- In today's video, I'll be taking you through
seven scientific hacks to lose weight easier than ever without any additional willpower
or hours on the elliptical. These hacks are grounded
heavily in psychology, as well as a bit of biology
and hormone science as well. I personally use every
single one of these, losing the first 100 pounds
and I will continue to do so for the final 30 that I have to go. So I can vouch for
them, they totally work. So let's get into the video. (upbeat music) Food is a powerful, natural stimuli and seeing, smelling, or
even thinking about food is enough to activate a
craving or make us feel hungry. A 2006 study placed
jars of Hershey's Kisses on the desks of secretaries, half of the secretaries
received a clear jar and the other half an opaque one. The secretaries who
could see the chocolate, staring them in the face all day ate 71% more than those who couldn't. Research shows that anytime you see food, particularly unhealthy food, the reward centers of your brain light up, you feel hungrier, your
heart rate speeds up and you even begin to
drool just a little bit. Essentially, your body
is priming you to eat whether you are actually
planning to or not. This is called food cue reactivity. You see the food, you want to eat the food and this doesn't just
apply to food itself. It also applies to anything we've learned to associate with food in the past. Certain images and locations
can all trigger food cravings, depending on our learned
associations with them. Think about how this is working
in your own life already. You were planning eating
really clean today, but your coworker brought in Epic Donuts, or you were watching TV and a
Pizza Hut commercial came on and you're like, "Damn, I
haven't had pizza in a while," and then boom! You've ordered Pizza Hut. Unless we're aware of how food
cues influence our decisions, we can end up consuming a lot of calories we had no intention of eating or that we don't even like that much. Hack number one, environmental awareness. Be mindful of where available
snacks and food are. If you have a snacking problem, it may just be because your environment is continually prompting you to snack. Rearrange your cupboards or drawers. If you're opening a
drawer five times per day, and it has your favorite
snack in it, guess what? You're probably gonna have
more cravings for that snack than if it was somewhere
more out of sight. Keep your unhealthy or more tempting foods out of places that you're
always gonna be seeing them. This helps you reduce food cravings just by exposing you to those foods less. Pay attention to your cravings. If you always have a nugget craving, it may just be because you're driving past McDonald's everyday. Or if you are always
eating too many cookies, it might be because your office
has a visible cookie jar. Point is, your dieting life
is gonna be a lot easier if you design your environment
to support your goals, which we'll talk about
a little bit further in the next point as well. Convenience is a huge
driver of our eating habits. Studies show that the easier
it is for you to eat something, the more likely you are to do so. Unfortunately, the unhealthiest
foods available to us are also by far the most convenient. Thanks to 24/7 drive-thrus,
Uber Eats and microwaves. Add on top of this, that research also shows
that tastes and costs are other huge drivers
of our eating preferences and you can see why ultra convenient foods pose a real threat to your
hopes of eating healthy. Healthy, real food typically requires some level of preparation
or at least forethought, for example, right now, what are the most convenient
foods in your home? If you're like most people, the most convenient foods
are things like cereal chips, frozen foods, or microwave
dinners, cookies, or any other number of
random process snacks. It's not that any of these
foods are inherently bad though obviously they can be, it's just that they're
a little too convenient. It's simply too easy to grab and eat them in moments of hunger, boredom or habits without even thinking about it, especially when the only
barrier between you and the food is a cardboard box or a wrapper. Meanwhile, the barriers to
preparing a nutritious meal are a little bit longer. And if you haven't planned
for this in advance, you're putting yourself in a situation where you absolutely will
need to expend willpower at some point to avoid eating
something more convenient. But this works both ways. If you are prepared and
the most convenient food available to you is something that you wanna be eating more of than in lazy moments, you're
likely to make a great choice. You'll notice a pattern
in people who are very fit and ultra consistent with their diets. It's not that they have some
crazy level of willpower though a lot of them do, it's
that they're always prepared. They know that if they
have good clean food available to them all the time,
then they're making it easy on themselves to make good choices. Hack number two, make healthy food more
convenient than unhealthy food. Don't bring foods home that
don't support your goals. If they're not around you,
they are less convenient. Prep healthy ingredients or at least plan ahead for the week. You don't have to full-on meal prep if you don't like
microwaving all your meals, but at least having some forethought, buying the groceries that you need or cutting things up in advance is a good way to make sure you
are ready to go for the week and you lessen the chance they
are gonna make a big mistake. Putting some space between you
and your typical snack foods is a willpower free way
to get some more control over what you put in your mouth. Research shows that we're so
bad at estimating our calories that most of us eat an
additional 20 to 30% more than we think we do every single day. On a 2,000 calorie diet, 20 to 30% equates to about
four to 500 calories a day. That works out to the equivalent
of four medium bananas, a McChicken burger, a pint
of Halo Top plus a bit more or two slices of a medium pizza that we can have no idea
that we've even eaten. And an extra four to 500 calories a day is the difference between
not losing a pound a week if you're on a diet and
gaining one if you're not. Hack number four, weigh
and track your food. If you are trying to lose weight,
weigh and track your food. If you've never weighed your food before, you will be shocked at how
much more you were eating than you thought. Research shows that if we
wait too long between meals and let ourselves become ravenous, then the odds are
stacked against our hopes of eating healthy that day. Imagine you haven't eaten for
six hours, you're starving and someone says, "Hey, we're
all going to Burger King." Research shows that if
you're a fan of Burger King, you're not only likely
to say (beep) the diet, but also eat more calories
when you get there and feel less than satisfied afterwards. This is thought to be caused
