Diet Fiction

On June 3rd, 1997,

the World Health Organization defined obesity as an epidemic.

That definition was crucial for food and pharmaceutical companies,

because once this became a medical calamity,

then everyone could profit by providing a cure.

The very food companies charged with making us fat,

began making money by trying to help us lose the weight.

It was the beginning of the golden era of the weight loss industry.

In the last 30 years, hundreds of diet programs were created.

Thousands of books got published, and billions in products were sold,

creating one of the most profitable industries on the planet.

In the meantime, people kept getting bigger and everyone got to be blamed,

from fast food, carbs, sugars, fats, to genetics, lack of exercise, and even fruits.

With so much conflicting information,

an escalating global health crisis emerged,

leading millions of people into a never ending cycle of yo-yo dieting.

It is now estimated that by the year 2030, 42% of the American population will be obese

and 80% overweight, so we've decided to embark on a journey

and look for answers.

So I don't think of obesity as causing disease.

I think of it as sort of like that canary in the coal mine.

It's something that starts happening well before the diabetes

and the heart disease are so bad, that we know about it.

Over time, it catches up to you, and it leads to our number one killer, heart disease,

high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes.

And people get autoimmune diseases.

It's a comorbidity to so many other conditions.

That's why when you look at the charts of obesity and diabetes in America,

they go just like this together. And then if you look at

high blood pressures, with stroke, they all rise together.

Not because they're different diseases, but they are caused by the same problem,

and they're caused by the kinds of things that we're eating.

We are humans living in, most cases, in what we call a very toxic food environment.

An environment of highly palatable, very processed foods

that keep us addicted and interested in those foods,

and serve us a huge number of calories, without making us feel full.

It's important to lose weight, not only in ways that help us lose weight,

but in ways that don't mortgage our health. I mean, there are lots of ways

you can lose weight that aren't good for you. Amphetamines used to be

a very popular way of losing weight. I wouldn't recommend it.

And so it's important that when we're talking about weight loss, we're talking about

how to lose weight in ways that enhance our health, rather than mortgage it.

To try to blame a broken metabolism,

or hormones, or menopause, or,

"I have a knee injury and I'm not working out anymore",

or, "I used to work out and I'm not working out anymore".

I'm not saying those don't have contributions, but they're not the main problem.

Think about it this way. The average adult human eats a ton of food in a year.

A ton. Now explain to me how anybody could claim

that putting a ton of food through your body,

a ton of anything, wouldn't have a profound impact on your body.

Of course it's going to. Eat garbage, garbage in, garbage out.

Eat something fabulous, you get health as a result.

And food addictions are so common today,

that people aren't even aware they're addicted because: "Hey, everybody does it,

so I'm not an addict. I'm just doing what everybody does."

You literally are what you eat. I always say that.

You know, your mouth is your first and most consistent access to the outside world.

And you put food from nature into your body,

and your body knows what to do with it when it recognizes it. You know,

It knows how to process it and metabolize it and take care of it,

and it helps promote optimal health,

but when you're consuming things that your body doesn't recognize,

that's really refined and manmade, if you will, it's so destructive.

It's so difficult on the body and it really does lead to

the disease promoting processes that occur, when you consume these foods.

What other species that's ever walked the planet,

had obesity as a symptom of poverty?

It's not from deficiency. It's not water deficiency.

It's not sugar deficiency. It's not protein deficiency.

It's chronic overnutrition and no one wants to deal with it.

I kind of wish the entire weight loss industry would just disappear overnight,

because it is rife with lies, misinformation and products

that are not connecting people more deeply with their food choices and with themselves,

but ironically leading them away from that.

Nowadays, you can find a study to back up practically any theory.

In 2015, a journalist and associate scientists from Harvard University

published a hoax study to prank reporters and show how easily the media can be fooled.

The study proposed that by eating chocolate, people could lose weight.

Of course, that was not true, but the media bought into it,

and the story was featured in major publications

and news stations all around the world.

What's shocking is that none of the reporters took the time

to investigate the facts. So if we can't trust the media,

how can we, as consumers, navigate this confusing world of diet and nutrition research?

Medical journals are so cluttered up with junk,

that you can find a study to support almost anything you want to say,

and by the way, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,

because there's a lot of great stuff in medical journals too.

But, a good example that I think is easy for people to understand

is that if I wanted to give a lecture today

on the fact that smoking is actually not as harmful as we thought,

I can find some studies in major medical journals,

saying that smoking is beneficial,

it relaxes people, takes away our anxiety.

Okay, so if I cherry picked a dozen studies and talked about this for a half hour,

I'm sure some people in the audience would be thinking, "Boy, have I been misinformed!

I mean, I really believed all these people who said, smoking is harmful."

