- Transformation videos are all the rage on YouTube.
And recently, Mrwhosetheboss,
did a hundred day body transformation.
Let's see which one of these methods
is scientifically proven and which ones are not.
- A hundred days ago, I challenged myself
to a fitness a transformation.
This was me, every day I was sleeping
just four hours a night,
walking an average of just 2000 steps,
drinking four cups of caffeinated tea.
- Okay, so there's a lot happening right off the outset.
What's my feelings on transformations?
I think they're great,
as long as you're doing them
with the mindset that you're transforming
to create a healthy lifestyle.
Otherwise, you're gonna find yourself in this yo-yo dieting,
crash dieting phase, losing weight, gaining weight,
losing weight, gaining weight,
and that's problematic because fat almost has like a memory.
So once you have it, it comes back very quickly.
Sleep four hours a night is terrible.
You're gonna suffer the effects of that
just several days in.
And I'm talking about shot productivity,
creativity, metabolism, energy levels,
everything's gonna struggle there.
Steps, it depends what else you're doing for exercise.
You know, people say 10,000 steps,
that's also kind of overstated.
Caffeine, 44 milligrams, not really a problem.
- So I committed to making 10 key lifestyle changes
to see if I could turn this all around.
- I'm curious what these 10 key lifestyle changes are
because so many people, especially influencers fall
into fads that they think are healthy
but just result in short-term goals being achieved.
Like hitting a certain number on a scale.
But hitting a certain number on a scale
with an unhealthy habit
is not something that's good for your health.
- The first five days were horrible.
I dropped immediately from three to four cups of tea
and coffee a day to zero.
And while I did think this would be challenging,
I had no idea that I'd be practically unable
to function without it.
- It's pretty interesting that even
with such a small amount of caffeine in his diet,
he was already feeling the effects of that.
The common thing that we hear is if you quit cold turkey
any kind of caffeine substance,
you start developing headaches.
Usually we theorize this
is because the blood vessels in your brain start to expand
'cause caffeine actually constricts blood vessels.
And when they're allowed to expand,
when that happens in your head,
it creates a headache sensation.
- And what made this slightly harder was the fact
that at the same time my gym regimen
had just tripled in intensity.
- Yeah, so if you're increasing activity
and at the same time decreasing caffeine,
that's gonna be quite hard.
Because remember what caffeine does is it fights off fatigue
by blocking adenosine receptors.
Throughout the day, you form more adenosine,
as a result, you feel more sleepy as the day goes on.
Now, the way that you can clear this
outside of ingesting substances like caffeine
is by taking naps or by sleeping a good night's sleep.
- I was running at every possible opportunity
literally until I could not take another step.
- That's a problem.
When you start over training
when you haven't been training for a long period of time,
that is gonna be extremely problematic
'cause it's gonna raise your risk of developing an injury.
Once you get injured, you're gonna stop working out
and it's gonna damage your ability to reach your goals.
In general, when you are sedentary for long periods of time,
your ligaments get weaker, your muscles get weaker.
And it's usually not the big muscles that suffer,
so you feel okay, it's the small stabilizing muscles
within your low back, your hips,
your knee, that really give you that support
when you're taking an uneasy step
when you are fatigued, when you aren't able to
oxygenate your body, 'cause you're huffing and puffing.
- Plus I was making myself do 25 minutes
of fast walking at an incline every evening on top of that
- Fast walking on an incline is great
because that essentially puts your heart rate
in the blue zone like an ideal fat burning zone.
And it won't stress you out
so that you can continue doing longer sessions like this.
It's actually a great way to build up an aerobic base.
- The scales we're saying 83.8 kilos and 20.3% fat.
- A lot of the weight that you lose initially
usually happens to be water weight
when you start exercising quite heavily.
Also it depends on what time
of the day you're weighing yourself.
Ideally, this is right after using the bathroom
in the morning, naked because that allows you
to be the most consistent
- Over the next couple of weeks, as all the other stuff,
I started to properly turn my attention
to the art of meditation.
From everything I'd heard about meditating,
I knew that this was gonna be the key
to reducing my overall stress levels.
- Meditation, mindfulness is extremely powerful.
You don't have to sit cross-legged
with your fingers touching in order for it to be effective.
There's multiple ways an individual can be mindful,
be present in the moment or meditate.
For some that means sitting in a quiet room,
for others it could mean people-watching at the coffee shop.
