The Science To Burning Body Fat Explained | Shawn Stevenson EP 383

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

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0:50Is there a way you think I'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good? There's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon, is epigenetics and things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having an understanding and an association with what fat actually is. Most folks have no idea. Fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. A couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're going to go even deeper.

1:24So the first type is subcutaneous fat. This is a fat that's just below your skin. If you think about like fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly, but that's the stuff you can pinch. The other type of fat is visceral fat. It's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity, right? So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs. You know, if you have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in your core. This is the most dangerous type of fat.

1:58This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core, everything, which there's so much around there. Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything. This is the stuff, it's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. So these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay, so your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy.

2:37Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it though. And it can be a little bit clingy, you know, so you have to give the right messages. And that's part of the issue. We tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones, producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about.

3:12It's called intramuscular fat. This type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle, they have this dichotomy. Like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, that's your intramuscular fat. Now that can get out of hand too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles. So there's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community.

3:49So these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now here's what's really amazing. And a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue or brown fat. The reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of ourselves, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy.

4:24And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. We're taught these diet paradigms, like how does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? They actually track the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated in our culture we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it it's sweating yeah like we're out there we're at the gym we're sweating it out but in actuality about 84 of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing so fat about burns in the body and then it goes what into your lungs it's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out it's it's an eliminatory organ you You know, we don't think about that.

5:06We tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract, our bladders, eliminatory organs, your lungs. And so you breathe about 84 % of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens while you're sleeping at night. How much fat do we burn through our lungs? It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoots. It just comes through the mouth. Through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. You know, somewhere around the ballpark of about 15%, 16 % to 14 % sweat, urine, tears. All of these things are eliminating products.

5:43So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to, quote, kill fat or burn fat. But that's not really how it works, actually. Your fat cells are storage containers. When you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells. You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So what we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel. Right. All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell or they usher them out when it's time to leave.

6:16So one of its hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater. All right. And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing. Your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin. And the other one, its brother is glucagon. When you think of insulin, what do you think of though? Eating sugar. Yeah. Insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar, right? Yeah. And most folks think of diabetes too. It's like tied into that lexicon.

6:50Insulin is so important for our survival. We need it. Yes. You absolutely have to have insulin. in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin, you can die. Your cells won't get energy. Now, here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy and to encourage all those enzymes to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem. It's storing too much fat. Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly.

7:25That's where you get insulin resistance. So you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy. But glucagon cannot do its job unless his brother sits down somewhere and stops. Yes. So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job? That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want it to stop. We just want it to be efficient. Efficient. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin. Carbohydrates in general. Breads, pastas, right? Yeah.

7:58But protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree for sure. And even fat in a kind of backdoor way does drive insulin function too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing, but we do know that in our culture, you know, on average folks are eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know, So that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this overactivity of insulin to the point that we have insulin resistance. The life expectancy increases every year, it seems like. We're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

8:37That's the misnomer, though. We're not necessarily living longer. We're dying longer. We're getting sick and being able to stay alive. Yes. The goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable. The goal is to live as long as you can, healthy, flexible, abundant, not with chronic pain, and then die quickly. We don't just want lifespan. We want healthspan. Beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's turning into a fat-storing type of fat or a fat-burning type of fat.

9:16and the browning of this fat, coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 % to 11 % increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now, there's a U-shaped curve of benefits, right? Some is good. Once we get to a certain place, we can mess ourselves up. And also, we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with? Is it coffee? Are you consuming coffee with... Donuts and crap. coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals. That's not good. And even the coffee itself. Are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut.

10:04So there's a big conversation there. We dive into all these pieces to see like, there's so many wonderful things that we have access to, but in our culture, we've been a little bit led astray it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad it's been utilized by humans for centuries but it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make all the difference in the quantity probably and yeah yeah and so just going back to your original question when we're targeting that you know the belly fat specifically and this is something that is not talked about enough it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning.

10:40And this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this. It's a measurement of energy in food, just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same same distance however calories are different completely ignore when you're talking about a measurement of energy it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function it's going to be different every day the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body because our hormones are changing our bodies are changing our timelines are changing what we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50.

11:31Exactly. Let alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And I'm sick of it, man. Wow. Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them and they're not getting these very fundamental principles.

11:50Thank 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 Podcast 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.

12:46Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

12:59Thank you.