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The food industry has spent decades funding research designed to reduce nutrition to
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calories in versus calories out because that framework lets them sell you a 100 calorie pack
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of some bioengineered food and then call it healthy.
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Just because it says only 100 calories doesn't mean it's good for you.
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Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
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host, doctor Alessi and Matt Tack.
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Here's a number I want you to sit with.
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Ninety three.
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That's the percentage of American adults who are metabolically unhealthy according to a 2019
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analysis published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders at the University of North
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Carolina.
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So they looked at five markers.
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They looked at blood glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist
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circumference.
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They found that only six point eight percent of adults met the optimal thresholds for all five.
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Ninety three percent.
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Yet, the interventions that actually move those numbers, most of them are completely free.
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You don't need a prescription, you don't even need a gym membership, no supplement stack.
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And so today, I want to walk you through what I consider the five highest leverage
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interventions for fat loss and metabolic health.
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And I call them levers because the right lever applied in the right place gives you an
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outsized return on your effort.
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So, let's just get right into it.
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I'm Doctor.
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Alessi.
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Welcome to the Health Decoded podcast.
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I'm excited to have you on the show today.
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Let's start with lever number one.
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Lever number one is walk 8 steps a day.
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I want to start here because this is the most underrated prescription in medicine.
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We have so much data showing that hitting 8 steps per day is associated with a fifty one
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percent lower risk of all cause mortality compared to 4 steps.
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So, that comes from a study by Saint Maurice and colleagues published in JAMA in 2020.
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They followed about 4 adults for a decade.
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And here's what most people don't know, the benefit plateaued after about 12 steps.
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So, you're not getting meaningfully more protection by grinding to fifteen ks.
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The dose response curve flattens.
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8 should be your target daily.
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And so here's the mechanism that most people miss.
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Walking at a conversational pace keeps you in a zone where fat is your primary fuel source, not
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glucose.
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Your respiratory exchange ratio, which is the ratio of CO2 produced to oxygen consumed, sits
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below point eight five at this intensity.
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That is the biochemical signature of fat oxidation.
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So, you are literally mobilizing stored fat as fuel.
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And now beyond direct fat burning, consistent daily walking improves insulin sensitivity
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through a completely separate pathway.
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The muscle contraction activates the AMP activated protein kinase, which drives GLUT4
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transporters to the surface of your muscle cells.
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Now, those transporters pull glucose out of your bloodstream independent of insulin.
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There was a study in 2022 in Sports Medicine Journal found that a single twenty minute post
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meal walk reduced your postprandial glucose spike by up to 30% compared to just sitting.
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That's basically a free metabolic intervention that you can deploy after every single meal.
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And one more thing, the 10 step target is not science.
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It came from a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer called the Monpo K, which
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literally translates to 10 steps meter.
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So, it was never really derived from a clinical trial.
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8 steps is more where the mortality data is the strongest.
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And so, you know, don't let a sixty year old marketing slogan set your health targets.
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Focus on what the science shows.
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8 steps a day for that metabolic boost completely free.
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That's number one.
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Number two, and this is definitely rank number two for me, building muscle.
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So, resistance training at least twice a week.
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Skeletal muscle is the largest glucose disposal organ in your body, accounting for roughly 80%
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of insulin stimulated glucose uptake.
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But here's what makes it extraordinary from a metabolic standpoint.
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It doesn't need insulin to do its job.
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When you contract a muscle, mechanical stress triggers a signaling cascade that causes that
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GLUT4 transporter to migrate to the cell surface and pull glucose out of your
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bloodstream directly without insulin.
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This is why resistance training improves blood sugar control even in people with significant
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insulin resistance.
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You're building a parallel glucose disposal system that bypasses a broken pathway entirely.
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The resting metabolic rate effect is also a real and compounding effect.
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Each pound of muscle tissue burns approximately six calories per day at rest.
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So, 10 pounds of added muscle achievable within realistically a year of consistent training is
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60 extra calories per day burned doing nothing.
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Now, across a decade, that's the difference between maintaining your body composition and
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slowly losing ground.
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The visceral fat data is particularly strong as well.
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2022 systematic review by Lopez and colleagues in the Obesity Review Journal analyzed 58
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randomized controlled trials and found that resistance training alone reduced visceral fat
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by an average of 5% with no dietary changes.
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Now visceral fat, if you're not familiar, is the fat that is stored around your organs, and
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it is the fat that is most strongly linked to metabolic disease, cardiovascular risk, and
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type two diabetes.
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You cannot target this fat with cardio as effectively as you can with resistance
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training.
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So, the frequency you need to focus on, two sessions per week is your minimum effective
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dose.
