The Liz Moody Podcast - Ask The Doctor: Diet and Weight Loss Myths Edition—Cutting Through Misinformation To Get To The True Science Of Weight

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

My Ask the Doctor series was built around the idea that functional doctors have SO much incredible information about transforming our health, but the really great ones can be hard to find, tricky to get appointments with, and unfortunately quite expensive. On these episodes, I invite on the best doctors in the world and ask them all of my questions—and yours!—about a topic. We have Ask the Doctor episodes about hormones, longevity, gut health, anxiety, skincare, and more, so definitely check those out! This episode features Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, one of the most influential medical doctors in the UK. Dr Chatterjee is the host of the most listened to health podcast in the UK and Europe, Feel Better, Live More, and has written four Sunday Times best-selling books, including his most recent, Feel Great, Lose Weight. He hosts his own wellness show on BBC Radio, regularly appears on BBCNews and Television, and his TED talk, How To Make Disease Disappear, has been viewed over 3 million times. On this episode, we cover: The efficacy of calorie counting The impact of various diets on weight, including more wellness-y diets like keto and paleo The role that protein, fat, and carbs in weight loss The overlooked lifestyle elements that play a HUGE role in our weight How our microbiomes impact our weight What our metabolism actually IS, and what impacts how fast or slow it goes What changes Dr. Chatterjee recommends as we get older How the hormones leptin, ghrelin, cortisol, and insulin all impact our weight The role of privilege in weight management A 3-step exercise to deal with food cravings—and figure out what you’re really hungry for How different types of workouts (cardio, weight lifting) impact our weight Plus his take on caffeine, fruit, intermittent fasting, alcohol, and more! IMPORTANT: I want to be completely clear—this is not an episode that will tell you to count calories, restrict your food, or maintain an unhealthy weight to look a certain way that the media tells you to. This episode is all about BUSTING the myths and lies of diet culture and getting to a place of food freedom, arming with you with the real science you need to feel your best and support your health. But—if the topic of weight loss, even around the concept of reframing it, rejecting diets, and taking beautiful care of your body—is at all is triggering, I totally get that, and I’d invite you not to listen to this episode—I won’t be at all offended. As you’ll hear in this episode, so much about our weight involves figuring out what’s best for US individually, and I want you to feel empowered to decide whether listening to an episode that talks about weight in any way fits into that for you. Dr Chatterjee and I would love to hear any thoughts, feelings, things you’ve learned as you’re listening, so definitely screenshot and tag us on Instagram—I’m @lizmoody and he’s @drchatterjee. I’d also so love if you’d share with anyone in your life you think could benefit from this episode! Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a cookbook author and long-time journalist. Today, I am super excited to share another edition of our crazy popular Ask the Doctor episodes. If you're new here, first of all, hello, hi, welcome. I am so glad you're here. Next of all, my Ask the Doctor series was built around the idea that functional doctors have so much incredible information about transforming our health. But the really great ones can be hard to find, tricky to get appointments with and unfortunately quite expensive. On these episodes, I invite on the best doctors in the world and I ask them all of my questions and yours about a topic. We have asked the doctor episodes about hormones, longevity, gut health, anxiety, skincare, and more. So definitely check those out if those topics are of interest to you. This episode features Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, one of the most influential medical doctors in the UK.

Dr. Chatterjee is the host of the most listened to health podcasts in the huge. UK and Europe, feel better, live more. And he has written four Sunday Times bestselling books, including his most recent, Feel Great, Lose Weight. He hosts his own wellness show on BBC radio regularly appears on BBC news and television, and his TED Talk, How to Make Disease Disappear, has been viewed over three million times. He is the perfect person to talk to about our subject for this episode, diet and weight loss myths. There is so much misinformation out there about weight loss from detox teas to calorie counting, and I really wanted to create the most comprehensive episode ever on the science of weight. We cover so much in this episode, starting with

food, the efficacy of dieting, including wellnessy diets like paleo or keto, how different macronutrients like protein, fat, and carbs impact weight, how meal timing is way underdiscust. We get into the interaction of hormones like leptin, cortisol, and insulin with weight gain and loss, the exact right amount of time to work out and exactly what workouts to do. Why he doesn't recommend counting calories, I repeat, he does not recommend counting calories. The complete myth that so many people believe about our metabolisms, the role that privilege plays in weight management, a genius method to deal with food cravings, plus his take on caffeine, fruit, intermittent fasting, alcohol, and so much more. I want to be completely clear from the beginning. This is

not an episode that will tell you to count calories, restrict your food, or maintain an unhealthy weight to look a certain way that the media tells you to. This episode is all about busting the myths and lies of diet culture and getting to a place of food freedom, arming you with the real science that you need to feel your best and support your health. But if the topic of weight loss, even around the concept of reframing it, rejecting diets, and taking beautiful care of your body, If the topic of weight is at all triggering, I totally get that, and I would invite you to turn this episode off. I won't be at all offended. As you'll hear in this episode so much about our weight involves figuring out what's best for us individually. And I want you to feel empowered to decide

whether listening to an episode that talks about weight in any way fits into that for you. Dr. Chatterjee and I would love to hear any thoughts, feelings, things you've learned as you're listening. So definitely screenshot and tag us on Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody. And he's at Dr. Chatterjee with a J-C-H-A-T-E-R-J-E. All right. Without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Chatterjee to the podcast. Right, Dr. Chatterjee.

Thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today, especially from England. What time is it over there? Well, Liz, first of all, thank you for inviting me onto your show. I'm really excited about coming on. At the moment, it's about 3 p.m. You know, we're almost at spring here in the year. UK. So it's kind of pretty exciting over here, but it's about three o'clock in the afternoon.

Yeah, we lived in London for a while. My husband went to graduate school there. And the feeling in London in the spring and summer, when the days start to get really, really long and everybody's just out in the parks all the time, it's just the most magical thing in the entire world. Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic. And I think, you know, there's something special about this time of year, depending of course, on where you live. But, you know, in the UK at the moment, we are coming out of, well, we're still in our third lockdown. We've been in complete national lockdown since two days after Christmas. So, you know, it was dark, it was cold, the weather wasn't very good. So, you know, people are really struggling in the UK. And I think spring, certainly over here,

we have, you know, it suddenly gets lighter and in the mornings and the evenings. And, you know, as you know, when you live in London, we can have some super long days in June and July where it's, it's light, from 4.30 in the morning until like 11 o'clock at night. So I think it's making everyone's spirits go up a little bit. And you know, one thing I've noticed is that people want to get more active naturally without being told to at this time of year. People just want to get out there and move their bodies. Yeah. I feel like it's a sense of refreshment and renewal. And I think that we need that right now more than probably ever before in our lifetimes. Yeah. No, I completely agree. So this episode is going to be all about weight loss,

diets, all of that. We're going to answer all of those questions. But I want to start right off the top. I would love to talk about how weight loss and dieting sits with the notion of body positivity, body neutrality, and body acceptance. On this podcast, we talk a lot about using your body as a tool to really live your best life. It's not so much about appearing a certain way. And I can see people coming to this episode and thinking, like, well, wait, how does weight loss fit into all of that? and I've heard you talk about this before in a really lovely and accepting and educational way. So I would love if you could kick us off with that. Yeah, Liz, I think it's such an important topic.

And something that it's very, very much worth speaking about right at the top of this conversation because, you know, there's been this movement over the last five or ten years to, you know, really talk down weight loss. And I think that's because, you know, a lot of the messaging in public has been. very harmful and damaging and makes people feel bad about themselves. Everything has been about deprivation, restriction, punishment. And, you know, I think it was quite toxic, if I'm honest. And I think this body positivity movement has, you know, has grown out of the ashes of that kind of language. Now, I'm in large agreement with a lot of the body positivity movement in the sense that

we shouldn't shame people for the way that they look. We should accept people for who they are. You know, people are so much more than their physical appearance, the amount of fat on their bodies. I completely agree with that. You know, we should, we should be compassionate to people who are struggling with their weight or who are trying to lose weight for sure. But actually, then there's this, then there's this little bit extra, which we often don't talk about sometimes, which is, it's okay to accept someone for who they are and say that my weight is not my worth, but we can still help those people to lose excess weight in a compassionate way, in a helpful way, in a sustainable way.

And really, Liz, you know, what you're touching on here is one of the reasons why I nearly did not write this book. This is my fourth book now. And, you know, I did not need to write a book on weight loss, if the truth be known, because it is a controversial topic. And everything in my first few books is about promoting health and well-being first. Everything like physical health, mental health, emotional health, that comes on the back of us looking after ourselves in a holistic, rounded, 360-degree fashion.

But what I saw Liz was that a lot of people now have gone to the other extreme where it's a case of, well, hey, you know what, I'm going to love myself for who I am right now, and I'm not going to make any effort at all. and I don't need to make any effort at all with my weight. And that's where it's a medical doctor with 20 years experience. I have a slightly different perspective. This is not about shame. This is not about making people feel bad at all.

