The BIGGEST Weight Loss Scam

okay guys so it's close to the new year a lot of people want to lose weight and we here at healthy gamer are here to help you do that so i'm dr k um one of the co-founders of healthy gamer and today i want to talk to you guys about some of the scams of the weight loss industry and frankly why it's hard to lose weight and at healthy gamer you know our main goal is to teach people how stuff works right so my hope is that by explaining a little bit about how weight loss works some of the science behind it and also a little bit about how the weight loss industry works we can empower you guys to actually achieve some of your goals and live sort of a healthier happier life okay so we're gonna jump in with talking a little bit about the diet industry so i want you guys to just think about this for a second so the diet industry has been growing the wellness industry is growing they're now multi-billion dollar industries we have a lot of advances in medical science you know a lot of people are studying um weight loss and obesity and all these kinds of things we have all these qualified professionals like nutritionists endocrinologists medical doctors personal trainers there's so many people out there that are their job is to help you lose weight and we have a whole industry that's spending billions of dollars on helping you lose weight and what's happening across the world people are getting fatter right so obesity is actually on the rise and it blows my mind that this is actually happening right now that despite all of the advances in medical science despite this gigantic industry people overall are still getting more and more obese and more and more unhealthy and so the question is like why is that right so what's going on here and can we understand a little bit about the science of weight loss which may explain why actually going on crash diets doesn't actually help you lose weight it actually potentially makes it harder for you to lose weight and we'll dig into the science behind that so let's start by talking a little bit about crash diets right so you guys may have heard of things like you know 20 30 years ago it was the south beach diet then people were doing this thing when i was in college called the master cleanse which is when you drink like a bunch of like lemonade with cayenne pepper in it for like five days and nowadays everyone's like low carb paleo like everyone's got these kind of new diets atkins diet whatever and the the goal of these diets is to kind of help you lose weight in sort of a drastic manner and we see this a lot where people like oh i need to get in shape for the summer i need to get in shape for a wedding so like i want to lose 10 pounds in 15 days and i heard about this person that did it they posted it all over their social media and instagram so that's what i'm gonna do too and so the diet industry loves to sell you these kinds of of weight loss programs right they say stick with this diet and you'll lose this amount of weight in this amount of time but the reason that all of the the diet industry exists is because none of those really work and what do i mean by that i mean if we just think about that for a second if these solutions actually worked then the industry wouldn't be there right everyone would be in shape and so if the industry is actually growing and growing and growing it doesn't mean that their their methods are effective it actually means the exact opposite that their methods i know this sounds really bizarre but the more that people invest in the diet industry the more obese we're getting so is there actually a scientific reason behind that and i know it sounds absolutely crazy but there actually is and there's actually really strong data that going on crash diets actually causes you to get fatter and the main scientific theory that's behind this is something called set point theory and what setpoint theory basically says is that your body has an ideal weight that it homeostatically tries to maintain so your your body actually has an ideal weight that it is going to try to maintain and if you try to lose weight it'll actually fight against you and if you go over your set weight it'll actually start to lose weight and i know it sounds really weird but let's just think about this for a second so let's say you and your friend may not be the same weight even though you guys eat roughly the same stuff right most human beings eat around 2000 calories a day and it's not like people who weigh 300 pounds eat twice as many calories as people who weigh 150 pounds and so if we look at a population that's roughly eating the same amount of calories how do we explain some people being way heavier in some people being way lighter well it turns out that set point theory perfectly explains that each of these people all of us have this internal calculator that tells us how much we should weigh and so that's the idea behind set point theory so the first study that i want to talk to you guys a little bit about is from the journal of nutrition and it basically explains the concept of of set points which is sort of this intrinsic biological capacity to stay at a particular weight so let's try to look at what happens when people actually go on a crash diet so when we lose a lot of weight our internal body is like oh my god we're losing a bunch of weight we better compensate for all this weight loss because otherwise we're going to end up in starvation and so one of the things that it does is it changes something called your basic metabolic rate it changes the way that you expend energy and it tries to conserve that energy so basically in a gaming analogy what this means is that like we're losing a bunch of weight and then our body is saying oh my god weight loss is op so let's nerf weight loss and let's change the way that our body holds on to energy and i know this sounds absolutely crazy but that's exactly what happens so there's a great study from the new england journal of medicine which is one of the most prestigious and well-respected journals in the world that basically talks a little bit about how when you lose weight your body compensates by slowing down its metabolism and so basically what it says is that this weight loss is too drastic let's conserve our calories let's hold on to weight as much as possible and the other thing that's really really scary about this is that there's another study in the american journal of nutrition that suggests that this compensatory mechanism that causes your body to hold on to calories when you go through a drastic period of weight loss actually lasts even if you gain the weight back so what that means is that if you go through a drastic period of weight loss your body thinks you're starving and it starts to actually make changes to your metabolism to cause you to hold on to calories in a more desperate way it tries to compensate and even if you start to gain weight again those changes to your body those periods of starvation will actually remain and you'll actually start to be potentially even go above your set point and set a new set point that is actually higher than your old weight and so what this really means it sounds absolutely crazy is that if you do drastic weight loss your body will try to keep you conserving more calories and you could actually wind up at a higher weight than you used to and that's actually what setpoint theory tells us so let's think about that for just a second so why does our body do that and it turns out that it's actually evolutionary so if we go through a period of starvation you know the organisms that were able to be more calorie efficient after those periods of starvation