Simplified Explanation of Weight Loss | Jason Fung

this week we're going to talk about the difference in calories versus hormones and how we understand weight gain and this is really one of the most important things to understand if you're going to lose weight and it's coming right up [Music] there's been two major views of weight gain that have predominated over the last couple of centuries up until about the 1960s most people believed that certain foods were more fattening than other foods and for the most part people believe that it was the simple refined carbohydrates that were particularly fattening when people tended to eat a lot of sugar and refined flour for the most part they would tend to gain weight when people ate things such as meats and fats but also relatively unrefined carbohydrates then they didn't tend to gain weight so a lot of vegetables for example were mostly carbohydrates so if you look at broccoli in fact it's largely carbohydrate but there's a lot of other stuff in there there's a lot of fiber there's really very little fat and there's a little bit of protein so it's still mainly carbohydrate but it's in a form that's highly unrefined as opposed to flour which is highly refined the difference being of course that flour by stripping away everything other than the carbohydrate is virtually 100 percent carbohydrates and carbohydrates are forms of sugar in this case glucose so up until about the 1960s that was the view that predominated those highly refined highly processed foods predominantly carbohydrates were what made people gain weight and if you ate natural foods you were less likely to gain weight however in the 60s this began to change when people started to adopt a more calorie based point of view and people would say things like a calories a calorie or all calories are equal in that it means that the calories is the only or the major part of what made a food fattening as opposed to how refined or unrefined it was so people would say that 100 calories of cookies are going to be as fattening as 100 calories of broccoli or if you look at breakfast foods 100 calories of bagel is the same as 100 calories of eggs and this is the caloric view and you have to understand that when you talk about calories calories are simply units of energy if you were to burn a bagel in a bomb calorimeter which is a which is a machine that is specially designed to measure how much energy is contained within that bagel it'll tell you how many calories it has now you can put anything in there you can put an egg in there and get 100 calories of eggs you could put in a block of wood and you would get 100 calories of energy that is stored in that block of wood and from the 1960s and 1970s up until today you get a lot of people that believe that calories are the only or major thing that determines how fattening a food is the problem with this point of view is that the calories is something from physics and it's not from physiology your body doesn't in fact respond to how many calories a type of food has so if you eat a bagel 100 calories of bagel versus a hundred calories of wood the response is completely different the wood is not absorbed at all in fact it's just passed out through the through the stools and you get no energy from it at all as opposed to the bagel which is almost 100 of that energy is absorbed so you have to understand that the body doesn't really care about calories in any way it has no idea how many calories a certain food has or if certain food doesn't have so if you were to drink a diet soda with zero calories your body doesn't know it it responds with hormones and hormones are the link between the calories that a food has and what our body does with it it sort of acts like a translator to tell our body what to do so those foods actually contain more than just energy it contains information as to what our body should be doing with the energy that it takes in so if you compare two different foods bagels on the one hand and eggs on the other hand bagels are almost 100 percent highly refined carbohydrates eggs on the other hand are mostly unrefined and mainly proteins and fats with very little carbohydrates and as soon as you put those foods in your mouth the calories are the same so the energy amount of energy is the same but the instructions as to what to do with that energy is completely and utterly different the bagel for example will spike up the insulin which is a hormone and our body produces insulin in the pancreas when it sees all this highly refined carbohydrate the insulin spikes up very very high because it's so refined our body isn't really quite equipped to handle it it goes up very high but then it spikes very low and when it spikes very low we start to get hungry again because our body is sensing that hey all the energy is gone the other thing is that insulin is a key hormone in telling our body what to do with those calories because remember just because you take in 100 calories of energy doesn't tell you whether your body will store it or use it it may store all of that energy for example as body fat and then your body is now looking for another source of energy for walking around and generating body heat and so on the eggs on the other hand are not going to spike that insulin so therefore all that energy is still going to be available for use the protein is going to be available to build other body proteins and the body fat is stored directly with the body fat and your body continues to use it but there's no instructions which is the insulin to store more body fat the bagels on the other hand are going to have almost all of the instructions going towards insulin but there's other things that happen as well so for example with the eggs with the protein and the fat it's going to stimulate other hormones such as cholecystokinin which responds to fat and peptide yy and both of these are considered to be satiety hormones so when they go up the body senses that hey i'm getting i'm getting fat i'm getting proteins in my diet so i can stop eating and those are satiety signals so one of the key things that people will notice is that if you eat a hundred calories of bagel well very soon after you're going to be hungry again and therefore you're going to be at 10 30 looking for that low-fat muffin whereas if you ate 100 calories of eggs in the morning it will probably last you throughout that whole morning at least until lunchtime so the instructions as to what to do with those calories are just as important as the number of calories so you can't ignore one versus the other the number of calories you take is important but what we do with those calories is equally as important the body has a choice as to what to do the body can say hey let's store all of it as body fat or the body can say hey let's use some of this the body can say hey i've stored it all as body fat so let's go get some more food and make you hungry which is what the bagel does or the body can say hey i'm still using the energy that i took this morning from that egg and therefore i don't need to eat again i'm full don't eat anymore i'm good to go so keep in mind that this calorie-centric point of view really ignores a lot of the physiology of how we maintain our weight people say well it's all about how much you eat and that's the calorie point of view but what really determines how much we eat the key is not thinking about it the key is how hungry we are if we're more hungry we're going to eat more if we're less hungry we may not eat at all so those instructions that come from the proteins and the fats the peptide yy and the cholecystokinin are going to tell us to not eat because we don't need it whereas when you eat the bagel when you get all that carbohydrate with spikes very high and then spikes very low we're going to get those instructions that hey we're hungry we need to go eat some more food and get more energy so this is the important thing is that the hormonal view of weight loss doesn't mean that the calories are irrelevant or doesn't matter it simply adds another layer of complexity and a more complete understanding of how our body determines what the proper weight is how much we should be eating how hungry we are and what sort of metabolic rate we're going to have so when you eat foods you're eating more than just calories you're eating a complex set of instructions as to what to do with those calories when you eat natural foods so whether it's carbohydrate-containing foods or not like beans like broccoli our body has evolved to know how to eat these foods without getting into any problems with obesity when we start to eat highly processed foods that we haven't really figured out how to quite deal with then we start to get into trouble because all of those foods may have a substantial effect on the insulin which may make us more hungry which may make us eat more remember if you were to drink a soda big soda for example with a lot of calories and a lot of sugar it doesn't really make you full at all that's why you can drink those huge cups of soda those calories doesn't correlate to how full we are because how full we are is a hormonal effect that's the instructions not the energy so always keep that in mind and the bottom line is that when you're looking at the calories view versus the hormonal view they don't contradict each other the hormonal view does take into account all those calorie view of things but what it tells you is something in addition to that information which is that different foods not only contain different levels of calories but they also contain different instructions as to what to do with those calories which means all it means is that some foods are more fattening than other foods thanks for watching everybody if you enjoyed this video then you might want to check out this other video on my top weight loss tips and give it a shout i'll see you next week

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 218,700

Keywords: explanation weight loss, low carb, lose weight fast, low carb diet, insulin resistance, insulin, simplified explanation of weight loss | jason fung, ozempic weight loss before and after, anti obesity drugs, michael greger speech, simplified explanation of weight loss, carbohydrates, obesity caused by refined carbs, diabetes mellitus, peptide yy & cholecystikinin, Explanation of Weight Loss | Jason Fung, Weight Loss | Jason Fung, Simplified Explanation of Weight Loss, jason fung

Id: mucQl3GfdHA

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021