The video discusses the best diet to lose belly fat and weight permanently. It emphasizes the importance of not only losing weight but also maintaining it in the long term. The video explains the role of insulin in fat storage and how high blood sugar levels trigger insulin production. It explores the impact of different food groups, such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat, on insulin levels and blood sugar stability. The video also discusses the effects of cortisol, stress, and set point on weight loss. It compares popular diets such as the USDA, low-carb high-fat, intermittent fasting, paleo, Mediterranean, and ideal keto diets, highlighting their pros and cons in terms of addressing hunger, stabilizing blood sugar, improving insulin resistance, and achieving long-term health and weight loss.
Key Insights:
- Creating a calorie deficit is important for weight loss, but it’s not enough for long-term success.
- Avoid the mindset of going on a temporary diet and instead adopt a lifestyle with certain principles.
- High blood sugar triggers high insulin levels, which indirectly causes fat storage.
- Eating frequent meals with high carbohydrates keeps insulin levels high and prevents fat utilization.
- Low blood sugar leads to cravings, causing the body to seek quick energy fixes.
- Stress raises cortisol levels, which can increase cravings and blood sugar.
- The best diet is the one that is sustainable and satisfies hunger and cravings.
- The quality of food is important for long-term health, rather than just focusing on weight loss.
- Low carb, high-fat and ketogenic diets help stabilize blood sugar, reduce cravings, and address insulin resistance.
- Intermittent fasting can create a calorie deficit and aid in weight loss.
- Understanding the principles of insulin and cortisol is important for developing a successful diet plan.
Transcript
Hello health champions! If you’re one of the millions of people who have tried various diets to lose weight and lose belly fat but without results, or maybe you had some results but the weight and the belly fat came right back, then this video is for you. Today I want to talk about the best diet to lose belly fat, to lose weight for good, forever. And I want to emphasize, I know you think this is sort of self-explanatory, but I want to emphasize a couple of things. In this phrase „for good“, that means to not gain it back, because if you lose the weight and then you gain it back, then what was the point of it all? I know you’re desperate and you just want to lose it fast, you want to lose it now. I don’t care. But yes, you do care. You do not want to gain it back.
And the second word is „diet“. We want to get past the idea of a diet. So many people think, „I’m going to do this for a while. I’m willing to do anything for a week, a month, three months. But as soon as we have that mindset, then we’re gonna do something for a while, we get some results, and then we’re gonna stop doing that something and we’re gonna go back to doing the same thing that created the problem in the first place. And that’s why we have hundreds of millions of people who are yo-yo dieting, because they’re doing something for a while. Get over that idea. What we have to do is adopt a lifestyle, adopt some principles around which we’re going to keep this off permanently.
It all starts with high blood sugar, high blood glucose, because that triggers high insulin levels. And insulin does many things in the body, but one thing it causes indirectly is fat storage. The insulin acts on the glucose, the glucose gets into the cell, we can use some of it right now, but most of it we’re going to store for later, and most of that storage is going to be as fat. But if we maintain that high insulin because we keep eating frequent meals with high carbohydrates, now that high insulin prevents us from using that fat storage. So even though we store all that energy, we can’t get to it as long as we maintain high insulin.
One more thing happens, and this is low blood sugar. If we eat high glucose, high carbs frequently, we teach the body to depend on that, but we also sort of confuse the body over time, and the body learns to make a bunch of insulin, and oftentimes that’s going to overshoot and it’s going to push, if we have high blood sugar, it’s going to rebound and cause low blood sugar. That’s a glucose roller coaster. That is why a lot of people, even with insulin resistance, are going to have hypoglycemia. So even though they may have high blood sugar according to an A1C test, in between, they’re actually hypoglycemic. And this is extra bad when you can’t get to the fat storage because of high insulin. So you have all this energy stored, you need some energy because of your low blood sugar, but you can’t get to it because of that high insulin. And now what the body does, it says, „I gotta have some energy, let’s create some cravings.“ And a craving is an urgent need to bring your blood sugar up. And this is why they put a vending machine and a soda machine on every corner in every office and every business and every school so that we can get a quick blood sugar fix. We can get some comfort foods. And now, of course, that creates high blood sugar. So we’re sort of stuck in a loop, and that makes it very, very difficult to get out of this loop because we’re constantly hungry, we have high blood sugar, but the high insulin keeps us from ever using that fat that we have in storage. So insulin is the first and most important thing we have to understand.
