New Weight Loss Study Shows How to Keep Weight Off Long-Term

0:00You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. Today, I'm going to share with you groundbreaking new information about weight loss and fat loss. Most people are completely unaware of why sustainable weight loss is so difficult. In fact, it's the primary reason why, according to a meta-analysis published in the journal Obesity Reviews, 85 % of all conventional weight loss attempts fail long-term. You see, when you undertake a conventional plan of diet and exercise, cutting your calories and exercising more, your biology adapts to those changes that you're making.

0:44In fact, one of the things that your biology does to adapt to that decrease in caloric intake is to reduce your metabolic rate or your RMR, your resting metabolic rate. Your biology is designed to do just that. It's great at it. The genes that you have, those pristine genes that got you here, you are a result of your ancestors survival of the fittest. But it is better stated as survival of the fattest because those who were best at gaining weight and keeping that body weight on were the ones who survived and passed on their genes. And so we are evolutionarily adapted to hang on to wait. Your body is not in a hurry to let that go.

1:36Now, that's all fine and dandy in normal circumstances. But in our modern world today, we are not in a condition to where we have feasts and famines. We have 24-7, 367. I'm adding two more extra days on there. I know it's one extra day sometimes, late year. 367 days a year, access to every food, delicious delicacy that you can imagine, right? We're swimming in conditions that are at war with how our genes and our cells have evolved. And so with that being said, these biological adaptations to calorie restriction, this is one of the primary reasons why long-term weight loss is so difficult and most people are not telling you about this and the reason that i'm talking about this specifically is that when you lose weight your body automatically begins to reduce the amount of calories that you're burning specifically while you're not doing anything this is known as your resting metabolic rate Your resting metabolic rate, or RMR, is the number of calories your body burns at rest to perform basic life-sustaining functions like breathing, circulating your blood, moving all of the hormones and neurotransmitters throughout your body and where they need to be.

3:05And it accounts for about 60 % to 75 % of your total daily energy expenditure. And this amount can go down significantly when you lose weight through conventional calorie-restricted dieting. And today, I'm here to share with you a brand new study that has revealed a way that you can potentially defend against this. This fascinating new study was published in the International Journal of Obesity, and it analyzed how something called gravitational loading during conventional calorie-restricted diets can influence your subsequent weight regain. And it was looking at a way to potentially defend against the habitual, the standard, the conventional normal weight regain when somebody loses weight.

4:05So again, we might diet and exercise, we cut our calories and we lose, say, 20 pounds over the course of a few months. And for about 85 % of all people, they regain that weight within about the same amount of time and oftentimes gain back a little bit more. What can be done to defend our bodies against it? And again, the researchers are affirming that this weight regain is so easy to gain back that weight plus a little bit more because your resting metabolic rate goes down when you're cutting calories because your body don't like it when you're cutting back those calories and what it's accustomed to, it's going to defend against it.

4:47And so this study, again, published in the International Journal of Obesity analyzed how something called gravitational loading can be used during your conventional calorie-restricted weight loss program to potentially defend against the subsequent weight regain. So again, I want to be as clear as possible. This is brand new information. To potentially circumvent the drop in resting metabolic rate during calorie restriction, the scientists in the study sought to utilize gravity. So how on earth, literally how on earth did they do this? Well, what the scientists did was they took 18 test subjects and split them into two groups.

5:34Half of the participants were placed on a standard six month calorie restricted diet, while the other half were placed on a standard six month calorie restricted diet with one difference. They were also instructed to wear a weighted vest throughout the study. The weighted vest group was instructed to wear their weight vest for about 10 hours a day, just living life and doing their typical routine. Now, the weight of the vest was increased incrementally over time to match the amount of weight that they lost. So for example, they may have started off with the one pound vest. And as they dieted and lost, we'll say five pounds, five pounds of weight would be added to the vest, making it a six pound vest.

6:22In essence, the weight of the vest was canceling out the weight that was being lost. Well, according to your biology, and we're going to dig in deeper on this. Now, just a note, the weight of the vest didn't get that heavy over time because the maximum was not exceeded to a certain point, but it led to some interesting results. Now, please note, this is very important. There were no other lifestyle changes in either group. The only intervention was a weighted vest to match the amount of weight that they were losing over time. And here's what happened at the end of this initial six-month study period.