were the ones that were more likely to survive future periods of starvation so our body basically learns from this period of of enforced starvation and says we better hold on to weight as quickly as possible or as severely as possible and so the problem with this is that if we kind of switch back to the diet industry for a second you know the diet industry is really interesting because what it does is it helps us lose weight for a brief period of time and then what inevitably happens is we gain all the weight back right and then something very very important happens is that we don't blame our physiology or the diet industry for that what we do is we say oh my god i lack discipline i'm lazy i lost the weight and i just needed to stick with the diet if only i had stuck with the diet then i would have kept the weight off whereas in reality what's going on is sure you may have deviated from the diet because they're not really sustainable but then we we kind of walk out of that scenario thinking that the diet worked but we didn't and that's not really what's going on actually what's going on is that the crash diet that you went on is actually changing your metabolism to gain weight afterwards so it's kind of like it's a huge scam and a huge point of misunderstanding um and so another thing just about a set point theory like so a lot of people when they diet they diet with the idea that okay so i'm eating 2 000 calories a day right now i'm not gaining weight i'm not losing weight so if i go on a crash diet and i lose 15 pounds and i go back to a like my regular diet i'll stay at that new lower weight i won't gain weight i won't lose weight but that doesn't really work because exactly what happens is setpoint theory sort of kicks in and says oh my god we've lost too much weight so even if you eat the same amount that you're eating right now you'll actually gain weight and may even end up at a higher weight than you started at which is what's really scary so you can go on a crash diet nowadays they're kind of like you these no carb diets um you can even kind of like do all this kind of stuff and you can sort of end up with the idea that discipline is the problem oh you should have stuck with it but the real truth is that if you go on these crash diets and if you do this this really drastic stuff then kind of no matter what happens you're going to sort of gain your weight back so what ends up happening is that you start to view yourself as a failure rather than the diet as a failure and when you gain it back it becomes this abusive cycle of like losing weight and gaining weight and each time you know you think oh the diet worked but i didn't work so then you go back to the diet industry you buy more books you go on another crash diet as you go on your second crash diet your set point actually increases further and as you start to introduce even a healthy normal diet you notice that the weight actually goes back to where you used to be which is what most people's experience with the diet industry is so then we kind of get to the quite the main question which is okay what do we do about it right so how do we lose weight if crash diets don't work if the diet industry doesn't work how is it possible to actually lose weight and it turns out there are a bunch of solutions and this is kind of what we're going to get into there are a lot of things that you can do once you understand what your physiology is to actually lead to sustained weight loss right so we don't want to institute something where our body says oh my god this weight loss is too op nerf this this is op like let's correct it what we want to do is sustained weight loss solutions through sustained action and they're actually really good ways to do that really good ways to understand your physiology that lead to constant and relatively easily sustainable changes to your weight so don't crash diet because it's actually going to make it harder to lose weight and there's a great there's a great paper from american psychologists that sort of digs into why like losing weight will actually cause you to binge more so here are just a couple of things that you can do so the first thing to understand is that sustained weight loss is gained through sustained action you need to change your diet on a daily basis it can't be a temporary thing the good news is that you may not even need to change it much there are small sustainable things that you can do that will actually change your weight in a relatively efficient way there are all kinds of interesting solutions that we can do based on our understanding of science and a good example of this is flax seeds so flax seeds actually increase our leptin sensitivity and so people may ask okay what is leptin so in our body we have two hormones leptin and ghrelin leptin is the hormone that tells us hey we're feeling full and ghrelin is the hormone that says hey we're hungry we need to eat more so what we find in people who are overweight is that they are actually resistant to leptin and so what that means is that there's a hormone that is telling you hey we've had enough food but you are resistant to that signal so you're not really receiving that message and flax seeds have actually been shown to increase leptin sensitivity so what that means is that if you're eating a particular meal and you add let's say like a teaspoon of flax seeds on top literally that meal's capacity to make you feel full goes up with that teaspoon of flax seeds so a lot of simple things that you can do that will sort of play with that hormonal balance and allow you to actually feel more full and your body will start to tell you hey we actually don't need to eat as much because you know your leptin is actually functioning as normal other things that we can do are actually increased sun exposure there's actually a great uh paper that sort of explores this is a from the medical journal medical hypotheses um that explores how obesity and vitamin d deficiency are actually linked and there's some good evidence behind this but some of it is also theoretical but literally this can be as simple as exposing yourself to sunlight and so sun exposure may actually help lead to weight loss through correcting vitamin d mechanisms and if that sounds really biz bizarre just think for a second about you know how your body functions and there's a really simple um sort of causation between sunlight exposure and weight gain and it's simply that people in northern climates are less exposed to sunlight people in northern climates tend to have heavier winters and in the winter time you have less access to food so evolutionarily what our body does is says oh if there's not a whole lot of sunlight we need to store calories so you can do something as simple as just getting some sunlight which actually produces vitamin d and is more likely to make you lose weight so these are just a couple of the solutions that we're introducing you guys with today um and there are actually a lot of other solutions that will empower you to get control of your weight and sort of lead to a sustained weight loss and so we don't want i really don't want you all to blame yourself for your weight loss just understand how your physiology works and then start to institute changes that will lead to sort of a sustained and healthy weight and that's really what we're here about so i hope that was helpful thanks a lot and good luck in the new year from dr k and healthy gamer you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 163,050

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist, weight loss, weight loss motivation

Id: Ufn_VvEXtRo

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020