Vegan Health - CALORIE DENSITY & METABOLISM - Stop counting calories!

out of all the basic concepts related to maintaining a health promoting diet and lifestyle there is one core concept that is the basis for all of it if you understand calorie density you will be well on your way to eliminating type-2 diabetes from your life heart disease high blood pressure high cholesterol and all without the aid of any prescription medication I'm going to explain it to you right now everybody this is Dylan the biggest challenge for people that are trying to wrap their heads around getting off of a standard American diet and transitioning to a health promoting diet and lifestyle is simply understanding what it is you need to do what do you eat how do I actually go about doing this there's so much information out there frankly bad information about what you should and should not eat it is really really challenging to know who's telling the truth I am telling you the truth let's talk about calorie density some of you out there watching that already understand this concept may be thinking oh it's more than just calories its metabolism - yes it is a little bit about metabolism - and we're gonna talk about that later in this video but first I want to introduce this core concept of calorie density the the way that you get to a weight that you want to be at if you're not there already and then you maintain it for the rest of your life it's simply understanding what basic food you can eat and the rules are so simple I promise you you're gonna fully understand this concept by the end of the video many of you watching may come from a background of having to count calories you're used to calorie restriction you're used to sizing out certain portions of food on your plate you're used to adding up points are weighing food to understand how many calories you're getting so that you can maintain your diet around this specific calorie mark this is not sustainable these practices will not work out for you in the long run nobody has time to be dealing with this at every meal for the rest of their lives if you are just doing it for 30 days and you're gonna do this and that's the way the dieting worked then maybe you would be able to do a 30-day diet where you're counting calories restricting weighing food portioning food maybe you can do that but when I use the word diet I'm not talking about a thing that you do for a little while to get things back in order so that you can go into your next period of gorging on standard American fare it doesn't work the diet word has been completely ruined by all of this industry diet means the things you eat every day forever when you have a certain diet it's your diet it's the way that you actually eat always so we have to make it so that your diet that you actually eat always is a good one to wear you never have to count calories you never have to portion you never have to think of food actually at all because you've created this system and I don't want to make it sound too complex by calling it this system that you have to create because really it's it's not that complex at all it's the simplest way of eating you could ever imagine much simpler than the way that we're used to the most important thing that has to happen for you to feel satisfied when you're eating is that you're full and you feel satiated you feel like you don't desire putting another bite of food in your mouth because you've had enough if you can do that and get the right enough amount of calories at the same time without thinking about it then you've solved the entire problem for the rest of your life and you never have to deal with this again but most people haven't they don't understand calorie density they don't understand that a handful of this food is a lot more calories than a handful of this food and if you understand that you'll know that you want to focus more on the calories the calories I lose food the one where if you take the handful and put it in your mouth it's less calories than this other thing so that is the core concept that I want to explain today most people that are eating too when they're full and satiated at their meals are eating around 3 or 4 pounds of food every single day so if we're all eating the same amount of food every day why do we all look different why are why we have an obesity problem now that we didn't have before the problem is that three or four pounds of food today does not have the same amount of calories in it that it used to have say 30 or whatever years ago in one of my previous vegan health videos I talked about calories just falling out of the sky how we're just living in a world where we have access to the most calorie rich foods the animal products the oils all of the processed refined carbohydrates and and packaged foods and junk food vegan or not that we could ever have dreamed of in our history and we need to recreate our environment and focus on Whole Foods different types of foods than these ones that are most readily available to us in packaged ready-to-eat form so the idea here is to get back to a world where we're still gonna eat the same three to four pounds of food every day we have to in order to feel physically satisfied with the amount of food that we're eating so we're not going to try to reduce that three or four pounds it's impossible you'll never feel well doing that emotionally or physically ever in any sane sustainable fashion you've got to continue to eat your 3 to 4 pounds of food every day so now how can we do that where you're getting a more reasonable amount of calories so that you're not gaining weight and if you're currently overweight you'll be able to normalize your weight back down to your goal weight it's simple you just have to focus on these basic core calorie densities off of this one simple calorie density chart that I'll show you I'm not gonna quote science I'm not going to quote studies and show you a bunch of graphs I just have one simple chart and once you understand like three or four numbers we're talking if you were gonna memorize this chart it'd be like four flashcards okay four flashcards