But what it is about is helping people understand that I want to help you love yourself where you are right now. I want you to talk to yourself in a kind way in terms of where you are right now. But also I can't pretend that carrying, you know, excess amounts of weights, and of course it depends on how much you're carrying, doesn't have a health consequence. We've seen that over the past 12 months in terms of carrying excess weights, what that does to increasing our risk of getting sick from all kinds of other different conditions. We're seeing that all the time. And I really feel the responsibility as a medical doctor that

it's okay to love you. It's okay for me to help you love yourself, but it's also okay for me to help you lose weight. And the truth is, so many people out there, they actually do want to lose a bit of excess weight. And I think it's reflective if the state of the world at the moment, which is everything gets polarized. It's either you can talk about weight loss or you have to talk about body positivity. And it's like, well, they're not mutually exclusive. We can actually talk about them both. And so that was really why I wrote this book was because I felt, you know what, there are a lot are people out there. There's two reasons why I wrote it. One of them is to address this issue. The other issue is that it's become very unfashionable to talk about weight now, okay, in a way

that it wasn't 10 years ago. It's not, certainly here in the UK, it's almost frowned upon. And I got a bit of, you know, a few negative comments from my followers and people who've always supported my work when I announced that I had a book out called Feel Great Lose Weight and they made all kinds of judgments about what was in the book, said, I can't believe you've jumped on the diet bandwagon and you're releasing a diet book, even though it's none of those things. And it was really interesting. It's a very triggering topic. But Liz, what I've realized is that in the UK, and I'm sure this is in the same in the US, some people will only pick up a book on health if it says weight loss on the cover. They have been conditioned by society to think that

weight loss equals health. Now it doesn't. It absolutely does not equal health or it doesn't always equal health. But the reason I wrote this book is to say, listen, it's called feel great lose weight because I'm going to help you feel great now. I'm going to help you feel good about yourself straight away. I'm going to help teach you simple daily habits that don't take long that are going to help you boost your self-esteem, how you feel about yourself, your energy, your mood. And you know what? any weight loss is going to come along as a side effect of feeling great in yourself. And so that's kind of really my overarching overview. Does that sort of answer your question, Liz? Yeah, it totally does. So basically, in a in a nutshell, tell me if I get that right. One,

one way of loving yourself is to acknowledge when perhaps your excess weight is hindering you living your best life. And then two, this is your sneaky way of getting some people on the health van wagon. Yeah, for sure. Exactly. And it's, you know, the word sneaky, I get what you're saying with that. But, you know, my, my mission is to help 100 million people reclaim their health over the course of my career.

Now, will I get there or not? I don't know. But for me, it's a really, you go. Yeah, it is. But it helps to orientate everything I do, whether it's TV shows, podcasts, radio, whatever it is. it helps me think, okay, if I'm going to, you know, accept this opportunity, for example, has it got the potential to impact the health of lots of people rather than just one or two? Not that, you know, helping one or two people is not worthwhile as well.

That's what I like to think I do in my clinic, one-on-one with patients. But why it's such a helpful goal for me is because then it's, then it helps me with a book like this, go, well, we're wrong. And if you are going to reach 100 million people, you have to. to be able to reach out to those people who are not accessing your first three books or the messaging you're trying to give out on your channels. They're expecting they want to pick up in every January or every April or every September. They want to pick up a book that actually they feel is going to help them lose weight. So I thought the only way I can reach those people

is to give them what they, not what they think they're getting, give them what they want to get on the cover and literally from paragraph one, help them understand, hey, you know what? I get you want to do that. I'm going to help you do that. But I'm going to help you do that in potentially a different way from what you've experienced before. So, you know, it's certainly proved a huge hit in the UK in the last three months that's has been out.

And, you know, I'm really excited for it to come out in America, for sure. Well, and I think the approach in it, to your point, is so different than a typical diet book. It's really about how can we revamp every part of your life to make you feel your best. And so I think you really succeeded in what you were setting out to do. So given all of that, and given kind of how messed up our body signals are from years of this negative outside influence and being bombarded by media messages, how do we know what weight our body actually wants to be out? Like how do we know if we should be losing weight or if we're trying to be 15 pounds less than our body wants to be because we see that in magazines and in movies. Yeah, Liz, it's a great question. And you know what? The truth is,

it can be a bit challenging because all the metrics we have to determine this, you know, they can, well, certainly the general metrics like BMI, for example, body mass index, you know, they can be very helpful on a population level to look at a country and go, okay, what, what is the weight spread here in this country. But on an individual level, you know, they can be helpful, but a lot of the time they can be a little bit misleading for people and people get quite upset when doctors or people online post about BMI. And I would agree it is an imperfect measurement. You know, there's all kinds of more sensitive test you can do. You can get bloods and labs done at your doctors, which will help you understand your blood sugar, whether there's any inflammation

in your body, what is your lipid profile, you know, all kinds of things can be used to build up a picture of in what kind of status your health. You can do sorts of measurements where you actually measure your visceral fat level or you can actually get that assessed. And so, you know, it depends what you have access to. But if we just zoom out for a minute, the approach I always take is really the weight loss isn't the focus. So I very much believe from, you know, seeing tens of thousands of patients that I don't really focus on weight loss with my patients, even the ones who come in saying they want to lose weight. I spend time trying to connect with them, trying to understand what really matters to them.

And that we focus there. We focus on small changes that are going to help making them feel good on a day-to-day basis. And what you often find there, Liz, is that actually, if they don't need to lose weight, weight, they don't lose weight. But actually, if they are carrying excess weight and they start to eat more, let's say, real foods, they start to move more in harmony with their lifestyle and what they enjoy. They start to prioritize sleep, get on top of their stress levels. Actually, those who are carrying excess weight tend to start losing excess weight and those who don't actually don't lose the weight. So the approach is not about, you know, I don't really be careful how I word this.

I understand that there are many different ways to lose weight. And I never, ever would say, this is the only way to do it, right? I say there's all kinds of different approaches that work for different people. I personally don't, I don't find counting calories and talking about a calorie deficit. I personally don't use that approach with my patients. Now, I recognize some people do. Some personal trainers do that and seem to get good success with their patients. But where I think I start the, I wouldn't say I differ, but you know, I'm a GP, so I'm a general practitioner. So what we see in the UK as GPs is we see everything, right? So we see all kinds of different people coming in. Whereas if you are a, let's say a personal trainer, of course you may see a

variety of people, but you may also see a certain subset of the population, people who think that actually intense exercise is necessary to help me lose weight. So these people are naturally going to be drawn to getting a PT. So a PT is going to see a certain type of person who believes that heavy exercise is going to help them. And so they, you know, there's a slight inbuilt bias there as to what that PT sees. And of course, I will have my own biases from what I've seen in 20 years, but I see people who believe that exercise is necessary. I see emotional eaters. I see people who need to change their diet. I see people who need to change the timing of their diet. I see people who need to change their environment. So I kind of feel that

I've really come around to the conclusion that there is no one right way to do this at all. We all need to find the right way that works for us. And what I tried to do in the book, and it was quite tricky really because one-on-one with a patient, I can really personalize things. But what I always try to do in my books is to come up with a framework that each reader can personalize for themselves. And on the penultimate page of the book, actually, I remember it was due to go to print last September. I think the book gets printed in Italy. It was due to go to print. And I, I phoned up Penguin, which is my UK publishers. And I said, guys, you've got to stop it. I've got to add another line. I said, no, no, no, it's too late. I said, no, no, I'm going to pull the book then because the line has to go in it. And it, it may seem like nothing, but, but the line was something like this. And when your friends ask you which diet plan you're following, you can tell them that you no longer follow other people's plans because you've been empowered to create your own. And I felt that was so important because this is not the doctor chattery plan, right? There's, you know, 10 people could read the book.

come up with 10 different approaches. What I want to do for every single person is help to, you know, hold their hands and walk them through all the various different aspects that may be at play for them and help them realize and help them work out, which ones do I need to focus on first. So, you know, yes, it's a weight loss book, but in many ways, Liz, it isn't as well because, you know, there's so many, I don't need to lose weight, but I found writing the book and actually applying some of the principles in the book, they've helped me. Because really this is a book about health. It's about well-being. It's about energy. It's about mental health. It's about helping us get to know our own behaviors better so that we can make better choices. And that's exactly why you're the

doctor that I wanted to have on my Ask the Doctor Weight Loss edition episode. I tend to agree completely with the idea that kind of if you treat your body well, you do all these healthy things, you'll achieve your body's best weight. The thing that messes with that for me is the idea of like a weight set point, which I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the idea that your body can kind of continuously move back towards your heaviest weight because your fat cells start behaving differently or something. Is that true?

And can you explain it and kind of if it is true, how we can overcome it? Yeah. So look, this is, you know, really come out of the scientific, literature, probably in the last 10 years or so, this idea of a set point or what I call in the book the weight points. But there's this idea that your body has really like a thermostat in terms of where it wants your weight to sit. So just as in your house, you know, you put your thermostat on at a certain temperature. And if it goes a bit above that, the air conditioning might kick in. and if it goes a bit below that, the heating might kick in with the goal always to maintain that

constant temperature. We have got, we believe, something very similar in the body around our weight. It's our body's set point of weight. What your body thinks is the right weight for you. Now, one of the problems is that if we have been unintentionally abusing our body for many years with lots of highly processed food, loads of sugary treats, not moving enough, being too stressed, not sleeping enough. Basically, the way many of us now live in the 21st century, our weight point can start to change. It can start to nudge up. And we saw this, let's say, with the biggest loser in America, for example, that people in the biggest loser lost a lot of weight quickly. But most people, two years on, would right back to where they started, if not a

heavy because their weight point hadn't changed. They just had a sudden calorie reduction. They suddenly lost weight, but then your body will always fight and change your signals and your hunger and your metabolic weight to get it back to where it was. So that I think that is true and it is a problem and many people know that feeling where they they're really good for a month or two. They're really trying to follow something. They're losing weight. They're feeling better. and then before they know it, they've crept back up to where they were before. But there's no need to get downhearted. What we need to do is be honest and understand that that exists. And I say, well, how can we change it? Because we can change it. And the way we think we can change it is by doing

