Stay Young Forever: Diet & Health Tips to Fight Obesity, Burn Fat & Heal The Body | Dr. William Li

what are your thoughts on fasting and do you think it actually is worth the hype listen I am so glad that you asked me about that because my new book is titled eat to beat your diet and it's not a diet book in fact it's kind of an anti-diet book because it actually shows you it's a little bit of a kind of a trick title it actually shows you how you can be healthy without having to jump onto a ship of an extreme point of view or an extreme practice and let's talk about fasting for a second you know here's the reality I'm a pretty reasonable person but I'm uncompromising when it comes to science here's the fact we actually all fast anyway fasting is what happens when we're sleeping and we're not eating that's the definition of fasting so whether you're sleeping for five hours a day six hours a day hopefully seven or eight hours a day which is healthy sleep during that period of time all right we're not eating and that's called fasting and when we get up take a shower get dressed go out of the kitchen and you know pour ourselves something we are breaking our fast which is why it's called breakfast all right and so there's really no religion or crazy breakthrough idea about fasting it's how the body is wired when we're sleeping we're not eating or fasting when we eat we're actually breaking our fast now what is new and what does actually help argue for increasing the period that we're not eating meaning increasing our lengthening our fasting time is that when we're fasting we are allowing our metabolism the way that our body is hardwired okay our operating system to be able to actually burn down extra fuel let me explain this to you so when we eat food okay when we're breaking our fast okay which is breakfast lunch dinner maybe some snacks all right what we're doing and this is what metabolism is all about it's all about fuel just like when you're driving a car you gotta load fuel with your car at The Filling Station when it's loaded up you can actually get your car and drive away and the engine uses that fuel to keep you powered that's what we do when we're eating we're putting fuel into our body and then we're actually going about our day we're actually burning our gas our fuel now what happens is that our body's hardwired so that when we are eating we can't burn that fuel okay like our body is a completely in storage mode it's only when we're not eating okay that we're actually able to burn that fuel down so think about this the longer we're not eating let's say sleeping late okay or just not eating before you go to sleep no midnight snack and maybe having a late breakfast or maybe even skipping breakfast you're extending the period of time where your body is able to burn down fuel well what happens you're actually cleaning your pipes you're burning that extra fuel that you might have accumulated from the day before the day before that and your metabolism is actually just burning down that fuel because you're working on that hardwired system that operating system where when you're not eating you're able to burn down fuel so you want to stay trim and lean you want to lose harmful extra body fat lower inflammation fasting actually does that for you and by the way other systems also respond well to that energy burning fuel burning stage your circulation improves your stem cells improve your gut microbiome use that as a period to reboot itself your DNA is able to stand back from all the stuff you might pour into the body and your immune system also improves as well reboot so fasting it's actually normal and kind of good for you this idea so I'm trying to tell you we already intermittently fast just by going to bed all right and we can tweak it now because we're beginning to understand if you've spouses a little longer it's better for you but this idea that you have to fast until you go into ketosis and then you you know if you fast for days on end you know these kind of extreme ideas okay they might be okay for the short term your body's not going to like it for the long term I guarantee you and it's going to wear down your health eventually and so it's just like you want to fuel your car or on a regular basis and you never want to overfill it so that's another kind of caveat to this whole thing but you want to run things normally and for people that want to live long and prosper you know that old Star Trek Spock kind of thing you want to be reasonable and you want to enjoy your life and you want to do things that are not too unreasonable and that's why these extreme patterns are really unsustainable and don't give you pleasure as well so I'm all about sustainability pleasure and biology all at the same time absolutely and I think fasting can be a great tool too to keep your calories in check if your goal is weight loss and trying to lose weight because it reduces your your eating window I know that weight loss is a theme of your new book as well and you talk about some new things as it relates to that I know typically when people think of weight loss they say that you know it revolves around like energy expenditure and calories and calories out that you're like what you're consuming versus what's your like how much you're moving and stuff like that like what are your thoughts on weight loss and like what other insights do you have to to share on that that's featured in your new book yeah well so my book does talk a lot about weight loss and foods that have been shown in human research that allow you to lose weight now this is not the Quick Fix lose 20 pounds in two weeks kind of thing I mean there are things that you can do to aim for that but it's not healthy for you it's not sustainable but what I really talk about is how I kind of uncloak how human metabolism works so how many of us have heard this idea that well you're born with either a fast metabolism genetically or slow metabolism and people will point out look at my sister she was so lucky she was born with a fast metabolism that's why she's skinny as a stick and eat anything and that has a problem and then they always Point me on the other hand I was born with a slow metabolism my genetics aren't really good and so I've been struggling with my weight the whole time and that's a very common kind of it's a common idea that's out there but it's an urban legend and I'll tell you when this urban legend was overturned just about a year ago there was a landmark dark study that changed everything we know about human metabolism and this was done by a study by a researcher named Hermann ponzo out of Duke University and he studied 6 000 people involving 19 countries okay and he studied metabolism in people across the human lifespan from two days old to 95 years old the entire human lifespan and study 6 000 people in exactly the same way by the way these people were male and female men and women girls and boys they were young and old they were healthy and sick some had diabetes some of them had big body frames some of them were skinny and when they studied the metabolism in exactly the same way here's what they did they gave everybody a drink of water H2O is what we call water in which the H of hydrogen and O of water oxygen had a special Atomic signature not radioactive but everybody drank the same now you can measure in the lab the hydrogen option and therefore your metabolism in your breath in your urine in your blood and so imagine this six thousand people across the human lifespan from days old to 90 years old in exactly the same way and they looked at the metabolism what do they find all over the map scattergram everything is completely confusing and so they said oh well you know isn't this what we just expect is that everyone's got a different metabolism well that's not where the Breakthrough came the Breakthrough came they developed an algorithm right in which they could actually subtract out from the results of this study the contribution of excess body fat okay we call Fat adipose tissue when you actually employed this algorithm to remove from the scatter of data that remove the effects of excess body fat it was like bada Being Human metabolism emerged only four phases of metabolism across humans over the course of Life everyone followed the same exact same pattern so so the inner workings of our metabolism are exactly the same this idea that you were born with fast or slow completely wrong and the four phases are absolutely fascinating zero to one your metabolism skyrockets when you're a baby to one years old at one year old your metabolism baby's metabolism is faster 50 faster than their their metabolism as an adult okay which is surprising from one year old to 20 years old all the way through puberty when you see kids sprouting up when they're super active when they're eating two dinners teenagers okay metabolism is going down down down down down down okay to so completely different than we thought from age 20 to age 60 metabolism is completely Rock stable is how we are hardwired this is through your first job this is through your pregnancy this is through your menopause all right it's exactly the same and then from age 60 to 90 it does decline a little bit only about 17 percent by the time you're 90 compared to when you were 60 which is the same as compared to your 20. so when you're 90 years old our hard-wired metabolism is only 17 percent lower than when you were 20. now here's what happens so that's the pattern of human metabolism like it's a bombshell but this is how we're actually wired now what happens is that when you start adding back the effects of body fat into that equation what do you think happens you take this beautiful four stage pattern and you start to suppress it okay so you squash the metabolism so it's not that slow metabolism cause you to gain body fat and gain weight it's that extra body fat and weight squashes your metabolism it's completely the other way around and the reason that that's why that's important and back to your question about so what do I think about weight loss I think that not everyone needs to lose weight but everyone needs to understand that excess body fat including skinny people that might not be able to see their body fat it could be packed like peanuts inside a thin frame like okay you go to FedEx you're going to ship you know some long fluorescent lights you're going to put the lights in the Box you're going to add peanuts in it you can over pack peanuts tape it up still a skinny box but it's way over stuffed in our skinny bodies in a skinny body you can have that those extra peanuts that harmful fat choking your organs and releasing really harmful inflammatory substances so here's what I think I think we should all try to aim at getting back to our Baseline metabolism so we can be who our body wants us to be from a metabolic perspective and part of that is by fighting extra body fat we can do this with exercise and we need to stay active but we can also do that with by eating food and so this is the kind of the irony of what I write about you can eat to beat your fat and there's even more surprises because you can actually harness and leverage good fat to burn down bad fat and so this is there's all these serious really surprises that turn the equation around don't fear your food use your food don't fear your fat because we need some fat to live you need to tame your fat and so on and so forth as it relates to weight loss that's such interesting stuff because I was always one of those kids too who was like man that person's just lucky they have a fast metabolism or she's just lucky she has a fast metabolism and you're right we hear this all the time so let's just say we have that person that might be reading your book they're listening to this podcast and they're like wow I do have a bunch of extra body fat to lose I want to be able to in a way jump start my metabolism and do what I can to control my metabolism so that I can get rid of this stuff as fast and healthy way as possible like what are a few things that you think are shown by science or that you could recommend to help them do that yeah I'll give you a couple of examples so first of all in my book I read about 150 Foods I think this is the first book that ever did is 150 foods that have been shown by human clinical research that they can actually improve your metabolism decrease amount of body fat reduce your waistline and improve things like your blood sugars and your insulin sensitivity and how healthy hormones that relate to your metabolism okay and so I think this is the first book ever to put together this compendium of all these Foods so let's pick a few out okay because we don't have time to go through all of them but I'll pick a few standouts all right turns out tomatoes have a lot of good things about them they're a great source of vitamin C they're they do have some dietary fiber but they also have these bioactives natural chemicals called carotenoids one of them called lycopene lycopene many people might have heard about but lycopene is a fat fighting