#1 Absolute Best Way To FIX Your METABOLISM

Hello, Hellchampions. Today, we're going to talk about the number one absolute best way to fix your metabolism. And that is to start understanding that your body is guided by an intelligence. There's an intelligence reciting in your body that is driving everything, that is taking care of business. And our best hope to fixing things like metabolism, which is pretty complex, is to try to start thinking like the body. And that is my goal today, is to get us going in that direction. And the first thing to understand is that food is about survival. Every living thing on the planet is trying to get some resources, is trying to ingest some resources to help that species, that bacterium, that plant, that animal survive. And there are always going to be times when there is more, and there's going to be times when there is less. And if we have the ability to adapt, and when there is a little bit more, we can store some things, we can store some resources, then we have a certain buffer. There's a certain safety that we can rely on when there are times when there is not so much. And that the body is guided by a principle called a set point, that there is a certain range of weight. There's a pretty narrow band of weight where the body feels comfortable, where it feels safe. It feels that at this level it has enough resources. And if we start dropping below that level, then the body will do whatever it can to get back there. And if we overeat, then the body will spend more energy to try to get back to that set point. And if there's a longer period of time where we have less food, then we will tend to lose weight. We will tend to lose the buffer of stored resources that we have. And then we will have a threatened survival. Our body will feel like it's not safe. It has to start changing something in order to secure survival. And we're not just talking about losing weight, about expanding more energy, because you can do that by forcing your body to exercise a whole lot. We're talking about the basal metabolic rate, which is how much energy is your body using at rest before it's doing anything else. This is also called RMR, resting metabolic rate. And sometimes they try to estimate that by giving you a very, very rough idea. You multiply your weight in pounds by 10, and then you get your basal metabolic rate. And if you measure your weight in kilos, then you multiply by 22 approximately. But again, that's an average. And it's probably if your basal metabolic rate is working reasonably well, realize that there are huge, huge variations in this. And if you're watching this video, chances are that your basal metabolic rate is not all that normal. And it could be plus, minus 50 percent fluctuations in this, depending on what's happened to you. But just to get an idea, if you weigh 180 pounds, we multiply that by 10, that would put your basal metabolic rate at 1800. And then we add to that the activity that you do during the day. And that could be everything, not just exercise. It's walking around and moving and fidgeting and shivering and all of that other stuff. If you do another 700 calories, that would put you at about 2500. But then we really need to start understanding what happens when we try to change those numbers. And how is feast and famine different than starvation? How does the body think differently about this? How does it perceive that differently? So what we need to know is anytime that you reduce the intake more than the time between two normal meals for you, then your body will reduce the expenditure. Anytime the body is out of food, then it will cut back on the metabolism, on the metabolic rate, just a little bit. But when does this reduction become a problem? When does it become permanent? If you eat and it comes right back up, that's not a problem. But it's a problem if it goes so long that it starts shutting down permanently long term. And here's where we need to understand that the body is super intelligent. There's a reason why it's doing this. And there needs to be an interpretation. There needs to be a perception. And usually when we talk about perception, we're talking about our conscious minds perceiving something. But we need to understand that your cells, every individual cell, has a perception of its own at the cellular level. And that perception is all about survival. So when is survival threatened? So for example, if you eat 24th, 2500 calories, that's about 100 calories per hour that your body would be using. Does that mean we have to eat every hour? No, obviously not. So there's a time factor in here. It doesn't feel threatened immediately. It feels threatened when it starts seeing a trend. When it senses that this is heading someplace unsafe. And it also has to be about satisfaction. Once you get to eat again, does the body feel it got enough to feel safe or did it still feel like it's missing something? So starvation is when there's a sustained lack or a reduced amount of resources to the point where it goes on so long that the body feels threatened. It feels this is heading someplace bad, especially if we are consistently below the basal metabolic rate. On the other hand, intermittent fasting, which is when you on purpose wait a little bit longer between meals. You compress your meals into a shorter time period and usually you eat fewer meals, but especially it's a shorter time period where you might go 16 to 18 hours without eating. Then you might think that the body would feel, hey, this is going to someplace bad, but here's the thing. As long as you get to eat, to satiety. As long as you get to replenish those resources and the body is satisfied and full, now it doesn't feel threatened. Now that becomes part of a normal pattern which the body does. It's part of feast and famine, which is very, very normal for