by the hunger hormone ghrelin. When we haven't eaten in a while, our body secretes ghrelin
to increase our appetites and motivate us to eat. Ghrelin levels are lowest
just after we've eaten and are satiated. And then they continue to rise from there until we have our next meal. Research has shown that
as ghrelin levels rise, we become irritable, food-focused and increasingly attracted
to high-calorie foods. And at the same time,
our rational thinking and impulse control are impaired. We also become hyper aware
of food in our environment, reacting strongly to
foods we see and smell. Even our taste receptors
are affected by ghrelin. Food literally tastes better, the more ghrelin you have
circulating through your body. Once we've eaten, ghrelin
levels take a huge dive, usually returning to baseline. However, if you wait
too long between meals, your ghrelin levels
will have risen too high to return to baseline leaving
you feeling unsatisfied with your normal portion
and urging you to overeat. Hack number four, eat
every four to five hours. Ghrelin peaks for most people
four to five hours post-meal, so plan to have scheduled
meals every four hours or so. And if there are specific times everyday that you happen to be chronically hungry, work your meals into them. The more TV people watch,
the fatter they are. As TV viewing goes up,
weight goes up along with it. A 2003 study showed that
for every additional two hours spent watching TV,
people had a 23% higher chance of becoming obese. According to the research,
eating a meal while watching TV, not only increases calories
consumed during that meal by roughly 10%, but also
by an additional 25% during subsequent meals and it's not just TV. I put the blame on TV here because I have a particular
vendetta against it and it's associated with a ton of other negative health effects, but it seems that eating
while being distracted by anything at all is bad for us. Researchers fed two groups of participants a 400 calories lunch. Group A was told to
simply focus on their food while group B was given
a video game to play while they were eating. Later that day, both
groups were offered cookies and group B, the video game players, ended up consuming 69% more
cookies than group A did. Hunger and satiety are complex processes and they involve a lot more than just that physical
feeling of fullness you get from having food in your stomach. While you're eating, your brain actually partly
relies on your focus and memory to recall how
much you've just eaten and predict how much
you should eat later on. If you're not paying attention
to what you're eating, you're not fully experiencing your meal and it's easy to miss
cues that say you're full while priming yourself to
want to snack later on. Hack number five, no distractions. Sitting down and quietly
enjoying your food with nothing else going on is
a scientifically proven way to feel more satisfied
with what you've eaten and feel less snacky later on. Ever noticed how after eating
an insane amount of sushi, most of us have that little
second stomach for dessert? We've all had that experience of feeling totally full and satisfied, but then making room for something
just a few seconds later. Say you're eating something
simple like a baked potato. While you're eating
it, your hedonic rating or how much you like it
is steadily decreasing. That first bite is the best and every subsequent bite is
a little bit less pleasurable until you ultimately feel satisfied and no longer feel the
urge to continue eating while at the same time,
your interest and rating in other foods doesn't decline at all. It stays the same. So even though you may truly feel full and totally satisfied
with the baked potato, if you were to introduce another food, particularly one that was quite different from the first food, say something sweet, then you would genuinely feel hungry and interest in eating all over again. Even when totally stuffed,
the hunger hormone we talked about earlier, ghrelin, actually blocks out feelings
of fullness from the brain when presented with a novel food. This effect is amplified when
it's something very different from what you've just had, for example, sweet dessert
after a savory sushi. Therefore, if you're eating a
wide variety of foods at once, it's gonna take you a lot longer
to feel full and satisfied than if you had kept your
plate a little bit more simple. Hack number six, limit variety. Keeping meals simple and
limited to two or three foods is a super easy way to feel more satisfied with whatever you're eating. In order to help me build some muscle, I switched to a high-protein
diet about a year ago, and I noticed some unexpected benefits. All of a sudden I felt a lot
less hungry through the day, I felt a lot less snacky, and I was just kind of thinking
about food less in general. I found that I wasn't really
fighting the urge to snack as much when I was eating more protein. And there is a ton of clinical research matching my experience. In one study, overweight women
took in 441 fewer calories, totally unintentionally just by switching their
diets from 15 to 30% protein. Protein is by far the most
satiating macro per calorie, meaning a calorie of
protein has the ability to make you feel more full than a calorie of fat or carbohydrates do. Protein has also been shown to reduce circulating levels of ghrelin while also boosting peptide YY which is a hormone that
helps us to feel full. Also one of the most important
reasons to eat protein on a weight loss plan is because
while we're losing weight, we wanna make sure we're
mostly just losing fat, not healthy lean tissue. And if you're lifting
weights or going to the gym, eating enough protein will
ensure that you're able to actually build muscle
while in a caloric deficit. And if you're not lifting weights, getting enough protein is gonna make sure that you're losing mostly fat so that you don't end up skinny fat when you've finished
your weight loss journey. And that's not all. A diet high in protein provides
a moderate metabolic boost and is positively correlated
with weight maintenance after weight loss. Hack number seven, protein. Include protein at every meal and ensure it works out to about 30% of your total energy intake per day. Most people begin a weight loss plan, hoping that this time they're
gonna be strong enough to muscle through it with
brute willpower alone, but we don't really need to do that and it's not even actually effective at changing our behavior,
especially long-term. I personally tried to
do that a million times before I was like, "Okay, this
is just not working for me." But what does work is
making little changes to our habits and our environments that add up to big sustainable results and not relying on our ability to stare down our cravings with willpower. Thank you so much for watching. If you are looking for more
science-backed weight loss tips, hit the subscribe button and we will lose this weight together.