bioactive here's what it does it actually takes our harmful fat it helps to burn it down by activating a special kind of fat we have in our body called Brown fat so Brown fat can good fat can burn down white fat which is harmful fat dangerous fat and eating tomatoes will light that up it kind of lights up the space heater and uses fuel so you can improve your metabolism improves your metabolic profile overall lowers bad cholesterol this is all with tomatoes and actually shrink your your waistline as well one study that was done actually took normal healthy young women who were not overweight or obese okay because many researchers many much a lot of research is done with people who are already overweight but this is actually taking young healthy female grad students who don't have extra weight they're considered normal body size whatever that means okay that that can be debated but the bottom line is that they had just one tomato to eat before lunch every day and they were able to lose weight and improve their metabolism very achievable dosing so tomato can actually do it here's another one strawberries have also been shown to actually improve your metabolism and what's really interesting by eating strawberries is that although strawberries can be sweet when they measured blood sugar eating strawberries in a way to improve your metabolism not only decrease weight and waist size and lowered weight and decrease body fat it also didn't raise blood sugar so this whole idea another kind of like common idea that's kind of a kind of like a paintbrush idea and I don't eat fruit it's got too much sugar in it it's got too much fructose it might kind of sound like it makes sense at a casual level but the science actually doesn't show that and the reason is that the bioactives in the strawberry activate your body so it starts to burn down the bad fat yeah okay so you can actually metabolize even faster this is by the way not about trying to become a supermodel this is about optimizing your engine of your body and I think that's something that we really want to be able to emphasize look people that want to actually look like you know a supermodel they want to fit into a bikini body back they need to get into a wedding dress they need to actually get you go for a bodybuilding competition those are short-term things that people do extreme things for okay I'm not categorally against that I'm just saying that and what I write about my book to be your diet is we should all be trying to do things that are good for our health over the course of our lifetime if we want to live long and prosper and then Thrive this is what longevity is all about so another food that can actually actually have incredible benefits is actually tea just sipping green tea actually has been shown to decrease excess body fat as well so remember I told you this experiment where you know you when you remove the effects of body fat your real metabolism starts to shine and when you add unhealthy foods and you add extra fat back you'll start to suppress your metabolism so this is really the concept we have a hardware program inside us that goes through four phases of metabolism if you want to be all you can be work on the sum of the body fat work on the metabolisms you can eat foods like tomatoes and strawberries and green tea and there's 150 other Foods including Seafoods that I have in there that can all work in harmony to help you get there and so this isn't about a fad diet this is really about a lifestyle and trying to embrace and enjoy your life as well yeah and I think from what I also understand is a lot of this comes back to satiety as well and that's why you know people who eat a decent amount of protein it can be good for your metabolism and weight loss because it keeps you Fuller longer and it seems like that's the same with what you're saying especially with some of these foods that contain a decent amount of fiber because one of the other benefits of fiber is it keeps you Fuller longer right that's right that's right so when you eat like if you're at a bean burrito okay provided it doesn't have a ton of unhealthy things in it you're going to be feel full longer it's not because the beans are heavy it's because there's a lot of fiber in the beans and the fiber feature got microbiome and that actually sets into motion this series of signals in your brain that may just make you less hungry now there's a hormone actually that doses it's made by body fat called leptin some people may have heard of leptin but we all you know it's all part of this remember I told you like intermittent fasting is natural leptin's natural so we have a little bit of fat in our body which we need and when we eat and our stomach gets full one of the things that happens is that the full stomach sends a signal text messages are body fat and our body fat releases some leptin the leptin okay travels in our bloodstream to our brain and our brain receives the leftist signal the text messages and that leptin says hey you know what slow down man like you're full just slow down and stop all right and that's basically what when we feel full in front of a dinner plate like it's because our fat is signaling our brain saying all right you know chill out man like stop slow down and stop all right now here's what happens when you've got too much body fat lots of leptin gets produced and the funny thing that we don't fully understand is your brain stops reading the leptin it doesn't read the signal anymore and so even though you make more leptin you're always hungry and you don't never stop eating and so basically what you want to do is to tame that fat so your brain becomes more sensitive to leptin and leptin will tell you chill out and by the way when you eat if you eat too quickly you'll outstrip the speed of your signal that your stomach is full and your fat will make the leptin so you can chuck a ton of food into your gut and you can overeat really easily if you eat super fast and so this is another kind of like trick to actually optimize your metabolism is eat the healthiest eat the right stuff but eat more slowly don't wolf your food down because you'll beat your body's ability to signal to turn on the off switch and then you'll overload yeah yeah I mean you got to eat slowly I've also heard like eat till you're about like 80 full or something like that I think the these there can be some great tools that you can do as you're eating to not eat as much and if your goal is to lose weight this will likely help you to do that as well I want to shift gears just a little bit you talked about how somebody can be lean but quote unquote also obese in your research even in your practice like do you believe that people who are obese can still be metabolically healthy okay so here's the way that I want people to think about the idea of body size right and I wanted you to think about healthy people super healthy people they can have different body sizes and how do we know this look at Olympic athletes you got your tiny little gymnasts you've got your shot Putters you've got your lean track stars you've got your svelte ice figure skaters there's a champion there's an Olympian in every body size category and then if you want to take a look at another sport like boxing you've got 14 weight categories you get featherweight to heavyweight and there's a champion there's a world champion every day and then if you want to really look at an extreme look at Sumo these are behemoths three to four hundred Pounders right people would call them obese and yet actually they don't suffer from the diseases that you would normally think about heart disease and diabetes and cancer they don't actually get them and yet and they're in super fit shape all right and so the first thing that I think is really important is to for us to kind of rethink this idea that large body size is equated to poor Health Science Matters but it's not the only thing that matters what's actually happening inside matters a lot more so back to your question if somebody has got a large body size can they ever be healthy or are they stuck being unhealthy and what I would say is that the science tells us you can Unleash Your Inner metabolism by focusing on ways that allow you to burn down harmful body fat including the stuff you can't see which is packed inside your body whether you're thin or big and you'll actually start to improve your health overall so I think that there's a different measure like true Health isn't visible in the mirror that's the key thing and you can't measure it automatically on a scale and yet that's what we have come to think is that when you step out of the shower in the morning out of the corner yeah you look at the mirror and you see some lumps and bumps you know like oh man that really stinks I must not be as healthy as I can be I got to go to the gym where you step on the scale the number that comes up isn't the one that you want to see and you kind of like you know you have some self-loathing about that it's a wrong way to think about it the fact of the matter is that we are all hardwired to be healthy we've got Health defenses our metabolism is there and so what we want to do if people haven't thought about this before it's never too late to take advantage of the new science that says we can make these little moves little adjustments and eat delicious food at the same time to help us kind of maneuver our way towards Better Health regardless of your body size I think a lot of people now based on stress based on their lives and just you know maybe what's going on over the last few years where people are just kind of at this low level stress their energy is depleted just naturally and maybe they're aware of it maybe they're unaware of it in your research in your experience what role does food would play in this like do you think that you know if you eat processed food all day it can have an impact on your mood or do you think that's false no no it's absolutely true the science shows that to be true for sure our diet affects our gut microbiome the healthy bacteria in our gut and a lot of people may not realize this but the research is really really making it clear the healthy gut bacteria that we have in the lower part of our gut is in our colon a part of a colon called the cecum it's a little bag near the end of our gut it's filled with something on the order of 39 trillion bacteria it's called our gut microbiome and when you talk about gut health largely it's referring to actually that bacteria being very happy it's an ecosystem think about that bacteria ecosystem like the Great Barrier Reef all right it's an enormous collection of Life bacteria being life and in the Great Barrier Reef you've got this Myriad you've got different corals you've got Turtles you've got big fish you've got sharks you've got all kinds of different colorful things living organisms living together and it makes the sea around it healthy and our gut bacteria makes our bodies healthy they help us heal they help our immune system but very importantly back to the mood and the Sleep part it turns out we now know our gut bacteria sends text messages to our brain and among the things that our gut back to interior helps our brain release our social hormones and hormones that control our mood and lower our anxiety hormones like serotonin like dopamine like oxytocin these are the hormones that make us depressed happy sad anxious Moody cloudy and also the good news is that when your gut bacteria is Happy it makes our brain release happy hormones one of them is called oxytocin as I mentioned oxytocin there's one bacteria by the way called lactobacillus rhetori and this is just how one area of research and I want to cite for people listening to this lactobacillary which is a natural gut bacteria text messages to our brain it causes our brain to release oxytocin oxytocin is a mood hormone it's a brain hormone that makes us feel good it's the same hormone that you get when you are picking up a good friend at the airport and you see them coming out of the you know to the baggage claim and you give them a big hug all right you feel good right that's oxytocin your brain is flooding out when you have a kiss a French kiss your brain is pouring out oxytocin makes you feel good when you have an orgasm for a few microseconds your brain is pumping out as much oxytocin as it can when you disturb your gut microbiome by eating foods that destroy our gut health you actually interfere you snip the wire you prevent that text message from coming through you know it's kind of like putting your your mood your connection but to your gut brain connection on airplane mode it can't signal and so therefore you don't feel as good now what are some of the foods that can actually actively destroy our gut brain connection unfortunately it's the food that we tend to consume the most Ultra processed foods the stuff in a box in a bag in a can and a tin and the things that have you know 20 or so ingredients that you can't pronounce except that what you know is that their artificial preservatives artificial