The second thing is that low blood glucose creates a second hormone. It triggers the body’s cortisol, and cortisol is a messenger that tells the body to make more blood sugar.
Now, there are two ways you can do this. You can eat it by cravings, or your body can generate it from glycogen or from protein. But you can’t really get it from the fat. Still, cortisol raises blood sugar, and now you have a second loop where you get stuck. And this is why it’s so difficult to just eat less because you’re not really breaking this pattern.
For a lot of people, there’s one more factor called stress. Because what does stress do? Stress is a state where your body says, „I need more energy because there’s a threat, there’s something I gotta get done, I’m having heightened demand.“ So we have to make more energy. So no matter what your glucose levels are when you’re stressed, your body still wants more because that’s fast energy. So stress is also going to create cravings, and stress is going to raise cortisol.
If we want to lose belly fat for good, we have to be absolutely clear on what triggers insulin. And we already said that it’s triggered by blood sugar. But then obviously, the next step is the foods that can become blood sugar, and carbohydrate is the obvious candidate. But there’s more to it. First of all, there’s enormous confusion around carbohydrate. We hear all the time that white bread and processed carbs are bad, but complex carbs are good, as in white bread is bad and whole wheat bread is good. It’s not true. It doesn’t work like that. High sugar things like candy and soda, they’re out of the question. Everyone agrees on that. But things that are starchy, like white bread or whole wheat, they’re still 80% starch. They break down the same way. The fact that one has a smidgen of fiber makes no difference. They break down into glucose within minutes and they have a huge impact on blood sugar and insulin. So any concentrated form of carbohydrate and starch is a bad thing if you’re trying to reduce insulin and lose weight.
If we compare the insulin response between different foods, then high sugar and high starch, we’d put around a hundred. High starch, carbohydrates, and high sugars, they’re like a hundred. How does that compare to other foods? Well, low sugar and low starch, like berries and leafy greens and cauliflower and broccoli and Brussels sprouts and asparagus, they’re still all the energy that they have pretty much is carbohydrate, but there’s so little of it, it’s mostly water. So in comparison, a non-starch or low-starch carbohydrate would only produce a fraction as much insulin. And that’s why you can still eat those things, even though they’re all carbohydrate, because it’s mostly water. And if you’re counting carbs, then these are the kind of carbs you count.
But there are other things that can turn into blood glucose. If the protein you eat is like egg or meat, then a fairly high percentage gets turned into tissue because the composition matches the composition of your body pretty closely. But if you eat much less, then less of that protein gets turned into tissue, which means more of it gets turned into glucose. So protein can become glucose, and then it will affect insulin.
And even fat can become glucose. The fat itself can’t, but the way we package fat in the body is called triglyceride, three fatty acids on a glycerol molecule. And this glycerol is about 5% of the weight, so a few percent of the calories in fat can actually become glucose. But again, it’s much, much less and it’s vastly slower than either protein or carbohydrate. So if we have a relative relationship in how much insulin is produced, this is pretty much what it looks like.