7:04At the end of six months, both groups lost a pretty similar amount of weight. The diet-only group lost about 23 pounds on average, while the diet-plus-weighted-vest group lost about 25 pounds on average. And if you're like me, I felt that this two-pound difference was not worth the trouble of wearing a weighted vest. But here's where it gets extra spicy. they followed up with the participants after two years. All right, so two years later, they follow up with the study participants. And as you'd expect, the people in the diet only group regained all of the weight that they lost plus a little bit more.

7:49But something unusual happened with the diet plus weighted vest group. Although they put the weighted vest down a year and a half earlier while they were doing their calorie restriction, and continued on with their life for some remarkable reason, they only regained half of the amount of weight that they lost. The calorie restriction, the diet only group, regained all of their weight that they lost. Wow, the weighted vest plus diet group only regained half of the amount of weight that they lost. Now, my question is, what the falling apple is going on here? How did these scientists utilize gravity to be able to get these results?

8:40What is going on? Well, to put this in simple terms, wearing the weighted vest helped to prevent the participants' resting metabolic rate from dropping super low while they were losing weight because their bodies thought that they still had that weight slash gravitational load on them and it needed to account for that. Without the intelligent use of gravity via the weighted vest, the diet only weight loss group lost weight but simultaneously had a huge drop in their resting metabolic rate by nearly 250 calories a day. Their resting metabolic rate went down by 250 calories a day, regardless of what they were doing.

9:24They weren't burning as many calories as they normally would just by living and doing their normal day-to-day practices. Now, here's the most important point. Just because they stopped dieting and started regaining the weight, this did not mean that their resting metabolic rate was going to go back up again to match that. Their resting metabolic rate stayed low. It's an adaptation. Their body was like, they took away those calories from me. Let me go ahead and drop this down. I'm going to drop it low. Shout out to Uncle Luke. Shout out to Flo Rida. I'm going to drop it low just to insulate against if my person, is devoid of calories, the calories that I'm used to again.

10:12And now here's what was so amazing about this study. While the diet only group, their resting metabolic rate went down by about 250 calories a day, the diet plus weighted vest groups, resting metabolic rate only went down by 16 calories a day. Even though they were losing about the same amount of weight, their resting metabolic rate did not drop. Five, 10 times more what was seen in the calorie-restricted diet only group. Having that weighted vest, having that gravitational load matching their weight loss buffered against the drop in their resting metabolic rate. This is why they only regained half of the amount of weight that the diet only group regained.

11:08Now, I was so fascinated by this new science that I reached out to one of the world's leading authorities on this subject matter. And of all things, he's an award-winning gastroenterologist, and expert in gut health of all things. His name is Dr. Brennan Siegel, and he's a physician, professor of medicine, and research scientist at Cedars-Sinai in UCLA. And having the opportunity to work with Dr. Spiegel and to gain even more insights about the power of utilizing what he refers to as biogravitational medicine has just been profound and really opened my eyes. And here's what he had to say about this incredible new innovation in science and weight loss.

11:54You know, gravity was here long before we were, and it'll be here long after we're gone. So it stands to reason that every part of your body, not just the gut, your bones, your muscles, your tendons, even your brain and your nervous system evolved to manage this fundamental force of physics. That's what we do right now is we're managing gravity. And biology emerged in large part to stand up and stay up in the force of gravity itself. And when you give into gravity, our health suffers. Our relationship to gravity is like a fish to water. The fish is designed to survive and thrive and move through this aqueous buoyant world that it's in.

12:39I don't think it knows it's in water, but that's what it's doing. We are the same way with gravity. We are designed to survive and thrive in a world of gravity. And the better you do it, the more you engage with it, the stronger your body becomes and the easier it is to stand up to it. In the book, I talk about my own experiment. I call it Operation Gravitate, where I decided for eight straight weeks, I was going to weigh myself down like I'm on a bigger planet. And I want to see what it was going to do. So it looked a little crazy. I wore almost like a tactical vest. Some people looked at me a little funny.