that's it this is the easiest vocabulary test you've ever taken all we got to do is understand some basic calorie densities for some basic food groups than those food groups are the ones we focus on entirely we can eat three to four pounds of them every day like we normally would of food and we're happy and we're getting just the right amount of calories and life is good the chart I'm showing you here is a calorie density chart from nutrition expert Jeff Novick and all we've got here is a list of foods along the bottom and their calorie densities are these bars okay if we go all the way to the left we see that vegetables such as anything you would ever put on a salad greens fresh non starchy vegetables are around 100 calories per pound that means that if you ate your normal three to four pounds of bulk per day on just one hundred calorie per pound vegetables you'd be eating 300 to 400 calories in a day obviously that is completely unsustainable no one is going to eat three to 400 calories of vegetables a day and feel satisfied you need to be eating more food than that but that gives you a sense of the most calorie dilute foods available to you and we're gonna talk about food sequencing and why this number is important for the way that you can fill up on calorie dilute foods remember calorie dilute foods are just the opposite of calorie dense foods the next part on this graph is fruit fruit is 300 calories and a pound of fruit which means if I have a pound of lettuce in this hand and a pound of fruit in this hand there are 100 calories in this hand and 300 in this hand you can see how although that will take up a similar amount of space in your belly that one's going to provide you with significantly less calories a third as many calories with the veggies than the fruit the next two columns in the chart are our unprocessed complex carbohydrates and our legumes I like to kind of bunch them together and just call them starches this would include potatoes rice beans legumes whole grains everything like that these are all going to be between 400 and 600 calories per pound pretty significant amount of calorie increase compared to fruit and veggies right to be more specific potatoes are around 400 calories per pound whole grains are around 500 calories per pound the legumes the beans are around 600 calories per pound but they're all right right around 4 to 600 I treat them all as if they're in the same category and all of these that I've mentioned so far the main foods that I always eating every single day without fail if you eat all these foods you see that vertical green arrow on the chart here that's pointing down between 500 and 600 the purpose of that arrow is to say that our average amount of calories per pound that we're eating is about 550 calories per pound this makes sense because we're eating between 3 and 4 pounds of food per day and if we average out around 550 calories per pound then we're right around safe 1,800 to 2,000 calories per day and we're eating the exact perfect amount of calories to maintain our metabolism our well-being our daily operation let's check out these other foods on the chart that are eaten generally in excess as part of a standard American diet that would include animal products about thousand calories per pound I said this before in past videos but yes we did eat some animal products as part of our natural history during the times when we were hunter-gatherers but the animal products were very scarce there was not a successful hunt every day and the animal products that we did eat were very very lean they were not like the animal products that we're eating today obviously you know I am not advocating for a diet with any animal products at all but I'm telling you that the way that they used to be eaten is nothing like they're eaten now the calorie density of animal products is actually one of the smallest issues associated with the animal products that ignores the fact that the animal protein is cancer-causing that the animal products are very toxic from environmental toxins feed toxins antibiotics that are injected hormones etc there are a million reasons why animal products should not be eaten we're only focusing on the calorie density issue so that's animal products let's go on now you have 1400 calories per pound are the processed carbs bread is around 14 or 1500 calories per pound all of the processed cookies snacks flowers all these things they've been dried they've been refined the water's been taken out there much more calorie dense than eating the whole starches that I mentioned are between four and six hundred calories per pound so you should avoid these junk food and other processed garbage is 2300 calories per pound you can see that if you eat a handful of junk food and a handful of beans you're gonna be getting way more calories without doing anything differently you're still chewing you're still swallowing but you're eating inadvertently way way more calories and it's hard because your taste buds really like this at first until you get used to this other thing the beans and the fruit and the veg ever here so you've got to avoid all of the junk food nuts and seeds are an interesting one because although they are really high calorie density 2,800 calories per pound including the nuts seeds nut butters like peanut butter almond butter tahini all of that those are around 2,800 calories per pound now nuts art can be a perfectly healthy thing to eat in your diet unless they cause you to go off the rails and trigger you into eating way too much nuts and junk food etc but nuts as dr. Fuhrman would say are a very important part of the daily diet but you have to make sure that you're eating them in very small 1 or 2 ounce amounts per day can you do that do you have the ability to maintain a 1 or 2 ounces of nuts diet in a day if you can do that then great by all means have a little bit you're only having a couple ounces of nuts at 2,800 calories for a whole pound that's 16 ounces you're not eating 16 ounces you're gonna eat a little bit added to your hundred calories a pound veg your 300 calories a pound fruit and your