How to Lose Belly Fat: The Complete Guide

hello health champions if you're ready to lose that belly fat and you're ready to lose that weight and do it once and for all this is the video that's going to bring it all together for you why are there so many new diets all the time nothing has changed the human body the one that you have is the same genetic makeup as it was a hundred thousand years ago so all you have to do is understand how the body really works and then you will know why it's doing the things that it's doing so watch this video very closely from beginning to end because only when you understand the mechanism will you be able to create that weight loss and that fat loss forever and it will be easy 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 hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life saving video so why do we gain fat is it because we're eating too many calories well of course it is but that doesn't answer anything the question is why would we eat too many calories what is it that determines that behavior so there are two things really that we're going to go over in some detail and really elaborate so that you get it one is that we eat too often and two is that we eat the wrong things and once you understand why they are the wrong things and how things fit then you'll see it clear as day do you think this bear is overweight he might weigh a thousand pounds he might have a huge percentage of body fat but he's perfectly normal and he is healthy mobile functional he can run faster than you or i ever could he has the exact right amount of fat for that time in his life in his environment he's following natural behavior and his behavior is dictated it's determined by hormones now humans may not weigh a thousand pounds like the bear but 75 percent of americans are overweight today more than 40 percent of americans are obese is that because of a genetic switch did it just flip and turn us fat no because we've created most of these problems almost all of them in two generations after that genetic makeup has remained the same and been successful in keeping our weight normal for thousands of generations is it willpower did we have willpower for all those years and then all of a sudden it was just gone i don't think so sure we have some food addictions we have some cravings but the question is why is that now just like the bear we are following hormones hormones are determining our behavior but unlike the bear we have developed unnatural hormones an unnatural balance of hormones because the food that we're eating is not natural anymore every other animal on the planet eats food from nature that is appropriate for their species and humans don't do that anymore now i understand this can be extremely frustrating because we've been told so many different things we've been told about this diet and that diet and calories and low fat and all of these different things and you've been told the wrong thing this is not your fault but it doesn't relieve you of responsibility from now on when you have access to the correct information now you have to learn how your body really works so that you can make those changes and be successful once and for all the first issue i mentioned was that we eat too often there's a pattern a cycle of feast and famine everywhere in nature and we eat something when there's plenty of food we store the excess so that we have plenty left over when there is less we can fast we can burn through the reserves until we have a chance to eat again now for the bear that cycle is about six months they bulk up for six months so that they can afford a six-month hibernation without eating at all of course humans don't do that and we can't know for sure what our prehistoric humans did but if we look at every other species on the planet we can safely say that our ancestors did not have three square meals and snacks every two hours throughout the day more likely they probably ate once or twice a day when they were lucky and if they were not so lucky they might go a couple of three days without food so there's a fasting pattern there's a cycle built in to our metabolism what about modern humans well we probably get if we're lucky eight hours and five minutes and that's if we can sleep a full eight hours and it takes us five minutes to find food when we get up so what we have done as modern humans is we eat and we store but then we bypass the fasting we skip that part and we skip the burning because you can't burn unless you fast and you just short that cycle out to eat and store and eat and store and eat and store so it's not really that you eat too much you're supposed to eat until you're full you don't have to stuff yourself till you're nauseous but you're supposed to eat until you're satisfied till you've had enough that sends the body a signal that you're safe everything is okay we can maintain your metabolism when we try to skip when we try to eat less then we're sending the body the message of deprivation that there's never quite enough and the body starts slowing down on metabolism so you're supposed to eat until you're full but you're not supposed to eat six times a day and when we do that that's where we get stuck in this eat and store cycle we never get a chance to balance that cycle out and how do we ever come to this point well there's two things really it's because we've been told to eat six times a day that we've been told that raising blood sugar six times a day is a good thing which is atrocious but the other part is the types of food that we're eating sort of invite to that you've probably heard about blood glucose and here's how that works and how it relates to fat and weight gain the average person has about 100 milligrams of glucose per deciliter so for the average size person that adds up to about three grams okay that's half a teaspoon of glucose at any given time and the body really likes to keep it in a tight range so that when you're fasting you might be at 80 to 85 milligrams and after a meal it might be 120 if you eat whole food with protein like