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Fat loss resistance is very often not just a willpower problem or even purely a calorie
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problem.
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It's a signaling problem across your gut.
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Your hormones, your stress, all of which are interconnected.
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Two people can eat the exact same diet and get completely different results because their
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internal signaling environment is completely different.
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This is also why fasting protocols pulled from a podcast or an influencer that are just
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applied blindly can help one person and actually harm another.
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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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Health decoded listeners, if you're dealing with bloating that just won't go away no matter
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what you eat, no matter what you try, I need you to hear this.
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The bloating isn't the problem.
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It's a signal.
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Every external symptom you're experiencing, the discomfort, the fatigue, the frustration has a
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root cause.
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And in my years of clinical practice, it almost always leads back to the gut.
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Nothing else in your body can fully heal until that foundation is restored.
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I built this framework from my own health journey.
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I was that patient, frustrated, dismissed, searching for answers.
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I took everything I learned, refined it through years of clinical testing, and have since
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helped hundreds of patients achieve complete relief from their symptoms.
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That became the Total Gut Reset, a step by step protocol with one goal, reset your gut in six
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months or less.
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If you're ready to learn exactly what's causing your symptoms and eliminate them for good, I'm
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hosting a free webinar where I walk you through the entire framework.
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The link is in the show notes.
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Go ahead and register, and I'll see you there.
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Welcome back to Health Decoded.
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I'm your host, doctor Alessi.
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In the last episode, we talked about why chronic dieting suppresses your metabolism and
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why the fix is actually rebuilding your metabolic rate, not just restricting further.
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Today, we're gonna go one layer deeper, into your gut and your hormones, Because fat storage
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isn't just a calorie math problem, it's a signaling problem.
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Your gut bacteria are talking to your hormones, your hormones are talking to your fat cells,
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and if any part of that conversation is disrupted, you can do everything right and
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still not see the results that you should.
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We're also going to talk about fasting, honestly, and with the nuance it deserves,
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especially for women because there's a lot of confidently wrong advice out there.
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This is Health Decoded.
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I'm Doctor.
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Alessi.
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Let's get started.
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So let's start with something most people have never even really connected.
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Your gut microbiome directly influences your hormone balance and therefore your ability to
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lose and keep off fat.
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Your gut bacteria produce and metabolize a huge range of compounds that interact with your
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endocrine system.
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One of the clearest examples is what's called the estrobiome, a collection of gut bacteria
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that specifically metabolize estrogen.
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When this population is disrupted through either poor diet, chronic stress, use of
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antibiotics, or gut dysbiosis, estrogen metabolism gets disrupted along with it.
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That can mean estrogen is being reabsorbed instead of properly cleared, which contributes
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to estrogen dominant patterns, which we commonly see alongside stubborn fat storage,
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particularly around hips and thighs.
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Your gut also plays a major role in insulin sensitivity.
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Certain gut bacteria produce short chain fatty acids, compounds such as butyrate, that improve
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how your cells will respond to insulin.
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When gut diversity is low, this production drops and insulin resistance becomes more
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likely.
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Insulin resistance means your body is pumping out more insulin to manage blood sugar.
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Insulin is fundamentally a fat storage hormone.
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When it's chronically elevated, it makes fat loss significantly harder regardless of what
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you're eating.
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There's the gut brain cortisol connection.
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Your gut produces the majority of your body's serotonin, and gut inflammation can directly
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influence your stress response through the vagus nerve.
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Chronic gut inflammation can elevate cortisol.
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Chronically elevated cortisol does several things that work against fat loss.
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It's gonna promote visceral fat storage, which is specifically fat around the organs.
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It can increase cravings for high calorie foods and it will interfere with thyroid conversion,
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connecting right back to what we discussed in episode one.
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If you missed that episode, go ahead and go back and listen to that.
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That's part one of this mini series.
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When a patient comes to me and says, I'm eating well, I'm exercising, and nothing's happening,
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gut health is one of the first places we look.
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Because if the gut is inflamed or dysbiotic, we can have someone doing everything else
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correctly and still hit a wall.
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This is why testing markers like inflammatory markers and in some cases even a comprehensive
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stool analysis is part of how we actually find out what's happening instead of just guessing,
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throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
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So, me give you a picture of what this would look like clinically.
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I'm going to call this patient Maria.
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Again, this is a composite, not a specific patient, more of an example.
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Maria came to us after years of doing everything right, air quotes, clean diet,
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consistent workouts.
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But she was still carrying this stubborn weight, particularly around her midsection and
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hips.
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She also mentioned almost as an aside that she had ongoing digestive issues for years.
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Most people are going to almost dismiss that, right?
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When the fat and body composition is their primary focus.
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She had bloating, irregularity, stool changes that she basically stopped mentioning to
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doctors because everyone told her it was just stress or she had IBS and manage it with fiber
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is what they said.
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When we ran comprehensive panel, inflammatory markers, full hormone panel and gut testing, we
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found significant gut dysbiosis alongside elevated inflammatory markers and a pattern
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consistent with estrogen dominance.
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Nobody had ever connected these dots for her.
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She'd been treated for IBS and separately told to just diet more for the weight, as if these
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were two separate problems.
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They were not.
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They were not unrelated.
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They were the same problem showing up in two places.
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Once we addressed the gut inflammation directly, her hormone markers began improving
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within a few minutes.