It's really just about being present in the moment
because a lot of times our anxieties will take us
either to the future or to the past,
both places that we don't have control over.
So by being in the present
and understanding you have control
over the given moment does reduce stress levels.
We have seen this in good quality scientific research.
- But the other side to this coin is the eating.
At the point where I decided to make this change,
I was eating horribly.
Eating junk food had essentially become my way
of pushing myself to work harder.
- Eating junk food can become an addiction
like anything else that is inherently rewarding
to the reward center of your brain.
You eat junk food, dopamine gets released,
other feel good neurotransmitters get released
and you keep doing it when you're stressed.
It's basically a form of self medication
but an unhealthy way of self medication.
Just like how we have healthy
and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
- This challenge really forced me to get creative
with my recipes.
I was really craving pancakes.
Obviously I couldn't make myself the full fat version
but that allowed me to figure out
a recipe that was pretty lean, very quick,
and really tasty once served with some blueberries
and a bit of honey.
- The idea is to create a healthy relationship with foods
and to control and stop yourself from eating out of control.
And that will go a long way to keeping you healthy.
Everyone is going to eat something unhealthy
every now and then.
It's very hard for most people to be perfect all the time.
And it's not even something
that most doctors would recommend.
Because in medicine seeking perfection
ultimately yields negative outcomes in many cases
'cause the body is firmly placed
in a state of homeostasis,
which means balance not perfection.
- By this point, I could actually feel
like I was in better shape.
I felt lighter.
I felt more agile.
Not to mention that my weight was now sitting at 81 kilos
which isn't even close to actually factoring
in the full difference because as well as losing the fat,
I was putting on muscle at the same time.
It's even weird all these minor stumbles I had with my diet.
I think the fact that I wasn't too hard
on myself when I had to be a bit unhealthy
meant that I never felt like it was all over
or what's the point anymore.
- See this is a good example of not being afraid
of taking three steps forward and one step back
and still seeing that you're making progress
because very often I see patients fall
into this cycle where they're doing well.
They're trying to be as perfect as possible,
then one thing goes wrong
because they're in a place where they can't eat
or there was a temptation, they can't eat healthy,
and there was a temptation.
They say, "Oh, I need to punish myself.
I need to feel shame.
I need to feel remorse."
And then when they feel that way,
they want to eat more unhealthy foods
and then they go back and fall into their cycle
of eating unhealthy.
Whereas, if they take the opposite approach,
which Mrwhosetheboss here took
and say, "Okay, but I'm still two steps ahead
so I can continue on this journey and keep crushing it.
Even if I took three steps back,
I'm still ahead from where I was last week,
so I'm gonna keep pushing on."
That's where you get the best outcomes.
It's like really having the stamina
to keep going forward and stay motivated.
- Three months ago, I got myself this standing desk
and I spent an average of four hours per day working
from it.
I could not recommend it more.
Because it's not just that you stand
and you keep your core active,
but you also find that you move your legs more
your arms more, and you're just generally active
for four more hours a day, which is enormous.
And this board that I've been using-
- Spoiler alert for everyone watching this video. (laughs)
I have the same thing underneath my desk
and I don't use it just under my standing desk here
while I'm standing,
but also while I'm sitting right now.
It actually allows me to keep my feet busy.
And studies have shown that those who like tap their feet
and especially when you have something fidgety like this
actually burn more calories throughout the day,
so I'm with this type of advice here.
- And then every now and again
I've been swapping it out for this vibration plate
which basically exercises my body for me.
- Okay, I don't know.
Quick fixes, gimmicks, cool If you enjoy them,
not mandatory by any means
- Like one thing I used was Slendertone belt
that shocks your abs
into contracting many times very quickly.
- This is where like we get into the hacks,
the gimmicky stuff.
This is the stuff that I think most people do not need.
And I think hyper optimization and hyper focusing
on these results will actually yield worse outcomes
in the long term.
Because my job as a doctor is not to give you
the best transformation in a hundred days,
but to help you live a hundred healthy years
because I could easily strap on a bunch
of these things and make your quality
of life absolutely terrible
and drive up your anxiety so high.
All the potential benefits
of these gadgets end up backfiring.
- One of my other resolutions
was to install a water reminder app
on my phone that pings me every two hours
to make sure I drink.
- I think this is another gimmicky thing.