meat and good fats and non-starchy vegetables and things like that then the changes they fluctuate very very slowly well what about a diabetic or someone with insulin resistance would start shooting up and they have milligrams per deciliter that's only one more teaspoon that means it's gone from three grams to nine grams of circulating glucose it doesn't sound like much right but here's what's happening you get these enormous blood sugar spikes and when that happens your body goes into emergency mode this amount of blood glucose is very toxic to the brain it ruins it destroys blood vessels causing micro vessel disease which is the cause for kidney failure and blindness further causes neuropathy which is the leading cause of amputations so this is a big deal now let's say that you follow the recommendations and we're not talking about snacks here that just keep it simple and you eat 100 grams of carbohydrate three times a day four hours apart now you can't use a hundred grams of carbohydrate until you eat again so you might be able to use fifty so at least has to be stored now a lot of times you will hear people say that carbohydrate is the preferred fuel because the body uses it first it's the preferential fuel well it's not that it prefers it it's that it has to use it first it's an emergency it has to get this glucose out of the bloodstream and if you ate a hundred grams all of that glucose has to get into the bloodstream before it gets into the cells and this has to happen in a relatively short time period because even one teaspoon is going to shoot your glucose up to 300 and all this glucose has to pass through the bloodstream into the cells and whatever extra carbohydrate you can't use before the next meal it has to be stored the excess has to be stored so every time you have something above this line here your body goes into emergency mode it releases a ton of insulin which we'll talk about in a little bit and it stores the excess now how does the body store energy and why does it do that well there are two types of energy that it can store carbohydrate and fat now in your muscles you have protein storage and this can be used in an extreme emergency you can convert protein to energy but that's not the purpose the purpose of protein is building blocked and structural parts it's carbohydrates and fat that we're going to talk about today we have a very limited very poor ability to store carbohydrate your muscles can hold about 1600 calories your liver can store about 400 calories and why we store energy for survival okay we need energy for movement we need it to generate heat and to think to move we need those signals from the brain to control movement and metabolism and all those different things and if we look at the total storage of carbs as being 2000 calories represented by this little square then this is how much a lean relatively lean person would store and if you're using up about 2 000 calories a day for survival then that means if you relied completely solely on carbohydrates you could live one day and that means any time that humans didn't have food for a day we would be wiped out we would never have made it as a species and this is why we can store fat fat is a much more efficient form of storage we can store 90 times as much which is 180 000 calories which would keep us alive for three months you could live on that amount of fat for three months drinking nothing but water and do perfectly fine and your body figures out the difference it figures out how to function and do the best possible under those circumstances and this isn't even an overweight person this is a 180 pound person with 28 body fat so it's not like a super slim athletes but it's not an overweight person either at 28 percent and where did that fat come from it came primarily from glucose the body can store any excess energy as fat but as we saw in the previous example it's the excess glucose that most readily gets stored and converted into fat and what we have to understand is if you start building up too much fat if you have the desire to lose some weight lose some fat you can't burn fat if you keep adding carbs if you put more carbs in before you burn through the previous ones you can never get to lose that fat you can't get to fat burning and the other thing is if your insulin is high which again is a result of those carbohydrates in the presence of high insulin you can't burn fat because your body is busy making fat in the pre in the presence of high insulin your body is making fat and it is way too smart to make fat and burn fat at the same time what would be the point so you can think of carbohydrates as kindling if you're going to make a fire you put some kindling in for short term but that's never how you intend to keep the fire burning if you want to keep it burning for for days and weeks you put some big big logs on and that's what the fat is now while we do want to reduce overall carbs not all carbs are equally bad they don't work the same what we have to understand is that a plant is made of glucose if it comes from the plant kingdom it is built from glucose and if this glucose gets into the bloodstream then it will trigger insulin to a much higher degree than protein or fat would but if we take bread for example this bread is 70 percent of the weight is net carbs pure starch and that starch is going to get converted into glucose so we have three percent of calories are from fat 12 from protein and 85 percent of the calories are from starch from glucose two slices which is very easy to eat is 28 grams and if we couple that with some jam and some orange juice and some sugar in the coffee and maybe some other part of the breakfast it's very easy to get up to 100 grams of carbs in in one meal let's look at an example of a non-starchy vegetable like cabbage it has three percent of its weight is net carbs meaning that it can be absorbed and turn into glucose in the blood 12 percent of calories from fat 36 from protein and 52 from carbohydrates so the ratios are very different the carbs are not as dominant