Hello, Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about the number one absolute easiest way to burn fat. If we want to understand how to burn fat, we need to understand how the body ends up with fat in the first place.
The reason is not that you eat too much fat because fat is just a form of fuel—it's a natural fuel for the body. But so often you hear that you get fat because you eat too many calories and that fat has the most calories, and that's why you get fat when you eat fat. That is not how it works.
It is the excess energy from any type of food, and here's how that works. When your body needs some resources, then you get something called hunger. Then you can store the excess energy from that.
So, if you eat something terribly unhealthy like a 1,000-calorie milkshake, that milkshake is going to be absorbed and work its way through your bloodstream, into the cells, and into storage within two to three hours. If it's 1,000 calories, but during those two to three hours you only use up 200 or 300 calories, then you're going to have to store about 700 to 800 calories. That's what you do with the storage.
So then you would have some extra. Again, milkshake is not your best example. I used that kind of as an extreme just to illustrate something, but it's very practical to store excess energy because then, when you don't have food and you go without, that's called fasting.
Now you can burn that extra energy. It's a constant back and forth: you have hunger, you eat something, you store the excess, and then when you go without, you can burn that. It's a beautiful system, and it's worked for as long as any living thing has existed on the planet.
The reason we store it as fat is that fat is the most effective way to store excess energy. It's where we can store the most energy without weighing hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of pounds and still have enough energy to last us for weeks or even months if we were to go without food. So, if you have a lot of fat on your body, it is simply because you ate too much.
And don't get me wrong, there's no judgment here. I'm not trying to say that you're a glutton or that you have no willpower. There are many, many reasons why you would store extra fat and why you would eat too much, and we're going to go over a lot of those.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that we need to understand why you did that—what sort of circumstances created that behavior. The first thing that we need to understand is that you cannot store fat; you cannot make fat without a hormone called insulin. It's a fat-storing hormone.
If you couldn't make it, you can't get fat. That's what happens with Type 1 diabetics—they can't make insulin. Therefore, even though their blood sugar is through the roof, they do not gain weight and they actually starve to death in some cases.
So we need to understand the difference between having energy in the bloodstream and having energy in the cell. After you eat something, you absorb food and glucose into the bloodstream. This is the bloodstream here, but over here is the cell.
The cell is where all your metabolic activity takes place—or the vast majority. That's where your body manufactures things, that's where you make energy, and so forth. You make tissues and proteins, and they are going to become body parts.
This glucose needs to get into that cell, but it can't do that without insulin. Insulin is the key that opens up that gateway. Like I said, with Type 1 diabetics, they don't have that insulin unless we can inject it.
Before we had insulin to inject, a lot of Type 1 diabetics—or basically all of them—would die. They could make it for a while with certain diets, but they could not survive in the long run without that insulin. They just need to get the energy from the bloodstream into the cell.
If you are a diabetic, if you are insulin resistant, or if you watch some of my videos, you've heard a lot about insulin. It's easy to start thinking that insulin is some evil, some bad substance that we need to fight, but it's not. Insulin is not evil; it's not bad.
It's absolutely necessary for life. We just need to get it in the right balance, and it would never become a problem as long as we live in balance with nature. As long as we do what all the other animals on the planet do—which is they eat food from the planet in its original form—they eat it the way they find it.
The second thing is that they move to get the food. They move a lot; they move all day long. That's the purpose of movement.
That's why animals can move: so that they can go and find food. There are living things that don't move—they're called plants—and they have roots that they can use to extract energy, nutrients, and water from the soil. But if you don't have roots, then you need to be moving.
Unfortunately, we have a lifestyle today where we can get food without moving, and that's a problem. So then we need to understand how that affects us and what we can do instead. So, as long as we eat food from the planet in its original form and we move to get it, now there's a natural regulation—the balance between eating and fasting, the balance between hunger and satiety.
There's a beautiful system in the body that is so sensitive and tells us exactly how much we need to eat and when we're done. But when we start breaking those rules, when we move outside of that natural lifestyle and we start eating unnatural foods, now we bypass this beautiful system. We bypass that regulation, and we change those set points, and we get what's called dysregulation.
This is where we can't tell when we're hungry, we eat for the wrong reasons, we eat too much, and we don't have those natural boundaries. Normally, that balance helps us survive. This whole system is there for survival, but when we bypass it, now we create something that's counterproductive, that acts opposite to that survival, and we could call that counter-survival.
So when we talk about natural and unnatural regulation and natural foods, then what is that compared to? We need to have a reference, and my reference is the early humans—our ancestors. So, I went to the encyclopedia to figure out what that means, and it's Homo sapiens.