coloring artificial flavoring you know additives that actually make it last longer on the Shelf all those things that kind of had made our modern Mass food industry the Goliath it actually is we're beginning now to do the research to realize you know what I'm glad that you know we're able to address the hunger needs of more people but the quality of the food remember the quality of the fuel in your tank that's low quality Fuel and when you actually put all those chemicals in your tank you're poisoning your gut bacteria when your gut bacteria poison they're not able to you put them on you put them on airplane mode they're not able to signal to your brain in fact sometimes they send inflammatory signals which actually darken your mood to begin with that's fascinating yeah I mean and I love the way you kind of describe that because like I have heard that like the neurotransmitter is like you know dopamine and serotonin they are a lot of them are made in our gut and they like you're right they impact so much of our mood and I think what I'm also hearing you say is if somebody's looking to improve their mood and reduce their stress and improve their outlook on life they should obviously deal with the underlying trauma whether that's through therapy whatever you know method of healing that they resonate with the most and focusing on sleeping more than focusing on improving their diet quality and moving their body more I think all of that obviously will help people reduce stress and improve their overall quality of life so many people when they start a journey on health and fitness they have this All or Nothing approach like I am going to be all in or I'm all out and the moment I slip up you know I'm done because that means I'm a failure that means I suck that means I'm not made for this I've been there I mean I'm sure a lot of people that are listening to this I'm sure they've maybe experienced to some degree or they know somebody who has what's your take on that like how can somebody you know get back on the path the healthy path if you will after maybe they didn't have a good night's sleep and maybe they over ate them one day or maybe they had enjoyed themselves at a party too like more than they wanted to like what's your advice for people to keep moving forward yeah listen I mean what you just described is so common and and it's happened to me many times over the course of my life I'm a medical doctor I train to be a medical doctor there's no lifestyle less healthy than going to medical school and training to be a doctor you don't get enough sleep you don't eat quality food you're stressed out all the time for a long period of time like years and you're confronted with you know things that are overwhelming scary depressing I mean you know like it's a it's a very difficult part of the journey and so I you know I've walked that walk I I can tell you so one of the things that I sort of want to communicate to anybody listening is that the first thing you need to know no matter where you are in this journey and how you're feeling know that your body your systems your metabolism your health defenses are like a gyroscope your body's like a gyroscope and for those of you who don't know what a gyroscope is it's like that thing that doesn't allow a top to be knocked over to always can regain its balance all right it's why ships don't go over the big cruise ships like they've got a gyroscope they actually keep it completely stable that's why satellites stay in the air all right the gyroscope in our body allows us to always get back to our Baseline of what it wants this to be now our Behavior can knock it off its Center Line can knock ourselves off balance but if you just ease up a little bit okay even a little bit it'll start to immediately self-correct and so that so so when you say this all or all in or all out you know those are extremes recognize that our body is always self-correcting and if you give it even a little break it'll let you start to self-correct so even if you're a little in that starts to make a difference and if you're all in and you start to slip you could go back and you can regain that pretty easily your body watch you start to self-correct and you're not going for an extreme honestly what you're doing even when you do extreme things you're trying to hasten you're trying to make the resurrection of your balance a little bit faster it is true if you go all out and you really decide that you're you know you're going to screw yourself you know by embarking on dangerous Behavior you could knock that top over but the moment you stop it's going to start to right the ship again I think that's a good that's really good news secondly if you then actually want to have a better chance of gaining balance one thing to do is to just not do anything you know you kind of get that Zen state where you allow your body to reboot itself skip a meal skip two meals don't drink exercise is just and and just be calm Center yourself don't do anything that calmness all right no matter how it what it takes for you to get calm you know even if you need to hug yourself all those trauma and stress managing techniques can help you actually your body start to reboot itself one of the most important reboots is when you're sleeping your body literally has a can have a hard restart you know control alt delete and reboot itself if you get a really really good night's sleep that's why by the way all of us in our lives when we've actually had that incredible sleep and you get up and you feel really good that's because you've rebooted so that's the other thing you know like withhold anything for yourself go empty for a little while reboot and you can actually be better and the third thing I'll actually tell you is don't give up you know a lot of people who cycle they wait cycle they I'm going to be really healthy I can't do it anymore I'm going to go on the other side now I'm going to be really healthy again and your weight goes up and down all right don't give up you want to keep on moving towards that I mean Studies have actually shown losing even a little weight and by the way weight is most people think about weight as Humanity here's what I think about weight is actually the harmful stuff inside your body cavity you could be a big person big body type or you could be a thin person you can still have extra body fat inside you it's like extra peanuts you pack into a FedEx container you can really over stuff that that contain a skinning container tape it shut duct tape it shut it'll still be a skinny container but it's bursting on the inside what is it bursting like bursting like the inside when you grow too much harmful body fat it's like a baseball glove wrapped around your organs choking your organs that's why you want to not overload on your fuel that's why you want to get good sleep that's why you want to lower your stress you want to stay physically active and you want to make good choices and anybody to know that your body wants to go there that's your harmonious set point and so I think no matter who you are taking even the first baby steps to get there it really is the first step to the end of your journey yeah it's so important because at the end of the day we all do want to feel well we all want to we want to be like comfortable with who we are as far as our health and how we look physically but at the end of the day I think a lot of people are just so overwhelmed they don't know where to start they think they have to change everything overnight and like we've talked about like that's just not the way it has to be and I think the the other thing I will add is that other than the amazing points you brought up are that when you can learn to embrace like the journey and the process and knowing that this isn't going to be like a a 30-day thing it's not going to be a 90-day thing this is going to be a lifetime Journey with your health and fitness and that there's going to be days where you don't feel good there's going to be days where you don't eat well there's going to be days you don't move as much and that's okay I think what counts is is that over time if you continue to be consistent and you are consistently moving your body you know more days than not you're eating well on most days what you'll find it's kind of like the stock market over time the line will go up and up and up I'd have a you know some down days but it'll go up again down then over time you'll see this trajectory of growth in your health and wellness the other thing I'll add is I think it's important for people to celebrate how far they've come and not how far they have to go because there's so many people especially early on they're looking at all the things they haven't achieved in their health and fitness journey but they're not looking at some of the things they have achieved maybe it is that they haven't been eating as much fast food they're not drinking as much you know regular soda they're not you know skipping the days the gym whatever the case may be and that can all be you know positive you know reinforcement right to continue on the journey you have to give credit to yourself and I think the other thing that's helpful you know in medicine we call this reflection and looking at the past we call it the retrospectus scope you know if you actually go back and look at where you started do you realize how far you've come and credit yourself from every little bit that you've actually done that's good for you going forward I mean that's really the progress you've made you deserve that reward and really you know like and it makes actually taking the steps ahead a lot easier what would you say would be like five tips that you could share with the audience on how people can improve their diet quality yeah happy to give you the five tips but let me kind of frame this by saying there is so much negativity associated with food I'm coming at this from a completely different perspective I would say negativity was out there and also misperceptions and and lack of accurate information so I like to kind of in turn the entire formula around and come at this with how do we not fear our food number one and number two how do we actually use the facts and the signs to really be able to inform uh how we can Embrace food instead and you know this has to do with my background as a physician as a scientist and as somebody who's actually been involved with biotechnology and developing cancer treatments and diabetes treatments and treatments for blindness and for almost 30 years the reality is is that food in fact is really one of the most powerful Health Care interventions that we can do for ourselves and five tips I will give you right up front that could be really useful is and this is sort of you know really across the board for anyone who has to eat which is everyone I would give you the five general principles number one stay hydrated because dehydration actually makes everything in your body work harder and so if you want your food to work for you you actually want to make sure your body has enough water content to be able to keep all those metabolic processes functioning really well number two I would say eat what you like but make sure that most of what you eat and the priority of where your head goes when you're choosing something making good choices really falls in the category of what we call plant-based foods which is pretty broad I mean there are hundreds of foods that are plant-based and doesn't have to be broccoli and kale it could be beans it could be mushrooms it could be onions it could be garlic all the things that you think hark back to those traditional delicious recipes that came from the grandmothers of the Mediterranean whether it's Italy or Greece or Spain or France or Asia whether it's Japan or China or Thailand I mean all those delicious things that you might see in the menu I want people to think about healthy eating is when you look at a menu or when you actually are shopping look for the things in the produce section first or look for the things that actually have vegetables in them they don't have to be the only thing but if you use that as a kind of a filter you're going to be doing something really good for you that's the second thing third I would say to the extent possible avoid Ultra processed foods and we all have things that we like that we grew up with that are snacky type of foods and we all have lives that take us in different places in our communities or around the world even and we can't always get the healthiest food but what I want to kind of like emphasize is if you can cut down if not cut out Ultra processed foods things that actually have lots of artificial preservatives artificial colorings artificial flavorings you know those are the things that actually taste pretty good and we're kind of addicted to from marketing from our childhood so you've got we've got legitimate reasons why we like these things because they taste pretty good if you can cut down if now cut out those things that's actually going to tip your dietary pattern in your favor the