there is much much much less of them but also it is absorbed much slower and you can't eat as much two slices of toast is pretty easy to eat two pounds of cabbage is not that easy so you're just not going to load up on a bunch of carbs by eating non-starchy vegetables so the two factors is quantity and speed how much are you eating and how quickly do they get in there this is safe and this is not what does insulin do so much talk about insulin basically it unlocks cells you eat something it turns to glucose glucose gets in the bloodstream but it is no good to you until it's in the cell the cell is the metabolic machinery that's actually going to use this glucose for energy it can't become energy until it's in the cell and that's what insulin does it unlocks the cell to allow it through and then the glucose enters the cell the cell uses some of it for energy and turns the rest of it into fat and here's what that would look like if we have a normal blood sugar like we talked about before it stays within that range and then the insulin required is very moderate it's going to rise very very slowly the yellow line here represents insulin it's going to rise slowly in response to a slow rise in glucose and we have a low insulin response we remain insulin sensitive that's a healthy place to be but if we have the 300 milligram blood glucose example like a diabetic now it looks like this and we have huge spikes of glucose and whenever glucose is really high we need a ton of insulin this is an emergency we have to get that glucose out of there shuttle it through into the cells but if we have that much insulin going and we eat every four hour that insulin doesn't even have time to come down to baseline before we load up on more carbs so carbs are the things that drive insulin high insulin but the frequency amplifies it so if we do all of those things now we drive that insulin higher and higher and higher it works less and less and less so the body has to make more and more insulin because the cells don't respond and now we have insulin resistance let's look at insulin resistance and our friend the fat cell what's the purpose of a fat cell well its purpose is to store fat that's where we load up our energy so we can survive a famine a fat cell can grow quite a bit more so than any other cell in the body really and in its shrunken state it's about 10 microns 10 micrometers but it can grow in diameter 20 times so because it's a spherical or a volume structure that means it can grow 8 000 times it can expand and hold 8 000 times more fat that's the capacity but when we start pushing the limit of that capacity then this is not a healthy fat cell anymore it becomes inflamed we have stuffed it so full that it starts leaking and now is where we get all of these metabolic problems of insulin resistance of metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease stroke dementia and the list goes on and on now let's look at the historical perspective of what we've been eating so if we go about a hundred thousand years some people argue we've been around with the same genetic makeup for about a quarter million years but let's just call it a really long time for all of that time 100 percent of what we ate was from nature unprocessed unmodified just like every other species on the planet to this day we ate from nature we didn't mess with it no grain no processed foods we ate meat vegetables nuts tubers anything we could hunt capture dig up or pick basically just like every other species then 8 000 years or so give or take we started with some agriculture and that time frame is represented by this yellow here so everything was still unprocessed we ate most of what we ate was still whole food the grain was probably processed to some degree but it certainly wasn't bleached or hybridized or anything like that and maybe during this time we also started using some oils like a natural easy squeezed oil pressed oil like olive oil then we get into the last 50 years so in comparison this 100 000 years is probably like 5 000 generations thousands and thousands and thousands of generations and then we get into two generations like from your grandparents basically and this time period is so short that if i did that to scale it wouldn't even be one pixels that's a tiny tiny little line here that wouldn't even be visible that's how short a time frame that is where we have turned everything completely upside down now hardly any of what we eat is unprocessed there's virtually no whole food to be had anymore we eat white flour sugar plant oils processed with with harsh chemicals and high heat with gmos chemicals artificial flavors artificial sugars artificial colors etc etc so almost all of this is non-food we changed it it's not food anymore and this is what we have to start realize that we come from a genetic makeup that is used to getting fed and we're not getting fed anymore now here's an interesting question if you were trying to get someone fat as fast as possible what would that diet look like well they haven't done that with humans but they do it with mice and rats on a regular basis because for certain studies they want fat rats so they designed obesogenic rat chow they formulated it so that these rats would gain weight as fast as possible and they came up with a formula that was 15 percent of calories from protein 45 from fat and 40 percent from carbohydrates mice are much smaller rats are much smaller than humans but if you convert these percentages to the human scale of 2 000 calories then that's about 200 grams of carbohydrate in a day about a hundred grams of fat and about 70 grams five 70 75 grams of protein now maybe it's just me but when you look at the standard american diet it's not that different it's almost as if this diet was designed to make you as fat as possible as fast as possible and this is what they tell you they say eat lots and lots of carbs and then you say well that's just the standard american diet that's not what they're supposed to eat people just eat junk food well let's look at the u.s daily allowances