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Out of a 2016 meta analysis in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, it found no
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significant difference in muscle growth between two and three sessions per week for trained
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individuals.
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So, two days is defensible.
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Equipment, irrelevant.
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You can use body weight, bands, free weights, they all produce sufficient mechanical
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stimulus.
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What matters is progressive overload.
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That means making the work harder over time.
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That's the signal.
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Everything else is really just the vehicle.
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So, this should be two days a week of full body training, whether that's HIIT workout, whether
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that's doing some level of body weight or bands.
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Making sure we're activating lower and upper body muscle groups.
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Lever number three, and this is a big one to complement lever number two, is prioritizing
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protein with every meal.
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Protein is really doing three jobs simultaneously that no other macronutrient can
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even replicate.
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So let me walk through each one.
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First, satiety.
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Protein suppresses ghrelin, which is your primary hunger hormone, more powerfully than
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fat or carbohydrates.
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It simultaneously stimulates the release of peptide YY and GLP one from the gut.
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GLP one is the satiety hormone.
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So, the same drugs that people are taking, we can stimulate by eating enough protein.
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It's also the exact pathway that's targeted by those Ozempic and similar GLP-one agonist
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drugs.
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Protein stimulates that system naturally with every meal, without a prescription.
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A 2005 study by Weigel and colleagues in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed
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that increasing protein from 15% to 30% of daily calories produce a sustained reduction in
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caloric intake of over 400 calories with no instruction to restrict food.
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So basically, increase protein, you will eat less overall.
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Second, the thermic effect of food.
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This is awesome because the energy cost of digesting and metabolizing protein runs 25 to
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30 of its caloric value.
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Fat costs 5%, carbohydrates costs five to 10%.
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And a meta analysis confirmed that high protein diets increase twenty four hour energy
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expenditure by 80 to a 100 calories per day purely through this thermogenic effect.
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Before any change in activity, you burn more calories processing the food itself.
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And then third, muscle preservation during fat loss.
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This is where most diets will fail.
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When you're in a caloric deficit, restricting calories, your body will actually catabolize or
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cannibalize muscle tissue for energy unless protein is high enough to prevent it.
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16 study by Longlin and colleagues in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition put
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participants on a severe 40% caloric deficit for four weeks.
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The group eating 1.1 grams of protein per pound of body weight simultaneously lost fat and
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gained muscle.
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The low protein group lost fat and muscle.
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It was the same deficit but entirely different body composition outcome.
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So what's your target?
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Aim for point eight to one gram of protein per pound of body weight.
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Front load at breakfast.
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Research consistently shows that a high protein breakfast reduces total daily caloric intake
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and appetite for the rest of the day.
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Things like eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, start there.
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It doesn't have to be super complicated.
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Lever number four, protect your sleep seven to nine hours consistently.
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Sleep deprivation is one of the most reliable ways to dismantle your metabolic health and the
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mechanisms are more direct than most clinicians actually acknowledge.
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In a controlled study at the University of Chicago, healthy young men restricted to five
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and a half hours of sleep for two weeks showed a 25% reduction in insulin sensitivity.
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That's a significant drop, comparable to what you would expect from gaining 20 to 30 pounds
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of body fat produced purely by sleep restriction.
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There was no diet change and no reduction in activity.
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That's because the hormonal disruption is equally severe.
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A 2004 study found that even two nights of sleep restriction increased ghrelin levels by
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28% and decreased leptin by 18%.
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Ghrelin up, leptin down.
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So now you are chemically compelled to eat more and not more of everything.
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Subjects reported they had increased appetite specifically for calorie dense, high
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carbohydrate foods.
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Things like chips, bread, cookies.
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So sleep deprivation doesn't just make you hungry, it steers you toward the worst possible
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choices.
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The body composition consequences are also the part that nobody talks about.
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In a study by Ned Cheva and colleagues out of the same institution, 2010, participants on an
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identical caloric deficit, sleeping five and a half hours, lost 55% less fat and 60% more
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muscle than the participants who slept eight and a half hours.
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They had the same diet, the same deficit, the only variable was sleep.
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So what's the mechanism?
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Well, during slow wave sleep, your body secretes the majority of its daily growth
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hormone.
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Growth hormone is the primary signal for fat mobilization and muscle preservation during a
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deficit.
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So if you cut sleep, you're cutting that slow wave sleep, you're cutting growth hormone, and
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your body will shift from burning fat to burning muscle.
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So you are working directly against the goal of every diet you've ever tried.
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The intervention is simple, but this is a non negotiable.
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Consistent sleep and wake times, including on the weekends.