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For the first time in years, the stubborn fat that hadn't responded to diet and exercise
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alone started to actually move.
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So now let's talk about fasting because I get asked about this constantly and I know many
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people are curious about this topic.
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I want to give you a real answer instead of just a trend, because fasting works differently
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for different people.
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Intermittent fasting does work.
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I'll start with that.
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For the right person, through legitimate mechanisms.
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It can improve insulin sensitivity.
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It can support cellular cleanup processes called autophagy.
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And for some people, it simplifies adherence to a low calorie intake without having to
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constantly track things.
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That's real.
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That's the way it works.
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And I'm not here to say it's bad because it's not and I fast occasionally.
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But just saying blanketly that fasting is healthy for everyone is really not good
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medicine and can actually cause more damage to people.
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And that's where it's very important, especially with women's hormonal health, to
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make sure we understand the mechanism.
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And so here's the way it works, because I want you to understand, and this isn't caution just
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for the sake of being cautious, your reproductive hormone cycle is regulated by a
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communication system between your brain and your ovaries.
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The hypothalamic pituitary ovarian axis, HPO axis.
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This system is exquisitely sensitive to your energy availability.
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So when your brain detects that energy is coming too low relative to what's going out
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through a signaling hormone called Kispeptin, it can down regulate the entire reproductive
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hormone cascade.
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Your body decides reproduction isn't a priority right now when there's not enough fuel.
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What this can show up like is irregular cycles, shortened luteal phase, and in more severe
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cases, the cycle stopping altogether, which is a condition called hypothalamic amenorrhea.
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This is also a reason we see many women struggle with fertility.
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The body does not want to prioritize pregnancy or growing a fetus when it doesn't have the
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adequate energy that it needs.
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And so who's actually at a higher risk for this?
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It's not all women.
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I'm not going to blanketly say that.
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It's women who already have low energy availability in play.
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Maybe women with a history of disordered eating or chronic calorie restriction.
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Maybe women who are training at high volume without matching their intake.
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Anyone who's already underweight or in a significant deficit.
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Anyone who's actively trying to conceive.
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Fasting is not appropriate during pregnancy or breastfeeding.
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Full stop.
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It also includes women showing signs of high cortisol or adrenal dysfunction because that
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same stress axis interacts directly with reproductive hormone signaling.
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Now, perimenopause is where this gets genuinely nuanced.
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It's not a simple yes or no.
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A woman in perimenopause with a still regular cycle, low symptoms, maybe no sign of HPA axis,
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dysfunction, she may tolerate fasting reasonably well and it may be a good play.
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A woman in perimenopause who already has irregular cycles, significant symptoms like hot
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flashes, disrupted sleep, mood changes, and signs of HPA dysfunction, that's a different
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clinical picture and fasting is more likely to add stress to a system that's already under
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strain than to help it.
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What actually determines this isn't really age.
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It's cycle regularity, symptom burden, and whether there's already evidence of
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dysfunction.
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So, if you fall into one of the higher risk categories, the fix isn't just eat on a
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schedule and don't worry about it, because meal timing usually isn't the real lever.
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The actual issue is typically total energy availability and nervous system load, a food
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quantity and stress problem, not a clock problem.
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Fixing that requires actually knowing where your numbers stand, not just guessing.
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So to be clear, this is general education based on the physiology, not personalized
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recommendation.
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What's right for you depends on your actual history, your labs, and much more, your
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lifestyle, everything, which is exactly what we would look at together.
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And so, here's where this leaves us for this.
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Fat loss resistance is very often not just a willpower problem or even purely a calorie
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problem.
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It's a signaling problem across your gut.
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Your hormones, your stress, all of which are interconnected.
00:11:39
Two people can eat the exact same diet and get completely different results because their
00:11:44
internal signaling environment is completely different.
00:11:47
This is also why fasting protocols pulled from a podcast or an influencer that are just
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applied blindly can help one person and actually harm another.
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The variable isn't just willpower or discipline.
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It's actual physiology.
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And you can't know your physiology without looking directly.
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And so, as an aside to everything I just said, this is not personalized medical advice.
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I hope you know that.
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This is general education information.
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If you need personal medical advice, I would encourage you book a discovery call with us,
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with myself or a member of my team, and let's get into what your actually needs.
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On the next episode of this mini series, I'm going to bring all of this together because
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understanding the problem is necessary, but it's not the whole solution.
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We're going to talk about the piece that actually builds lasting results, muscle as a
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metabolic asset, how much protein actually matters, and where thermogenics realistically
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fit in.
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I'll walk you through what a real comprehensive approach to this looks like, not just a thirty
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day fix, but something built around actual data.
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Thank you so much for listening in.
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If any of this, the gut connection, the hormone signaling, or the question around fasting
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sounds like it applies to you or you have questions and you want real answers instead of
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guesses, that's exactly the kind of assessment we do at Ascend Functional Health.
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Go to the link in the show notes.
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You can book a discovery call with myself or a member of my team to learn more about a
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personalized approach with functional medicine.
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I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
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Thanks for tuning in.
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Thank you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things
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health and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
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If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
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someone who needs to hear this.
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For more resources, personalized support, or to have your questions answered live on the show,
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visit Ascend Functional Health and head to the contact page to connect with us directly.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember, your health is in your hands.