Hello Health Champions. Today I want to talk about the calorie density diet which is a low
calorie diet and how it compares to a very high calorie density diet like the ketogenic diet
by the end of this video you will understand how they really work and how to get the best
long-term sustainable results in terms of weight loss and health coming right up hey I'm Dr Ekberg
I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification
bell so you don't miss anything the whole premise of the low calorie density diet is that
you can eat large amounts of food as long as they have few calories per pound so something like
non-starchy vegetables they would have 60 to 200 calories per pound
so even if you ate five pounds worth you still wouldn't have more than a few hundred calories
and the non-starchy vegetables would be the best and then followed by fruit which has a little bit
more calories but still very few so you could eat a lot of fruit as well tubers corn and rice have
more calories but they're still okay they're still mostly water and fiber beans and lentils
follow and they're still good so these would be the foods on the calorie density diet that
is your foundation you can have basically as much as you want of those and then when they have more
calories like meat fish and eggs now you need to limit them you can't have as much you should avoid
them or eat them sparingly things like bread and muffins have even more calories so stay away from
those sugar honey and agave everyone agrees but they have more calories so here you need to stay
away from those dry cereal and crackers have even more so limit those cheese and cream is a no-no
1600 to 1800 calories nuts and seeds have astronomical amounts of calories almost as much
as butter and oil which tops the scale over 3 000 up to 4 000 calories per pound the whole premise
again is that if you want to eat large amounts of food you can feel full all the time by eating
pounds and pounds worth of non-caloric low caloric foods and that way you stay full but you're not
getting very many calories i want to cover a few issues and the first one is that this model is
stuck in the idea that calories are evil a lot of calories is a bad thing a few calories is a good
thing well every other species on the planet tries to get as many calories as possible to survive
and as long as they eat food that's appropriate for their species they can trust their hunger and
satiety responses well humans have stopped eating food that's appropriate for our species we have
started eating grain and sugar and processed foods and chemicals and artificial flavorings
and all of these different things that hijack our hormone system and they hijack our hunger
and satiety responses so we can't trust our hunger and satiety anymore and as a result we
have become obese and for some reason the simplest thing seemed to be to blame it all on calories
well it's not quite that simple and now the other next issue i have with this model is that it's not
very satisfying that sure you can eat five pounds of lettuce and not get a whole lot of calories
but you do a whole lot of chewing and you won't be very satisfied and if you're not satisfied
then it's not sustainable life has to have some satisfaction we need to feel satisfied we need
to feel full we need to feel good and if the food doesn't do that it's not sustainable how long will
you stay full even if you can stuff yourself you can fill the volume of your stomach with these
foods how long will you stay full are you going to have to top it off are you going to pretty much
have to eat all day long and the next issue they ignore is hormones that hormones determine human
behavior you can fight it you can have willpower that will get you so far for a short time but in
the long run your hormones will be determine your behavior hormones like leptin ghrelin and insulin
leptin is a tidy hormone ghrelin's a hunger hormone and insulin is your main metabolic
hormone and that's the one we're going to talk about the most here insulin is not a bad thing
it's not your enemy it is a wonderful healthy hormone as long as we maintain it in balance
so if we have a feast if we eat a lot of food then insulin increases and it helps us store that extra
food the excess from that feast we store it as fat so then when there is famine when there's a time
of less food now that insulin goes down and allows us to use the fat until we can have another feast
so as long as it's in balance it's a wonderful and healthy and necessary thing now here's what
we want to focus on and understand insulin is a fat storing hormone it doesn't directly work on
fat but it works on glucose and the glucose gets shunted into the cells and the excess glucose
gets converted to fat so indirectly insulin is a fat storing hormone it promotes lipogenesis
and this is a good thing for a famine now it also decreases fat burning because you don't want to
burn fat while you're in the process of storing it and let's take a look now at once we understand
that insulin is the key to this it's not the calories it's the insulin then how do we reduce it
well one way is with carbs low carb high fat diet and the second is intermittent fasting to eat
less often because every time you eat you signal the body to make insulin and store fat
the third way is to reduce the quantity so this is how the low calorie diets work but they don't work
very long so let's take a look at how that works now if you're insulin resistant that means that
even when you don't eat your insulin remains high so if you have a blood test a fasting
insulin test a good value would be between three and five but if your value is five six seven times
higher than that that means you have a high insulin level even when you don't eat so here's
what happens you eat less but that high insulin level prevents your body from burning fat and
because of these two principles your fat stores are not available normally when you don't eat
your body's supposed to access that fat that extra energy but with high insulin
the body can't see it and two things happen now when the stores are unavailable now you get hungry
because you stopped eating but you can't get to the stores see normally when insulin is in
balance when you don't eat insulin goes down but when you're insulin resistant that doesn't happen
so now when you cut back on the calories you just get more hungry the other thing that happens when
your fat stores are unavailable because of high insulin is that your body has a perception of lack
even though you may have hundreds of thousands of calories stored up from previous feasts
when your insulin is high your body can't see them so the overall impression is there is still lack
and if there is lack then we better save let's turn down the basal metabolic rate so now your
metabolism slows down and these two things put together makes it impossible for you to keep
eating less in the long run like i said willpower will take you so far you can do it for a few weeks