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Research on social jet lag, the pattern of sleeping in two to three hours more on the
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weekends, it shows it is independently associated with increased metabolic syndrome
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risk.
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Your circadian rhythm is not something that just you can ignore on Saturday and then reset
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it on Monday.
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The biology doesn't work that way.
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So try to aim to go to bed and wake up within thirty minutes of the same time every single
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day.
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Now, lever number five, and this is one that really can turn the needle if you're hitting
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all the others.
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Eliminating ultra processed food.
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So food quality comes before calories.
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And I'm gonna end it here because this is the lever with the most impact and is also the most
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corrupted public conversation.
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The food industry has spent decades funding research designed to reduce nutrition to
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calories in versus calories out.
00:13:33
Because that framework lets them sell you a 100 calorie pack of some bio engineered food and
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then call it healthy.
00:13:41
Just because it says only 100 calories doesn't mean it's good for you.
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The science doesn't support that.
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Ultra processed foods defined by the Nova classification system as industrial
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manufactured products containing ingredients not found in a home kitchen.
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Things like emulsifiers, artificial flavor compounds, modified starches, hydrogenated
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oils.
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They're not just calorie dense.
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They're engineered to defeat the biological systems that regulate your appetite.
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So, the goal here is literally to make you crave more.
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The definitive study in 2019 in the Journal of Cell Metabolism, this was a rare randomized
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control inpatient trial at the NIH Clinical Center.
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Basically, participants lived on-site for four weeks, were randomly assigned to either an
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ultra processed or minimally processed diet with food available, meaning they could eat as
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much as they wanted.
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Both diets were matched for total offered calories, macronutrients, sugar, fat, and
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fiber.
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The only variable was the degree of processing of the food.
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The ultra processed group consumed an average of five zero eight more calories per day and
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gained approximately two pounds over the trial period.
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The whole food group simultaneously consumed less and lost approximately two pounds.
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No dietary instructions were given to either group, The food itself drove the entire
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difference.
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That's huge.
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So, the proposed mechanisms, ultra processed foods are consumed faster.
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They require less chewing and they're designed for rapid oral processing, which outpaces the
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gut derived satiety hormone response.
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So basically, GLP one and peptide YY, which are your fullness signals, they need time to
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register.
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If you eat fast enough and the signal arrives after you've already eaten.
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Beyond that, ultra processed food is systematically fiber depleted, which degrades
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the gut microbiome.
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Butyrate producing bacteria, which depend entirely on fermentable fiber, directly
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regulate GLP one secretion and gut barrier integrity.
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So you strip the fiber, you lose the bacteria, you blunt the satiety signal, and you increase
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intake.
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The system fails very predictably.
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The practical rule I give every patient and I'm giving to you today is buy food that's one
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ingredient.
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An apple is an apple.
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Chicken is chicken.
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Oats, rice, you get the picture.
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If the ingredient list has 25 items and requires a chemistry background to get through,
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it is actively working against your biology.
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You cannot out exercise, out walk, or out sleep a diet built primarily on processed food.
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This is the floor that everything else sits on.
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So there you have it, five levers, all of them free, all of them backed by mechanistic
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science, not epidemiologically guesswork, and not some influencer anecdote.
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Here's what I want you to notice before you go.
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These levers are not independent of each other.
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They compound.
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Walking improves insulin sensitivity.
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Muscle improves it further.
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Sleep preserves the muscle you've built.
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Protein supports and protects it.
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And food quality determines whether any of it can work in the first place.
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Because you cannot build insulin sensitivity on a foundation of ultra processed food.
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The system is interconnected and every lever you pull makes the next one easier to hold.
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The challenge is never information.
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You just got more in fifteen minutes than most people get from their annual physical.
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The challenge is choosing one thing and executing consistently until it requires no
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willpower, then stacking the next.
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So do this.
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Pick your first lever, apply it for two weeks, then come back, pick the next.
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When you can create a sustainable non negotiable lifestyle and then build on top of
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that, that's how you win.
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All studies referenced today will be in the show notes.
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If this episode was useful, please share this with one person.
00:17:54
Send this to somebody you know who may be struggling with fat loss, metabolism, and
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that's the highest compliment that we can get.
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That's how we help grow this message.
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It's how we help change lives.
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If you ever wanna get in touch with us, go to our website, ascendfunctionalhealth.com.
00:18:10
You can contact us there.
00:18:12
We'd be happy to share your story, answer any questions, and I thank you for tuning in today.
00:18:18
I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Health Decoded.
00:18:23
Thank you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things
00:18:28
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00:18:31
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00:18:36
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00:18:38
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00:18:46
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00:18:52
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00:18:57
Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember, your health is in your hands.