every species. Even if we go a little bit longer like several days, maybe two days all the way up to seven, then as long as we get to eat to satiety, then there is no permanent damage. We're not permanently shutting down that basal metabolic rate. And I don't know that anyone knows exactly what the time frame is when it starts shutting down permanently. And there's probably a big amount of variation there as well, but there is some evidence that if you go longer than two or three weeks with total fasting, then the body will start to lower that basal rate permanently. Another indication that we can get is that people who die at people who do calorie restrictions, they'll usually lose weight pretty well in the beginning. But then after two to three weeks, either it starts plateauing and tapering off or they might even start gaining weight back even at a calorie restriction. So two to three weeks, I think, is probably a pretty good measure of when things start changing permanently. Whereas if we are talking hours or just a few days, then we're safe as long as we get to eat until we're full and the body feels happy again. The thing to understand about feast and famine is that it is very, very normal. There's always been variations in food supply. Sometimes it rains more, sometimes there's more food growing. Sometimes you find an animal to kill if you're a lion and sometimes you don't. There's also seasonal variation. And if we miss one or two days here and there, but then we get to eat again, then the body feels perfectly safe. As long as we replenish the resources completely. And some critics say that, well, if you practice intermittent fasting or if you miss a day or two, then you're going to overeat. You're going to overcompensate and undo all the benefits and then some. I don't believe that's true. In my experience, it's not true. And most of the people who practice this are not having that problem. I think what's going on is that it happens when you eat processed foods. Because processed foods have sometimes drug-like effects. They will stimulate receptors, opiate receptors. They'll stimulate pleasure receptors. And they're designed to do that. They put chemicals in there to do that on purpose. And by doing that, you bypass this normal regulation. But If you eat whole food that has plenty of resources, plenty of nutrients. that's nutrient dense, then I don't believe that you will overeat. You miss a day or two, and then you reset and you're back on track. But now let's try to keep thinking like the body would, and try to understand what happens when we die it. And what happens relative to this thing called the set point, this narrow range of weight where the body feels safe and comfortable. So we cut back on food. We reduce calories on purpose, and hopefully, first thing that happens is we start off at this weight, and now we start losing some weight. And we're happy it's working, but then eventually we've gone long enough that the body is uncomfortable. It starts feeling threatened. And what does it do? It does what all living things do. It compensates, and it adapts. And the way that it does that is by reducing energy expenditure and increasing hunger. Because it's trying to get back to this line. This is where it thought, it believes it needs to be. So first of all, it starts to reduce expenditure and the weight loss plateaus. But then it's also trying to get back up there. So it turns back the thermostat. It turns down the heat even more. And now it starts to go back up. So we start gaining back a little bit, even though we're still eating less food. We're still eating fewer calories. So the body is trying to get back to that set point. We're burning less energy. We're getting hungerier and hungerier. And despite all that, we start to gain the weight back. What do most people do at that point? Well, they kind of lose hope. They say, "Hey, this didn't seem to be working. It worked for a while, but now it's not. So I give up." And you go back to eating like you used to do. And this is pretty much always what happens when we don't have a long-term plan. When we think that we can do something for a period of time and then stop doing it, we're automatically going to go back to eating like we did before. Except now we have a lower expenditure. We're using less. So what that means is, not only are we probably going to gain it back to the set point, but we have a lower expenditure. And we're going to probably gain a little bit extra. And now what happens is that we have raised the set point. And we don't know if this is exactly how it works. I'm just trying to get you to think of possibilities of how the body is reacting, how the body is adapting. Because it is super, super intelligent. And if it does something, there has to be a reason. And we know that this is pretty much what happens with all dieting. And oftentimes this is called yo-yo dieting as in you lose the weight and you gain it back. But unfortunately, it really should be called yo-yo dieting plus. Because every time it seems like you add on a few more pounds. And a really sad example of this is called the biggest loser, which was a TV show that ran for over 10 seasons. And not only was it a monumental failure, but they kept doing it year after year after year. And a lot of people thought at first that, hey, you know, the biggest loser meant the person who lost the most weight, but what turned out was that these people really were the biggest losers because they completely destroyed their metabolism. So let's say, for example, they would eat 1,500 calories. I don't know what the exact number was. It probably varied with body size, but just pick a number. And let's say that they had a resting metabolic rate, a basal metabolic rate of 3,000 calories because they started out at 300 pounds. Now they would exercise a