That's modern humans. Homo sapiens, the species that includes all modern humans, evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. The reason we compare ourselves to them is that their DNA is 99.
9% or more identical to our DNA, and that's the DNA that codes for all the enzymes that are going to help break down the food. So when you put food in your body, you can't digest that without enzymes. You can't use that food without enzymes.
And if you have the same DNA, then you have the same enzymes, and you're supposed to eat the same type of food that they ate. Those are the systems that developed for millions of years prior to Homo sapiens and that have stayed the same for about 300,000 years. So, what does that mean in terms of tolerating modern food?
Well, any food introduced in the last 300,000 years that they did not have is basically an experiment. We don't know. It's possible that we could tolerate it, that it could even be good for us, but it's not very likely because these changes occur so slowly.
And 300,000 years is thousands of generations, and most of this modern food has been introduced in the last two or three generations. So when we start living differently than what our DNA is asking for, what our DNA is designed for and accustomed to, that's when we get this dysregulation, this lack of balance. There are two main causes for that.
The first one is the timing of food—are we eating more frequently or less often than our ancestors? —and the second is the type of food. So let's talk about the first one.
The natural patterns for how often we should eat is that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and they could go around, and they could pick some things. They could pick some berries, some nuts, and whatever edible plants they could find. But for the most part, the vast majority of their calories probably came from hunting.
That means they did not eat very often. And here, as an example, I've just put in two meals a day and what might happen to their blood sugar. But maybe they just ate once a day, or maybe they grazed a little bit, and then every other day they had a huge meal when they slaughtered a woolly mammoth or something.
We don't know for sure, but one thing is fairly certain: they did not wake up to breakfast, and they did not have snacks throughout the day. They were probably very metabolically healthy, which means that their blood sugar stayed in a very narrow range, probably somewhere between 80 and 120, possibly even a good bit lower—like maybe 65 to 100 or 110 or something. But they didn't have these huge spikes of blood sugar that we have today.
If we compare that with what we do today, I'm going to call that an unnatural pattern. That's when, if we look at the starting point as midnight, we sleep for several hours, but then as soon as we get up, we have breakfast, whether that's at 6:00 or 8:00. For a lot of people, for most people probably, it doesn't pass very many hours.
So maybe a couple of hours later, we have a mid-morning snack before lunch, and then an afternoon snack before dinner, and then an evening snack. So we eat throughout the day, and we're told to eat throughout the day because we believe that blood sugar is what gives us energy and that carbohydrate gives us energy, which is a fallacy. Your body is made to store energy and then to slowly retrieve that energy from a few meals.
When we do that, then we have something called insulin, like I said. So every time that you eat something and your blood sugar goes up, we're going to release a little bit of insulin to bring that foodstuff—the glucose—from the bloodstream into the cell. But if we have very slow and very few blood sugar swings, then we're going to have very few and very slight insulin swings as well.
They're going to be triggered by the food, so they're going to be just a little bit behind the glucose curve. Then, in between the meals, assuming that we had two meals in a day, it's going to go down, but it's not going to go all the way down to the baseline because insulin takes a while to get back. But overall, by eating whole foods and fewer meals, they never leave that average baseline.
They have slight fluctuations, but they still stay metabolically healthy at a very low and balanced amount of insulin. But now, if we look at the modern way of eating, where we have large blood sugar spikes many, many times a day, then the corresponding insulin spikes are going to be very large and very frequent also. The biggest problem here is that, over time, if we have our insulin spikes so frequent, then insulin is never really allowed to drop.
So for most of the day, we have an elevated level of insulin. What's going to happen now is that, over time, insulin baselines are going to go up. This is what creates insulin resistance.
So, instead of having a level of maybe three, now, over time—5, 10, 15 years later—our baseline never goes below maybe 15. This is where we start getting metabolic disease and insulin resistance. Here's why this is so critically important to understand: because high insulin leads to insulin resistance.
Whenever something is really high chronically, your cells start resisting it. Your body adapts by creating insulin resistance. One thing that happens now is you get hungry—and we'll talk a little bit more about that.
Also, high insulin blocks fat burning because insulin is a fat-storing hormone. If there's no way for us to burn fat while insulin is really high, then in order to burn fat, we must break that insulin cycle. Here's what's happened with this dysregulation: if we are insulin sensitive, if we're metabolically healthy, now we can store fat—we can store excess energy.
That happens at a certain amount; there's a certain momentum to do that. Then there's an equal momentum in the other direction for how much our bodies have a tendency to burn this fat again. So, it's like a revolving door—that's the way it's supposed to happen.
