If You're Only Focused on Fat Loss, You're Missing This | Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

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0:30Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What if I told you, I don't think we're over fat? In fact, we are under muscled. And the reality is, as you pointed out, there's been this fixation on fat, adiposity, the diseases related to obesity. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, insulin resistance, all of these that go along with... With obesity, right? Exactly. Well, what if obesity is actually just a symptom, which in fact it is? And what if I told you that these diseases are actually diseases of skeletal muscle first and that obesity begins in skeletal muscle? Insulin resistance begins in skeletal muscle first. What is skeletal muscle?

1:27Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. Well, I mean, just even from a general perspective, it's the things that you, it's the muscles you have voluntary control over. Okay. Right? So it's your biceps or your triceps or your quads. Anything you can flex is that. Okay. So the disease starts there or there's a weakness first there? Well, if you think about what skeletal muscle is, skeletal muscle is your metabolic. currency. It's number one, for most people, it makes up 40 % of their body weight. For you, maybe 45. For me, maybe 35. You're about a foot taller than me. Exactly. And when we think about skeletal muscle, we must understand that really, again, as your metabolic sink, what does it do?

2:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It is the site for glucose disposal. 80 % or more, it is the site of glucose disposal. Your muscle is a site where glucose can be run through. Yes. So glucose is a really interesting molecule in the fact that it is toxic, but we need it. And we have to get rid of it. It can't just hang around. And if we don't get rid of it, it's stored in the fat. Well, if we don't get rid of it, the definition is diabetes. But we have to move glucose out of the bloodstream and into tissue. The main side of that is skeletal muscle. one if you think about skeletal muscle as a suitcase if it is over packed with glucose and fatty acids everything spills back out into the bloodstream okay right and what we must understand is that healthy muscle will act as the body's sink you flush it out well yeah i mean you got to clog it yeah so if we are overeating and under exercising we are having a negative impact on skeletal muscle, which is really the focal point of metabolism from my perspective, from a muscle centric perspective.

3:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Well, what does that mean practically? Well, that means practically that the healthier your skeletal muscle is, the better your glucose regulation. Everybody cares about blood sugar regulation, right? Sure. Care about insulin resistance and insulin resistance is, you know, requiring and being able to, you actually need more insulin to be able to put that glucose, which is toxic, back into the cell. Insulin resistance is just needing more. Well, when we think about skeletal muscle, it's the site for glucose disposal. It's also the site where fatty acids are metabolized, which people don't often think about that.

3:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Skeletal muscle is your body armor. Should you get injured, should you have or need or be in a compromised state, skeletal muscle is what's going to allow for your survivability. Your recovery too. Your recovery. If you've got more muscle, you should be able to recover faster. Is that what you're saying? Yes. Not only that, but your survivability for every injury, for nearly every injury, every disease is going to be based on you will survive better the more muscle mass you have. Is it important to have more muscle or is it the quality of the muscle? Or is it... Yeah. Can you have less muscle and be more efficient with the muscle?

4:42Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yes. So let's break this down. To just pump your muscles to creatine and just swallow them up? Or is it flexibility of the muscle? What is it? All of these points are important. And I love what you said. Is it really about the amount of muscle or is it about the health of the muscle? And I would say we know that obese individuals have more muscle because they are required to carry around more weight. Obese individuals have more muscle. But you mentioned something that was really smart, healthy muscle. Something that happens that we know that affects skeletal muscle is if your skeletal muscle is infiltrated with extra substrates, it turns marble.

5:23Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's like marbleized, like a marbleized steak. So you can have muscle, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's healthy. And it's called lipotoxicity. So there's some like fat strains throughout the muscle. You don't want that. No. You want to be like the filet. You want to be like the filet. Of your muscle. But it becomes very interesting when we think about, is it the amount of muscle? Well, you know, and I've thought about this a lot, and, you know, I'm actually working on my first book. And one of the things in clinical practice that I see, and of course, every physician will tell you, is that they go in and we look at body fat percentage or BMI, which arguably, you know, is kind of...

6:04Is that the wrong metric? Is that the wrong metric we should be looking at?

6:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's body mass index. It's the wrong metrics. What should we be looking at? Well, we should be looking at skeletal muscle. And there's ways in which we're beginning to look at it, and that's appendicular lean mass or skeletal mass index. But they're not perfect, and it's not the standard of care. The standard of care is always focused on the problem. It's what is your percent body fat? In fact, we don't even have great ways in which we measure skeletal muscle that are able to reach everybody. For example, the best way to do it would be an MRI or CT or even an ultrasound to look at the tissue quality.

6:45That's not feasible. Really?

6:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So we've made it very easy to look at fat tissue and we've become obsessed with fat, which arguably so there's a reason it's homogeneous. meaning, you know, typically a lot of your fat would look the same as mine, whereas skeletal muscle is different.

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