other thing that I would actually say that would be really helpful is to try to avoid foods with added sugars whenever you can this is your regular soda this is actually even your diet soda which actually has artificial sweeteners added that mess up your gut health and your gut microbiome and actually throw your metabolism off kilter but stay away from added sugar because we can get plenty of sugar from the regular Foods we eat but if you start stuffing candy bars you know the Habit we had as kids right Halloween get that pillow and stuff it like a gunny sack and go out there and Peg out all night long look that's a lot of artificial sugar and even as adults we wind up actually snacking that way unconsciously and then if you overloads our metabolism that's a fourth thing and the fifth thing I would actually say is that I want to come back to beverages for a second you know besides water there's two other beverages that I think are go-to's for health and one is tea could be green tea could be oolong tea could be black tea and the other one is coffee remarkably you know water teen coffee are the go-to's for beverage and health now what you add to them can make a big difference but you know those are five general rules that I think will take anybody else towards the path to health and by the way you'll notice that I didn't give any absolutes and I didn't say things that are really unreasonable so that's probably a good place to start yeah I love that and I would imagine that the five tips that you shared probably go in line with what you would recommend for somebody as far as a dietary pattern to follow for longevity so I guess outside of making sure you're consuming a lot of plants drinking plenty of water limiting Ultra processed foods what are a few other like Staples that you think people should include within like a dietary pattern if they want to increase their longevity right okay so longevity means not only having more birthdays but also having good quality of life along the way right so we want a good healthy lifespan not just a long life span if you're gorked out you know at 100 years old or you are blind 100 years old that would not be worth it so I think the key to longevity and you know this is such an important and popular topic I think and it's really driven by science there's a lot of really exciting things about longevity I want to make sure people don't forget that you want to we want to actually be able to enjoy our lives even as we live longer nobody wants to add more miserable years to their life all right so having said that what are the things that are important to us and I'm going to give you some concrete food things but I you know what you're going to hear me talk about is the framing because I think a lot of times when we hear about nutrition or foodist medicine we hear about individual substances of individual Foods individual recommendations without getting into context so I think context is important how do we actually maintain good later years in our life if we want to expand them our brains need to work we need good cognition what does that require at a minimum our brains need to have good blood flow so we need to protect our circulation so foods that can actually help protect our circulation keep our circulation going are really helpful research has shown there's actually a natural chemical that's found in a lot of foods called bersolic acid that actually helps our blood vessel system stay healthy so we have better blood flow where do you get ursulic acid it comes in chestnuts it comes in Fruit peel which is found on dried fruits which are a healthy way to actually get a lot of dietary fiber which feeds our gut microbiome our healthy gut bacteria in our body and healthy gut bacteria text messages our brain and helps us release social hormones so we're happy to do the things and see the people that we happen to see and so this is sort of like a little bit of a contextual idea of some of the foods that we can eat and the reasons why in order to be able to have a good long healthy life I think number one would be actually a good having a brain working really well second one just tell you is you know we want to be able to move we want to actually you know you don't want to be wheelchair bound or paralyzed or or so weak we're unable to be independent or as independent we possibly can so we need our muscles to be able to function properly now muscles are built and broken down on a daily basis which is why you know young kids are so active and teenagers are working out and you know why we actually try to encourage people to actually exercise is that you know use it or lose it is really absolutely true so we want to use it well in addition to just physically exercising we need to be able to actually build our muscles now how does our body build our muscles from the time we're born all the way until our Advanced stages uses stem cells now these are not the stem cells you would get at the strip mall injected into your knee you know or your for your tennis elbow or your shoulder these are stem cells we were born with and a lot of people don't know this but humans do regenerate we're actually formed of stem cells when our mom's Peg met our dad's sperm and we were just a ball of cells all stem cells and these stem cells that you will want from your jaw and our face and our ears and our livers and our hearts we have a bunch left over when we're born about 70 million leftover cells they're packed away kind of like on the shelves of Home Depot you know extra cans of paint you can draw on them when you need to and these stem cells actually will participate in building our muscle over time so what are some of the foods that actually help us build help our stem cells come out so they can help to regenerate things well it turns out that extra virgin olive oil turns out to be really helpful for our stem cells it protects our stem cells as we age and not surprisingly in the blue zones those parts of the world where people live really to healthy ripe old ages over 100 for example centenarians they tend to eat olive oil extra virgin olive oil which by the way comes from a plant it's a plant-based healthy fat number two there's another fat that you should know about that's found associated with protein that's in seafood and that's omega-3 fatty acids Omega-3s also help our stem cells regenerate they prompt our body to stay renewed which is important for aging where you get Omega-3s well besides salmon and Anchovies and mackerel and sardines you hear about that a lot it turns out many many many different kinds of Seafoods and even seaweeds actually edible seaweeds actually have omega-3s so one of the things that I write about in my new book Eat to beat your diet is leaning into that Seafood section of the grocery store which you know some people already like seafood but some people aren't familiar and I want to take people's apprehension away to say dive in there because there's a lot of great stuff that's a secret to longevity as well it turns out in many of the blue zones and in many places where people live to a ripe old age they eat reasonable amounts of seafood regularly and not surprisingly this omega-3 is found in there now I'm going to throw one last kind of delight and surprise that can help your stem cells which help to rebuild your brain and your heart and your muscles actually is dark chocolate turns out chocolates are candy okay it's a confection but to make dark chocolate you have high amounts 70 80 percent 90 percent cacao Cacao is that actually from the c pipe the cacao plant and that's a plant-based food it turns out there's natural chemicals bioactives in cacao made in dark chocolate and high concentrations that help our stem cells come out and rebuild our muscles our circulation many other parts that need to be renewed and as we get older one of the things we want to do is we want to continuously be renewed rather than broken down these are some of the ways that we think about diet and Longevity those are some great tips and some great Foods as you were naming those Foods I was like yep definitely eat that yep definitely eat that and it just seems like it's pretty consistent too with like the Mediterranean dietary pattern right would you say that that's pretty accurate absolutely and here's the thing that I think is really important to understand about the Mediterranean diet as you said it's a pattern it's not a single recipe or a single commercial package the Mediterranean is not just Italy and Greece and Spain which people can pick out in two seconds but in fact it may made up of like 27 different countries that all surround the Mediterranean Sea and most people don't realize this but Tunisia and Israel Croatia are all Mediterranean countries and what that means that there's a really rich diversity of traditional foods that people have enjoyed so you know for people that say well you know I'm not really into Italian food or I'm not really I don't know who wouldn't be a Italian food but you know some people are very picky with their food what I say is that if you want to look at Mediterranean pattern you have to appreciate this is more than 20 different countries that have something to offer for you and similarly Mediterranean is one pattern of healthy eating but the other pattern of healthy eating is in Asia because Asians live there's a long pattern of longevity it's traditional patterns lots of seafood lots of plant-based foods and here's the cool thing Doug is that the Mediterranean in Asia if you think about restaurant menus might look like there couldn't be more differences but then two different types of Cuisine but in fact the pattern of eating and the things that are in them could not be more connected because two thousand years ago there was something called The Silk Road and it was a series of Dusty trails that linked China to the Mediterranean and the traders that did trade silk but many other things as well also exchanged their ingredients and recipes and so when you want to think about healthy patterns of eating please do think about Mediterranean eating and realize that Mediterranean is much more than Italian food it's a lot of different foods but now I want you to actually open this up to a kaleidoscope of Cuisine that includes Asia and the interconnections between Mediterranean Asia and I actually in my new book I call this mediterration because it really is something that is not new but thousands of years old and now it's time for us to kind of really go back and tap that well of culinary genius that's always existed and the stuff tastes great too and staying on the theme of eating certain foods that can improve our overall quality of life we talked about olive oil you talked about Seafood that contains Omega-3s you talked about dark chocolate I know that you're a big fan of polyphenols as well so I think this would be a good kind of segue to talk about like why you're such a fan of them what exactly they do and what are some foods that contain them first of all polyphenols are a research term that describe hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are other so it's sort of a blanket term for many of these natural chemicals that mother nature put into food now these chemicals I call them Mother Nature's Pharmacy not with a pH Pharmacy but actually with an f as in farm you see because these are the things that farmers have been growing part of our Agriculture and a lot of our plant-based Foods Now polyphenols by themselves are pretty amazing if you study what they can actually do they're antioxidant they can activate epigenetic changes that help our DNA perform better you know and there's a lot of popular information out there about polyphenols and I'm telling you the president in many many different types of foods including the ones all the ones we've talked about so far but I will also tell you that when it comes to food and health and polyphenols it's not just about the food and their polyphenols it's about how our body responds to the polyphenols that you would ingest so I'm going to tell you I've done research looking at how we stay healthy and it turns out that our health is not just a passive state of being but in fact the reason we're healthy is the result of Our Own own bodies hardwired Health defense systems we've got five of them androgenesis angio blood vessels how our body grows our circulation talked about how important that is for longevity in our brain number two stem cells regeneration we regenerate all the time which is why we're still around tomorrow is that we're regenerating ourselves today we talked about stem cells growing our muscles also really important polyphenols activate that as well our gut microbiome we touched on that earlier today as well polyphenols actually help to groom the healthy gut bacteria that represents part of our ecosystem this ecosystem of our gut bacteria controls our immunity helps us lower inflammation helps our metabolism and our healthy gut bacteria detects our brain as I mentioned earlier to release social hormones and so