We eat, we store some, and then we burn it, and we're back to square one. But if we drive insulin up over time and we become insulin resistant, now this tendency to store is many, many times higher, and our tendency to burn is almost non-existent. Because, remember, we cannot burn fat when insulin levels are high.
High levels of insulin lock in the fat. It pushes this equation—this equilibrium—in one direction only. So, it's not about eating fewer calories per se.
It's about eating fewer things that stimulate insulin. So we drop carbs because fat has a very, very slight insulin response. If you can see that tiny, tiny area—you might have to zoom in.
Because if we compare by numbers, then fat—the insulin response of fat—is in single digits. With protein, it's in double digits, and with carbohydrates, it's in triple digits. So if carbohydrates are 100, protein is about 10, 15, 20.
Fat is single digits, like two or three or four. The second way to reduce insulin is to eat fewer meals—reduce the number of meals. Because every time you eat, you spike insulin.
So if you eat fewer meals, then there's fewer spikes. And if you eat your meals in a shorter period of time—if you only eat one meal a day—then there's 24 hours to the next one. If you eat two meals and you put them in a six- to eight-hour period, now there are longer periods of no food.
That means during that time, we allow insulin to drop. That simply means that your body knows how to use fat for energy, for fuel. So there's basically two types of fuel.
Your body can use protein, but there are so many mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening. So, as long as there's carbs and fat available, your body is going to burn that for fuel. Your body is very, very adaptive.
So, simply put, if you reduce one—like carbs—then your body will tend to increase the dependence on others. You're more likely to burn fat if you reduce carbs. But there's a couple of points here because it doesn't work exactly the same way the other way.
For example, if you ate 50% of your calories from carbs and 50% of your calories from fat, would that mean that you were balanced? That you were 50/50 on carb versus fat adaptation? That your body was equally likely to use both types of fuel?
And the answer is absolutely not. The reason is that carbs raise blood sugar. Carbohydrates become blood glucose, and therefore, they must be processed first.
Your body is not in a hurry to get rid of the fat. If you eat 50/50 and you have half the calories in the bloodstream as fat and half as glucose, your body is in no hurry to get rid of the fat. But it has to get rid of the glucose very, very quickly because it's so important to keep that glucose in a very narrow range.
High glucose and very low glucose are extremely dangerous. The second reason is that the carbohydrates you eat not only have to be processed first, but they also stimulate insulin. And insulin blocks fat burning.
Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. So, because carbs increase insulin, now carbs are also going to block the usage of fat. And here's another key that most people don't realize: because high insulin levels block fat burning, that means you can't retrieve those calories—that energy—from fat as readily.
This is going to make you very hungry because if you store all that fat but your body can't get to it, now you have to eat more. So the solution, therefore, would be to reduce the amount of carbohydrate, which will reduce the amount of insulin. This is how you break that vicious cycle.
With less insulin, now you can access the fat, and you can start returning to balance. This is what's called fat adaptation, and it simply means that if you don't eat so many carbs all the time that have to be processed first, now your body returns, the metabolic pathways upregulate, and the enzymes and pathways to use the fat kick in. That lower insulin allows you to access the fat.
So fat-adapted simply means that your body knows how to use fat for fuel again. The reason this works so well is that once you're fat-adapted, and you can use fat, and you keep the carbohydrates low enough for this to happen, now you have long-lasting fuel. Carbohydrates bounce up and down every couple of hours; fat doesn’t do that.
And if you have a reserve of fat on the body, now you can eat some of your food off the plate, and you can eat the rest of the food, in terms of energy, from the body. Because it doesn't fluctuate all the time, it gives you stable energy, and you therefore have less hunger. If your energy is stable, you don't need to run and look for food to stimulate your blood sugar and raise your blood sugar all the time.
As a result, obviously, now you can go longer between meals, and this helps you eat less and burn fat. It helps you eat less because now you have a resource on your body that can provide energy. So the number one absolute easiest way to burn fat is simply to work with your body—to allow the body to do what it's supposed to do and to provide the resources that it's supposed to have.
That simply means to get healthy, and that's the beauty of this. It's not a short-term fix, it's not a magic pill, and it's not something that's going to rebound three weeks later when you get tired of it. It means that you get healthy by providing the natural conditions, circumstances, and resources that your body is designed to have by natural law.
I often call that the Triad of Health, and we illustrate that with a triangle. It simply means eat better, which is the chemical aspect—the nutritional aspect. It means move better, which is the structural or mechanical aspect, meaning we need movement.
And then it means think better—that's the emotional or the stress reduction aspect of it. So then, what is the best diet to accomplish all of this? It's not a single diet, it's not a label, it's not a program.