13:16It was a weighted vest, 20 pounds. I put 20 pounds on each ankle. And I always use a standing desk at work. Plus I had a balance board. And my author photo in this book is me literally standing in my office looking all goofy. And I did it for eight weeks. Everywhere I went, I did it. Not the balance board part, but the weights. And I like I'm a scientist, so I wanted to measure what was this going to do to my strength. And so I measured my VO2. I measured my ability to walk up a standard flight of stairs. I measured my one mile time running time, a whole bunch of other how many squats I can do.

13:58And what was amazing to me is not only did I get stronger, not only did my VO2 go up just by passively walking around with weights dangling off of me. But I lost weight also. And I wasn't even intending for that to be part of it. And so it turns out that we have this system in our body called the gravitostat. It's like a thermostat for weight. And if you weight your body down, especially quickly, not progressively with through weight gain, the bones feel the tension. And they tell your body like, gravity just got crazy strong. We got to get lighter and metabolic activity goes up and you can lose weight just by having pressure on your body.

14:38Now you got to do it safely. But that was the idea of like now at the end of the day, you felt stronger because I felt the buoyancy when I took off the weights, like, you know, like a, like a baseball player on the on deck circle weighs down their bat. And then when they get to home plate, they take the weight off and they're strong and fast because in relation to where they were before, they're much stronger relatively. Now, I just want to reaffirm how important and profound this new science is. Now, it's not really new. This is the thing. We evolved with these gravitational forces. You know, we can understand some of these dynamics with physics and how our bodies are interacting with these forces, right?

15:20These invisible forces. We, with our human senses, we tend to be very tied to those senses alone. And so we have adapted to those pressures. And as a species, we are very resilient when dealing with the forces of gravity. But what we can do today is intelligently work with and through these forces to train ourselves to be even more resilient and to utilize our incredible insight and innovation to support the changes with our body composition. And Dr. Spiegel is just one of the leading researchers in this field, and specifically looking at this through the lens of gut health and the potential with utilizing biogravitational medicine for supporting and healing all manner of issues with the gut.

16:18the same thing is being studied in regards to the cardiovascular system. If you think about it, it is in many ways, as Dr. Spiegel has shared with me, an anti-gravity system. Our blood is pumping up against these gravitational forces. And this is how we're able to circulate the blood from your pinky toe. Little pinky toe can get down there and back all the way upstream, stream, even in somebody as tall as Wimby. All right? It's so powerful. Our bodies are designed to deal with gravity and we can utilize this to great effect when it comes to changing our body composition and to changing our health.

17:02So let's further this in regards specifically to changing our body composition because there's another new study published in the journal BMC Medicine. that found some surprising results that utilizing gravity can have on fat loss. In this randomized controlled trial, the scientists placed participants with obesity into one of two groups. Group one was instructed to wear a weight vest that was 11 % of their current body weight. This was designated as the quote heavy load group. while group two was instructed to wear a weighted vest that was 1 % of their current body weight designated as the low load group.

17:52Essentially, if a participant was say 200 pounds, their weighted vest would be 22 pounds if they were in the heavy load group and just two pounds if they were in the low load group. There were about 30 participants in each group and they were instructed to wear their weighted vest for eight hours a day for five weeks. Here's what happened at the end of the study period. The scientists found that participants in the heavy weighted vest group had significant reductions in body fat and increases in lean mass compared to the low load group. Specifically, the heavy load group lost about two and a half pounds of actual body fat and gained about one and a half pounds of lean mass compared to the low load group.

18:44Plus, the heavyweight vest group also had a notable reduction in waist circumference compared to the low load group. The heavy load group lost about two and a half centimeters from their waist compared to the low load group. Note, neither group saw significant changes in their body weight in this study. But here's where superficial results can miss the point of radically improved health. The heavy-weighted VES group were the only ones that had reductions in body fat and increases in lean mass, which that change can be seen as a neutralizing effect on the scale short term. But here's something important the researchers noted.

19:35The scientists stated, quote, despite these beneficial changes, sedentary time was higher in the high load group compared to the low load group, while energy expenditure and energy intake remained unchanged, changed unquote. So they weren't necessarily expending more energy than the low load group. They're actually the people with the heavier load. They're just sitting around more because they're just like carrying this extra weight around. I don't want to move as much. And they weren't eating more. So this could lead to what is effectively known as a body recomp, a body recomposition versus a general loss of weight.