polyphenols that help our gut microbiome our gut health are absolutely critical polyphenols also are antioxidant as I mentioned they protect our DNA from damage that can happen now most people say well why do I need to worry about my DNA well because healthy DNA is responsible for healthy you healthy proteins healthy cells and unhealthy DNA is mutations and mutations are the reason the root cause why we develop cancer and so that's why you want to be careful and why you care about it and if you don't fix your DNA repel the incoming missiles that are trying to develop damage your DNA from the environment you actually wind up actually being at a greater risk for being mutated and we're not talking about the X-Men we're talking about the average cancer patient that's out there nobody wants to be that person and if you are someone who's dealt with cancer you don't want to get it again and so this is really why polyphenols can be important for DNA and by the way one other thing polyphenols slow down the fuse that involves DNA that burn down on the end of our cells so you know it's like the mission impossible Strike A Match Light the fuse the fuse starts burning down down well that's really our lifespan as our DNA starts to wear down and burn down our life gets shorter and our cellular Health our longevity gets shorter and shorter so polyphenols slow the burn and in some cases can make the fuse longer again which is cellular longevity and that counts as well and the fifth thing that polyphenols do and it's part of our health defenses is they light up our immune defenses we know that you know a good immune system protects us from the common cold and other viruses that might be out there so you ask a very simple question why do I care about polyphenols and I'm saying that look polyphenols activate our health defenses and when our health defenses are activated we stay healthier longer and are able to repel disease and so many people they end up starting something when it comes to their nutrition they stop they end up not starting something because they don't have the confidence to be able to make that transformation or whatever the case may be and they end up not making these changes and they don't in turn Embrace a lot of the information Nation that's out there about nutrition diet and how it can actually be super beneficial for your health in your opinion though as a doctor even in your own experience maybe just experience and talking to friends and colleagues like why do you think most diets fail yeah well I you know first of all I love the fact we're having this conversation on a show called The adversity Advantage because adversity is actually how many of us have come to view food and our diet right and so you go on a diet to fight something else in your life that you're not happy with and so then food becomes actually your enemy your foe your opponent or the patterns of eating become that so you know when you say why don't diets actually tend to work it has to do with the fundamental nature of why people think they need to go on a diet to begin with and this is really kind of like the basis of my new book it to be your diet it's a trick title it's not a diet book in fact it's an anti-diet book that teaches you how the science of the new science of our body the new signs of our metabolism I'm a scientist and a doctor teaches us that we don't really have to suffer we don't have to go on these yo-yo diets we don't have to swing to Extremes in order to really be able to use food or grapple with food not as our opponent but really as our collaborator and not just to be able to help us lose weight and feel better but literally to be able to bring us joy as well so if I told you that this topic of food and your metabolism and health is the antithesis of adversity it's about Harmony and the question is the question we're talking about is how do you turn something that appears to be an adversary into a situation where you can really embrace the harmony I think that's the modern conversation about diets absolutely but I think it's easier said than done because I think that when P A lot of people are starting to make the change to eat healthier it's in the midst of adversity in their life right they maybe they just got some bad news from a doctor maybe they went through a divorce and they're like you know what like I'm gonna get that Revenge body or maybe they had some health scare in the family or whatever the case may be and their stress levels are are high they're overwhelmed they're seeing all this information online about this diet and that diet and try this and lose 30 pounds in three weeks and all this information that we see now and I love what you said about it being coming to a place of Harmony because at the end of the day it's going to actually help you in so many ways and it's going to bring you more peace with yourself and in your lifestyle if I were a patient of yours and I would say you know Dr Lee I'm looking to I'm eating nothing but processed foods right now my life is a complete mess like what are some initial steps that I could take to make sure that I'm in this for the long run yeah that's you know and that's not a uncommon situation right I mean so many people either articulate and acknowledge or they are living with this sort of in a little Shadow recognition in the back of their minds that they're not they're not living their best lives and how they feel both physically and emotionally actually is a consequence of that but they don't know how to get out of that rut right so what I would tell you Doug you know if you were see coming to me as a patient with what I know is I would say first of all there's some natural temptation to grasp at something that seems like a silver bullet and whether that's a supplement that's being sold to you a super beverage a super food or a program diet that some Guru is trying to tell you even if you hear your friends talking about it you know like we're humans so we we tend to gravitate towards you know like what's going on and who's doing it and if you have friends that are doing it you kind of want to jump on there that's why we've got keto that's why we had Atkins and South Beach and you know you named a diet that's basically why people jump onto these ships but I would argue that people who go on to diets need to really take a moment before jumping at that and grasping at that straw you know it's like you might feel like you're on a Titanic going down all right you'll take any life raft that you think is nearby all right but let me tell you diets and a healthy way to use food is highly highly individualized it has to do with who we each are so the best thing I would tell you Doug is first if you were looking for help I would have this conversation with you say let's take a look at your individual self let's take a look at what your preferences are your needs okay let's have a level of self-actualization self-knowledge that you need to understand what makes you tick why you actually are even interested in a diet and what are your goals all right if your goals are more energy to kind of be renewed to be regenerated as somebody and you and your goal is to really kind of step further and further away from a path that you think is going to lead to disease then I've got some good news for you and the good news is that while we used to think you have to go into these Extreme Elimination diets that are really loaded with value judgments don't do this don't do that it makes you feel bad you know like food and fat are all kind of like these bad kind of ideas the new science teaches us something completely different and really kind of surprising and this is what I write about my new book hate to beat your diet first that we are all hardwired with all the operating system we need to be able to have a really really good metabolism and when we have a good metabolism we've got good energy we've got good use of the calories that we're taking and all the other micronutrients that we're actually eating and that we're actually fueling up our body's own health defenses these Health defenses not just make us feel better they do make us feel better give us more energy all right but they also protect us against chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease and cancer and all the specters of Health that people are a little bit afraid of when they go to the doctor's office like oh man I hope they don't give me bad news and what I'm telling you is that this is not fate there is actually your own destiny is hardwired in your body so how do we unleash our inner metabolism to allow our body to do the things that it wants to do and you don't need to actually do elimination and restriction instead it's sort of understanding how to get in harmony with yourself not just what to eat we can talk about that but how to eat and when to eat become really really important things so don't just go pick up a bottle or a can or a jar of powder or you know start copycatting what somebody else says you need to do every day let's first think about what your own goals are what are the things that are dogging you that you want to actually overcome and then what we do is we actually realign that with how your body actually works and then how do you choose foods and eat mindfully to be able to get there yeah I love that and I think now that you we've kind of identified that you know for people trying to lose weight become healthy or whatever their main goal is the approach that really counts is the one that they're going to stick to and the one that's best for them individually and then along the same lines as goals you know I've heard a lot of people talk about and I believe this myself that you have to have some level of emotion tied to whatever it is you're trying to achieve so that it just helps you not just stick to it but when things get tough you kind of remember why you started and I'm sure there's other reasons to go along with that what is your take on that and what's your advice based on your take on how somebody can really get deeply connected to the goal they're trying to achieve yeah well this has to do with Harmony right and Harmony is Inner Harmony like when it comes to health it's really about what's inside us and I think too many of us and maybe our society today is so externally focused checklist Focus task photocus maybe even kind of financial goal focused or or advancement focused and so what we forget about in this sort of busy crazy Rush of our modern lives and by the way it's also not helped by our mobile devices that we're scrolling on and first of all there's a lot of incredible things that our technology digital technology gives to us but one of the things it doesn't give to us is it does not hand us the permission slip to be able to have a moment of peace and rest and reflection and you know in fact we're continuously bombarded with new information on a moment-to-moment basis that takes us further and further away from ourselves so back to sort of like this idea of internal Harmony what makes me happy what do I want to aim for in my life like how do I know and how will I know when I get there you know what are those kinds of fundamental things knowing yourself is one of the both easiest and hardest things to do and I what I'm telling you is before you pick up any food before you start any workout before you do any type of therapy this is a kind of the the Moment of Truth self-truth self-knowledge self-awareness that I think all of us have the ability to be able to kind of reach for now is there trauma and pain that that Minimus will encounter when we do that yes but that actually is also equally the secret and to be able to actually solve that problem otherwise it's always going to be a hidden bump in a road that we're actually not going to be able to overcome and so this whole whole emotional centeredness this idea of knowing who we are and what our goals are and what makes us tick and by the way even when it comes to food and I write about this extensively you know most people who are trying to lose weight or let's call it better Fitness for the lack of a better word I mean losing weight loss is a very specific thing the better Fitness is the goal that everyone has even if you're trying to lose weight okay how are you actually living your life today you know taking stock of how what you're actually doing to yourself because the good news is that there may be some things that you are doing naturally that are actually quite good for you you just don't know it you're not keeping score and so what I my research is showing is that you know elevating our health to a better level using our metabolism and using the defense Health defense systems that are hardwired inside us is actually hidden in plain sight we have to start at the beginning to be able to understand what our own inner goals are first and then taking one step at a time allows us to unpack the path to get to Better Health I love what you just said about taking one step at a time and then also acknowledging that you know in a perfect