I’m going to talk about three main topics here that when combined, can really accelerate weight loss. I hope it serves as a good starting point for some people. It’s not an exhaustive explanation, so don’t be shy about contacting me if you have any further questions! I won’t bite!
Food:
You have been designed by evolution to eat naturally occurring, seasonal foods, that you might find in the wild. Eating like this will help keep you at your optimal weight, which is trim. It’s important to understand that your metabolism naturally slows down in the winter because, throughout evolution, winter has been a time of food scarcity or famine. When your metabolism slows, whether from the season or from being sedentary, reduce carbohydrate intake, and make saturated and monounsaturated fats your dietary staple.
Eat:
- Naturally Raised, Pastured, Organic Animal Products, emphasis on fish.
- Mostly raw fruits and veggies, but greatly reduce fruits and starchy veggies in winter
- Healthy Fats: Coconut, Olive (oil), Avocado (oil), organic animal fats including butter
- Seeds and Nuts
Avoid:
- Unhealthy Fats: Margarine, Soybean Oil, Corn Oil, trans fats, any other seed oils
- Added Sugar (a little raw honey in the summer is alright)
- Grains (a little rice in the summer is alright)
- Deep Fried Foods
Why grains are a problem:
Grains spike blood insulin almost as much as sugar. In fact for most people a bagel spikes blood sugar and insulin more than a can of coke. If your goal is weight loss, it’s arguably worse to eat a bagel than have a can of coke (and a can of coke is really quite bad if your goal is weight loss). Grains are nutritionally devoid and calorically dense. They tend to cause imbalances in our gut bacteria when they’re a staple of the diet, and that can lead to long-term problems with both your metabolism and your immune system. If you, like so many people, have problems with your immune system or have an autoimmune condition, I would absolutely recommend cutting grains 100% out of your diet.
Grains are not foods we are well-adapted to eat. Bugs and birds do well on grains. How do you fatten up cattle? Feed them grains. Ever had 100% grass-fed beef that wasn’t finished on grains? Not a speck of fat. And what do you have to do as soon as you have cattle on grains? Get them on antibiotics. Same premise with people. We’re no better adapted to eat grains than a cow is. Consider grains a rare indulgence.
What’s wrong with seed oils:
In short, seed oils (and oils from grains and beans) are rich in something called omega-6 fatty acids, which help the body create inflammation. They are mostly devoid of it’s counterpart, omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish and grass-fed animals), which help the body calm inflammation. From an evolutionary point of view, our bodies are not used to dealing with such high quantities of omega-6. There’s no way to get them in appreciable quantities in the wild; in our diet they almost all come from refined oils made of seeds, grains, and legumes.
The rampant consumption of these omega-6 fats has led to the problem of our bodies being able to create inflammation really easily, but not being able to calm it very easy. This is why we want to especially avoid fried foods, they’re all fried in cheap oils, and actually cooking them makes the inflammatory properties much worse.
The reason keeping inflammation levels low is important, is that this kind of cellular inflammation causes the metabolism to work less efficiently, so you won’t burn calories at the same rate as someone with better metabolic function. If your goal is weight loss, you want your metabolism working as well as it can, and that means avoiding these oils. When in a grocery store these kinds of oils are what you should be looking for (and avoiding) on food labels.
Light:
Hormones control almost every aspect of your biology, and most of them operate in daily cycles. This means it’s very important that our body knows what time of day it is, so it knows what hormones should be active. It determines the time of day from the frequencies of light that hit the eyes. Thus, light is the ultimate conductor of our hormones. If you want to lose weight, balance your hormones. Get a lot of natural sunlight directly on the eyes, especially in the morning, and avoid artificial light, especially at night. Artificial light at night has been shown to play a major causative role in diabetes & heart disease.
- Get UV from sunlight on your eyes, and especially in the morning
- Eat a filling breakfast of protein and fat, with little to no carbohydrates
- Stop eating when the sun goes down, sleep in complete darkness
- Block artificial blue light in the evening (electronics, energy saving bulbs)
- On Apple products, use the Night Shift function to dim blue at night
- On everything else, use Iris (iristech.co) for the same purpose
- For TVs get Drift TV to automatically dim blue light as the sun sets
- Get a few orange or red incandescent bulbs for around the house in the late evening
- Use orange colored blue-blocking glasses in the evening
Why does light have such a big effect:
Most of our hormones are all supposed to work according to the 24-hour day/night cycle. Light frequencies are the primary signal that queues these hormones up and sends them into action.
Blue light tells the body that it’s morning time, and so it throws off our stress hormones, our sleep hormones and our digestive hormones if we’re exposed to it at night, from our TVs, our phones, our laptops, or light bulbs (especially the energy saving bulbs unfortunately).
UV light tells the body what season it is, and therefore how to regulate its metabolism. If we block UV light with glasses, sunglasses, contacts, windshields, windows or just being indoors all the time, our body thinks we’re living in perpetual winter or fall, and prepares itself for famine by slowing metabolism and signalling cells to store any carbohydrates consumed as body fat, for later use. Conversely if we get lots of sun, our body recognizes that food should be in abundance, and it’s less necessary to store extra calories as body fat.
Exercise:
The older you get the harder it becomes to out-exercise a bad diet, but exercise sure does help when your diet is on-point. For most people I advocate a quality over quantity approach to exercise, not that quantity is bad. The intent is to achieve the most bang for the buck.
- Exercise before our first meal is natural, it simulates the hunting & gathering process and burns body fat more efficiently than any other time of day
- Even 30 minutes of power-walking can be highly effective at this time, but study after study shows 15-20 minutes of High Impact Interval Training is best
- Studies have shown that squatting with extra weight is the most effective way to build and/or maintain overall muscle mass, which is especially important for keeping our metabolism working well as we age
How to use exercise effectively:
A little exercise before breakfast encourages the burning of body fat for fuel. Then, eating only fat and protein but no carbohydrates for breakfast right after exercise helps to further adapt you to burn body fat for fuel. From an evolutionary point of view, we are used to switching between using carbohydrates as our primary fuel source, to using dietary fat as our primary fuel source, in the summer vs. the winter respectively. Because of the modern availability of sweets and grains and fruits all year round, after decades of using carbohydrate as fuel, our body has essentially forgot how to burn fat for fuel. We need to re-train it, and we can do this by strategically denying carbohydrates, as well as fasting once the sun goes down, until it learns how to be flexible as to what kind of fuel it will burn.
In addition to exercise before breakfast, have a zero-carbohydrate breakfast (or as close to it as possible) and make sure your last calorie of food or drink for the day is consumed no more than 10 hours after breakfast, giving your body 14 hours of the day to fast, and 18 hours of the day without any carbohydrates.
