Hello health champions today i want to talk about the top 10 ways to lose belly fat
that are supposedly backed by science isn't it frustrating when something's supposed to work
and they say it's backed by science and yet it doesn't work for you that's because it doesn't
have to work for everybody to be called science it just has to work for most people but once you
understand some of the basic mechanisms of losing belly fat then you can still make it work for you
and reach your goals 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 and you can also join as a member so you
don't miss anything the first item i saw on a list was to track your calories is that a good idea do
calories matter well yes and no you still have to have a calorie deficit yes at some point you
have to expend more calories than you take in but if you try to count calories and reduce calories
in a form of calorie deprivation then that is not going to work because it's not sustainable
you have to understand the underlying mechanism and that is a calorie is not a calorie it depends
on which hormones these calories trigger so you want to reduce sugar and carbohydrates why because
that is the only way to reduce insulin and insulin resistance and insulin is a fat storing
hormone they change behavior so when you reduce insulin you reduce hunger that's the way to reduce
calories not by counting calories now consider for a moment why do we have belly fat why does
it accumulate in one place why doesn't it just spread out evenly and if it doesn't spread out
evenly which it doesn't then why doesn't it all collect in the left foot or in the right leg right
if it was random it could just end up anywhere so the answer is it's not random again there are
hormones that determine where it ends up and if we have an imbalance in these hormones then we
have to fix that underlying imbalance in order to correct the problem so we have to reduce insulin
we have to reduce cortisol and we have to increase growth hormone because both of these have to do
with fat storing and blood sugar and this has to do with fat burning number two on the list i saw
suggested we eat a high protein diet does that work well let's look at the underlying mechanisms
if we eat carbohydrate it contributes a certain amount of insulin response if we eat protein
it does a certain amount but it's much less it's about 30 to 50 percent depending on the protein
and how it's utilized in the body but let's just call it half as much insulin whereas fat
contributes just a tiny little bit of insulin now let's say that for the standard american diet
that we eat a certain amount of protein a certain amount of carb and a certain amount of fat
then the total insulin load would be when we add all those contributions together so it would be
this much now if we want to reduce belly fat and reduce insulin then we have to lower
the total insulin load can we do that on a high protein diet well let's say that we increase the
protein by 50 percent then the contribution from protein on insulin would obviously be 50
larger but here's the beauty and this is why a high protein diet can work but may not work if you
don't understand this if you keep eating sugar and carb then you're going to bypass any beneficial
effects because you're going to bypass the satiety mechanisms but if you eat good quality food then
what this protein allows you to do is to eat less carbohydrates so if you eat more protein you could
cut back the carbohydrate down to maybe a fourth and still be very satiated and then you eat the
same amount of fat but you've still reduced your total insulin load by maybe a third but once we
understand this then we say okay well a high protein diet could work but is there something
else that could work even better and that is called a low carb high fat diet so now we could
eat maybe a hundred percent like the same amount of protein but let's say we eat what's recommended
of a moderate protein diet so eat eighty percent of that it would still work if we had a hundred
but the difference now is we cut back carbs dramatically we cut it back to about 10 percent
so the contribution from carbs are very very small now we need to eat something else to get satiated
to get full and have energy and that's fat so we triple the fat intake but that has hardly any
effect on insulin so now even though we're eating the same calories we're having the same satiety
we have less than half the insulin load and as our bodies get used to this now we can reduce calories
and still be full because the body is eating the fat off the body tip number three reduce stress
that's a great advice for so many reasons but the primary here is that there is a stress
hormone called cortisol cortisol puts you in a fight flight response where in a fight flight
response the body tries to increase glucose which will increase hunger and cravings which
will increase blood glucose which will increase insulin so here you're stuck in that vicious cycle
of stress and cravings and insulin so if you can reduce stress then you have a really good chance
of reducing all of this and kind of breaking that vicious cycle so reducing stress is fantastic
advice tip number four is to get adequate sleep is that good yes because lack of sleep equals stress
and as we just talked about on the previous slide you have stress create all these problems so
sleep is one of the ways to avoid those problems but here's a quick little quiz for you what is
wrong with this picture and i don't have a lot of time for you to think about it but the answer is
do not sleep with your cell phone because that is unnecessary electromagnetic stress
put it in another room or put it really far away from you don't have it in your bed tip number five
aerobic exercise is that a good idea yes but not necessarily for the reason people think most
people recommend exercise because they think it burns calories that it helps put you in a deficit
that is not the way it works primarily and when you do exercise you have to make sure you don't
do it at a high sustained intensity you do a low intensity with maybe short bursts of short term
high intensity why because you do not want to increase cortisol like we talked on the previous
slide it does help to use up some carbohydrate it helps kind of clean up those carbohydrate
and glycogen stores but it's not the primary mechanism even though it does help a little bit
what it does help is circulation it helps detox it helps oxygenate tissues it helps on so many
different levels but mostly exercise helps with brain activation and when you increase
your brain activity you also help reduce stress now let's look for a moment at what does it mean
when something is backed by science and why it may not work for you even if it works for a majority
so this is a purely hypothetical example i made up every bit of this don't draw any conclusions that
one thing would work better but let's say they did a study and they tested a number of different
people and they had them jog for 10 days and these people lost or gained various amounts of weight
and then they did what's called a best fitting line they take the average and they draw a
conclusion and say that out of all these people on average if they jog for 10 days then they lose
one and a half pounds per person on average and then they had another group
and again purely hypothetical and they had them walk for 10 days and then