lot. And this is why they lost weight. If you exercise 3, 4, 5, 6,000 calories and you're already in a deficit, the body, even if the body turns the basal metabolic rate close to zero, then you're still going to lose weight because you're working out all the time. You're going to lose 1 or 2 pounds a day because of how much you're forcing the body to expend energy. But you could only get healthy. You could only find long-term balance if the body perceives that as moving towards some form of equilibrium, some form of harmony and balance. And how do you think the body reacts to working out all day long and not getting any food? The body's perception is that this is an extreme threat. Hey, I'm spending all this energy. There's nothing coming back in. And not only that, but it's an extreme fight flight mode. You're pushing the body. You're pushing, pushing hours and hours every day. And as a result, you get an extreme reduction in basal metabolic rate. And most of these people, they gained a weight back very, very quickly and not only that, but they couldn't even maintain weight unless they exercised several hours a day because their basal metabolic rate had cut way, way down sometimes in half. So let's go through some factors. Let's try to understand the different things that will lower your basal metabolic rate. And we talked about the first thing, which is dieting, that it creates the perception of a threat that it thinks it's going to die if it doesn't change, if it doesn't lower the expenditure relative to where it thinks it needs to be. And as a result, over and over, doing that over and over, you will raise that set point. The second thing would be aging. And there are some things that are inevitable with aging. Things do slow down. We have a cycle of life where we can a peak around 25 and then it's downhill, but how quickly it goes downhill has to do with a lot of different factors. So a lot of people will be less active. They will start getting hormonal changes over the years and the decades. And to some degree, they'll have a loss of muscle. But we need to realize that a lot of the things that we call aging, some are inevitable. But a lot of things we call aging is actually disuse or premature aging from abusing the body, from using chemicals and too much sugar and too much alcohol and too much oxidative factors. So aging is inevitable so far, but we can do a lot to slow it down. And if we maintain an active lifestyle and eat good food, then a lot of these things won't be nearly as pronounced. And a third huge factor is insulin resistance. Now we need to understand insulin because it's at the root of most disease processes and most health problems today. And it is unnecessary. It's life saving. It's a good hormone, but we need to keep things in balance. So first of all, insulin is a storage hormone. And the first thing and the best known thing it does is it assists glucose. So we eat food. We bring up our blood sugar and the insulin acts as the key to get that blood sugar into the cell where it can be used and turned into energy. But if we eat excess glucose, if we eat too much sugar, too much bread, too much pasta, too frequently, too much processed foods, too frequently. Now we get excess glucose. And as they response from the body, we get excess insulin because it has to constantly respond to those high levels of glucose. And if we have this problem chronically, if we have the situation chronically, it becomes a problem called insulin resistance. Because we keep pushing so much stuff into the cells that they say, hey, we've had enough. Let's back off a little bit. The cells start resisting the action of insulin. And now the body has to make even more insulin to try to take care of the problem, but the cells are resisting. So there's no amount of insulin that will get the job done. And now what happens is we have chronically high insulin levels. And remember that insulin is a storage hormone. So now we end up storing energy rather than using it, which of course now will lower that basal metabolic rate because all that energy is locked away. And insulin promotes lipogenesis, meaning it promotes the turning of glucose into fat. High levels of insulin makes more fat, but it works the other way around too, that it prevents lipolises. It prevents the breakdown. So it makes more fat and it keeps us from using it. And in doing that, we're going to store more and spend less. And this is one of the main principles that gets that set point stuck. That the body gets stuck at a certain weight and it can't move away from there. It can't lower it back down as long as insulin is high. Now there are many other hormones that are super important. And the number one hormone would be thyroid because the thyroid. Hormone is your actual metabolic hormone. It is the actual thermostat. It's the thing that cranks things up, but you can't do that by itself. It's depending on all these other variables that we're talking about. And very often people will mention that the thyroid hormone depends on iodine. And therefore they say if your thyroid is slow, if your metabolism is slow, just take more iodine. But there's a huge problem with that thinking because 90% of people in the modern, in the Western world, does not have a problem with iodine. They might be a little deficient, but that's not the reason that the thyroid is slow. It's an autoimmune process. It's an inflammation process. It's a toxicity process. And if you just load up on the iodine, you could actually make the autoimmune part worse. So in my clinic, we find thyroid issues with probably 30 to 50% of people and virtually none of them need iodine. There are other things that the thyroid need for support. So if you think you have a thyroid problem, I would suggest that you find someone that can help you work with it, someone qualified