The problem with that is that in presenting those studies,

I'm ignoring the larger body of evidence that clearly shows that smoking is terrible for you.

There's a lot of junk science out there, so you have to be very careful.

And if you read magazines or see TV news, it is generally very unreliable.

You need to find someone who is very good at analyzing research,

and then be very careful because there is a lot of wrong information out there.

I see these people going on these shows now, posing as experts.

These people have never studied statistics. They've never sat in a scientific meeting

where we review the research at detail.

More importantly, they've never sat across from a patient

and followed a patient for years and seeing how they respond to diet,

and yet, all of a sudden, these are the experts that are on TV talking about diet.

In the month of January,

millions of people from around the world

set their New Year's resolutions

and decide it's time to lose weight.

During that month, gyms experience an astonishing 18% increase

in new member signups, with numbers plummeting down in the subsequent months.

So why is it that so many people fail at losing weight through exercise?

What happens though, when you exercise is you get hungrier,

so remember, your body is basically saying

the amount of stretch in my stomach means I've eaten enough.

And when you exercise, it's going to say you need a little bit more.

So what I find is that some people that are exercising

are still eating the bad standard American diet.

They wind up overshooting by even more calories,

because the food they're eating, they're going to want their bodies

giving them signals to eat more of that. Another problem

is you have someone that hasn't exercised in years,

you know, they're sedentary, all of a sudden they'd start doing things

that their body's just not ready to do. They can get hurt.

So I think there's lots of things that are connected to exercise

that make exercise health promoting,

but simply running on the treadmill longer

so that, you know, just to burn more calories, is not the answer.

I think diet and exercise go together.

I think exercise is very important for promotion of health.

I do not think that alone as a standalone, it's very effective with weight loss.

So I think again, it puts people into this cycle of extreme frustration,

which is, now they're incorporating exercise and they're getting up

and they're moving, and they're either not losing weight,

or they're still gaining weight.

So you really have to put your diet right first.

Inside each overweight individual is a lean, fit individual.

They just, sort of, have a fat suit, you know, to think about it that way.

Now if I took that fat suit, the 40, the 60, the 80, the 100,

or one of my clients, the 180 pounds he was carrying around,

and I handed their lean person inside that 180 pounds and said,

"Carry this around all day long, every day."

Why would that not be called exercise?

And why are we telling these people that they need to move more

and they're not in the gym enough.

I'm not saying exercise is wrong.

I'm saying it doesn't matter if they're carrying around a 100 pounds

of steel all day, every day, or carrying around 100 pounds of body fat.

They may not notice it because of the distribution,

but they're spending the energy to do it.

Well, when you weigh 500 pounds,

uhm, you spend a lot more of your energy in managing your body.

What I mean by that is, uh, it's harder

to go up and down stairs, it's harder to do anything.

It's harder to move, to walk, whatever, and it's exhausting.

So, what I would do, because I was cooking,

I would have a private chef, or a personal chef's service at the time,

so I would get up in the morning and go to the store and come home.

And I would cook for three hours then I would have to take a break.

So, I'd be taking these hour long naps or sit downs in between cooking.

And I only cooked three days a week, and then let my body rest the rest of the time.

So, I wasn't fully participatory in my own life.

Exercise is clearly important, but most studies show

that exercise alone, is hard to lose weight and keep it off,

but if you can combine exercise with a healthy diet,

and meditation, and stress management, and love and support,

and getting enough sleep, those are the things that really make it sustainable.

You can't out exercise your mouth,

unless you're maybe doing these ultradistance, you know, runs 100 mile,

you're running marathons, but most people, including professional athletes,

are having a really hard time meeting their ideal weight.

In fact, if you went out and ate a burger and fries and coke,

you better run 13 miles to lose those calories.

You can't even do that, because even if you burned off the calories at the gym,

you are not reversing the deleterious effects that bad food had on your gut microbiome,

and on your insulin spike, on your hardening of the arteries,

the inflammation that was caused. So, I mean,

I can go on and on, but it's not just the calories that you ate,

you are also really affecting your metabolism in such a bad way

that there's just no way to exercise that off.

Most of our society is not agrarian.

They're not going out into the fields and hunting, gathering, farming,

doing the things that we've done for centuries.

And so now, we have much more leisure time and people are actually sedentary.

And it is true that the chair is the new cigarette,

but if those are our jobs, then we have to adjust our diets

to try and make sure that we're not always in positive calorie balance.

I used to be 220 pounds and I used to think

that working out at the gym was, you know, the only way to lose weight.

I would be at the gym for two hours a day.

I would, you know, my diet was very unhealthy.

I wouldn't lose much weight.

I'd always yo-yo between 5-10 pounds,

but it wasn't until I focused more on my health that the weight just started shedding.

For those who don't exercise, if they increase their resting calories,