Slow Metabolism Is a Myth (Not Kidding) - Dr. Berg

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now why is it that most people that start a diet cannot stick to it and why is it that those who lose the weight regain it back and then some our bodies tend to resist when you start restricting food and calories and going on a low carb diet you know most diets out there do involve lessening of the calories I don’t know of any diet that increases your calories but when I was in practice I would always ask a person who has difficulty losing weight what happened in your history when did it start and this this is what they told me over and over and over again they would start a diet lose the weight gain it back and one for one those people who did the most diets have the most difficult time losing weight in other words the more diets that they do the slower the metabolism or they might have this apparency of a slow metabolism and I’ve never had an overweight person tell me that they can lose weight easily they just need to do the right things the great majority of the time that they don’t attempt to lose weight is because it’s very difficult they don’t see results that’s where the problem is so is it actually true that diets slow your metabolism well this is a very interesting topic because when you restrict energy from the body in calories and you lose fat the body will compensate and the metabolism becomes more efficient what does this word efficient mean it can run on smaller amounts of fuel just like a car you have different cars that are of a different efficiency those cars that can take the same amount of fuel and go longer are more efficient they’re not gas guzzlers well in the body it’s the same thing if you have a difficult time losing weight because you’ve dieted for many many years your body is probably compensated for survival purposes because dieting is similar to famine or a little bit like starvation and I’m mainly talking about the lowering of calories but what’s really going on if we want to isolate the real problem a person that is struggling with weight loss doesn’t really have a slow metabolism they have an enhanced metabolic efficiency problem they don’t waste energy very easily they can run just on a little bit of energy so is this really a bad thing well yeah it’s kind of a bad thing from the person’s perspective but from a survival standpoint it’s really an enhanced survival capacity those people that have a slower metabolism have more survival long term and it’s interesting to me how so many people are you know pushing well you have to lose weight you have to lose weight this is just a side note and I don’t want to get into this but it’s really interesting those people that are overweight actually believe it or not might not be as unhealthy as you might think now I’m not talking about the person eating a lot of junk food I’m talking about those people that eat healthily and they still overweight if we compare those to a skinny person who eats poorly that skinny person has less of a survival capacity so many times um people don’t change their diet because they say I don’t have a weight problem so we always associate weight with being unhealthy we don’t associate being overweight with a very efficient metabolism so that’s the topic for today I want to talk about it I want to do a deep dive into this because if you end up solving the wrong problem slow metabolism with things that maybe might stimulate your metabolism you might end up burning your metabolism out but I think for the majority of the population it’s not a slow metabolism it’s just a very efficient metabolism so I want to focus on calorie restriction I want to talk about that there’s a lot of data on calorie restriction but I’m going to give you a little summary on what it talks about people that restrict the calories are more susceptible to being deficient in nut nutrients which can then affect the hormone system I mean just let’s take one example The Biggest Loser uh years ago they had the show The Biggest Loser and uh these people very very dramatically lost a ton of weight and they had to do some serious calorie restriction and exercise well we know now the bad effects that that created every single one of these people gained the weight back and and more but uh those people who lost the most weight had the lowest metabolism so it kind of screws everything up it’s like it just makes it really hard to lose weight from then on out another term for this is called adaptive thermogenesis where your body is adjusted or adapted to this uh these lower amounts of calories and now just burns fat less because it’s more efficient now there was another uh interesting experiment called the Minnesota starvation experiment okay I’m going to put the link down below for that as well but this experiment involved um a group of men going on a very low calorie diet so they had 32 normal men uh went 24 weeks on a semi starvation diet and then 12 weeks on a restricted refeeding diet and then 8 weeks they can pretty much eat on anything they want and the results were similar to the experiments on mice where you’re forcing the machine to conserve energy uh as it’s trying to uh deal with this starvation and found that the metabolism was suppressed by like 15. 5% but they had rebound hunger they regained the weight quickly and some had a higher level of weight gain than others beyond the original starting weight so now what about intermittent fasting okay how does that compare with calorie restriction well when you lower calories uh the person usually has more hungry and they have more cravings when you do intermittent fasting correctly you’re less hungry and you don’t have the cravings and when we’re talking about intermittent fasting I mean the problem is there’s so many different types of intermittent fasting but the bottom line is that if you do intermid fasting without restricting the calories you’re going on a period where you’re eating nothing for a while versus just going on a period where you’re eating lower amounts of calories and there’s some very unique benefits to just doing intermittent fasting and not doing calorie restrictive type programs so out of the 27 trials that I looked at 18 were randomized control trials and pretty much in all the studies they all lose weight there were no serious Adverse Events most of the weight which was lost was actual fat loss most of the people lost weight in the midsection five the studies which included not just obesity but also diabetes had improvements in blood sugars now I will say that some of the studies involving calorie restriction uh did not show negative effects okay because again there’s variables with that as well and I think it has to do with what type of calories you’re consuming and if you have enough nutrients with those calories because when we talk about calorie restriction it doesn’t necessarily Define the quality of those calories which make sense from Pure logic is that if you’re consuming um less nutrients you’re going to create more negative effects with you know health and body function but what if you did calorie restriction with all the nutrients okay I’d like to see that study probably show a lot better results but regarding intermittent fasting okay periods of time where you’re not eating and then you’re eating um I always recommend with that doing the healthy version of the ketogenic diet so we don’t create imbalances in the body because one of the problems with calorie restrictive diets as well as inin fasting is are you getting enough requirements in your fatty acids or your amino acids if you are you’re going to have a lot less problems but here’s the big thing about intermittent fasting that’s different than calorie restrictive diets and I’m speaking in a generality when you do intermittent fasting you adapt your body to running on ketones which is basically a situation