all the things that we're going to talk about, you know, by eating mostly unprocessed whole foods as much as you can. I get none of us are perfect. We don't live in a perfect environment. We're always going to be tempted, that's okay. But the more of those whole food you can eat, the more you start to bring that set point down. The more you can move your body regularly. And I don't mean movement to start punishing yourself. I don't mean movement to necessarily burn calories because we can maybe touch on that later. It's not technically true that when we move more, we burn off more. if we can sleep adequately, if we can help working on our stress levels, what weight loss and health really is about is signals. It's about these little signals that different aspects

of your lifestyle can send your body and teach it how it wants to be. So if we send enough of those signals to our body through the way that we're living our lives, we can start to bring that that weight set point down. And I'm really passionate about this, Liz, because I know this. I know this, I know that for almost everybody, you can lose weight in a sustainable way, in a scientifically responsible way, but only once you find the right approach for you. Just because your best friend lost weight on a plant-based diet or your sister lost weight on a low-carb diet, great, maybe they found what worked for them. It does not mean that that's going to be the right approach for you. And I think That's the sort of one-dimensional thinking I'm really trying to challenge a little bit with, you know,

all the stuff I put out on social media, but also in the books is to say you can bring that weight point down, but it may not be the same approach as you friend. Let's talk about diets for a second. I, you say in the book that like diets as were sold diet culture in the media don't work. Does that to you include things like the more wellnessy diets like veganism or keto or the pale, your diet. Yeah. So let me clarify what I mean by that. So when I say diets don't work for most people most of the time. What I, what I simply mean is this idea of like a two week or a three week diet to kickstart everything and then that you follow that originally for the rest of your

life. That is the way you eat. For most people, they can work for a period of time. But then if they don't change anything else, the weight tends to come back to where it was, if not making them heavier. This is one of the drives to actually writing this was, you know, in the UK in January, that there's a big new year, new you movement. I'm sure it's the same in America where, you know, everyone goes on a diet in January. And I would see a lot of patients at my door in March and they'd say, Dost Chats, you know what? I was on the diet in January and it worked really, really well for me. you know, I lost weight, I was feeling better. But I don't know what happened.

It's March now and not only am I back to where I was, I'm a little bit heavier. But Liz, that isn't the worst thing. The worst thing is that their self-esteem has gone through the floor. They feel worthless as if they're to blame. It's the only industry where we don't blame the diet we're following. We blame ourselves. And I think that self-esteem going down is the most damaging thing because then that leads to more negative behaviors. Oh, I can't stick to anything. You know, I'm useless. I still couldn't do it this

year. So what do you do? You have more chocolate cookies in the evening to sort of to plug that hole in your heart. And so the diets, you know, let's say, let's take the Whole 30 plan for it. Are your listeners familiar with the Whole 30? Yes, for sure. Yeah, Whole 30, huge global phenomena. I know Dallas very well, one of the co-authors of the original book. And most really interesting is if you talk to Dallas, he will say it was never meant to be a diet for the rest of someone's life. It was it was meant to be a 30 day, almost like experiment to show yourself how good you might be able to feel and go, okay, look, let's start adding things back in now and figure figure out which are the components of this which are working for me, which are the components of this,

which are not working for me. And I know Dallas would get very frustrated that actually some of the time people were taking that and are going, right, that's it. I feel great on the whole 30. I'm going to be rigid and not veer off this month after month, year after year. And I think that's where diets can become problematic. I'm not against people trying two week plans to help them understand themselves better and go, hey, you know what? I didn't know. It was possible to have this much energy and sleep this well. But at some point, we need to stop following someone else's diet plan and start understanding what works for us. Liz, I can tell you what the one of the biggest things I've learned in seeing so many patients is

people will only continue doing something in the long term when they're, they feel that they've got some sort of ownership on it. So I can tell a patient what I think they should do. And they may follow it for a few weeks or a few months because Dr. Chatterjee told them to do it. But we never do things in the long term because someone else is telling us to do it. At some point, you know, we've got to take ownership. We go, actually, you know what? There's this component that works really well. This is now my plan. I understand my body better, which is certainly that's one component of the answer to your question. The other component, Liz, is I'm not saying veganism or plant-based diets or eating like a paleo template for your diet can't be helpful. It

absolutely can. But most diets tend to be about deprivation and restriction. And I never find those things helpful in the long term because if you feel that you're depriving yourself or you're restricting yourself, you know, the natural response at some point, is to bounce back the other way and binge out on what you weren't allowing yourself to consume. And I really feel there's a big emotional component to eating that it's not just for, you know, emotional eaters or what we would call emotional eaters. I think we all suffer from some degree of emotional eating. And I don't feel that a lot of diets take that into account.

I'll give you an example, Liz, during our lockdown last year, our second one, I started binging on sugar for a few weeks. And look, it was like what's coming on it? Well, I knew what was going on. I was really stressed over a few things. My mother wasn't very well. I was having a few pressures in my work life. I was also doing some therapy about some stuff from when I was a kid and how that

affects my emotions. And you know what? I was just feeling really stressed. And for me, I couldn't stop eating sugar for a few weeks. Now, the difference this time, Liz, because this has happened, you know, long in the past, before I really embraced wellness, you know, I would have a very, very sweet tooth. But what I did this time is I didn't beat myself up. I accepted it. And I was very much a case of, yeah, you know, life is tough at the moment. And I am stress. And the way I'm dealing with stress at

the moment is to consume sugar. Now, I don't want this to continue forever. But the worst thing I can do is to punish myself and say I'm worthless and I can't stick to. to anything because then I'll end up consuming more sugar. And after three or four weeks, it completely went. And then I'm back to the way I like to live, which is, you know, only having sugar, you know, every now and again as a treat rather than as an everyday norm. And so I think we all have a degree of emotional eating with foods. And I think a lot of diets really don't deal with the emotions.

They just deal with saying, you should be eating this. you shouldn't be eating this. Let me give you another example to make it a bit clearer. Most people who are trying to lose weight and improve their health, most people know not that chocolate cookies or ice screams on the sofa in front of the television in the evening are not going to be helping them, right? Most people know that. But why are they still doing it even though they know that? It's because it's not a rational decision. It's coming from their emotions. As I say in the book, we used to only eat to fill a hole in our stomachs. Now we eat to fill a hole in our hearts. When we're lonely, we eat. When we're bored, we eat. When we're

stressed out, we eat. When we've been on Zoom calls all day and not seen another human being, we eat. Right. So we've got to deal with that component as well as helping people with what they eat or we're never going to change the behavior in the long term. So we're definitely going to get into the emotional eating conversation in a little bit because I loved your techniques to deal with that, but I'd love to get a little bit granular on the food side first. You talked in the book about protein and the role that it plays in weight loss. Can you talk about that? Yeah, protein is really, really important for weight loss. No matter what diet you, what diet, whatever sort of eating plan that you want to follow, it doesn't matter what it is, right? Protein is really, really important.

So why is that? Well, protein is what we call the most satiating of the macronutrient. So, you know, I always very careful when I communicate not to use terms that, you know, not to assume that everyone understands these terms. So a macronutrient, there's fat, protein and carbs, right? This is how we talk about these three, you know, the three macronutrients of food, basically. And protein is thought to be the one that fills us up the most. So if you consume enough protein, you're going to be fuller for longer. And that's why protein is so important. That's the first reason. It's not the only reason. Second reason is that when you digest protein, you utilize more energy than when you're digesting other foods, which is, of course, really helpful.

If you're trying to lose weight, that can be super helpful if you're burning up more energy just to digest that protein. And the third thing is that protein helps us maintain our muscle mass. And the more muscle mass you have, the more likely it is that your weight points, which we were talking about before, will start to move down. Your weight point is real, your muscle mass is very important at sending signals to your body. A, the more muscle mass you have, the more storage room you have for the food that you're consuming, right? And the excess food you're consuming, you can store it in your muscles.

So that's one component there. But it's also that it helps to lower your weight point. So protein is something that even if you're, you know, vegan, you know, it's something to, but I really think it's worth paying attention to. Again, Liz, I just want to make it really clear. All of, none of these things are, are absolute prescriptions, right? Whatever way one finds to help someone lose weight, you will always find somebody else who did it a different way, who didn't follow those rules. And I'm very open-minded. I really respect that.

I'm simply saying for most people increasing their protein intake is super, super helpful for their healthful stop, but also when trying to lose weight. And what might that be? It depends on your bias, right? So if you do eat animal products, then meat, egg, fish would be, you know, very good sources of protein, eggs, you know, Greek yoghers, if you prefer to be plant-based, if you prefer to be vegan, pulses such as lentils and beans, seeds, unsalted nuts, tofu, fermented soy products like satan and tempe, corn, these sort of things are protein sources as well. And sometimes, right, because ultimately, if we're talking about what we eat, any way of eating that's going to be successful in the long term, whether it's for athletic

performance, whether it's for cognitive health, whether it's for weight loss, doesn't want to leave you feeling hungry, right? Any way of eating that leaves you feeling hungry all the time, you know, it's only a matter of time before you crack. Hunger is a very powerful ancient signal that it's very hard to ignore. And some people, when they're trying to lose weight, they restrict so much. They do two things, two things I commonly see. They're not eating enough or they're not eating enough protein.

And it may sound counterintuitive because they might think. think, I'm trying to lose weight so I need to eat less. But here's the problem, if you eat less at breakfast, if you eat less at lunch, by late afternoon, people are so hungry that they binge out on sweets, on chips, that like they compensate later in the day. And I find it's much better to eat a proper meal, you know, maybe eat a bit more, eat more protein, eat more volume of whole foods. And you often find that you're less hungry later on.