or even a few months but eventually you will go back to eating more and now you're stuck in
a cycle so the key is to reduce the insulin and now that we understand that let's see how these
color categories how this going from good to worst how that correlates with insulin
so the leafy greens the non-starchy vegetables they're still great however the fruit is not
great anymore even though it's low in calories the sugar in it is going to increase insulin and the
fructose is going to start clogging the liver and we'll get more into those in a little bit
the tubers corn and rice is even worse because they are only minutes away from turning into sugar
they're very starchy and the body starts breaking them down as soon as you put them in the mouth
so they raise blood sugar and they're bad for insulin beans and lentils even though they are
higher in calories are not as bad for blood sugar because they're not absorbed as quickly
meat fish and eggs are higher in calories but very low insulin response the protein in meat
can eventually turn into glucose so it does have some insulin response but it's much better than
any of those three bread muffins is terrible turns into glucose very quickly sugar honey and agave
some of this like agave could actually be good because the more fructose it has the less
the blood sugar responds but as we'll see in a minute the worse it is for your overall insulin
resistance so they're going from good to bad dry cereal and crackers go from bad to worst
depending on how processed they are cheese cream are great nuts and seeds go from good to great
depending on how much fat and how much carbs are in there butter and oil is great so as you can see
there is not a whole lot of agreement in the colors between the calorie scale and the insulin
scale and i want to make the argument that the insulin scale is much more important so you want
to focus on the foods that are good or great in terms of insulin because that's how you reverse
the insulin resistance now let's talk about the other aspect of insulin resistance which is the
liver if you are insulin resistant then you are very very likely you're almost guaranteed to have
a fatty liver to some degree and this is called if you don't drink alcohol it's called non-alcoholic
fatty liver disease and this pretty much all comes down to fructose fructose is about as bad as
alcohol in terms of clogging up and stressing the liver the two factors that stress the liver is
fructose and insulin and we already talked about the insulin so now we want to keep that in the
back of our minds but we want to focus on how much fructose do these things have so in terms of liver
clogging potential the non-starchy vegetables are still great the fruit however goes from okay
to bad depending on how much sugar and how much fructose is in there tubers corn and rice
is higher in starch it affects blood sugar more but it has less sugar and fructose than fruit so
even though it's higher in calories it's actually a little better for the liver beans and lentils
are also okay meat fish and eggs are even better because there is no sugar there is nothing to clog
up the liver and the blood sugar response is very very moderate bread and muffins go from okay
to worst if it's pure starch it's okay the more sugar they add it goes all the way to worst
all concentrated refined sugars are terrible absolute worst dry cereal
same as the muffins if they're pure starch then they're okay from a fructose perspective
but if you add some sweetener then they're the worst cheese and cream are good because there's
very low blood sugar impact and there is no fructose nuts and seeds are good
and butter and oil are the best they have virtually zero insulin response and they contain
no fructose as you can see there's again very little correlation between the calorie scale and
the liver clogging aspects and this is going to be similar to the insulin but if you go back and
review you'll see that there are some differences and the main thing is going to depend on how much
sugar they contain and the next variable i want to look at is satiety because this is also huge how
satisfied how full do you get how long can you go till the next meal and are you going to feel good
enough eating this food that you want to stick with it now starchy non-starchy vegetables were
really great all the way but here's the problem they don't contain hardly anything of anything
so satiety-wise they're the worst you cannot sustain yourself on eating those alone
fruit same thing they satisfy you for a very short while but after a few minutes to an hour or two
now you have to eat again tubers corn and rice they're a little bit better they're okay beans and
lentils are even better because they contain some protein that they're a little bit more satisfying
meat fish and eggs are the best these animal proteins they are very very satisfying they're
very complete foods and if you try to do something like one meal a day protocol then you'll find that
these foods are the easiest to use to stick to that one meal a day because you get so satisfying
it's easy to just eat once a day bread muffins are okay too bad depending on how much fat is in them
sugar honey and agave are bad dry cereal crackers are okay cheese and cream
great nuts and seeds are great butter and oil are great so as you can see here with the exception
of sugar which is just terrible in so many ways because it's processed just doesn't satisfy us
you'll see that pretty much the scale is turned upside down and that's why it's so difficult
to lose weight by counting calories because it is not very satisfying so the calorie density diet is
really just another form of calorie counting you don't have to count calories per say if you just
know which foods to focus on but the whole premise is that you need to eat less calories and how has
the success rate been how has this been working i think that's the biggest question we need to ask
for the last 50 to 70 years when the standard model has been go on a diet eat less food eat
fewer calories how successful has that been well the failure rate has been somewhere around 98
so i would call that an abysmal failure or a monumental failure or if you prefer
a spectacular failure i mean just look at the track record all right
now calorie density diets they do promote whole foods which is a big step in the right direction
but you still have to eat satisfying food if you want it to last and we have to start understanding
that it's the hormones that determine your behavior you can fight it you can have some
willpower you can create some temporary change but in the long run you have to balance your hormones
or it will not be sustainable it will not be successful long term if you enjoyed this video
and you'd like to learn more about how to get truly healthy i think you should really check
that one out next thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next video feet mission