four to six hundred calorie or pound starches so it's still going to even out to five hundred and fifty calories per pound for your daily intake is that making sense so even though that's are really high you're only eating such a small amount of them that you're still gonna maintain your normal average however if you're a person who can't maintain just a small amount of nuts and you're eating so much that it's causing your 550 calorie Everage to go up to say seven or 800 calories per pound average daily then you've got a problem and you've got to eliminate nuts altogether at least until you get things under control and start to regain control of your basic taste buds desires tendencies etc the most calorie dense food that you can possibly eat is straight oil this would include olive oil you know every oil all of the oils ever would be around 4,000 calories per pound you've got to avoid them at all costs they can take your delicious meal of whole starches 4 to 600 calories per pound and ruin the whole thing by making them closer to 800 calories per pound if you put a tablespoon or two of olive oil all over your healthy food you're gonna be adding around 250 calories to that meal that will totally throw off your average and it will be almost impossible to maintain your weight as you want it to be so you've got to completely eliminate oil it is total and utter poison there's just no exceptions to it again if you can maintain a lifestyle where you're having oil so infrequently like I do once in a while that your average daily calorie intake is still around 550 calories per pound and you can maintain this control then you're probably okay you can have oil once in a while on these very rare occasions but if it's causing you to eat it every day it's causing you to not allow your taste buds to fully adjust to the good food that you should be eating then you've got to eliminate it altogether the same as you might have to do with nuts the same as you definitely need to do with animal products and processed carbs and refined junk sugar for example is 1800 calories per pound that's not on this chart just call it somewhere between the processed carbs and the junk food is sugar and you should avoid it or else eat it in extremely small amounts under control and if you don't have control you have to be totally honest with yourself and say hey sugars causing me to not maintain my weight because it's adding a richness to the food I'm overeating the food I'm tending towards all of the processed junk food and therefore I need to eliminate it altogether that is why the safest thing to do especially for the first 30 days that you're transitioning from a standard American diet to a health promoting diet and lifestyle would be to focus on the first three bars of this graph the veggies at 100 calories per pound the fruit at 300 calories per pound and then your starches the four to 600 calories per pound if you eat according to this chart and you focus on these first three or four bars I guess the the unprocessed carbs and the legumes are split into two so the force first four bars of this chart you're gonna be in really good shape you're gonna be eating exactly the way that you should be you're going to feel full right when you should feel full because that's how we evolved be we we evolved eating this basic diet that averaged out to around 550 calories per pound and sure enough we felt full when we got it two or three meals a day whatever it is and so that is all there is to do you don't have to portion anything out you don't have to count calories I encourage you not to because counting calories can create some really toxic habits that you're gonna have a hard time kicking if you've really obsessed on this for a long time and a lot of people that have been struggling with their weight for an extended period of time or really hung up on counting calories if you want to do it you can it's not hurting you but it is causing you to continue to perform this habit that you don't need to be doing you don't you could free up time you can free your mind of having to fixate on calories and just cruise so if you eliminate all of these other bad foods from your environment and you do what I said in that previous video where I said you recreate your environment eliminate all the junk from your house from your pantry from your fridge from your freezer and just focus on these first four bars of the chart you're going to definitely start to lose weight and now some of you may start to lose weight and then you're gonna plateau and you're gonna ask yourself why am i plateauing this dude told me that all I have to do is eat these foods and everything's good well there's two things that could be going on one is about metabolism and one is about dishonesty and with the dishonesty means you may be sneaking in more non-compliant foods than you're willing to allow yourself to believe you may be putting sriracha all over your food sriracha look at this zero calories per serving that's fantastic clearly it's very calorie dilute and you can be eating this as much as you want right no this has salt in it do I eat sriracha yes I do but I want you to be aware of the fact that there are 75 milligrams of sodium in one teaspoon of sriracha what does that mean to you it means that it's gonna make your food taste a lot better a lot richer and it could cause you to eat more than your three to four pounds a day so even if the calories are around 550 calories per pound on average if you're adding hot sauce to your food then it's giving it a little bit of an artificial improvement of that flavor which is going to result in you eating more than your average of three to four pounds of food per day I know it does it for me when I add salt to food I fill up way more than I would if I didn't add salt to the food because I feel satiated sooner I feel a little bit bored of the food sooner I feel full sooner I'm good I'm done but if I'm adding salt and those flavors start to really your taste buds or like keep it going this is this is much richer let's go beyond the three to four pounds per day and keep it up so just because