So overall, you end up eating less rather than when you try and restrict, you keep going back for more later. Yeah, you had that case study in the book of the client, the patient you had, that you had him start eating his dinner for breakfast. And it changed his entire health. And I thought that was fascinating. Yeah. I mean, this is one of my tips that some people find very helpful. Eat your dinner for breakfast. You know, a lot of people start their meals, start their day with sugary breakfast. cereals and this patient in particular got quite a few like this. He noticed he'd got a bit of a spare tire around his waist. He wasn't, you know, particularly overweight, but he was trying to look after his health a little bit and we went through what he was eating. And it was granola. It was a

sugary granola cereal he got from the supermarket. And he thought it was healthy. It was marketed as healthy. And he said, you know, I keep feeling hungry in the day. I snack quite a lot. But you know, I think my performance of work is okay. Anyway, he was vegetarian this patient. And, you know, for ethical reasons, he preferred to eat vegetarian food. And as a doctor, I always want to be respectful for my patient's desires and preferences. I said, okay, fine. And he said, well, what else can I have for breakfast? I said, well, there's all kinds of options. I said, what do you have for dinner? I said, well, sometimes I really like either wild salmon and roast vegetables or goat's cheese and roast vegetables.

I said, okay, well, what about if you made some extra in the evening and you have that in the morning? And he said, what, for breakfast? I said, yeah, would you try it? It goes, well, okay, if you think it might help. So this is what he did. He literally, he'd make more roasted vegetables in the oven the night before. He'd keep them in the fridge.

He'd get up. He'd warm up the vegetables and he'd chop some goat's cheese on it. And he'd have a big plate of goat's cheese. and oven sauteed, not oven saute, oven baked vegetables. And the first day that happened, he ate breakfast at about 8 a.m. And he would normally snack all morning. He said, I didn't even feel hungry until about 2 p.m. in the afternoon. He didn't even feel hungry.

He was just totally full. He said his energy was better. His focus was better. His work performance was better. And this continued, basically. he would have dinner for breakfast every morning and he found out, you know, effortlessly, the weight started coming off. So he wasn't really trying to lose weight, but by cutting out the process food, by eating real whole food in a way that suited him and his lifestyle,

his work performance increases, his energy increases, his mood increases, and he loses weight. And he said, I'm not even trying to lose weight, but it's coming off. And that's the power of a lot of these suggestions is that you focus on health and well-being, the weight loss comes along as a side effect. But for people listening, Liz, you know, if you're struggling for breakfast, I would honestly say, try cooking more for dinner and try for a few days and see if that works for you in the morning for breakfast. If it doesn't, that's okay. You don't have to do every single tip that I recommend. These are all options for people to experiment with. I really feel, Liz, that we've really come into an era where we, I think we overly focus on what the expert is telling us.

And we forget that, you know what, we can be our own experts. Let the expert guide you. And then I really want people to become the expert of their own bodies because frankly, nobody's going to know their own bodies and their own life as well as that individual. Absolutely. We talked, okay, so that was protein. You mentioned the other two macronutrients, which are carbs and fat. Can you speak briefly to how those interact?

with our weight, especially because I think in these days, there's a lot of talk about going low carb, high fat diets, and that that's a very trendy thing for weight loss. Yeah, so listen, I describe myself as diet agnostic because, look, I've had my biases at various parts in my career, you know, maybe eight, nine years ago, I was putting a lot of my patients on what I call low carb diets. I don't particularly like the term low carb or low fat, because So I don't actually think it gives us any ideas to the quality of your diet. It's simply just isolating your diet around one particular macronutrient. But I recognize that some people find those labels helpful.

But I've had patients following a low carb diet who reverse their type 2 diabetes, who've lost weight, who've, you know, got more energy than they've ever had before. But the truth is, I've also had people who go on a vegan diet do the same things or a whole food plant-based diet or a paleo diet. And I think this is where I think this clinical experience comes in because when you've seen enough patients and you really sit back and go, what have I learnt from 20 years to seeing patients?

I've learned that people are always surprising you, number one, but number two, you learn that different things work for different people. So trying to say that there is one true diet that works for everyone, It just doesn't fit what I've seen. And I think, you know, if you look at humans, if you look at our evolution, what has made humans unique is that we can thrive on all kinds of different diets. We are opportunistic omnivores. Our diets has always been dictated by our geography and our climate.

And I think we get overly focused on, is it keto, is it paleo, is it low carb, is it vegan? I want people to experiment. My rule is you really want your diet mostly whole food based because if you're mostly eating real foods, whether that's plant foods or animal foods, your body recognizes what they are. They have three sort of magic benefits. Number one, you tend to feel less hungry. Number two, your body starts to try and manage its weight for you without you even trying. And number three, you are less tempted to eat what I call in the book blissy foods, these kind of super tempting things. foods like cookies or ice cream or pastries that we can't resist. So the side effects of eating real food is very, very powerful. And so I don't really have a bias. I want people to experiment. So I've made this place in the book called a 50, 30, 20 plate to say, listen, I want you to experiment. But if you want some guidance on how to start, I would say this. Make 50% of your plate non-starchy vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, greens, cabbage.

spinach, mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, right? 50% of your plates. 30% of your plates, make it with protein, such as, you know, depending on your preferences, it could be lean meat, it could be fish, it could be eggs, or it could be tofu, lentils, tempe, beans. And the other 20% either have whole food carbs or you can have natural sources of fat like, you know, nuts, seeds, avocados, things like that. Use that as a template. Again, I'm not saying people have to follow this. I much rather people figure out what works for them. But it's a pretty good starting point. And then if you're still feeling hungry or it's not working for you, you're not losing enough weight, you can start to play around with, you know, increasing the protein and lowering the

carbs. I've seen work really well. That is more of that traditional, you know, low carb approach, which can work super well for some people, or you could do another tweak, which is reducing how much fat you've got in there and increasing the amount of whole food carbohydrates, like sweet potatoes and things that you've got there. That's more what you might see with a whole food, plant-based, vegan type approach.

I think they can both work, but some people tend to thrive on different ones. And, you know, Liz, I think, I was chatting about this recently with Tommy Wood on my podcast. And I think one of the reasons is that A, we're all different, B, we've all got different ancestral histories, C, you know, people have moved all over the world these days. So let's say someone like myself, right, my mum and dad were born and brought up in India. I was born in the

UK. So I've got my Indian heritage. I will have picked up, you know, my genetics from my parents, probably my microbiome from my parents. But then I've been living in the UK my entire life. I've been exposed to a UK-type diet and a UK-type climate. So we still don't know yet how all these things interplay together. You know, am I better off following a diet of my ancestors, like how Indian families would typically eat, or am I better following off a diet of my locality where I live here in the UK?

these are things I think science is going to be teaching us over the next five, ten, 15 years because I think this, you know, we never had this kind of movement before from country to country from different parts of the world so rapidly. And I think this all plays into this complex needs that we all have and why some of us literally, you know, some people will swear to you black and white that low carb is the only way to go. And for them, it probably is. It probably is the diet that has changed their life.

But someone also different will tell you, when I went whole food vegan, my entire life change. I had more energy. My skin was better. So what do you do with that? Do we fight over who's white? Or do we take a bit more of a nuanced perspective and go, oh, well, they're both working in different ways for different people?

You mentioned microbiome. What role do you think your microbiome plays in your weight? and like should we be taking probiotics or prebiotics or focusing on that in terms of managing our weight? Yeah, I think our microbiome plays a huge role. I think there's there's more and more data coming out, you know, certainly every month supporting the relationship between a well-functioning diverse microbiome and a, you know, and a healthy weight. Now, the problem we've been having is trying to figure out which way the association goes. You know, is it the poor microbiome that is leading to carrying excess weight

or is it the carrying excess weight that's leading to a poor microbiome? And I don't think we're completely clear on that yet. There have been some interesting trials where people take probiotics or they go on a diet full of diversity to try and improve the health of their microbiome. And for people who are not familiar, the microbiome is simply the name we give to this collection of bugs and microorganisms that live inside us along with their genetic material. That's, it's just a scientific term. But basically we're talking about the trillions of gut bugs that live inside us. I have used proboscis with patients before and I found it to be helpful. I don't think it's necessary in every

single case. I think also that if you are having a whole food-based diet, it's full of lots of fiber, lots of different colors, then, you know, these are the prebiotics that actually feed your microbiome in the first place. So I do think that's incredibly helpful for the majority of people who are trying to lose weight. Again, there's a caveat here. You know, you, I'm sure you, Liz, and your, and your listeners are probably aware that there's a big movement, growing movement, the carnival movement in terms of just eating meat or a meat predominant diet. Are you familiar with that? I am a little bit.

Yeah, it's just, it's something that certainly the people I follow on Twitter or on Instagram, it seems to come up quite a lot. And some people are reporting incredible results from doing this. Now, it's very controversial for some people. As I've said to you before, I'm very open-minded. did I always respect people's individual experiences. And my feeling is that why that diet seems to work, I think, so well, is that it acts as a form of elimination diet.