Now, why do we need to know about cortisol? Why is that important? Because cortisol is a hormone that’s produced in response to stress. And when you’re stressed, your body puts a break on the healing and inflammation. So they use that principle by giving you a medication that is the same molecule but man-made of cortisol. And if they give you a shot, like in a joint somewhere, they’re going to call that cortisone cortisone shot. And if they give you a pill for a systemic effect, it’s going to be something like prednisone. And there are many different names for these. They’re called steroids and they’re many different brand names. But what they all have in common is that they are glucocorticoids. And the only thing you need to know is that it affects glucose. And if there’s any doubt as to how important, how profound this can be, then just ask anyone who has been put on prednisone, and they will tell you. In many, many cases, the side effects are weight gain, high blood sugar, increased thirst, and in some extreme cases, some more severe cases, and also frequent urination. And if you notice, if you watch some of my videos or if you’re a diabetic, you know that that’s another word for diabetes. High blood sugar, increased thirst, frequent urination is diabetes. So this is something that contributes very, very strongly to weight gain and diabetes.
So the best diet/lifestyle is simply the one that you can stick with. Right? So we’re not trying to promote a special brand or a special diet. We just want to understand how do they work. And if you’re in favor of calorie restriction, then you’re probably going to get hungry. So if you lose weight and you want to be OK with being hungry for the rest of your life, if that works for you, then that might be the diet for you. If you’re OK with deprivation, then that might be an OK diet for you. And if you want to do it like the people on „The Biggest Loser“ and exercise four, five, six, seven, eight hours a day and they lose enormous amounts of weight, if you are comfortable with keeping that up for the rest of your life, then that might be the model for you. But if you’re like most of us, then we want to start applying these principles in an intelligent way.
What is it going to take for diet success? And when I say diet, I mean the principles governing your food choices, the proper food for humans. Well, if you want to lose weight, first, you have to create a calorie deficit. That’s a given. But it’s not enough, because if that’s all you do, it will be short-term, there’ll be rebounds, you can’t keep it up, and so forth. That’s why 98% of diets fail. In addition to that, we have to solve the hunger deprivation problem. We have to create a plan that will keep us satisfied, where we’re full when we eat and not so hungry between meals. We have to solve the problem of unstable blood glucose because if it keeps being high and low, every time it’s high, you have insulin being high, you can’t burn fat. Every time it’s low, you’re going to get cravings and you get hunger and deprivation. You have to get to where you have metabolic flexibility, that your body can live off and create energy flexibly from whatever you give it, and it can burn the fat when you don’t feed it for a little bit, and when you feed it, it knows what to do with it.
Also, we have to solve the problem of insulin resistance because when we have insulin resistance, we can’t burn fat. That insulin has to come down before the fat off the body is burned. And we also have to create a long-term lowered insulin resistance. We have to become more insulin sensitive, to change our set point, because if we can’t change the set point, then we will have a rebound no matter how few calories you eat. And most importantly, it has to be satisfying and so easy that you won’t go back. You can’t go back because if you do, then you’re going to create the problem all over again.
So let’s talk through some of these variables and the different popular diets.
– The USDA: Initially, you create a calorie deficit, but it won’t solve hunger and cravings or stabilize blood sugar. It may help reduce insulin resistance temporarily but won’t change the set point. Long-term health may be possible if you eat whole foods.
– Low carb high fat/keto: It helps with hunger, cravings, stabilizing blood sugar, and insulin resistance. It may help change the set point for many. Long-term health depends on food quality.
– Intermittent fasting: It creates a calorie deficit and helps with hunger and cravings. How it addresses other factors depends on the individual and food choices.
– Paleo: It helps with hunger, cravings, stabilizing blood sugar, and insulin resistance. It may change the set point for many, and long-term health depends on food quality.
– Mediterranean diet: It helps with hunger, cravings, stabilizing blood sugar, and insulin resistance. It may change the set point for some, and long-term health depends on food quality.
– Ideal/clean keto: It addresses all factors, including the set point, for a majority of people. Intermittent fasting may be necessary for stubborn plateaus. Long-term health depends on food quality.
In summary, the best diet/lifestyle is the one that you can stick with. It should create a calorie deficit, address hunger and cravings, stabilize blood sugar, improve insulin resistance, change the set point, and be satisfying and easy to maintain. Ideal/clean keto, combined with intermittent fasting, is a powerful approach to achieving these goals, with long-term health dependent on food quality.