they draw the best fitting line and they come up with the conclusion that these people lost
one pound so based on comparing studies in science we would conclude that jogging is better
but what if you were in this study that concluded that jogging works for weight loss but you happen
to be this person right here who gained about two pounds and this is what we have to understand that
everyone is different there's so many different variables we don't know what else went on here
there may have been a death in the family they may have lost their job there may have been
some stress or some inflammation or an allergic reaction that we can't account for in here
or maybe this person was just super sensitive to stress and cortisol to any time they tried
to do something more then it backfired on them that's why we have to understand the principles
so that we can start fitting it together into a picture that works for us we have to understand
that statistics do not predict success or failure in the individual case that would be like saying
let's study what the weather is in Australia today and draw conclusions about the weather
in New York they're different data points and they may or may not have anything to do with each other
tip number six is to lift weights is that a good idea i think so but the typical advice is to keep
more muscle to build muscle because it's more metabolically active and even though that is
true that's a kind of small contribution the main reason is that weight lifting increases
growth hormone which is a fat burning hormone it does have a tremendous benefit in maintaining
muscle mass and how does it do that well when you exercise you're telling your body that look these
muscles I'm actually planning to use them for something I'm not going to just sit in the sofa
because if you sit in the sofa your body doesn't care if it burns fat or protein but if
you're using your muscles you're signaling you're telling your body these muscles are really useful
please put some extra resources into rebuilding and maintaining the muscles and that's the message
you get from growth hormone then again there's a slight added benefit in that
muscles are a little bit more metabolically active one more benefit is that when you work
out whether you build additional muscle or not you're going to maintain a good muscle tone
which is the same as increasing signaling and increasing brain tone tip number seven is to
drink some apple cider vinegar there has been significant amount of research that shows it
improves insulin sensitivity all things equal it will help does that mean that you can just do this
i wouldn't recommend it because yes you'll see some benefit but it would be very slight
in comparison to what you can do if you do all of these different things or most of these things
why would you add it because it's so simple it's inexpensive so you might as well tip number eight
is to cut back on alcohol is that a good idea yes absolutely not because it has a bunch of calories
which is what they usually tell you or even that it stimulates a lot of insulin but it's the fact
that alcohol and fructose are the two things that clog up the liver more than anything else and
when you clog up the liver you get fatty liver disease if it's because of alcohol it's called
alcoholic fatty liver disease and these go hand in hand with diabetes and insulin resistance
so if you're going to do it use it very sparingly especially if you're trying to
reverse a condition and if you drink a little more alcohol then realize that if the alcohol has sugar
and or carbs in it then it's way worse than just the alcohol tip number nine is to reduce
sugar and carbs and now we're getting into the real heavy hitters when it comes to reducing
belly fat high fructose corn syrup and agave are the worst and now a lot of people are going to
choke on their agave sweetened coffee because they've been told that agave is so natural
and so good and so low glycemic and it is low glycemic but just like high fructose corn syrup
it is highest in fructose so it has the highest liver clogging potential of any sweetener
almost as bad as sugar which is terrible that's 50 50 fructose and glucose and then honey
again a lot of people are to get a little bit of a surprise on that because honey is about
40 fructose so it's not quite as bad as sugar and it does have some natural things in it
but it's still a sugar and it's a lot of fructose in there and last on the carbohydrate list
is starch which is still bad it's not as terrible as the others because starch
is glucose only so it has a blood sugar effect but not a liver choking effect like
fructose does and tip number 10 is intermittent fasting and now we're talking about your most
powerful way to improve all of these things we talked about to reduce the insulin only when you
eat does your body have a reason to produce large amounts of insulin the longer you go
without food the longer you give your body an opportunity to lower insulin it's also the most
powerful way to increase growth hormone to improve autophagy to speed up weight loss and to reverse
alcoholic and non-alcoholic fatty liver and a quick little quiz for extra credit if you
know where these abbreviations come from on this chart you can put it in the comments down below
everything i talked about here are tools and you use these tools to the degree that you need them
so reducing carbohydrates is a tool and you cut back on the carbs to the degree that you need to
you increase the fasting period until you start seeing some results and then you balance
these two variables cutting carbs and increasing fasting until you start seeing changes in insulin
and appetite and growth hormone carbs and fasting is going to be the most powerful tool for most
people but again you may not be most people and that's where you have additional tools
so sleep meditation aerobic exercise weight lifting high intensity interval training these
may be for some people the thing that's going to provide the breakthrough or just that little
additional edge what we want to understand is that recovery is just as important as activation
exercise is activation but it's also stress and it's breakdown so life and exercise are stressful
but they're good for us if it's in balance if we can balance the activation and the recovery
then that's something that makes us stronger if we don't get the recovery then it's just breaking
us down and if we do this right now we end up with balance or homeostasis most people are really busy
so they tend to focus on maybe one or two of these things that they can get to and then they
say oh well I'll deal with the other things when my life gets in order and I understand but do your
absolute best to understand that these are not optional they are necessary you cannot express
optimal health you cannot express your genome optimally unless you find a good balance on
all or as many of these factors as possible and realize that we are all different and that's why
you can't just go by what one study says or what worked for your neighbor or the guy next door
we have to start understanding more about how the body works
and the principles and then we can go with trial and error we can fit it together
and come up with something that works for us and that works long term if you enjoyed this video
i think you really should look at that one next thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time