then what they recommend now they give us some ranges so it's not an exact number they tell us 20 to 35 percent of fat 45 to 65 carbohydrate but again it's really not that different right it looks pretty much the same so we're talking about an obese population we're talking about reversing it and they give you even more of the thing that is making you fat they're recommending you to eat as much as you possibly can of the thing that is making you fat now i want to contrast that with a low carb or a ketogenic diet which has the same amount of protein approximately but it has very very low carbohydrates so a keto diet typically becomes ketogenic when you get carbohydrates under five percent or about 20 grams a day and what you do then is you eat moderate protein and you fill up the rest of your energy from fat so you get a profile that's distinctly different than the other patterns so i hope you can see that the obesogenic rat chow is very very close to both what people eat and what they're told to eat but the low carb lifestyle that's often ridiculed is the one that's actually making a difference then are there any drawbacks to a low-carb high-fat diet well in my opinion the only drawback is unfounded fears because people don't understand this we've been conditioned and programmed so long that we think that we're supposed to eat more and more and more carbohydrate because the fat on the body comes from fat that's just not how it works and unfounded fears and myths are what's holding people back so one example is i hear all the time well the your recommendations they're going to clog your arteries because research showed that high fat diets are unhealthy well how do they do that research have they actually researched this on a healthy low-carb high-fat diet how do they do that well first of all most of these studies are done on rats and again what they do when they go high fat when they call it a high fat diet they start off with a standard american diet or those approximate ratios and then they take the fat from 35 percent to 45 that's their idea of a high fat diet but here's the problem they don't reduce the carbs significantly right you cannot burn fat while your insulin is high and taking it from 250 grams to 200 grams is not going to reverse your insulin resistance right so you're maintaining carbs at a level that's going to maintain insulin which means you cannot burn fat so now you raise the fat and you get even unhealthier so even though i eat tons of fat i do it while eating very low carb if you're very insulin sensitive then the fats are very healthy as long as they're healthy fats if you cram in a bunch of extra fats while you're cramming carbohydrates and sugar then that's extremely unhealthy so the research is not done on a high fat low carb diet it's done on a high fat extremely high carbohydrate diet another thing i hear very often is that saturated fat is bad so the keto diet the low carb diet lifestyle the paleo they promote way too much saturated fat which raises cholesterol which clogs arteries and i hear a lot of concerned people who say well i started eating like you said and i feel better my insulin is down i lose the weight my doctor says i'm healthier but my cholesterol went up and now i'm worried that i'm going to clog my arteries well let's look at that when we study the research there's some research from early 1950s and 1960s very old very flawed research that suggested there may be some relationship between cholesterol and heart disease it wasn't a causative relationship it was observational they found that people with higher cholesterol might have more heart disease but in every study since then there's virtually no correlation whatsoever however if we look at insulin resistance if we look at the amount of insulin in the bloodstream there's a very strong correlation to heart disease there's a very strong correlation to diabetes there's a very strong correlation to stroke and to alzheimer's and even to cancer so all of the things that cholesterol gets blamed for is actually about insulin resistance and if you eat a good quality fat while reducing your carbs then your insulin is going down even if your cholesterol goes up it is irrelevant it has no bearing on heart disease and there's one exception i want to cover that's if you have small oxidized ldl so you often hear about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol where hdl is supposedly good and ldl is supposedly bad well it doesn't work like that all of them are good unless they get damaged and oxidized now that ldl is actually a risk of heart disease but that doesn't come from cholesterol it was the insulin resistance and the oxidative stress that damaged the cholesterol so that it became harmful so it's never cholesterol by itself it is the insulin resistance and you can reduce the insulin resistance by eating saturated fat or any healthy fat what you want to avoid are plant oils and you want to eat lots of good healthy fat if the animal was healthy the fat is healthy so keep it simple it's really not that complicated the hardest thing we have to do is to unlearn all of the stupid things that we've learned in the last 50 years about cholesterol and calories and saturated fats so it's simple you eliminate sugar you eat till you're full you reduce carbohydrates you eat meat vegetables fat you stop processed foods you eat healthy fat you eat less often and you keep insulin low by doing all those things and you learn what actual real food is if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how the body actually works i think you should check out that one next thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 430,478

Rating: 4.9583979 out of 5

Keywords: how to lose belly fat, lose belly fat, belly fat, weight loss, lose weight, how to lose weight, how to lose belly fat naturally, lose fat fast, dr ekberg belly fat, wellness for life, how to get rid of belly fat, burn belly fat, how to lose weight fast, lose weight fast

Id: Qs5GnUDJVrk

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021