world there there wouldn't be all these stressors and there wouldn't be trauma and pain that sometimes could hinder our ability to see results and get results and continue along the path because I know that that gets in the way of a lot of goals when they're looking to achieve something is like the daily stressors in their lives and stuff that happens at work and so on and so forth and I think that also goes along with I think one of the biggest problems I know for me when I'm stressed I know food sometimes can become a crutch for me where I tend to eat worse when I'm feeling stressed eat more when I'm feeling stressed so just using me I guess as an example again you know if I was coming to you and I just said Dr Lee you know I'm just having trouble like overeating specifically when I'm stressed I just find myself like reaching for junk food processed food when I'm having a hard time what kind of advice would you give me to help counter that again your internal hardwired operating system is always available for you to tap into to be able to get to better balanced health so no matter how far away you are from that goal you can do it all right that's so the first thing I tell you I would tell you that in order to do that though you need to realize that in addition to the food choices that you make we can talk about junk food and and all that stuff but I want to also talk about the UN some of the underlying causes of stress if you don't deal with that it can be a problem I mean research studies have actually shown come back a little bit into this whole idea of trauma and anger and anxiety and the emotional aspect of it is that Studies have shown that if you take a look at there's a study done of women who looked at women who were overweight or obese and looked at and correlated with their level of anger and it turns out that those people who actually had more difficulty with their metabolism and with their body weight were also people who tended to have more repressed and unresolved deep anger and so you know and I want to call that out as an as an extreme example because we're all stressed from things life is stressful that's just the nature of it most of us have a decent amount of resiliency to deal with the occasional traffic stop or you know you forgot your keys or whatever you know it's like we bounced back from that stuff but when you actually hold on to anger deep anger that's really kind of gets into that trauma realm and then you really have a hard time letting go that needs to be worked on that needs to be worked on because it's going to interfere with almost everything else that you would try to do so I could talk to you about how to time your eating how to make better food choices the volume to eat like I want to talk to you about all that because that's important but you know back to this basic line if you are actually having something really fundamental that you're just not dealing with at all that internal self you're gonna have a hard time moving forward to this path no matter what so I I think I'm glad you brought this up as an early point you know we've got to actually confront ourselves as a very fundamental part of actually moving forward that said I can tell you there's some Basic Ground rules to actually clear up your body and allow your inner metabolism and your health defense is to rise to their own water level and that's the good news because that means your body wants to do this we're humans we want to do this all right so one of the natural things to think about is understanding our metabolism and a big surprise is in the last two years alone just 24 months it's been discovered that human metabolism Works in a way that is completely different than we thought for the last last hundred years it turns out that we're not born with a slow metabolism or a fast metabolism and that means that we're not destined to fight with food and body fat and obesity the way that we always have talked about you know oh my sister's so lucky she was born with a fast metabolism that's why she's skinnies a stick and can't eat anything in me on the other hand I was born with a slow metabolism so I've struggled my whole life with my weight and I have to be careful with what I eat right how many times have we heard that I mean a lot of people carry around that it turns out that's not true we are all born with the exact same metabolism that operating system the hard wiring of our energy of our metabolism using fuel to give us energy and power up our system and power up our health is actually exactly the same the four phases of metabolism we go through at any given point in your life and this is important because if you're coming to me at you're having hit middle age yet or you're just getting to middle age you're in a metabolic stage that it's important to understand so the first stage is zero to one years old your metabolism sky Rockets to 50 percent higher than it's going to be when you're an adult phase one phase two from one year old to 20 years old your metabolism goes down down down down down now why is that important as a surprise because most people who are parents will know that when their kids are teenagers and they're sprouting up like a beanstalk and they're eating two or three dinners and they're bouncing off the wall and they're full of energy we always used to think that oh man the kids are getting their metabolism is going up wrong their metabolism is going down down down down down to adult levels and then from age 20 to 60 and I know that you're somewhere in between there Doug all right your metabolism is hardwired to be Rock stable this is what your body wants to do not to change one bit so your energy level should be up in healthy full-blown levels because that's how our operating system is now obviously people's metabolism do shift and I'll explain why but 20 to 60 is exactly the same payment that means that if you actually allow your metabolism to do what it wants to do 60 can be the new 20. and that's an important thing because this is right through your first child your second child your menopause your 40s and 50s and 60s you know your life changes everything is completely your metabolism Rock Solid and then finally your last stage stage four is from 60 onwards to like 90 your metabolism declines about 17 before you get to the end all this means to tell you that this new science teaches us how we're hardwired and when you actually throw extra body fat into the equation what happens it's not a slow metabolism causes you to gain body fat and more weight it's an extra body fat throws rocks at your metabolism and crushes your metabolism so you do want to actually fight body fat harmful excess body fat but it's really for Inner Health it's not about vanity it's really about how do you get you know that question you ask me what do I I do what I would say is you want your metabolism to rise you want your health defenses to rise and one of the things you want to do is streamline allow your metabolism to do what it was designed to do so along those lines like how do we optimize our metabolism like what are some foods that you think we can eat how should we eat what types of activities should we be doing every single day that you found to be useful in like optimizing the metabolism well you know the first thing I sort of want to share is an explanation of what is metabolism because I think this is a term that everyone thinks they know something about but I'm telling you there's a new science the metabolism that is changing the way that we understand everything and and it's so new that some of the information is less than two years old the old textbooks are still being ripped up and thrown out the window the new ones haven't even been ripped yet so we're talking about some real Cutting Edge stuff the first point is that our metabolism as a scientist I could throw a lot of very very complicated scientific terms at you but I'm not going to do it your metabolism is your body system to be able to use fuel in your body to run your body's engines just like if you have a car and you have an engine that makes that makes the car run you have to put fuel into the car okay in order to be able to run that engine so in a car when you're driving and you look at the fuel gauge and the the tank is running low what do you do you turn pull over to the gas station and you pull out and fill up the tank when the tank is full the nozzle clicks put it back and then you drive off our body is the same way when our engines are running it's our metabolism how to use that in energy and fuel when our fuel tank runs low our fuel gauge runs low it's in our brain and it's hardwired in our muscles and our organs when it runs low what do we do we don't go to a filling station we pull over to the dinner table we pull over to the restaurant we pull over to the snack bar to the refrigerator to The Pantry all right and what are we doing we are actually getting fuel so just like fueling up your car so when we actually pick up fuel to put into our body think about the analogy I just gave you with a car and fuel good quality fuel that you put into your car your gas tank is going to make your engine run a lot longer your car could take a crappy low quality gas once or two twice you know when you're filling that's all that's available right to get you back on the road but if you actually continuously put low quality fuel crappy quality Fuel and you started to have contaminated gasoline into that fuel whether it's contaminated with chemicals or sugar or whatever else it is you watch you destroy your engine over time same deal when it comes to food in our engine our food is our fuel our body our metabolism runs that energy and the quality makes all the difference in the world now I want to talk about some specific foods that help our metabolism run really really well but in addition to one way to I want to say about how do we wreck our metabolism okay is just using the same analogy as the gas station now imagine you go to pull up to the filling station with your car and you put the nozzle in your gas tank the gas tank is full and normally the nozzle clicks when the gas tank is full and it's not going to fill anymore no more gas comes out and you pull it out and you're good to go our body doesn't have a clicker so when we sit down to put fuel in our body and you say overeating all right that's what we're doing where there's no clicker we're just continuing to shove food into our body now what happens when you're actually at a filling station if your gas tank were to overflow all right it would run down the side out of the tank down the side of the car around the wheels it would pool around your feet and you'd be standing in this flammable toxic dangerous mess right and you would hope that the air you'd have to walk away and the air would evaporate the gasoline right now we don't have the same luxury when we eat when we eat and we overeat what we're doing is we are overloading the tanks in our body and our body has to put that extra fuel somewhere it can't evaporate so what our body does is it takes extra Fuel and it stuffs it into our fat our fat cells our fat cells are normal fuel tanks all right so when we have when we eat we're using the energy anything extra gets stored into little fat cells fat cells get bigger bigger bigger all right and then if you're eating normal amounts it'll store some extra energy then when you're done eating it'll burn down that fuel now if you actually continuously actually overload the gas tank you're going to fill up that fat fuel tank it's going to be blisteringly big like a water balloon and then guess what your body says we still got more fuel you overeat now you got to make more fat cells fuel tanks and it's going to fill those up and that gets filled up now you got to make another one and it's going to fill up and now you kind of see why over putting too much fuel in our body causes us to actually gain extra body fat that extra body fat is like a toxic mess that our stand in that gasoline that overflowed gas tank is like it's flammable it's inflammation which is like flame inside our body that sets us up for a big problem the good news about that is we can actually eat less so being mindful that that's how our body works you eat less is really really helpful so I always tell people eat stop eating when you feel satisfied but before you feel full and if you eat slower your stomach will signal text message your brain to tell you like when it's actually naturally full the other thing you can do that would be incredibly important to actually keep your metabolism going well is not to eat too close to bedtime and not to eat too close to getting up in the morning because when we are actually eating food there's a hormone called insulin that our pancreas our body produces and Insulin Works to draw that food fuel as energy into our cells that's what insulin does all right and when our insulin is up it's the signal in our body is our metabolisms that store the fuel baby don't burn it store it we want to gobble it all up and pack it away all