because there's way more to it than just take an iodine. And the thyroid doesn't act alone. It responds to the pituitary, which sends out a hormone called thyroid stimulating hormone, TSH. So if the thyroid's underperforming, it could be just that the pituitary isn't sending out enough TSH. But the pituitary also doesn't act alone. It's responding to the hypothalamus, which sends out the thytrofen releasing hormone. So the hypothalamus is kind of the overseer of this whole picture. And the hypothalamus is really the big player in this. It's our homeostatic regulator. It's the one that oversees all these variables and tries to bring them back into balance. It's the decision maker. And because it overlooks everything, the hypothalamus is really the one that has this perception of the set point that if we get the body out of balance too much, then this set point can get out of whack over time. But even though the hypothalamus is the supervisor and regulator of all this, it still doesn't quite act alone because everything else that we're talking about feeds back and gives that hypothalamus information on which the hypothalamus makes that perception. So if other things are out of balance, the hypothalamus is going to get the wrong picture. And if we truly have a dysfunctional thyroid, then it doesn't matter what the hypothalamus is saying. We still can't produce the right hormones, etc. So the hypothalamus is the supervisor, but all the other parts have to work too both in performing their jobs and in giving the hypothalamus the right information and the correct picture. And in my clinic, when we have fixed a lot of the other stuff, when we are brought down the insulin resistance and we brought the thyroid hormones up to a good level and we've fixed a lot of other things, then if there still have stubborn weight and their metabolic rate is still low, there's a couple of supplements that I've found that tends to work really well. But again, don't try these in isolation. Don't try these without doing all the other things at the same time or doing them for a period of time first. And the first one is hypothalmapath and the second one is called metabolism path. And the first one here is probably the one that's shown up most often for me in the clinic. So I'll put some links down below if you want to check those out. But there are other factors as well, such as fructose and alcohol. And these two things are not poisonous in themselves. They're very natural substances, but the way we consume them today, they're pure poison because they can only be processed by the liver. So if you had a few grains or a teaspoon here and there, it would be perfectly fine. But in excess, they overwhelm the liver and they turn into fat. They create a fatty liver and a fatty liver is an insulin resistant liver and the liver being the metabolic hub of your body kind of sets the tone for the rest of the body in terms of insulin resistance. And now that those are the two factors that primarily drive insulin resistance. And another one is seed oils. This is something that has been voted as very, very healthy. We've had this phobia for saturated fat. So then they tell us eat this stuff instead, which are the vegetable oils and it turns out the saturated fat is perfectly fine. And this is some people say worse than fructose or alcohol. And some people say it would be almost as bad. Either way, it is pure poison and you want to stay away from it by any means you can. Also, there are pesticides and other chemicals that get into your body and interact with your hormones. They fit into receptors that are made for your body's own hormones. And now your endocrine system, your hormones don't function properly because of these chemicals and pesticides. Another factor would be dysbiosis. So if you have an imbalance or an insufficient amount of bacteria in your gut, they're finding more and more and more. And I think this is kind of the next frontier in health is to start understanding more about your gut flora and how to enhance it, how to get a greater variety and more amount of bacteria there. And also stress affects everything and it affects your gut flora, it affects your insulin resistance, it affects blood sugar, just about everything. And we're going to also talk a little bit about exercise. So in order to restore your metabolism to fix it, to bring it back, to burn more brightly on its own, there are some things we need to do. So first of all, we do need to reduce calories safely. If you're overweight, you need to reduce some calories. If you're at your ideal weight, you just need to address all these factors. But how do we reduce calories safely? We do it without creating the perception of a threat. So we can't just cut back on calories and keep going because the body doesn't like that. Also, we have to do it without hunger. If we have hungry, first of all, we can't sustain it, but hunger is also a signal of a threat. So a couple of ways to do that, low carb high fat allows us to eat less without getting so hungry because the processed foods trigger insulin and that insulin, like we talked about, makes you more hungry. Also, when you're fasting, if you're doing intermittent fasting, you're eating fewer meals in a shorter time period, then you need to eat to satiety. You can't feel deprived at the end of it because then you're just doing another form of dieting, of starvation, of calorie restriction, where you never feel satisfied, and the body doesn't feel safe to start expanding more energy. Therefore, we also want to produce processed foods because they make you more hungry. And artificial flavorings, all the chemicals, all the food additives that they put in there to make you eat more, they bypass, they make you more hungry, they bypass your normal satiety mechanisms. The second thing would be to restore