It is any type of food—whole food—that provides nutrients, that gives us the resources we need: the building blocks and the energy, the essential amino acids, the essential fatty acids, the vitamins, and the minerals. But at the same time, it doesn't cause a bunch of blood sugar swings to upset our metabolic balance. It's something that satisfies you, something that gets you full with less amount of food than you have been eating if you want to lose weight, and something that normalizes the regulation that we talked about and therefore prevents overeating.
I mentioned this a number of times, and obviously, we're talking about real food—whole food—the way it came off the planet, with minimal processing. Now, if we compare to our ancestors, should it be ketogenic? Should it be so low that our body generates ketones?
Well, not necessarily. But for sure, our ancestors were in a state of ketosis for long periods during the year. During the winter, they probably didn't have many plant foods unless they lived on the equator.
So humans, for sure, have been keto-adapted for a large part of our existence. But it doesn't mean that you have to be ketogenic all the time. Some of the time would be okay.
A little less strict than a ketogenic diet would be a low-carb, high-fat diet. This is typically where you eat probably less than 50, maybe less than 30 grams of net carbohydrates per day. You eat moderate protein, and the rest of it is fat.
This works for most people because this creates a lot of satiety, especially for people who have become insulin resistant and already sort of moved out of that balanced state. But it's not a one-size-fits-all because we respond differently to different things. We get satiated and full from different things.
So don't feel like you have to just try one thing and that's it, because some people respond better to a moderate amount of carbs. They might eat 70, 80, up to 100 grams of carbs, and that might work better for them. But the majority, I believe—from what I get reported back, testimonials, etc.
—low-carb, high-fat seems to work the best for most. But if that doesn't seem to work for you, try different things. One thing we know for sure that our ancestors did not have is they did not get 65% of their calories from carbohydrates.
That means you eat 250, 300, 400 grams of carbohydrates, and that means you have to eat typically a lot of grain and a lot of processed foods. Our ancestors had none of that. Now, I know some of you are thinking that you thought this video was the number one absolute easiest way, and you thought that you were going to get something super easy, and you're thinking, "This doesn't sound all that easy.
That seems like a lot of work for a long time. I have to change a lot of things. " Well, that's just the thing.
Whatever you've been doing, if it's not working, you have to change it. There is no magic bullet; there is no quick fix. Because there is something called natural law.
It's like gravity—it's there whether you want it or not. Our bodies respond to natural law. There are principles and mechanisms built in that have been ingrained for hundreds of thousands of years.
And if we start breaking those rules, then there are consequences. But it's not as complicated as people think. It's just step by step, learning to eat the foods that work and doing simple things in your lifestyle that align more with what your body wants.
And it does not mean that you have to eat sawdust and boring things. You can have meat, fish, poultry, wild game, etc. You can have leafy greens.
You can have non-starchy vegetables. You can have tubers, and you can have a lot of these. You can have nuts and seeds, and you can cook these things with butter and olive oil.
You do not have to be afraid of fat either. What you need to start moving away from, though, are the unnatural foods—or non-foods, as I like to call them—because they're not food. We talk about them as food; we call it fast food, but it isn't food.
It's destroyed garbage, with white flour, sugar, and seed oils in it. They have nothing that your body needs, but they upset your metabolic health. They upset your equilibrium and cause overeating.
Virtually all processed foods and packaged foods are going to be based primarily on white flour, sugar, and seed oils. So now, if we compare to our ancestors, what our DNA is designed for, 100% of what they ate came from this group because there was nothing else. They didn't even have the option.
So that's how I like to think about it a lot of times: that this stuff doesn't exist to me because our ancestors didn't have it. They couldn't miss it. They couldn't have a longing for something that never existed.
But today, as much as 60 to 70% of our calories come from this category that has nothing that the body needs. And then there's a couple of things in a category I call questionable. What I've described up here is basically a paleo diet, a caveman diet, the ancestral diet, and I think that's a great starting point.
But I'm not a stickler. I don't think that you have to be a purist and that there is no possibility of any other food being okay for us. So, legumes and dairy are a couple of things that some people need to stay away from, but for others, it could be okay.
Legumes are things like peas, black beans, and other forms of beans as well. Our ancestors didn't have them, but there are cultures who have done extremely well with them for hundreds of years. In terms of microbiome health and different types of fiber, there are beans that provide a tremendous benefit as long as you can tolerate them.
If you don't have the biome to tolerate them, then you need to make very slow changes. So, I think beans can be okay. Now, remember though, that they're not extremely high or very low carb—they're kind of in between.
