Weight Loss (My Best Tip and 3 Hacks) | Jason Fung

today i'm going to share with you my best weight loss tip something that the people in the 1970s used to their advantage to almost effortlessly stay slim and it's coming right up the obesity epidemic in north america really took hold about 1977. prior to that people were not really watching what they ate and yet they were able to stay effortlessly slim what was their big secret i grew up in the 1970s and when i think back on what i ate it probably wasn't foods that people would consider slimming today i ate a sandwich almost every single day for lunch which was two slabs of white bread with processed meat in the middle i'd have a juice box and maybe some cookies that my mom packed and it wasn't just me from grade 1 until grade 13 pretty well everybody in my class would brown bag their lunch and eat it in the cafeteria nobody ate kale nobody ate quinoa nobody ate whole wheat pasta whole wheat bread was around but very few people ate it not many people were watching their fats or their carbs there's the diet industry was relatively small the aerobics boom hadn't taken place so people were not exercising that much either so looking at that you might expect that there was a lot of problems with weight but there wasn't in fact people seemed to stay slim almost no matter what they ate there was no government programs telling you what to eat your mom told you what to eat and that was a bit about it so why was there so little obesity well here's the secret they didn't eat all the time there's two important parts about weight loss one is that the foods that they were eating and the second thing is how often you're eating and those two things go hand in hand if you are eating all these foods that are not particularly healthy as judged by today's standards the white bread and the sandwiches and the juice box and the cookies well if you're not eating all the time well it may not be that bad overall if you're to eat it constantly then that can be a problem and there's been changes since the 1970s in both what we're eating and how often we're eating the foods that we eat are now much more processed they tend to be a lot less natural than they used to be we tend to eat out a lot more than we used to be and those are things that we talk about in our diet but we also have to talk about how often we're eating because there's been a big change since the 1970s back then people ate three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner and if you tried to eat snacks well nobody really thought it was a good idea your mom would not have snacks available if you wanted an after dinner snack she would say hey you should eat more at dinner time there was no eating at your table there's no eating at the computer there's no eating in front of the tv none of that it was breakfast lunch dinner that's it in the 70s people ate about three times a day by the 2000s people were eating close to six times a day so that's going to make a big difference both of those are very important and while i'm not trying to say that the foods we're eating are not important we have to look at how often we're eating as well and that was the secret to the success in the 1970s but how to do this practically i have three hacks that you can use to stop yourself from eating all the time number one keep it boring if you limit the variety of foods that you eat you're naturally going to eat less if you are eating the same foods over and over and over again in my case the sandwich every day i'm going to be a lot less prone to eating too much of this there's two big reasons why we eat one is that we're hungry but that's not the only reason we eat we also eat because we enjoy it food is delicious so therefore you can eat for hunger or you can eat for pleasure if you are eating the same foods again and again and again the pleasure starts to diminish and it doesn't matter what food it is if you're eating it every day it soon becomes routine and it soon becomes boring then you're going to eat until you're no longer hungry but you're not going to eat more because you simply don't want to that's often the secret with a lot of restrictive diets if you have a diet for example that cuts out meat you're going to naturally limit the food variety if you have a diet that cuts out vegetables and is meat only you're going to keep it boring if you have a diet that is very low in carbs you're going to eat a less variety of foods if you are eating low fat you're going to have low variety of foods and so on and so on so the secret to success for a lot of diets is simply that they limit the food variety and you can do this yourself once you understand the power of limiting food variety it's often also important to eat natural foods because there is a natural limit to how often we can eat them without getting bored whereas processed foods are often designed to be addictive so adding a lot of msg or adding a lot of salt or additives or sugars keeps the foods interesting to us even when we would naturally get bored of them number two fat fasting this is a hack to try and get control of your appetite for people who really struggle with hunger or with cravings and the idea is to allow a period of very high fat foods by doing this this allows the body to transition into burning fat for fuel which then makes it easy when you're trying to not eat or fast for longer periods of time where you're going to try and rely on your stores of body fat because whether the body is burning dietary fat or body fat it's the same process if you're coming off a period of high carbs and high sugar like the holidays for example or you're having extreme stress extreme hunger extreme cravings you can allow your period of fat fasting before getting into a period of restricted eating the idea is to stave off the hunger by only eating very high fat foods no dairy or nuts because it's very easy to overeat them but things like eggs bacon salmon sardines olive oil avocado butter and any of the leafy greens teas coffees and bone broths are also allowed even if you wind up eating a lot and very often in the first few days it'll gradually taper off and then you'll be able to control that hunger more easily and this is one hack that we found successful in our clinic at the fastingmethod.com to transition people into a more orderly form of eating number three exercise exercise is generally not that effective as a weight loss tool because the number of calories that you burn during exercise generally is very small compared to how many we eat in a day however there are huge benefits to exercise and one of them is to take your mind off of food think about a time that you're playing basketball or playing soccer or going for a bicycle ride or going for a run in the middle of that exercise have you ever thought wow i'm really hungry probably not because if you're in the middle of high exertion you're in the middle of a tennis game your focus is on playing the game the muscles are demanding the blood it's the blood is not there for your digestive system so you're not thinking about food you're not hungry and you're shutting down your digestive system in order to shunt the blood over to the working muscles so it's a great way if you have trouble keeping your mind off of the food to do some form of exercise the other thing that's often very good about exercise is if you can get out into nature if you're going for a long hike or a long bicycle ride a walk along the river or something like that that is a natural stress relief and it's how we evolve to handle stress so picking up a hobby picking up some kind of exercise or game is a great way to stop eating all the time it really gives you something else to do that is going to take that hunger away because you're focused and your blood supply is going away to your muscles instead of to your stomach and you're not thinking about the hunger in summary my best tip to staying thin like it's 1970 don't eat all the time it's not so easy in today's world where food is all around us there's fast food joints everywhere we go and even in our workplaces but there's hacks you can use one you can try exercising number two you can try fat fasting three keep it boring limit the number of foods that you eat and you will naturally reduce the number of times that you eat them if you enjoyed this maybe share it with somebody you might help them they might learn something too and if you could do me a favor and hit that like button down below thanks for watching i'll see you next week

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 817,876

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Id: JzUmK2zkOvM

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021