a hot sauce has no calories does not mean that it's not going to affect the amount of calories that you're eating in a whole day of food eating so before I talk about metabolism and I'm getting there I want to show tell you how to calculate calorie density it's really really simple first of all you shouldn't really be eating this as peanut butter you shouldn't really be eating any packaged food but if you're going to you can at least understand the calorie density and notice the salt too so let's talk about peanut butter for example peanut butter it says here a serving size is two tablespoons and in parentheses it says 32 grams how are we and then a cut in the calories is 200 calories so for 32 grams it's 200 calories that is not in calories per pound so we don't know what the hell to do with that when we're going to compare it to the things in this chart so we need to convert it so grab your calculator and let's go through this we know there are 454 grams in a pound of food okay so we need to take the full pound of food 454 grams and divide it by a serving size of this which is 32 that means that there are fourteen point two servings of peanut butter in one pound of peanut butter so now we need to multiply the fourteen point two times the number of calories 200 in one serving and we see that peanut butter is 2837 calories per pound which is obviously extremely high now the fact that this peanut butter has 40 milligrams of sodium in a two tablespoon serving is only going to make it that much harder to eat a small amount of peanut butter can be very much a trigger trouble food for a lot of people let's put that aside I often get asked about calories in chocolate or cacao spoiler alert they are the same calorie density let's go through it we've got on the back here a 28 grams serving so we're gonna take our 454 grams which is a pound divided by the 28 grams to get the number of servings in a pound 16-point to multiply that by a hundred and ten calories in a serving that is 1783 calories per pound so you can see that even the plainest most unadulterated chocolate or cacao powder in existence is still 1,800 calories per pound you may be thinking oh who cares you eat so little of it it's just a tablespoon in my oak clusters or whatever well here's the thing if the tablespoon of chocolate and euro clusters is making you eat way more oak clusters because it's adding that richness to it then you can see where I'm going with this it's gonna cause you to overeat it's gonna cause you to eat more than your daily average of 3 to 4 pounds of food in a day that is the problem with adding calorie dense 1 or 2 tablespoons of items to your main to your normal food so yeah you're not going to get fat just because of a little bit of chocolate unless you're like really super overdoing it and I know some people do have chocolate problems where they are super duper overdoing it but for the most part it's adding richness to the food it's taking your food that are in those first 4 bars of our calorie density chart and it's making them much richer so that is why you have to be careful adding the calorie rich items to the calorie dilute items even if it's just sparingly in small amounts be super careful so let's talk a little bit more about Plateau before we get into the metabolism stuff for the most part if your metabolism is working properly the way that it should be you're going to reach a weight and you're going to cruise at that weight and it's going to be based on the food that you're eating so if you reach a plateau that is a higher weight than what you want to be at then it probably means that you need to change the food a little bit more and get even more strict you need to focus on even more calorie dilute foods this may mean that you need to completely eliminate nuts and you need to take on chef AJ's approach which is absolutely no oh for overt fats at all which would include nuts avocado soy coconut olives all of those foods would be completely eliminated for chef AJ in order to be as strict as you can on the calorie density chart and thus maintain a very low calorie density for your 3 or 4 pounds of food average per day so when you hit plateaus the first thing you want to do is start to get more and more strict and see what's going to cause you to break through that Plateau another way to sort of bust through one of these plateaus would be to sequence your meals differently if you're starting your meal with the 4 to 600 calories per pound starches then you're not getting some of those calorie dilute items so one way to get less calories and the same bulk of food in a meal would be to make sure that you're starting every single meal that you eat with the lowest calorie density the non starchy vegetables start every meal with a salad or steamed veggies steamed for broccoli cauliflower or what have you and that's going to take up a bunch of more space before you get on to the calorie bulk of the meal the starches you'll take up more space with these low calorie density foods so that when you move on to the starches there's gonna be less space available for them before you start to feel totally full and satisfied so this will result in you eating less calories in that meal without ever having to count calories or do anything crazy to get there if you're liking this video so far please hit the like button and subscribe it really really helps me on youtube let's keep going now the other thing is the metabolism if you are at your goal weight your metabolism is probably operating at its normal the amount of calories that you burn every day during your daily operation is going to be just where it should be maybe it's around 2,000 calories a day let's say that means that if you eat 2,000 calories you're going to maintain your weight if you're eating a little bit less than the 2,000 calories that you're burning every day you're going to lose more weight you've got to eat according to your metabolism now if you are overweight or obese and you're adopting these principles all of a sudden you may find that you plateau all of a sudden way before you should be and this could be because