20:26All right. So they're not changing much what's happening with their diet. They're not cutting calories versus the other group. Okay. Everybody's kind of maintaining their general diet. And again, if you're not proactively putting these participants onto a calorie restriction, we're not going to see those kinds of results. And so just merely by introducing the heavier weight changed their amount of body fat that they're carrying. It dropped the amount of body fat on their frame and increased the amount of lean mass on their frame. That's profound. Now, here's something else interesting that the researchers found that you got to dig a little bit deeper into the study to note.

21:13the researchers found that participants in the heavy weighted vest group also had significant reductions in markers of fatty liver disease. Their liver function improved dramatically. Fatty liver disease is rampant in our society today. This is referred to as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease because it was generally attributed to people who were drinking too much. All right. They were notably drinking far more than the human body is able to process and metabolize. And our livers are responsible for so much that we just simply do not respect, appreciate, give our liver love for, responsible for alcohol metabolism, for, you know, medication, supplement metabolism.

22:09So much of the things that we're exposed to, just even dealing with a lot of the toxins that we're exposed to, our liver is that primary protection. It's the primary processing center for so much to help to keep us alive, to help us to live, i.e. liver. And our liver also plays a huge role in our metabolism and obviously our overall health. But with these markers improving, notably with liver function via wearing the heavier weighted vest, this is indicative of improved overall metabolic health, which is pointing to long-term fat loss. Now, in a similarly constructed study that was cited in The Lancet, these same researchers saw, again, a significant reduction in body fat for study participants wearing the heavier weighted vest, but they also saw a notable amount of weight loss in this trial too.

23:13The researchers stated, quote, these findings demonstrate that there is a weight loading dependent homeostatic regulation of body weight, the gravidostat, also in humans, unquote, the gravidostat. And this is the revelation for you to take home today. We have these incredible, mind-blowing capacities within the human body to help us to experience homeostasis, that balance. Many of these regulatory control centers are located in the human brain. So one of the major hubs is the hypothalamus. It's sort of the crown jewel in this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. But there is so much going on along that information superhighway, including your cardiovascular function, your gut, your thyroid, your gonadal system, all right?

24:21It's this information superhighway and largely considered a master gland is the hypothalamus. And so whether this is helping our bodies to adapt to temperature or adapting to caloric intake and food cues, whether this is regarding hunger and satiety hormones or whether this is regarding our resting metabolic rate has a lot to do with this very powerful, we'll call it an internal thermostat. But specifically, now we have this revelation of the gravitostat, which is our body's awareness of our mass, the amount of weight that we're carrying, and that weight includes lean mass, it includes fat mass as well, and this awareness of itself and how much gravitational load we need to adapt to in the environment because our body has to adapt to the amount of weight that we are carrying.

25:24And so utilizing a weighted vest or these weight inputs is effectually working as a therapy or a treatment so that the resting metabolic rate doesn't drop too low because our biology is not reacting to this sometimes what can be considered by our biology to be an extreme weight loss, whether that's 10, 15, 20, whatever amount of pounds. Our bodies are really designed to defend against that. And this intervention, being mindful of the gravitostat that we have can be a very powerful implement or solution when we're looking at, yes, utilizing a great diet protocol and reducing our caloric intake, increasing, of course, the quality of our food, but having that caloric reduction, but defending against a dramatic drop in our resting metabolic rate, we can seek the influence of biogravitational medicine.

26:31And so what are some tips here for us to utilize this incredible revelation? Well, of course, in these studies, they're having folks to wear these weighted vests for five, eight, 10 hours a day. And that can be a lot, obviously. And if you're about your fashion as well, like if you're wearing a weighted vest outside your stuff. Or you could be like 50 Cent used to be and just have the vest on over your clothes. All right, you could just, you know, you could have it on ya. But keeping that in mind, we don't necessarily need to go to the extreme of wearing a weighted vest for all of those hours a day.