right it's like ammo for energy when our insulin is down which is when we're not eating our metabolism is shifts gears and says all right time to tap into the fuel so if you want to burn that extra fuel that's stored in your tanks which is your fat cells you might have extra fat from overeating yesterday or overeating the last week or the last month or from the holidays whatever it is your celebration all right the fact is that your body is actually hardwired to burn that down but it only Burns it down when you are not eating because the insulin goes down down and your metabolism shifts gears to actually be in fat burning mode this happens when we're sleeping Naturally by the way and when we're sleeping we're not eating by the way another name for that is fasting which is why when we get up in the morning and we have our coffee and our eggs or whatever it's called breakfast breakfast is breaking your overnight fast break fast all right and so when what you hear about intermittent fasting isn't just a trend is it kind of like this crazy you know new way of actually living your life it's how our bodies Hardware to do it every single day when you're sleeping you're fasting when you're fasting your insulin's now when your insulin's down your metabolism goes shoot let's go ahead and start burning down extra fuel all right so if you don't eat too close to bedtime like when you stop eating okay let's say you go to bed at 11 and you get up at seven in the morning that's eight hours of sleep I strongly recommend that as a generally good optimal amount of time of sleep to get cleans your brain it gets rid of the toxins it actually resets your immune system all kinds of things calm stress lowers inflammation good quality eight hours of sleep now let's say that you eat dinner so you go to bed from 11 and get up at seven eight hours let's say that you eat dinner at seven o'clock in the evening all right and for most people let's say that you finish eating at around eight an hour later you put their dishes away in the sink at eight o'clock all right now how many of us actually eat a little snack later we go for some dessert we're before bedtime I gotta eat one more thing all right don't want to do that because every time you do that close to bedtime you're spiking your insulin when the insulin goes up your metabolism isn't able to burn fat if you stopped eating when you put your dishes in the sink so let's say that you eat dinner at seven you stop eating at eight put your dishes in the sink no more food that's it okay you'll get used to it it'll be cool don't worry all right you've get and you go to bed at 11 from 8 to 11 you've given your body three extra hours you've given your metabolism the gift of three extra hour to burn down that extra fuel that's gotten stuck and trapped in your body and if you get up at seven in the morning rather than roll out of bed and do what you know our mommies told us to do when we were kids hurry up and eat breakfast so you can get on the school bus to go to school on time all right if you get up and said let's say it's seven take a shower get dressed check your emails read a book read a newspaper whatever it is you're going to do go for a walk an hour later you sit and have a breakfast you've given your body your metabolism the gift of an extra hour in the morning that you burn down fuel so let's do some math three hours after after the dishes are in the sink before bedtime plus eight hours of sleeping time that's 11 hours plus one extra hour before you actually sit down and eat breakfast it's reasonable to do anybody can actually do that honestly but do the math three plus eight plus one now it's 12 hours you've given your body fifty percent of your life is spent towards streamlining your metabolism by burning down that extra body fat that's how you allow your inner metabolism to start to rise to the surface so without actually having to even go on any kind of crazy diet any fats any elimination you can just kind of use that timing and of course the amount to eat like always leave some white space on your plate don't go back for seconds and quit The Clean Plate Club that's a way with before or even talk about what are some good choices to add that you can actually use your body to fight on your behalf I know that one of the things that's really important for our gut is fiber and it seems like based on the dietary patterns that you're talking about recommending these plant heavy diets are going to contain a lot of fiber naturally if you could explain like why high fiber diets are so important for people and maybe some potential dangers that can happen if people don't eat enough fiber okay so when we eat something with dietary fiber let me give you an example it could be a Celery Stock but I'll tell you something that doesn't seem very fibrousy which is a pear pear doesn't seem like it has a lot of fiber but it's got six grams of dietary fiber a lot of dietary fiber and when we eat a pear we're absorbing our you know sort of an upper gut all the polyphenols and the vitamins and all these great bioactives and then what the trickle down is to the lower part of our gut is the dietary fiber right that's the quote roughage now what we don't absorb goes down the pike of our gut to feed our bacteria so the roughage we eat the dietary fiber actually is the food that we feed our gut microbiome now if you've got a pet if you've got a dog a cat parakeet goldfish you are almost certainly conscientious in feeding your pets every single day and you know many people think about you know what's the best food I should be feeding them because you care about them and they pay you back right with affection and you know help lower stress well this is the same thing with our gut bacteria if we mindfully feed our pet gut bacteria that lives inside Us by the way the number of human cells we are made out of is about 40 trillion human cells and the number of gut bacteria that lives inside us is 39 trillion so we're almost one to one with our bacteria we got to feed those guys and we provide them room and board which is what we're feeding them and they pay us back for that by releasing these signals and hormones that control our metabolism they help us use glucose better so we have enough energy and we don't develop pre-diabetes and active diabetes they help us heal our wounds faster so when we were cut that we have surgery we heal up faster they help us control the amount of body fat that we have I mean like you and I sitting here we might not look like we have a lot of extra body fat but actually I'll tell you you don't have to look big to have a lot of dangerous body fat packed inside a thin frame they call this you know lean obesity and there's dangerous fat called visceral fat that can be packed around your organs like a baseball mitt holding your kidneys and your heart and your liver that kind of fat actually predates all kinds of chronic diseases and good healthy gut fights that as well as in addition to all the things that that are good for our mental health and wellness as well so what I'm saying is that when we feed our gut properly it pays us back with all these benefits and all different aspects of our health and when our gut is unhealthy and damaged all right what happens is that bad bacteria overgrow good bacteria the bad bacteria don't don't give us all those benefits and then what happens is that all those functions start to fall apart our metabolism goes Haywire our blood sugars rise we get pre-diabetes our wounds don't heal as well our immune system goes down and then mentally we start getting more agitated as well you know it's interesting dysbiosis which is a problem of our gut bacteria has been connected to depression schizophrenia even autism and so this connection between our gut and our brain is so profound that it really represents one of the new next frontiers of medical research and that's really why the simple thing that everyone needs to know about who's watching listening to this is that you know if you have a cat and a dog and you're feeding your cat and your dog just remember you've got bacteria to feed them well give them some dietary fiber they will thank you for it and you'll actually be healthier overall and I know what you've said that you don't like to speak in absolutes in terms of diet but it seems that you're big on fiber you're big on vegetables and there's a lot of information out there I guess online where people are seeing that it's super healthy to be fully carnivore and you have your diet composed of mostly red meat and that vegetables are bad like what do you say to people that believe that yeah look I tell people I'm a scientist and the interesting thing about science is that it builds upon itself with evidence and you look for new discoveries that help us understand something better and sometimes the new discoveries build on the old discoveries that make you more certain that something is a truth right and of course there are lots of ideas out there online and I think the issue about diet and nutrition and philosophy about food you know there is a true science of new nutrition and food as medicine and then food and nutrition also has sort of this very emotional component to it psychological component to it where it's almost like a religion you know you believe in a god of religion a belief a philosophy a school of thought and either you're for it or you're against it well that's not how science works and so I can only speak as a scientist all the evidence has accumulated to date with real hard scientific evidence so shown that fruits and vegetables nuts and Grains and seeds healthy oils Seafoods actually overall are good for you okay you know there's caveats of course but you know you can always overdo things but overall that's a healthy pattern listen I'm not again you mentioned a carnivore diet I'm not against red meat I'm actually not a vegan I'm not a vegetarian but I eat mostly vegetables I would say I'm probably like an 80 vegetarian I'm a very reasonable guy and I actually enjoy food I enjoy the tradition I'm kind of a foodie I'll eat some meat every now and then but I really don't think the evidence shows that eating a mostly red meat diet is good for you in fact I'll tell you it's quite the opposite most of the evidence is that if you eat heavy proteins red meat high in saturated fats and then you know you can even go to keto and other sources where you have a lot of butter and all that kind of stuff all the evidence shows that over the long haul that dietary pattern does not pay off in good health you might really enjoy that rib eye you know finished off with some melted butter all right but I can tell you that if you do that every single day for year after year your body will pay for that so I think more of a concept of understanding where the body of Health lies being a practicing moderation and you know what if you really like to eat something this is the kind of doctor I am I'm not about absolutes talk to me tell me what it is that that really matters to you I'm okay kind of coaching you a little bit on like okay you can have a little bit of that but just make sure that you don't have too much of it spend more time thinking about the good stuff and there'll be less room for the things that aren't so good for you and you can treat yourself occasionally I'm okay with that yeah it just seems like the the main thing somebody can do to improve the function of their metabolism is to lose excess body fat in the best way to do that without necessarily going on a specific diet or focusing on specific Foods is to just eat less than you are now and finding creative ways to do that one of them being almost like the time restricted feeding window like you said almost like you don't eat past a certain time you eat like an hour after you get up or something like that in my book Eat to beat your diet I call it once you realize what time you finish dinner and what time you eat breakfast you can set your own it's like an alarm on your watch or your phone you can set the time you're going to open your eating window in the morning okay and you can set what time you're going to close the eating Windows you're not going to eat anymore right and you can even set an alarm on your phone if you need a reminder but actually you know if you realize that the time that you're not eating after you put the dishes away your body is actually starting to shift into gear to start to streamline your metabolism that's kind of an awareness you can't unlearn that like once you hear that then next time you let you reach for that brownie or that piece of cake or whatever it is a bag of chips like some voice in your head is going to go wait a minute wait a minute I don't want to be interfering with my body right now my body actually wants to do something you another part of your brain might be saying go ahead and eat it right that's the the angel the devil kind of on both shoulders worry with your brain but again this is where I think you by understanding what your goals are you realize that your body wants to