The majority of people don't need a reminder like this
because what ends up happening,
and I could tell you this as a physician
with many years of practice, you develop alarm fatigue
where you get so many notifications
especially ones that aren't super urgent
like this one that you end up ignoring it once,
twice three times, and then you forget all about it.
Its value becomes meaningless to you.
- I thought this was genius.
I thought this was gonna solve
my hydration problems forever.
- What hydration problem is he having?
I'm curious, because carrying a water bottle
with you will inherently remind you to drink
and that you probably don't need a reminder
on your phone for that.
- It did gimme a nudge at the beginning,
but by the time we were approaching week 10,
the regularity of it almost made me start
to just tune out the notification.
- It's like we know what we're talking about
in healthcare.
- That said, the biggest thing
that was actually a game changer
was just making sure that I always had a full bottle.
- Bro, this hilarious.
It's like...
No, that can't be.
And this is my first time watching.
- [Sam] Recognize.
(Dr. Mike laughing)
- This made me feel less hungry and even more awake.
- And he's right here in saying that
because when you start developing mild
to moderate dehydration,
your metabolism does start to suffer.
So keeping it in a healthy range,
which again doesn't take a lot of work,
doesn't take a meticulous tracking,
will help you get to and stay at a healthy weight.
- It was at around day 75,
three quarters through the challenge,
where I actually started to notice
that I was also getting much stronger.
I was lifting about 80% more than when I started.
- Yeah the biggest joy that people get from weightlifting
is seeing that progress.
No matter if you lift lightweights
for higher reps or heavy weights for lower reps,
you're gonna see progress go up.
The most important thing when it comes to weight lifting
in order to see improvements is consistency
and injury prevention.
I cannot tell you how many people stop
their weight training journeys because of injuries
usually due to incorrect form or ego lifting
which is when you put too much weight on
that your incapable of handling and end up hurting yourself.
- Not to mention that while at the start I was planking
for about a minute a go,
by this point I was becoming able to do three minute planks.
- That's really good,
I can't do a three minute plank, shout out to him.
- By the time we got today 85,
my sleep was drastically better
than the 28% I was being scored when I started this change.
I was now regularly hitting 70 to 80% sleep quality
which was already a vast improvement.
- If you sleep the consistent number of hours
of sleep per night at the same time of day
and you're sleeping eight hours a night, 11:00 to 7:00,
and you keep doing that every night,
11:00 to 7:00, 11:00 to 7:00, 11:00 to 7:00,
and you feel good and you don't have daytime somnolence
where you feel like you're sleepy,
you're not waking up feeling exhausted,
you don't need things to tell you your sleep quality.
'Cause here's the problem,
we've actually done research with this.
We've told certain participants
even after they had a good night's sleep
that their quality of sleep was bad.
And we compared them with people
whose sleep quality was actually bad
and we told them that it was good.
And the outcomes of how they performed
actually ended up almost switching
because these individuals were so affected
by the numbers they saw in apps like this
that it didn't even matter that they got good quality sleep.
So I I'm really hesitant to use apps like this
that aren't carefully clinically monitored.
And I see so many glitches in these apps
that I don't want them guiding my patients in general.
Now, if you're enjoying it
and it's something you do for fun, that's fine
but be careful making health decisions off apps like this.
- But then I found this product,
it's an air filtration unit
that actually just sucks in all the allergens,
the dust and the pollen
that have been restricting my breathing at night.
- Okay, so those particles are not necessarily
restricting his breathing.
What happens when you get an air purifier like that
usually with a HEPA filter,
it clears out the allergens that cause your body
to have an allergic reaction within your airways
leading them to swell and block airflow
or create a constriction in the airflow.
As a result, it feels like you can't breathe.
But it's not actually the particles blocking you up
as if it's a plumbing system.
And I would actually recommend that people
with allergies or people who end up mouth breathing
get a humidifier in the room as well.
It allows you for your mucus membranes to stay moist.
When they're moist,
you're more likely to be comfortable sleeping
throughout the night and not wake up from a dry mouth.
And also it prevents cracking of those mucus membranes
which can lead to infections.
- [Mrwhosetheboss] And that leads us to the results.
- Looks great.
- [Mrwhosetheboss] I'm now averaging
just under the eight hours of sleep a day.
My daily step count's at 13,000.
My caffeine is leveled out to about one cup of tea per day.
And as for weight, 79 kilos with a 16.9% body fat.
- Check out the fitness mistakes my patients make.
Get educated and as always stay happy and healthy.
(upbeat music)