27:13We can leverage it and leverage our time. We can make an intention to wear it more often, similar to the results of these studies and the construct of these studies. So maybe it's just after you leave the office, you throw on the weighted vest to do your daily stuff, whether that's going to the gym, making dinner, going for a walk, those kinds of things that you would normally do in your day-to-day life, hanging out with your kids, playing chess, or cleaning up, whatever the case might be, whatever that looks like for you. So you can't absolutely wear it more often. But in particular, one of the most valuable ways and what countless people are doing today, because of it's just becoming more socially acceptable to wear the weighted vest or different iterations of that, whether it's a rucksack or ankle weights or whatever the case might be.

28:09But adding more load to your frame to go for a walk, long walks or hikes to utilize these incredible innovations, right, so we can do something like that, be more intentional about doing that and doing that on a consistent basis. So maybe you're getting in your 10 ,000 steps a day. Maybe every day you're taking a 30 to 60 minute walk and you've got your weighted implement on, right? So that's one way to use it without necessarily worrying about wearing a weighted vest for all those hours a day, which you can. You can follow the science with this and do it that way for sure. But one of the ways that I've been utilizing a weighted vest or other implements for years is by utilizing them.

28:58Again, this was before I knew anything about the science, but utilizing them during my workouts. And you'll often find me if I'm doing a workout, we'll just say I'm doing a leg day and I've got the weighted vest on and I'm doing the Bulgarian split squats, right? So I'm doing the one single leg training, got the weighted vest on, but then I'll add in, okay, I've got my kettlebell that I'm using, and maybe I'll add in two kettlebells, but I still got the weighted vest on. After I'm done with that, I'll go do lunges with the weighted vest on. And maybe again, I'm adding more low because I get used, the weighted vest isn't going to be that much for me, the one that I have that I use most often, right?

29:38So maybe it's like a 20 pound weighted vest, but it does add that resistance. And so maybe my workout is an hour and that's an hour that I have that extra weight on my frame doing everything that I'm doing in the gym. And we can utilize this for other stuff as well, whether this is pull-ups and push-ups and all kinds of body weight exercises, squats, things like that. There's so many creative ways that we can utilize a weighted vest and to get more bang for the buck with body weight exercises and also jumping, right? So maybe we are safely and intelligently putting a little bit more load on our frame when we're doing like maybe skipping rope or something like that.

30:19But outside of even utilizing a weighted vest or a weighted implement, what are some other ways that we can utilize biogravitational therapy and have more anti-gravity type exercises? Well, what are we doing when we're jumping? We are going against gravity. We're showing gravity that you can't hold me down. All right, I'm gonna get up here. Now, gravity is gonna bring you back down, but I can go again. You can't hold me down. I got this. And so really all forms of jumping are powerful anti-gravity exercises that are noted, well-established to be very powerful at reducing body fat because there is a evolutionary and metabolic consequence to having a lot of body fat or weight on our frames when trying to jump.

31:17And so it is a swifter road or inroads for our bodies to let that stuff go, to release that cargo so that we can actually jump and jump higher. But of course, you don't go from no hops to, you know, 30 inch platform box jumps. Okay, we don't go, we don't do that. Maybe for you, it's just jumping up on a six inch curb, you know, in the front of your house, right? So it's just starting somewhere. And just, even again, just jumping in place, even if you don't even have to have a jump rope, just jumping in place, just maybe getting a little bit off the ground. And that can express itself There's so many ways to go about this.

32:05I was just training with my youngest son who is, he plays basketball and he's already, he's 14. He's already touching the rim, which is crazy. And, but of course he wants to be dunking soon. So we were doing some jump training and the best way to get good at jumping is to jump. And so we did a variety of different exercises, but one of the things we did were rocket jumps. And so it's a body weight squat. And then it just goes into a hands over your head, both hands up, straight jump up into the sky, right? So, and then landing softly and going right back into it. There's, again, there's so many different exercises.

32:44We could do staggered split squats. So, you know, starting off with our feet together, but then like jumping into a lunge position and then back feet together, you know, jumping back to feet together. So jumping into a lunge position, jump back feet together, right? I can go on and on and on with the different ways that we can do this. Box jumps, obviously. But one of the most undervalued things still to this day is utilizing a mini trampoline, a rebounder to do our jumping. And you don't even have to jump off of the rebounder either. That's another reason it's such a good on-ramp for everybody, regardless of their fitness level.