The #1 Health Risk You’re Ignoring | Dr. Jason Fung EP 942

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:49One of the things which is still very prevalent is this idea of sort of calories and calories out. It's actually one of the most destructive ideas in weight loss because it's so deceptively sort of simple. You look at most academic centers, a lot of the guidelines are like, you know, watch your calories, watch your calories, watch your calories. And I think it's a disastrous sort of idea because the thing about calories is that calories is a measure of food energy, right? That's how much energy is released when you put a piece of food into a sort of measuring device called a bomb calorimeter. And it's like, OK, this cheesecake has 200 calories because when you burn it, you get this amount of heat generated.

1:37That's how you measure that. It's really simplistic and it's actually not very helpful because you can have two foods. Think about two foods. You have one which is cookies, which is 100 calories or 200 calories. and you have say, sand, which is 200 calories. So equal amounts of calories. The minute you eat the cookies, you release the hormone insulin, okay? And the insulin is a hormone that tells your body what to do with those calories. The insulin tells your body to store those calories. It moves it right into the fat stores. The whole thing is that if all that energy moves directly into your fat store, so these highly refined carbohydrates, sugar goes way up, insulin goes way up.

2:20When insulin goes way up, it is literally the thing that is telling your body, put those calories into storage and you store the calories in your body fat. That's all it is. Body fat's just a store of calories. So imagine you take the 200 calories of cookies. Now the 200 calories of salmon doesn't raise insulin. So you take the 200 calories and your body just burns it. That's going to make a huge difference in terms of obesity because in one case, you're just storing the whole damn thing. The other one, you're using it. you've got energy. You're generating body heat. You're feeling good. The other one, you took the 200 calories, you shoved it all into body fat.

2:58Your body's like, oh, I have no energy to use. So you're feeling a little bit, oh, I have no energy. I'm a little tired and I'm a little hungry. So let me go eat something. So it wasn't the calories. It wasn't the number of calories. It was the response to the calories, which is related to the hormones that are released. So the strange part is that what we're saying is that food contains not just the food energy, but it also contains instructions as to what your body is supposed to do with those calories. And both of them are very, very important. Whereas the calories people say, well, it's just the number of calories.

3:33Well, once you put it in your mouth, you can measure the difference in hormones between the two foods. And you have to pretend that that's completely irrelevant. If you're told to eat the refined carbs and sugar, which is what we're told, then you're setting yourself up to a situation where insulin is going to go way up. And that insulin is going to tell your body to store fat. That's literally its job. You told your body to do that with your choice of food. So I don't see why that is considered irrelevant. So not just the amount of calories, but you have to also look at the hormonal response because our body is completely dependent on hormones to tell us what to do.

4:17The other thing that insulin does, of course, it tells you that you need to put energy into storage. It's only when insulin falls that you can pull the energy back out. So what we say technically is insulin inhibits lipolysis. That is, if insulin is high, you can't burn fat because your instructions are to store fat. So if you want to burn fat, but you're keeping your insulin levels high with the choice of foods, then it's not going to work. Because insulin is high, you're not going to be able to move the energy from the fat back out. it? I think you really have to look at the sort of very low carbohydrate foods because of course they're going to provide you the energy.

5:00So things like, you know, salmon, of course, fatty fish is very good. Eggs are very good. Avocados are, you know, very good. If you want to do carbs, then things like beans are very good because of all the fiber and stuff like they're unrefined. So then they have other things that will work. If you take salmon and eggs, for example, you're going to get that energy the calories from that which is energy but insulin is not going to go up so your body's not going to say okay well let's put it into storage it's just going to burn it right you're going to stay in that sort of fat burning state and you're going to be able to use those calories because that's what you've told your body so you're allowing your body to still access the body fat for energy and it's going to keep you full because again it's going to release hormones like peptide yy like full acystokinin better keep you full as opposed to the white bread and jam right the problem is people like to eat those the five carbs are cheap so they taste good they're cheap they're donuts right that sets up a situation and there's a lot of people who say well it's just calories right so you can eat ice cream for dinner right i mean if you told your grandmother that she'd say you're stupid right like you can't eat ice cream for dinner, even if they're the same number of calories.

6:14Because again, one of them is going to go straight into your stores, which is body fat, leave you hungry. The other one, you're going to feel full. You're going to feel good. You're going to have energy to do whatever you need to do. So your grandmother was totally right. You can't just say, oh, both are 800 calories. So instead of eating my dinner, I'm going to have an ice cream sundae, right? Because that is literally what people have been telling people. Like it's all about the calories, right? It's like, no, that's like the worst advice you could give. It's about the quality of calories, it sounds like.

6:48It's about the quality. It's about the choices because certain calories are more fattening than other calories. That's all. Like some foods are more fattening than other foods. And that doesn't seem to be that controversial a statement. But by the time you get to the universities and stuff, people are like, oh, it's all calories. It's all calories. It was like, why don't you kind of live in the real world where people are actually trying to do this way? Because that advice is horribly wrong.

7:24Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:22Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the daily motivation show.

8:37Thank you.