Whole Foods, from even expeller pressed or no organic forms of these these oils can be fine in small amounts. Our diet is way too many omega sixes out of balance with the omega threes. We need both.

But, it creates an imbalance and that leads to inflammation. Now fast food chains and restaurants and fancy ones often use cheap oils for cooking. And they can rack up all kinds of problems. They can increase inflammation. They can be a source of phantom calories, and they don't really make you feel that great.

So cook your food in olive oil, butter, you know, you can use avocado oil. Obviously, stay away from trans fats. Those are poison. They should be out of the food supply, but they're still in there. They they were you know, rural is not safe to eat in 2015 by the government or the FDA, but they're still out there in the food.

Margarine, vegan butters, White bread pizza, popcorn desserts, all that stuff. And they make your cell walls rigid. In other words, crisco or shortening. You know what they call it shortening? Because it shortens your life.

It makes your your body vulnerable to inflammation instead of being fluid and flexible and responsive to the intracellular communication. Your cells just don't work as well. So what are the good fats? Well, omega-3 fats they're anti inflammatory and things like cold water fish are great, with salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel anchovies. Monowindsaturated fats are heart healthy.

These olive oil and that's seeds, macadamias are great. They're the olive oil of nuts, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, or grape pine nuts. I love those for my favorite. But here's the deal. Dietary fat is the most energy dense nutrient, macronutrient, and it's essential for optimal health, but it kinda can be easy to overdo from fatty dairy, from cooking oils, from too much fatty meats, and that can create a calorie surplus, which leads to my next tip.

Track your food, at least temporarily. The deal is pretty clear on this. And, you know, in an ideal world, we'd all eat completely intuitively. It was a great study I read, set in the twenties. It was in a book called nourishment by Fred Preventa's an amazing book.

Where you talked about kids who are orphans and they did this experiment on them when they basically allowed them to eat whatever they wanted. And they gave them, you know, these kids like brains and liver and weird things. And these kids actually would eat exactly what they needed to meet their nutritional needs in an intuitive basis. Animals are like this, but we've lost that because we've come completely dysregulated. Now we once your hormones and your brain chemistry, and you're gonna have microbiome have not been hijacked by the food industry, and you've taken them back from the body snatchers, you actually naturally will regulate your weight and metabolism.

I don't have to think about it. Now sometimes if I go crazy, like, I go to Italy and I just kinda go off the rails and I have pasta and gelato and I overeat and I drink wine, I'll come back heavier. But but when I eat properly, My body actually naturally regulates its weight, and my body naturally regulates its appetite. And that's true for everybody else too. Now it's hard to eat in line with your body's needs without any guard So you have to know what's going on, particularly if you struggle with your weight.

And then most people don't realize how much they're eating. Right? So research shows that people are terrible at measuring their energy intake. And they, underestimate their consumption by up to 50%. And I always said this when people came in, they said, but they usually over estimate the amount of exercise by twofold and under a to make the amount they eat by half.

Right? And there's two reasons. People don't realize how chloroquy dense many foods are, and they often misjudge portion of the side. Size, around 2 thirds of the time, in fact. So measuring and tracking your food can help you better understand your current eating habits and your portion size as well.

Retraining your body to regulate hunger and satiety cues. But the thing is if you eat the right foods, you don't really have to worry so much. Your body will naturally take care of itself. Weight management is not about having calories, but calories are still important. And it's a good idea to get a sense of what you're doing.

So estimate your body's daily energy expenditure, Now it's easy to estimate your body's daily energy expenditure. You take your weight and you multiply times 13. And that gives you a pretty good idea the total calories you should be eating, and then you add on how much exercise activity you do, and that gives you a sense of what your average needs are. If you're a £150 person, you know, you're you're basically going to be eating let's say 1800 calories a day for maintenance. If you're not exercising, if you exercise a lot, you might need another 500 calories a day.

So you can kind of figure it out pretty easily. That's an ideal body weight. Now if you go above that, you're basically increasing your risk for weight gain even if you're eating only healthy foods. Now you can download an app. My pallets grade and you can use a food scale to measure, even just writing it down can create a really powerful awareness that helps you automatically make better choices be more thoughtful about how much you're eating, and it can help you identify patterns where you struggle.

So you can see, for example, maybe you do okay till 3 o'clock and then you hit that bag chips or eat a package of pop tarts. That's good news. You know where you can make big time progress in your eating habits. Because you know this, you can plan for an ensure that at 3 PM, you have something really healthy that you also like. Maybe that's already ready to go instead of having something like pop tarts.

The goal for tracking is to be temporary, not forever. Right? Some people need these training wheels for longer and shorter periods of time, but ultimately the goal is to shed your training wheels and move towards knowing what how much and windy without Milton tracking or monitoring by listening to your body. Now don't necessarily if you're anxious about this or worried about it. You don't have to track your stuff.

If you're obsessed with food, maybe just look at your visual chart in the notes that we're gonna provide you about hand portions. But basically, a serving approaching is the palm sized portion of your hand. A serving of vegetables, a fist size serving. A serving of carbs as your cup hand, serving a fat as your thumb. Right?

So it's pretty easy. And stock your fridge with real food, real whole food. Lots of non stretchy veggies, kale, broccoli, lettuce, radish, regular, bok choy, snappies, and had those for dinner with great asparagus, bell pepper, watercress, whatever, you know, just hearts of pom, cucumbers, get lots of good fruit in their berries, kiwis, you know, pomegranate, whatever you like. Frozen fruit and veggies are fine. They last longer.

They don't take much space in the fridge, and they're actually nutrient dense off in more than the fresh veggies unless you get them right from the farmers market. Also eat high quality lean protein. You wanna get regionally raised grass fed meats, lamb, beef, pasture raised chicken, wild caught fish. I love force of nature. They have elk, deer, bison, really yummy stuff.

Check out your local farmers market. They have great quality meats at an out of a price. Thrive market, butcher box, force of nature, seetopia dot fish are all great sources of healthy, clean, and often regenerative protein. You know, don't have to be a chef and have fancy meals every night. But just get a basic repertoire of really, affordable, easy to prepare meals that decrease time, stress, and cost of eating and just there, your go to 3 dinners, 3 breakfast, 3 lunches.

If you want some sweeteners to use in something, get real food, real food sweeteners, honey, date, sugar, coconut sugar, You don't want to sugar, have some monk fruit. So that's a lot of stuff we covered. The weight is a complex topic. It's not so simple as calories in calories out. We've heard a lot of stuff that I think could help you understand the complexity of weight management and explores the role of diet hormones, lifestyle factors, and many other things.

So remember maintaining healthy weight is not about counting calories. Or chasing the next diet or fancy detox program. It's really about understanding what your body needs to thrive and making small, consistent changes to your diet and lifestyle that align with your own unique biology. Now if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe. I believe review and share with someone who might benefit for more resources and to learn about function health lab testing with a function health dot com forward slash mark.

Now together, we can take control of our health and leave our best lives. Remember, It's never too late to start making positive changes. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on health bites. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family.

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