So if you need to keep your carbs very, very low, then you want to keep beans to a minimum also. And then the other thing is dairy because that's only been around for about 10,000 years, and our ancestors didn't have it. But we have done well with it for thousands of years in some areas of the world.
Scandinavians, for example, tend to do relatively well, whereas Asians tend to do quite poorly. But there's a difference also between different types of dairy. So if you eat it, I would strongly recommend that you eat it either raw or fermented.
The problem for most people comes from the pasteurized and low-fat versions. The skim milk that has been pasteurized creates the biggest amount of problems. But if you eat yogurt or kefir, or if you eat raw milk, then those are generally very well tolerated.
I want to compare a couple more things to our ancestors. One thing, of course, is that they moved a lot. They moved constantly throughout the day.
They took a lot of steps, which was aerobic activity, meaning very low intensity. You're not huffing and puffing, and you are burning primarily fat with that aerobic activity. A lot of people ask how many steps should you take.
There's a lot of step counters that people have on their phones and on their watches, and some people aim for 10,000—that's a number we hear a lot. I think that's a great number if you can get to it. It's a whole lot better than 500 steps.
But our ancestors and most animals that move to get their food probably get in the neighborhood of 30,000 steps a day. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to do that, but just realize our ancestors moved a lot. And then they also performed something called very brief periods of high-intensity interval training.
Of course, they didn't call it that—that's a modern concept. But if you're a hunter, then there's going to be brief periods where you do an intense burst of movement, like a sprint running after something, or maybe running away from something. So that's part of our normal movement pattern.
But we also need to understand that high intensity is very stressful, but it's a very short-term stress that is a good contrast for the body. When we experience high stress and then we get to relax after, that's very healthy because it helps the body stay sharp, and it helps the body adapt. In contrast, we have what's called chronic stress.
We don't have these high ups and downs; we have a little bit of stress all the time. That does several things to the body. For one thing, it tends to break us down in so many ways.
It raises blood sugar, it breaks down immunity, it breaks down tissues. But one more thing that it does is it reduces the amount of hydrochloric acid, so our digestive systems don't work as well when we have chronic stress. So, one thing that you can try to compensate is called apple cider vinegar.
It's a very, very nice tool; it's incredibly inexpensive. You take a tablespoon or two every day. You could take it in the morning, you can take it before a meal, and that's going to help replace that acidity in your stomach that is reduced by that chronic stress.
Another thing that you might want to try is some kind of stress management, like breathing exercises or meditation—whatever you want to call it. It's just a way of getting away from that chronic stress, of breaking that pattern where your thoughts won't stop, and you always feel like you're under pressure. Another thing you have probably noticed is that as long as you stay active, as long as you do something—if you're out hiking or if you're super busy with something that you're focused on—then you tend to not be so hungry.
But if you're just kind of going through the motions and you're sitting at your desk, or you're sitting around, then you tend to develop cravings. You tend to want to eat something just to have something to do. And once we get used to it, humans have a tendency to always want to sip on something or bite on something or snack on something.
So, a lot of that is just a habit from being bored. The more active you can stay, the better. But if you can't do that and you feel this need to eat, now you can do things like coffee and tea because that still gives you something to sip on, but it's not going to change your metabolism.
It's not going to change your insulin or your blood sugar. And if you feel like you really need something, you can try about a teaspoon of MCT oil—medium-chain triglycerides—because they're a source of fast energy, but they don't raise blood sugar. It's a short-chain fat that gets absorbed and metabolized differently, so it can give you that little energy burst without really messing with anything.
And one more thing to understand is about electrolytes and insulin resistance. Your ancestors were never insulin resistant; it wasn't possible with their lifestyle. But if you have been insulin resistant and you start correcting it, now your insulin levels are going to drop.
When insulin was too high, then you tended to reabsorb too much sodium and electrolytes, and that's where we get the high blood pressure with insulin resistance. But once you start correcting it and insulin drops, now you're going to lose some electrolytes that were sort of artificially maintained in the body. So for a period of time, you're going to be losing electrolytes.
In the long run, it's a good thing because your blood pressure is going to go down. But before the body has a chance to find that balance again, you might be missing some electrolytes, and you might have some symptoms like lightheadedness, nausea, fatigue, or brain fog. So during the time that you're fixing this problem, you probably want to supplement with some electrolytes.
Especially if you do a longer fast, like over 24 hours, now you want to double up on those electrolytes because you're not getting any through the food, and your insulin is dropping even faster because you're fasting. I created a product called euLyte. It's an electrolyte powder specifically for that purpose, to help support fasting.
But it's a good product for everyday usage as well. I'll put a link down below if you want to check it out. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one.
And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.