So if you do have problems with your microbiome, it tends to be the carbs in our diet that feed, you know, that will feed your microbiome. And so if you've got a disrupted or an unbalanced microbiome and you keep feeding at loads of carbs, particularly processed carbs, you can get gut symptoms, you can not feel so good, you can get bloating, constipation, all kinds of issues. And if you cut them out completely and just eat meat all the time, for example, I have seen some people feel like a different person, they've got more energy, their joint pains, their autoimmune symptoms tend to go down. And again, I don't think, or certainly I'm not familiar with long-term data on this. So it's not something I put, I, I, I, I,

I personally use with patients, although I do know some patients who've come in to see me, and they're doing very, very well on that type of eating, which again, simply supports what I'm trying to say, which is different approaches work for different people. But I think the microbiome is hugely at play there. And the other thing, Liz, is what we have seen is if you've, if your listeners are familiar with FMT, fecal microbiota transplantation, it's basically when you get an implant of a microbiome from someone else from their stool and you implant it into someone else's guts. Sounds a bit gross, but it does actually, it is happening. And actually some people are reporting

that I've seen some case studies where someone who is not overweight, they get the microbiome implanted from somebody who is overweight. Within about six weeks, they've suddenly started to become overweight as well. So I think we are getting really supportive data that our microbiome is instrumental. But again, I don't want people to stress out about it. I think the rules of a diverse diet, lots of different colors, unprocessed food, those things, frankly, are going to help support your microbiome. But if you want to take a good quality probiotic as well, I don't think it's going to do any harm. I get asked constantly about my favorite protein powders because, quite frankly, it can be really hard to find ones that have great ingredients and actually taste good. Using protein

and green smoothies is key. Protein is the most safe. satiating macronutrients. So making sure there's a good amount of protein in your smoothies is the best way to avoid that mid-morning crash and make sure that you're full and happy through lunchtime. I've tried pretty much every protein powder on the market and there are only a few that I like enough to keep stocked in my kitchen to use in all of my green smoothies. And I am so excited to introduce you to one of them today. Meet Newsess Clean Lean Protein. These protein powders have some of the best ingredient list that I have ever seen with no allergens, gums, or emulsifiers. It's a pea-protein base, but they use this crazy patented chemical-free technique to make the protein highly digestible. It's actually got a 98%

digestibility rating, which is way higher than most protein powders on the market. That means that all of the protein on the label is actually being absorbed and assimilated by your body, which is not always the case. That same process ensures that the texture is super smooth too, so it's not gritty and gross like so many protein powders. It's regularly tested for gluten, soy, dairy, heavy metals, and pesticides so you can rest assured that you're getting just protein and nothing that can be at all harmful. My two favorite flavors are from their digestive support line. They have a probiotic vanilla and a probiotic cacao. The vanilla gets its flavor from organic vanilla beans and is lightly sweetened with just a touch of organic coconut sugar. There's no stevia

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Now, let's get back to the episode. What about metabolism? Can you explain the concept of your metabolism to me like I were five years old? And then also can you speak to like whether the notion of snacking frequently to stoke your metabolism or having cinnamon or like controlling your metabolism as a method of weight management is effective? Yeah. So I mean there's many ways to look at this. I think it's a very much, it's probably an overused term and a very much misunderstood term. And your metabolism really, I guess the way many scientists would look at it is, you know, what does your. body need, you know, to operate its machinery on a, on a minute to minute basis. You know, just to, it's not about eating, simply just to be awake and alive. And for me now in the UK speaking to you, Liz, and the United States, is requiring a certain amount of energy. I'm breathing.

It's quite hot in this room, so I'm probably sweating a little bit. My heart's pumping. I'm thinking about the questions that you're asking me, this is all consuming energy and the amount of energy it consumes is one way of looking at our metabolism. So it's this kind of background level of how our body is running. How much energy is it taking to run? Now, I don't really focus on it that much with my patients. I've never found it that helpful. I'm not, I definitely don't agree that we need to keep feeding and stoking our metabolism with snacks every few hours. I really think for most people who are trying to lose weight, that is not helpful at all. I think we over snack in the Western world. There's some really good data on that. I've shared some of it in the book. You know,

I think, you know, back in the 70s, you know, I think 70, 80 percent of us ate about three times a day. And I think now, about five years ago when I think, I think it was Satchin Panda who was looking at this from the Salk Institute in San Diego. You know, the top 10 percent of eaters are eating, I think over 15 hours in the day, like a huge amount of time. And, you know, every time you're consuming, particularly if there's any carbs or protein in what you're consuming, you're releasing a hormone called insulin. Insulin is a very, very important hormone. It's very complex to what insulin actually does.

It does many different things. But the key thing for weight loss is this. If there's insulin kicking around in your body, it basically instructs your body. not to break down fat. Right? So insulin being around means your body's getting a signal. Don't break down your fat stores. If you are constantly eating and snacking every few hours,

you're keeping insulin up all the time. And if insulin is up all the time, you're never giving your body the opportunity to break down its fat stores. And so I think most of us need to actually snack less. And again, as I mentioned earlier on in this conversation, sometimes we're only snacking so much because we're not eating enough in the first place. So we restrict ourselves at our meal. Two hours later, we're like, ah, I'm so so hungry. So you then have a snack. And the cycle continues, but you're never letting that insulin drop down, which I think is really important for fat loss. It's important

for our metabolism. The other thing I think it's worth mentioning with respect to metabolism, is this whole idea of, you know, calories in or energy in versus energy out. So this is a very common concept in weight loss. And actually, in order to lose weight, you have to burn off more calories than you take in. Now, that is technically true. It's not that that is false. The practical application of that never seems to be that helpful in my experience. So we feel, for example, that we can measure these things accurately that, oh, I'm going to

taking 2,500 calories a day. I'm going to measure that. I'm going to take it in. And then I'm going to work out. I'm going to run for 30 minutes. And I'm going to do 10 minute on the rower. It's just not that simple. Our body is complex. It's always adapting. So I give an example, a common myth when it comes to weight loss is that we have to work out more to lose weight. And it's pretty, it's well worth just exploring this for a second list because I think a lot of people get this wrong. So we feel that when we move more, let's say you go for a run and your watch or the treadmill says you have burnt off 300 calories. We think that that 300 calories gets added on to what we were going to burn off anyway. So if we were going to burn off, if our metabolism was going to

burn off 1,500 calories, we now can add on 300 calories to that, which means we're burning off even more. Unfortunately, it's not always true because your body will compensate. So your body wants to keep your calorie output the same every day. It's tightly controlled. It's a bit like your weight point. Your body controls these things. So if your body wants you to burn off 1,500 calories a day, right? And you've just burned off 300 extra running. It will sort of downregulate other processes. So that 1500 is only 1,200 in other places. So, you know, you fidget less, you move around less. These are things that we call neat, non-exercise activated thermogenesis, these non-exercise movements that also play a big part in our metabolism and how much energy we're

consuming. So the question then is, can you lose significant amounts of weight without moving at all, without exercising? Yes, you absolutely can. Do I recommend it? Absolutely not. And I'll tell you why not? Because it's so much more than metabolism. Weight loss is so much more than consciously controlling your calories in and then trying to expend them out in the gym. We are complex individuals, all kinds of things play a role. We mentioned emotions, right? So why I think exercise is so important is because it helps improve our self-esteem. It helps improve how we feed about ourselves. It's the fastest ways to improve our mental health. When you are moving your body regularly, you're sending signals to your body that you are a thriving, active human who's engaging with life. You are

going to snack on comfort foods less when you are moving your body regularly. You're going to not going to feel as yucky and as kind of, you know, slumped on the sofa, feeling bad about life and then just opening the packet of chips, you're going to do that less when you're feeling good about yourself. So exercise, I think, is very important as a part of a weight loss strategy, but not because of calories. It's because of how it makes us feel. I want people to move their bodies, not to burn off calories, but to make themselves feel good. And if we don't, do that, Liz. I'm going to tell you example of one person I knew who, this is a prime example of how damaging this whole idea of food and exercises, we only measure in terms of energies and

calories. When he was 11 years old, he remembers going on holiday with his parents. They were in a holiday resort, and at 11, he went to the hotel gym with his dad, and they spent half an hour on the treadmill. And at the end of the half an hour, his dad said to him, hey son, you've just burnt off 300 calories. Well done. You've earned yourself a Mars bar. And off they go to the sweet shop.

They buy a Mars bar and that starts off 25 years of a problematic relationship with food, which is why I end up seeing that chap. And it's because exercise was reduced to being just a number. That's it. That's his only value you have now earned. a Mars bar. So I think a lot of this messaging, you mentioned body positivity at the start, this kind of plays into it. Exercise to make ourselves feel good about who we are. You know,

I'm so passionate about this because it's not that calories in and calories out is not scientifically accurate. It is. But there's science. And then there's the practical application of how this works for real people with real lives. And that's where I don't find it particularly helpful. If we're working out to feel the best that we can about ourselves, does that mean that we should just be doing whatever workout we love the most? I know in the book you talk about the benefits of cardio versus weightlifting, for instance. Look, I think the most important thing is something that you enjoy because the truth is if you do not enjoy something, it is going to be hard for you to keep this up in the long term. You know, you can punish yourself at the gym doing a type of workout that you don't like for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, maybe two months if you're really motivated. But at some point, you're going to stop.

Now, look, strength training, I think is really important for all of us, especially if you want to lose weight. We've already mentioned when we spoke about protein, how important muscle mass is. And one thing that people forget is that once you hit the age of 30, you, you're going to be able to, you. you start to lose muscle mass every single year. Now, that's pretty depressing to actually think about that, but we start to lose muscle mass. So we have this idea in society that, you know, strength training is for, you know, people in their 20s and teenagers who want to look really good and they want to get buff. Actually, it's arguably more important the older we get.