normal insulin function, get back to being insulin-sensitive, where the glucose, the blood sugar can get into your cells with a tiny amount of insulin the way it's supposed to work. And therefore, you want to cut back or eliminate high glycemic foods. And those are things that get, raise your blood sugar very quickly. And if you look at tables, they usually call a high glycemic food anything over 70, and they call anything under 55, a low glycemic food. Don't believe that. Okay, a high glycemic food is anything over 20 or 30, because those are going to be high in carbohydrate, even if it's a slow carbohydrate, is still too much if you're trying to get back to normal insulin responses. Also, you want to cut back or eliminate sugar and alcohol. You want to cut back on seed oils, obviously, and you want to avoid pesticides and chemicals. And you also want to start understanding stress responses and how to control, how to practice stress management techniques, long terms that you can permanently change your stress responses, because stress will raise blood glucose, it will raise cortisol, raise blood glucose, raise insulin, and it will undermine your efforts to get back to insulin balance. Next, you want to learn more about how to restoring your microbiome, because it's involved with just about everything. It is involved with your cravings, it's involved with inflammation, it's involved with insulin resistance and the list could go on and on and on. I did a video on that. I'll probably make more as we learn more, but this is huge and it's much too big to cover in any detail here. You also wanna control your stress responses, not just for blood sugar, but because your stress also creates cravings, more cortisol, higher glucose, insulin, more inflammation that the list goes on and on there as well. And then there's exercise. So a lot of people say that, well, you need to exercise as much as possible because that burns calories and helps you lose weight. Well, that's not really what we're talking about. Like the biggest loser people, they exercised hours and hours and hours and it backfired tremendously. So exercise uses up calories, but that has nothing to do with the basal metabolic rate. It has no effect on that because that's what the body does before you start moving or doing anything. So that's completely irrelevant as far as using up calories or losing weight. Now, if you do it correctly, exercise does use up some glucose and you wanna do low intensity exercise or extremely short bursts of high intensity. And I've done several videos on that, so I'm not gonna go back into this. And when you use up some glucose, you are assisting in restoring insulin sensitivity and reversing insulin resistance. However, it is not the primary mechanism. It's not gonna do a whole lot, but if you do it right, it might be somewhere like five or 10% of resolving insulin resistance. So I definitely think people need to exercise, but we need to try to understand how is it relating to these topics to restoring metabolism. And some people will really emphasize that you wanna lift weights. That's the type of exercise you do for your metabolism because when you build muscle, then muscles are more metabolically active and you automatically increase your metabolic rate. And there are some numbers floating around where they think you can increase by 30 or 40%. And I'm not opposed to working out and building muscles. I think that's great and it does help, but we need to put it in perspective. So muscles make up, if you're healthy, if you're fairly muscular and not obese, they probably make up somewhere around 40% of your body weight. And they use up about 20% of your energy at rest. So you're out of your basal metabolic rate, they make up about 20%. Now we compare that to fat, where fat is 20% unless you're obese, where it could be up to 50 or even more, but for a reasonably normal person, it's fat is about 20% of your body weight and it only uses 5%. So we see here that if we divide these out, that muscles are about twice as metabolically active as fat at rest. So yes, it does make a difference, but here is the big deal and here is, this is kind of mind blowing. Then when we look at the brain and the heart, liver, kidney and lung, your vital organs, the things that are running and processing all day behind the scenes, they are less than 5% of your body weight and they account for 80% of your basal metabolic rate. So they're like 30 to 50 up to 100, when it comes to fat, up to 100 times more metabolically active than that tissue. So the moral of the story is that muscle is much better than fat. It's twice as good at burning energy at rest as fat is, but this is still not a big deal. It's pretty much negligible in the big scheme of things, however, it is still better than nothing. So go for it, not just a burn a few calories, but because muscles are good for a hundred different reasons, exercise is great for a hundred different reasons. And if you were to add five pounds of muscle, then you would burn an extra 50 calories. And that's not a whole lot, but it's still kind of moving the momentum in the right direction. So the key factors to restoring your metabolic rate in order of importance, in my opinion, is to reduce insulin resistance to become insulin sensitive. The second would be to help the hypothalamus restore your set point, to restore your overall metabolic state. Third would probably be the microbiome. And as we learn more, maybe the order of this will change and the microbiome will turn out to be everything, who knows. Number four would be stress, and number five would be to take care of your thyroid. Now, thyroid's not gonna be the primary thing for most people, but for some people, it is a key factor. If you enjoyed this video, you're gonna 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.