your metabolism is compensating for the dramatic change that it's just undergone it's very normal for your metabolism to kind of be like what's up why are the calories suddenly dropping significantly I better reduce the amount of calories that I'm burning each day so that we don't starve this is a very normal process that your body may go through but the bottom line is the longer you maintain the healthy diet the more your metabolisms gonna be like okay this is normal let's go back to normal operation get back to burning calories and you're gonna normalize now if you want to jumpstart your metabolism there are a few different things that you can do because you might see that it's not just about cutting the calories via focusing on the calorie density chart you may need to allow your metabolism to catch back up restart reboost whatever the hell you want to call it so here are those couple of things you could do one you could do intermittent fasting meaning you could narrow your food window I'm not gonna get too deep into intermittent fasting in this video let's say that you narrow your food window to an eight hour period every day and you're strict on it and you only eat your three to four pounds of food same amount of food but you're only eating it in an eight hour period this is going to have the effect of when you get up in the morning you're going to have burned through a lot of your glycogen stores so you're going to get into sort of a fat-burning mode like a mild form of ketosis if you want to call it that where you're starting to burn a little bit of fat before you start your first meal of the day for a lot of people that are trying to burn fat this may be a good time to exercise is in the when your carbs are all depleted and you want to burn through a little bit of fat before you have your first meal this is one way to sort of jumpstart get through that Plateau maybe go on a 30-minute morning walk before you have your first meal and and you've gone us a whole 16 hour period where you haven't eaten because you went eight hours where you were eating and then you have sixteen hours where you aren't eating it doesn't have to be it could be ten hours and fourteen you can try it like that first you could do twelve and twelve to start with if you've never given it any attention before and you can build your way up to an intermittent fasting schedule that may work best for you that is one way to start to burn a little bit of extra fat as you kind of normalize and get to your goal weight the other would be a prolonged water-only fast you can check out my interview with dr. Goldhamer about water fasting you can check out my seven-day synopsis of my water only fasting experience that I did at true north but the idea here is that when you go into a ketosis state not like by eating a ketogenic diet but actually a prolonged water-only fast you are going to jumpstart your metabolism into burning fat call it whatever you want it's going to bust you through some of the hang-ups that our metabolism related as you switch your diet over this is something that needs to be done supervised it's a more challenging thing to do so anyway that is the second way to get through these metabolism and bust through the plateau issues that you may experience that is all there is the calorie density that you need to understand this is the core concept if you understand this and understand how to implement it in your life you're going to get to your goal weight you don't need to be focusing on the bioavailability of every single nutrient and every single food that you're eating these are the things that if you're new to this are just going to be too taxing it's going to feel like you're having to focus on too many things that you're like reading a science book at every meal and you don't need to be doing that as you progress and these concepts that I've explained today in this video become really really simple and you never have to think about it you can start to look at some of these other things because that's kind of what happens when you get healthy you get really interested and checking out these other things and you can dig deeper but you don't need to be doing this all at once you we can't afford for people to get intimidated and then run away from this whole thing because they think there are a million videos from nutritionfacts.org that I've got to be implementing in every single meal every day or what have you you just focus on calorie density getting the basic food right and then progress over time into these other things don't focus on all these minut things all at once it's too much to handle focus on calorie density creating a system a pattern that you can follow recreating that old environment that we used to live in back in the day and eat that way get all the junk out of your house because nobody has the willpower to push up against these all-powerful calorie dense rich foods it's too hard you've got to eliminate them from your world so that you can focus just on those first four bars of the graph the veggies the fruits the legumes the grains the potatoes and you're good to go that is pretty much every calorie density if there is anything I haven't covered adequately or you would like me to reiterate please ask me we're gonna be doing the live show Thursday so you can catch me there with your questions otherwise leave a comment below and I'll talk about it in other videos this is like the most important concept period so I will go over it as many ways as you want me to gladly if you like to see more of my vegan health series videos click the playlist right here and if you'd like a low calorie density SOS free cheese sauce no added salt oil or sugar order some on the website through this link here you can pour it all over your beans and pìkô potatoes broccoli cauliflower anything I'll see you on the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Well Your World

Views: 185,743

Keywords: vegan health, calorie density, calorie counting, weight loss, how to lose weight, calorie restriction

Id: -8WQnTNHbww

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018