So I think strength training is really important. Now, I'm not saying you have to go. and have a personal trainer at the gym one hour three times a week, right? My recommendations are super easy and they're super practical. You know, one of the workouts in the book is aware, as I say to people, keep a dumbbell or a kettlebell in your kitchen. I have all these sorts of five-minute kitchen workouts because I love them because I do them. My patients love them because they feel really achievable. And this one is, you know, this is one I've been using in the UK, a lot of the the moment for people who are working from home. Are people still working from home a lot, Liz,

in the U.S.? Yeah. Yeah, right now we are. Yeah. And that's why I think, you know, a big thing in the UK is to make a cup of tea regularly, right? So what I say here is keep a dumbbell or a kettlebell in your kitchen. Every time you put the kettle on to make a hot drink, pick up that dumbbell and do five bicep curls in each arm and then have your hot drink. If you're having three cups of tea a day or three cups of coffee a day, you're going to lift that weight 30 times. Over the course of a week, you'll lift that weight 210 times. That's nearly a thousand times a month. And the beauty is, in the moment, it will feel like nothing. It will literally feel like nothing. And that's the, it's like toothbrushing. You know, you go there, you do a little bit regularly. That's what looks

after your dental health for life. And I want people to start looking at movement in the same way. Sure, love going to the gym, go to the gym, but do this as well. I do a five minute workout, Liz, every single morning. I don't think I missed a day in three years. And I haven't missed a day, not because I'm more motivated than you or anyone else, because I understand human behavior. So when we're talking about the ideal form of exercise to do, I could tell you all the benefits of walking or strength training or cardio. But if you're not, you're not, you're not. You're not, not going to do it, it doesn't really matter. So when you understand human behavior, you understand that you've got to, the two big rules that I've written about is number one, you've got to make it easy

if you want something to stick in the long term. And number two, you really want to stick on that new behavior onto an existing habit. So what do I do in the morning? Well, I have a little morning routine, but part of that morning routine is I will go into the kitchen and I will make coffee. Right. So I weigh my coffee grounds out, I pour the boiling water on, and I put a timer on for five minutes. In those five minutes, I either do a body weight workout or with a kettlebell in the kitchen. I do a workout in my pajamas. I don't get changed. I make it so easy. It's just what I do. I make coffee while the coffee is waiting. I don't go on Instagram. I don't go on email. I do my workout. So I don't go to the gym. I don't have time to go to the gym, but I get a five-minute workout.

in every day. And I think it keeps me in good shape. It helps me with my physique, with how I feel about myself. So the point I'm trying to make is there's all kinds of options I give in the book for people that they can choose. There's something called the core kitchen three, which is the three best full body exercises that you can do that takes under five minutes to do. And I want people just to do it for a few minutes every day. So in answer to your original question, I want people to move. If you make me prioritize, I'd say strength training is always really, really important for our overall longevity, but also for weight. But the second thing I'd say is walking, right? We so undervalue walking because we've got into this mentality of calories and we've got into this mentality

of more and more sweating and more effort means better. But you know what? It doesn't always, sometimes really pushing yourself in a workout can exhaust you afterwards. You're exhausted afterwards. You then don't want to move around and you want to sit on the sofa eating chocolate and cookies. Walking helps your body signals. Again, we've been saying as a theme throughout this conversation that the way we're going to lose weight in the long term, the way we're going to bring our set point down is by keep giving your body signals from different angles that you are an active thriving human.

Walking for even 10 or 15 minutes a day has so many health benefits for the body. And it will help you lose weight, but not because of the calories burned, because of all those other what I call ripple effects on the background. So please, people, please do not underestimate walking to lose weight. You don't have to go for a one hour run five times a week. If you want to do that, that is completely fine. I promise you, a regular walk each day will start to change your signals. It will start to change your hormones. And it's going to make you feel a significantly lot better. I bet a lot of people

are walking while they're listening to this very episode. So shout out to anybody who's walking right now. Is there anything else that you think we should be doing? You mentioned strength training is especially important as we get older. And I think a lot of people get frustrated as they get older that they have all of these healthy techniques in place. And they don't seem to be the same effect that they did before. So are there other behavioral changes that we should be paying attention to as we age? Yeah. So there's three daily habits that I think are really, really important. And I cover them in full in the book, but I'm very happy to share them here. So one of them was lift. So it's lift connect, reflect, okay? So we just mentioned lift. I think we should

all try and lift something reasonably heavy every day, even if it's just a dumbbell or kettlebell in our kitchen. The next one is connect. Now, this one's really important actually for many of us, whether we're getting, you know, we're all getting older, I guess, but, you know, even if we're in the younger part of life or middle age or older, I don't think it matters. We are, you know, we are herd animals, we're social creatures. We're designed to be with other people. That's something over the last 12 months that I think is really affecting a lot of people, this isolation, this loneliness, And here's the truth is that when we don't connect with other people, we feel that there's something missing. It's like we have this hole in our heart. And we will seek to fill that hole with whatever we

can, whether it's two to three hours of scrolling Instagram in the evening, whether it's, you know, a bag of cookies, whether it's binge watching Netflix, you know, whether it's gambling, whatever it is, we will seek to get that somewhere else. And with respect to weight loss and health, I often find that people are eating more than they wanted to because they're lonely. You know, I've seen this all the time. They're lonely, so it's just something to do. And actually sometimes that they're better off phoning a friend or if you can, meeting up with a friend because you feed yourself in another way.

You fill up on friendship and connection. So you no longer need to fill up on sugar and pastries. So I think connection is something we should all try and do for at least five minutes a day. I always say for five minutes a day, connect with another human being. If you're lucky enough to live with somebody, put your phone and laptop down, sit with them attentively, pay attention. This is what I do in my wife. It's called the, I call it the tea ritual when the kids are in bed every evening.

Before we do anything else, we try to sit in the kitchen with a cup of mint tea, no phones, no laptops, and just ask each other how are they? day was on the days that when we're doing this regularly, we're closer, there's more intimacy. When we think we're too busy for doing it, as we often do, the niggles start to creep back into the relationship. And it's amazing how five minutes of deep connection each day can save so many other downstream behaviors that we don't think about. So as a doctor, I'm always looking for how far upstream can I go? What's the root cause of this? What lever can I turn up here? that automatically fixes four or five downstream consequences.

So lift, connect. And the other one in relation to your question is reflect. I think all of us would really, really benefit from a daily reflection exercise where we ask ourselves two questions every evening. What went well today and what can I change going forward tomorrow? And Liz, I can tell you this is so powerful, right? sounds, you know, this is the kind of stuff that a lot of health plans are too busy for. It's like, no, you've got to eat from this group, you've got to cut out from this group. You need to work out

this many hours a week. You need to do this much strength, this much cardio. Okay, I get it. I'm not against that. But that's very much a sort of prescriptive approach to what we should be doing. But there's also a behavioral approach. There's also this other aspects of thinking about our health. So this exercise might look like this. Okay, so what went well today? Oh, you know what? Today was really tough. Like there was a lot of pressures at work.

I didn't get a lunch break. I was exhausted. But I still found 25 minutes at the end of the day to cook my family a healthy nourishing meal. You know, I'm proud of myself. Okay, that's what went well today. Question two, what didn't go so well today that we can change for tomorrow might be, you know what?

I just couldn't stop snacking today. I was hungry every two hours. I was just tired. I was craving sugar. I'm sure this was because I stayed up till midnight watching Netflix and I only got five and a half hour sleep. Tomorrow or tonight, I'm not going to stay up until midnight watching Netflix. I'm going to go to about at 10.30 because I know I'll automatically eat less tomorrow. And these are just two random examples. But this is like I often think the missing competitive. opponents or a lot of health plans. This, if we do that every day, if you do that every day, Liz, if I do that every day, I start to understand myself, but I start to go, oh, you know what, I went for a, I went for a one hour walk today at lunchtime. And, you know, my mood was fantastic for the rest of the day.

And I didn't want to, I didn't want to eat sugar. Or, oh, man, you know what? I'm not spoken to anyone today. I've just been on Zoom calls all day. No wonder I wanted ice cream in the evening. and you start to see the pattern. So it's like I said at the start, it's no longer someone else's plan. You're becoming your own expert. You're starting to understand, oh, this is why I behave the way that I do. So I hope this answered your question. I was really trying to broaden out how to say each day lift, connect and reflect. I think it's super simple to do, but very, very effective. I love that. Okay, so we talked about insulin and it's important. on your weight. Can we talk? I think there's two other hormones that I think of when I think of

weight, which are leptin and cortisol. So can we talk about, let's do leptin first. Can you talk about how leptin impacts our weight and our hunger signals? Okay. So, you know, leptin is a hormone. Hormones are sort of messengers that send signals around our body. And hormones really control all kinds of things. You know, hormones control more than we do in many ways. So you know, it's your hormones which will determine how hungry you are or how full you feel. For example, you know, after a meal, levels of, well, before a meal, levels of grellin is the hunger hormone. They go up. So that signals to you that you're hungry. So you respond to what that hormone is doing by eating more. One of the most important hormones in the body,

especially for weight loss, is leptin, right? So leptin is what we call a satire. tiety hormone. So leptin helps you to feel full, but not immediately in the moment. It's a bit more complex than that. Now, you don't know all the ins and outs of it, but let's just really try and keep it simple, but give you the overarching view of what leptin actually does. So leptin sends your body a signal that you have enough fat on your body. So over time, the amount of fat cells you have will determine how much leptin is released. And leptin is basically telling your body, you know what? We're good.