help you it's trying to help you it's there for you man like it's got your back and so by putting that in your head it's an easy thing now you want to take that to the next level and this is what I write about my new book he did your diet what's really cool tool is that during the time you're eating it turns out that food doesn't always grow fat in fact the research has shown some foods actually during the day even when your insulin is up some foods will actually cause your body to fight extra body fat and streamline your metabolism while you're eating so just now before I was telling you when insulin is up when you're eating your body metabolism is all about storing the food and not burning it and when you're not eating and your insulin's down it'll actually start to burn the fuel there's an exception to that rule and that's if you choose and I wrote about 150 different foods proven by human studies research studies that when you eat them in moderation these foods and the natural chemicals contained in them will fire up your metabolism so you can eat to lose and burn down extra body fat so you can streamline your metabolism that to me is a really amazing thing because it's good news you can choose foods I mean who would thought you can eat foods to lose weight doesn't make sense right yes it does the science teaches us and the clinical studies show us it can be actually done so the first step is to just focus on eating less and like identifying those windows that you're going to eat throughout the day and the second thing after you've mastered that is now to like look at like what you're eating within that time frame and out of those 150 foods that you talk about in your book like what are the common themes like I know that yeah protein has a thermogenic effect I know fiber does what are some of the you know properties if you will of these food that help with your metabolism well let me let me explain how your body how food can fire up your body's metabolism so I'm going to take you back to body fat like you know again I'm not a diet person in fact I don't really like fad diets and Trend diets and crash diets and you know like anyone else I have stepped out of the shower and out of the corner of my eye I see something on my body in the mirror that like yeah I don't like that I I gotta get in a better shape I gotta get in better diet like I mean it happens to all of us right that's a common thing that you step on the scale and the number that comes up isn't the number that you had hoped for so you feel right away from the get-go like oh man I gotta I'm disappointed I gotta do something about it well I can tell you that in my book what I want people to realize so that science is empowering us because you can buy these metabolism activating fight fatting Foods right in our grocery store so in the book I actually the whole second section of the book if you're anybody who wants to like have surprise and Delight I write the book as a view if I invited you like when you were a kid to jump into the grocery cart I take you on a tour of the grocery store I invite you like a like a kid to jump into like your mom's grocery cart where she's pushing around what I do is I whisper in your ear and tell you what to put in the cart so you go to the produce section and there are foods that are like tomatoes that have lycopene that actually dissolve into your body fat within an hour or so after you eat the tomato and that lycopene turns on your body fat and what it does it doesn't turn on legitly fat it turns on the kind of fat called Brown fat and brown fat isn't jiggly it's not lumpy bumpy it's paper thin and it's paper thin and it's pressed along your neck under your breastplate under your arms a little bit behind your back a little bit in your belly and when the lycopene from tomatoes and other foods will actually get to your fat it lights up the fat like the striker you have on a gas oven you know you click it click click click whoosh when that brown fat lights up it's literally burning it's thermogenic meaning it's a space heater it creates heat in order to create heat to fire up it has to draw energy right just like a space heater does you got to plug it in or just like your gas range does it draws down the gas from a gas tank now in this case your brown fat when it fires up due to food okay which could be Tomatoes could be Chili Peppers By the way Serrano chilies ancho chilies Anaheim chilies well all do this in their own way fires up the brown fat and where does that your brown fat draw its fuel from it draws it from the harmful fat that's stored extra energy so good fat Brown fat will burn down harmful fat white fat jiggly fat and it draws it right down and the first place it goes is from the most dangerous kind of fat that's stuck inside your body all right so foods like tomatoes ancho Peppers avocado broccoli bok choy onions garlics green onions red onions these are all foods that you would see in the grocery store tangerines lemons watermelon you know sound familiar anyone listening to this these are actually signs of shown these are metabolizing metabolism activating Foods they trigger your brown fat to start turning on its space heater function to burn down extra Fuel and then what I do is I take people from the produce section into the other sections of the grocery store or including the beverage section including the Forbidden middle aisles remember people used to say don't shop only shop under perimeter stay away from the middle aisles I tell people there are Treasures metabolism acting treasure Foods right in those middle aisles you just need to be able to tell the real gold from the Fool's Gold so that's why I call the whole chapter treasure hunt and then we can go to the seafood section to look for healthy metabolism activating Foods as well the long and short of it is that you can get these Foods in your regular grocery store that means that it's accessible to everyone and many of these foods are pretty inexpensive as well thanks for sharing all that because I do think that it is important to pay attention to the quality of your diet as you are making these small changes in your nutrition in your health because over time which you will find is that you're going to feel better overall you're going to feel better physically you will start to lose I think more weight because just by default I think a lot of these Foods as well tend to have less calories right then do like a lot of the other like processed foods and I just think you'll find that it's not as hard once you get down the path a little bit you'll realize like since you feel better you'll now have like a deeper connection to it you're like man I'm so glad I'm doing this I want to continue to feel like this I'm not going to stop and I know we've spent some time talking about metabolism we've talked about like body fat and brown fat and how to combat all this I want to talk about sleep because I think that you know without us getting a good quality night's sleep I think it's going to be hard to do any of the stuff that we're talking about now right what have you found in research what have you found in your own practice or even in your own experience with regards to habits you know nutrition habits and things we can do on a daily basis to help improve the quality of the sleep like what have you found with that well first of all one of the remarkable things about sleep is how restorative it actually is but sleeping is one of those everyday activities that nobody teaches us how to do right I mean we nobody teaches us really how to eat nobody's just how to sleep right so there's so many factors that can affect our sleep we don't just get tired and conk out you know on the couch oh yeah we can do that you know but the fact of the matter is that sleeping is an there's an art to actually sleeping there's kind of a preparation phase for sleeping and again we live in a modern society with bright lights you know a neon we've got all this Buzzy activity going on anybody's been to Vegas knows you know like that's a town that is set up to keep you from sleeping because it gives you some stimulation the surround sound simulation 24 hours a day okay let me just tell you a couple of things if that can be helpful to actually help get better sleep I think that you know if you don't get good sleep like your whole life is kind of a little bit against you so number one staying Physically Active being Physically Active during the day you can go to the gym you can go for a run but you don't have to just going for a walk for 30 minutes actually will help exercise your brain your circulation your muscles in a way that actually will help you sleep later in a day it sends signals to your body that you it needs to renew itself and sleep is part of renewal so you know something as easy as taking a walk for a half an hour every day after dinner or frankly anytime or split it up actually is a little trick that actually is very useful obviously you don't want to be taking stimulants just before bedtime now I'm somebody who can drink a cup of coffee I can I used to live in Italy during my Gap year so I'll have a cup of a little tiny cup of espresso after dinner doesn't bother me but for a lot of people okay it's an individual for a lot of people you know if you have caffeine at the end of the day after dinner like it's Gonna Make You wired for the rest of the night and then you're not going to get good sleep so I think be really really mindful of what you're putting into your body as you get into the evening time particularly you know what what are you drinking for dinner all right ironically you know even though people say you drink wine or beer you know alcohol makes me sleepy it can make you sleepy but actually when you actually have booze in your system you never actually get good deep sleep the alcohol in your brain actually doesn't allow you to go dive deep so you kind of a little bit near the surface you're Restless you're not you're not getting full renewal sleep and so that's why you know it's important just to recognize that among other reasons you want to control alcohol intake you know cut down or cut out it'll interfere with your sleep now the other thing is actually the volume of food if you eat a lot of food for dinner at night before you go to bed and especially if you eat close to bedtime that insulin is jacked up your body is full on trying to store that energy the fuel that you've just eaten into your cells that's a lot of work man and you know your factory is running full blast storing these things I mean it's kind of like you know if you've ever moved out of an apartment or a house this is like you know like you eat when you overeat or you eat too close to bedtime imagine having an entire crew packing up your house trying to store everything all right that's pretty disruptive and so you can't just brush your teeth and lay down and expect you're gonna crash right away so give yourself more time and don't eat too much don't overload your metabolism it's going to dog you as you get into your night and by the way if you're not getting good quality of sleep you're also your metabolism is not burning the energy optimally either you're cutting into that aspect of trying to elevate your own health now obviously stress again going all the way back to what we were talking about the very beginning stress trauma anger emotional injury anxiety those things also if we don't confront them somehow and deal with them there's lots of different tools that can be used to deal with them if we don't confront that part of it we're also not going to get a good night's sleep all right and by the way when you don't get a good night's sleep something that's not known by a lot of people is that when we're sleeping deeply our brain detoxifies itself but the way that a detoxifies itself is by opening a sewer system so most people don't know that our brains have a sewer system called the glymphatic system literally it's like the sewers of underground sewers of Paris all right they're actually shut during the day nothing really leaks out of your brain your brain wants to hang on to everything that all the input you're giving to it but it accumulates toxins it accumulates free radicals it accumulates toxins from the food that we eat the air that we breathe the inflammation it actually is part that can happen in functioning your brain at night when you get good quality sleep the glymphatic system opens up like the sewers of Paris and it flushes out all those toxins all that waste products all the dead cells all the inflammation gets flushed out of your brain when you don't get good quality of sleep or when you get little sleep disturb sleep the sewer system doesn't fully open and that's why when you don't get a good night's rest the next day you feel foggy you feel a little headachy you feel a little confused muddy toxic brain

Channel: Doug Bopst

Views: 1,205,660

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Id: CxBRGtciF3M

Length: 101min 11sec (6071 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023