We've got enough fat on boards. We don't need to eat or consume any more calories. That's kind of what it does. So if your leptin is working well, so if you're releasing leptin and your body is hearing the signal, it's hearing the sound of leptin, fantastic, you're probably not going to have a problem with your weights because you will automatically eat at the signal. the right amounts. The problem is in the modern world, for a variety of reasons, including too much highly processed foods, not enough movement, too much stress, not enough

sleep, the classic things that many of us are struggling with, we get something called leptin resistance. So our body still releases leptin, but our cells no longer hear the sound of leptin. And so the leptin signal is not working as well as you. you would want it to work. So, you know, why does that happen? As I said, there's many reasons. One of the reasons is that these large amounts of processed foods can play havoc with this. And that's because, firstly, these foods contain a combination of highly refined carbohydrates and oils that can cause the body to flip itself into a special survival mode that we call inflammation. And when we're in this mode that we call inflammation, the body caught here,

the leptin signal because it's focusing on other priorities instead. In addition to that, the refined oils that you get in a lot of these processed foods interfere with the body's crucial ability to switch off any inflammation. So it's really problematic from that perspective. The other reason it's problematic is that these highly processed foods contain a lot of refined carbs. And then with high levels of refined carbs, you release unusually large. amounts of a hormone called insulin, which you mentioned before, compared to when we're eating whole foods. And insulin helps us to direct where the energy in our food goes, where it gets

stored. But if we're having large and persistent increases in insulin from regularly eating and regularly snacking on highly processed foods, that insulin travels to the brain and it interferes with the signal from lepsin. So we don't feel full when we should. So, you know, baked goods such as quassants and pastries, cakes, biscuits, a lot of supermarket breads are particularly problematic in this regard because they're high in calories, they're high in refined carbs and they cause large spikes in insulin. They play havoc with your blood sugar. They leave you feeling tired, moody and hungry, and they make it very hard to stop overeating. So that is a bit of a dive into leptin.

Was that clear, Liz? I think it was. I tried to keep it simple. Yeah, that was super clear. So then would the way to get our leptin under control just to be to avoid processed food, refined carbs, etc? Are there other things we should be doing? No, it's, again, it's the same approach that we're talking about. It's about doing these small things in all those other areas. But yes, directly for leptin resistance. If you can, even if you can just change the balance of how many processed food you're having compared to whole foods, if you can reduce the amount of processed foods and increase the amount of whole foods, you will start to repair that leptin resistance, which means it's going to be much easier for you to eat less and eat more in harmony with

what your body actually need. So leptin is a very important hormone to get working well. The good news is that although in most of us who are carrying excess weight, it's not working so well because we're resistant to it, you can in most cases repair that resistance. You also mentioned the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is a very, very important hormone because it's the one of the body's main stress response hormone. So when you get stressed and stress can mean a lot of different things and it can come from physical stress, emotional stress, nutritional stress, psychological stress, but many sources

of stress will cause cortisol levels to go up in your body. Now, why is that a problem? Well, if cortisol is up, we've got to think about the stress response, right? I think just take a little aside here into stress because I think it's really important. So your stress response is there to do one thing, and that is to keep you safe. So let's just, you know, think about this, you know, very, very crudely. About a million years ago or so, imagine that we were alive. We were in our hunter-gatherer tribe, just getting on with our day.

and then let's say a wild predator like a lion was approaching the tribe. In an instant, your stress response kicks into gear and all kinds of hormones start to go up in your body. And they cause your biology to change. So what happens? Your blood sugar goes up so you can run faster. Your blood pressure goes up. So more oxygen can go to your brain, which is going to help you.

your amygdala, the emotional part of your brain, goes on to high alerts so that you're hypervigilant to all the threats around you. Your blood becomes extremely prone to clotting because if you were to be attacked by that lion and cut, instead of bleeding to death, the blood's going to clot and that's going to save your life, right? These things are very, very helpful things when you're stressed. The problem for many of us these days is that we're no longer getting stressed out because of wild predators, we're getting stressed out to our daily lives, to our email inboxes, to the three social media channels we're trying to keep up to date with, to, you know, elderly parents and young kids were trying to care for by ourselves without any help. Whatever it is,

our stress response has been activated on a daily basis. And so here's the problem. Those things that work in the short term become problematic in the long term. So blood sugar going up and the short term helps you run faster. Brilliant. If that's happening day and day out to your life, that blood sugar going up is going to cause fatigue. It's going to cause a weight gain around your stomach. It's ultimately going to lead to type 2 diabetes just from being stressed. This is something people don't think about with type 2 diabetes and blood sugar.

They're always talking about food. Stress, one of the first things will happen in response to stress, your blood sugar goes up, right? We don't think about that. We don't think about it enough. So, and all those things, blood pressure is okay for it going up for half an hour. You're doing a spinning class at the gym. Your blood pressure will go up. That's a good thing.

But afterwards, it will come down and it will be much better afterwards. So cortisol is your body's primary stress response hormone. And for many of us, not only is it elevated higher than we want it, it's elevated continuously throughout the day, every day. And this is very, very important for weights management. It's not just diet. It's not just movement. If you are chronically stressed, like many of us are,

and I will say, Liz, this is particularly prevalent in my female patients. What I have seen over and over again is that females, and I appreciate this is a generalization, and it's not the same in every case. but the females tend to be the more nurturing of the two sectors. They tend to be the ones that are looking after the family or they're looking after their partner. They tend to really struggle to put themselves first.

They're always doing things for everybody else. And often with my female patients, they change their diet. They're moving regularly. They're sleeping well. I cannot get them to lose weight until I address their stress levels. It's only when they often come back to me and say, to Chastich, you've given me permission to relax. And it's funny because I never think as a doctor, it's my job to give anyone permission to do anything. But actually, I've realized in the 21st century,

many of us now, we need permission from someone else to say, you know what, it's okay just to stop and do something for me for 10 or 15 minutes. And that can be so powerful for people trying to lose weight, particularly women. So if you're caught us all this up, all the time, your body thinks it's under attack. And if it thinks it's under attack, it's going to hold on to wait because it thinks that could be a problem coming up. I'm going to hold on to wait. I'm not going to let go of this because I think I'm going to need this.

And this is at play for many different people. I don't think we talk about it enough. We don't think about it enough. And we don't act on it enough. And let me tell you, Liz, let's just think about these last 12 months, right? where we've had a lot of stress in the world because of the restrictions that have been placed on movements, the restrictions in terms of the way we live. No matter where you are in the world, there's probably been some change in terms of the way you've had to live. Many people over these

lockdowns have had their weights go up. The media have got all kinds of terms. What do they say? The Corona Stone, the quarantine 15, all kinds of things, right? Which I don't think of that helpful. but let's think about what's going on here. The research suggests that about, you know, 45% of us eat more in response to stress. 35% of us eat less. So let's just take a step back and think about this. What we're effectively saying is about half of us,

in response to stress, we eat more. We've just gone through some of the most stressful, in living memory for many of us in terms of the way we're having to live, fear, anxiety, financial worry, job worry, health worry. 50% of us deal with that stress by eating more. So, of course, some of us are going to put on weight. Now, some of us are going to eat less, but nearly half of us are going to eat more. So if we're putting on weight, because it's our way of managing stress, do we need a new diet book? Is that what we need? Or do we need better strategies at managing stress. This is the point about weight loss and looking at it in a holistic

fashion. If stress is driving your weight loss, you don't need to keep trying to find the right diet for you. Maybe your diet is absolutely fine. Maybe you just need better help managing the stress in your life. I have such an exciting product to share with you today. One of my all-time favorite brands, Garden of Life, just launched apple cider vinegar gummies and they are amazing. First of all, they taste so good. Zach and I have started storing ours on top of the fridge because otherwise we will much on the entire bottle in a single day. But more importantly, they're great for you.

Each gummy contains organic apple cider vinegar with 5% acetic acid, which is the part that's responsible for all of the health benefits. The apple cider vinegar that they use is fully unrefined and fermented, originating from the mother. There's also no gelatin, so all of the vegan members of my H.T. fam can enjoy them too, and their certified organic and gluten-free and non-GMO project verified. I love the original ones and the probiotic version, which also has 2 billion CFU of probiotics. You can eat them pretty much any time, but my favorite way to take them is about 30 minutes before meals,

especially heavier ones like pasta. I found that it makes the biggest difference in my digestion. They're also super supportive for your immune system. And I know I already mentioned that they taste really good, but they taste really good. but they taste really good. I'm almost nervous for you to try them. You are going to be hooked. You can find the gummies at health food stores near you on Amazon

or by using the link in the show notes to visit Garden of Life.com. Grab a bottle or two and come back and tell me what you think. Now, let's get back to the episode. Can you speak to some of those stress management strategies? Because I think a lot of people are like, yeah, that's great. I would like to be less stressed, but there is a global pandemic. I do have a sick parent. I do have to go to work to make money.

money to feed my family. And I do think there's also a lot of talk, and I don't know if this is relevant here, but about the role that privilege plays in our ability to maintain our weight. So I'd love to hear some stress management strategies that you would use in your life or that you recommend. And then also maybe speak to that privilege and things that we can do to address that. Yeah. I think I think this is such an important point. And something that I think we definitely should cover, which is this idea that, look, where you have grown up, what your financial status is, what opportunity you have in life, absolutely plays a role in your health and your well-being and your weight. And we cannot ignore that. Here in the UK, there's a lot of

controversy here about this where if you talk about empowering people with tips to improve their health, some academics will say, this is harmful because this is a, you know, socioeconomic problem. And by putting the onus on individuals, you're taking attention away from the main problem, which is structural and societal change. And again, like with most things, I try to take a bit more of a nuanced approach to say, look, that is absolutely true that there are societal and structural issues that play a role in how people feel about themselves, whether they're going to have time to look after

themselves, where they're going to have the finances to cook coal foods and the time to be able to actually cook it in the first place instead of working two jobs just to keep a roof over the heads, right? That is true. But I have worked, I used to work in a place called Oldham in the UK in a practice right in the center, very deprived area, lots of immigrants, lots of people on social security benefits. And yeah, life was really, really tough. the stress in their lives was significant. But you know what I learned in those seven years is that even if your life is really, really stressful, if you can learn a few simple stress management techniques that are easy to do that don't cost any money, you can still get benefits.

You know, I couldn't remove the financial stress and poverty they were facing. But by teaching them a few things, I could help them be more resilient. they were better able to face the stresses in their life because of what they were doing. So I think we need to do both. We need to advocate for systemic and structural and societal change. Absolutely. But we can also, in a compassionate way, empower individuals and say, hey, look, I get it. Life is tough.

But you know what? I promise you, if you move your body for five minutes each day, you will burn off some of the stress hormones in your body. If you feel really negative about your life, it sounds really simple and a bit trivial. But if you take the effort every evening to, for two minutes, write down three things that you are grateful for or three things that went well today, you will start to shift your attention from the negative to the positive. You will start to switch off your stress response. If you have a stressful meeting with your boss and you practice a breathing center, you want to of my favorite ones that I use on my patients is what I call the three, four, five technique where you breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. Very, very simple, but very,

very effective. Any time your out breath is longer than your in breath, you help to switch off the stress part of your nervous system, and you help to promote the relaxation part of your nervous system. Again, the three things I mentioned are simple. They are free. What else can you do? Nature, again, nature comes with a bit of privilege for some people, whether you've got access to nature, may, depending on where you live, depend on your financial status and whether you live in a nice suburb or in an inner city. But you know what? Even staring at a tree or a pot plant or a screen saver of nature on your computer, we know levels, lowest levels of the stress hormone cortisol. That is incredible this. Simply looking at nature will start to lower your stress hormone

cortisol, right? So if you're really, really stress and you can afford a pot plant or outside your house there's a tree, go outside, sit there with a drink for five minutes and stare at the tree. I wrote about this in my second book, the stress solution. That is very, very powerful for people to do. So the point I'm trying to make is there are lots of simple things that we can do. journaling, right? Journaling is free. You don't have to buy a fancy leather-bound journal and a nice, you know, flash pen. You can just use a bit of scrap paper and any old pen.

And you can write out how you're feeling. We know that the simple act of writing out how you're feeling helps to lower stress. You literally take the stress out of your mind and you start to put it out onto paper. And the last tip for stress, I would say, is, you know what? have some phone free time every day, if you can. Ideally, a little bit of time in the morning, a little bit time in the evening. You know, that, that, I've got this concept called micro-stress doses, and I say that our phones are little boxes full of micro-stress doses that come firing at our head the minute we look at them. And just 10 minutes of phone-free time in the

morning and evening, even that will start to lower how much stress you have in your life. So, So last thing on that is sleep. Sleep is so, so important for health, for weight loss, for stress. Everything in life is better when we have slept well. And for many of us, we simply need to prioritize our sleep. Many of us, you know, we've got so many temptations, so many things keeping us away from sleep that we just don't give it the priority. And I understand that.

But your stress levels are lower when you've slept well. You feel better. You're less emotionally reactive. I'll let me tell you about weight loss for a second. A lot of people don't realize just how influential not sleeping is. If you sleep, compared to sleeping eight hours a night, if you sleep five and a half hours a night, you eat on average 22% more calories the following day. 22% more, that means five days of not sleeping well, you consume a whole extra days worth of calories just from not sleeping.

I have this 44-year-old patient of mine. I can remember so well, she went on a new diet every January. She couldn't lose weight. She was really frustrated. And when I was diving deep into her case, I really wasn't sleeping. So I didn't touch her diet. I just got her sleep, really, really got to help her get into really good routines around her sleep. She started sleeping seven and a half hours a night and she lost weight over the next three or four months. She would lose it slowly, but steadily without even trying because once she was sleeping better, she crave less sugar, she ate less, she was more motivated to move her body, she was less stressed. So again, the theme always lives is, I need to find the right, I need to, not I need to find it,

I need to help each reader, each patient, find the right approach for them. If stress is your problem, you don't need a new diet book. You need better help managing your stress. If sleep is your problem, don't buy a new diet book. Let's get your sleep figured out first. And let's see if you even need the new diet book in the first place. So I'm, yeah, I don't mean to say the same thing again, but I'm just so passionate that you can always help people.

But let's identify the right problem and then try and fix it. I feel like you just terrified all of the insomniacs listening. They're like, oh, no, I can never get my weight under control because I can't get my sleep under control. Okay, let me just respond to that because that's the last thing I wanted to do. And if I did do that, I will apologize because I think sometimes in the health world, we can actually cause more problems because we share data like that. And then what we do is we stress people out who can't sleep and it makes it even worse. So let me just try and soften that a little bit. What I'm simply trying to say is, is that, look, sleep is important.

For some people, a few small tweaks to their sleep can make a big difference, honestly. Now, not for everyone, but for most people, they are doing something in the day that they don't realize as impacting their ability to sleep at night. So it could be not getting natural light in the morning. We know that natural light exposure, 20 minutes of natural light exposure in the morning, helps you sleep better at night. It's not good enough to get it through the window. You have to be outside. Caffeine. We know that caffeine sticks around in the body for a long period of time, right? I can't have coffee or tea after 12 o'clock and many of my patients can't as well. A large

Starbucks latte at 12 p.m. Half of that caffeine is going around your brain at 6 p.m. A quarter is going around at midnight. So for many people, it's simply a case of just have your coffee in the morning, don't have it in the afternoon. Eating too late in the evening can be a big one for sleep quality. You really want a two hour, three hour gap. If you can before you go to sleep, I get it's not always possible, but you don't have to be perfect. The more of these things you can do, the better. A really good breathing technique to do before you go to bed. You could try the three, four, five, one I mentioned, but there's another one that I learned from the breathing researcher in California, Brian McKenzie, where you breathe in for three, you have a brief pause,

and you breathe out for six. That one is so yawn-inducing. It's incredible. I was using that last night in bed to help me sleep. A hot shower or a hot bath about one hour before bed, it's really great because when you come out, your body's core temperature just starts to drop. and when your core temperature starts to drop, you send your body a signal that it's time to sleep. And again, the hardest one is not looking at screens before bed because they are so tempting to look at. But, you know, it really makes a big difference. So again, please for people, you know, try some of those tips. The more of those things you can do, the better.

But also, just to really answer your point, Liz, we are very resilient as humans. If you can't get your sleep better at the moment, okay, fine. then we look at other areas to get better. We say, okay, I'm only sleeping five and a half hours of nights. Okay, maybe I can't improve that, but I'm going to get really good then at stress. I'm going to get really good with my diet. I'm going to really work hard on my movement. The point I'm trying to make is there is always a way.

Don't get stuck on the roadblock. Like with any problem alive, let's think latchly. That's go, okay, you know, I've had many patients where, you know, sleep was a real problem or they had young children or their baby was crying. in the night. And it's like, yeah, we're not going to be able to get you sleeping better at the moment. Okay. For the next few months, let's park sleep and let's work on other things. So I hope that's a bit more of an optimistic message compared to what I was saying maybe five minutes ago. It is. It is. Okay. I have one big topic I want to address and then we'll get into a really quick

speed round. I love the way you talked about cravings in the book because I think it really spoke to the notion of intuitive eating, but also to the notion that we might actually not be in touch with what our intuition is actually asking for. And I'd love if you could just kind of walk us through the technique that you talk about in the book to figure out what we really are craving in the moments of craving. Yeah. So the technique you're talking about is what I call the freedom exercise or the three Fs, I think. And the sort of central message here is what are you hungry? agree for. You know, we use food for all kinds of reasons now. And this is why, you know, I'm so passionate about this whole why we eat. Yes, let's talk to people about what we eat,

but let's really think about why we're eating as well because let's think it's really, really important. And so this exercise is really to help people understand what's going on. So let's say somebody, it's 9 p.m. in the evening and they want to just relax. And they want to just relax on the sofa and they want to put on the television and watch something. But they want to open up some ice cream as well at the same time, which is pretty common. And I certainly know what that feeling is like. Okay, so fine. So first of all, we're not going to beat ourselves up. We're going to be very compassionate to ourselves. But let's just walk us through this 3F exercise, the 3F. So the first step is feel. Now, before you have the ice cream, just take a pause.

you can write this in a journal or you can just simply have a think about it. What am I really feeling? Am I hungry for food or am I hungry for something else? And it could be, you know what? I've been really lonely today. I've not really seen anyone. I've just been on my computer all day. I'm not really hungry. I'm just, I don't know, the answer is going to make me feel better. Okay, great. Or it could be I'm really, really stressed. I'm not hungry. I'm stressed. But I know this is probably, probably going to help me feel better. Or it could be the kids' bedtime took too long tonight. I've wanted them in bed an hour ago. They're still up asking for stories. This is a bit of time to myself, a little reward to me. Okay, whichever one it is, that's okay. Note it and that you can go and eat

it. Fine. The next time it happens, go to the second F. So the first ever feel, the second F is feed. How does food help feed that emotion? And I sort of answered that in the first one, but it's basically like saying, oh, I'm stressed. That's what I'm feeling. Food helps me feel less stress. Or I'm down. I feel low. Ice cream helps me feel high or helps me feel better. Or I had no control in my workday today. Everything was out of control. I was following other people's schedules. The ice cream is me sticking two fingers up to the rest of the world and saying, hey, this is my time where I'm going to have full control over what I put on my stomach. Okay, great. Now you start to build in a awareness, go ahead and eat it. And then you come to the third F. So the first of is feel. What are you

feeling? Second F is feed. How does food feed that feeling? And then the third F is, can I now find, that's the third F find. Can I find a non-food behavior to help me feed that feeling? So if it was stress, it could be, instead of having ice cream to feed the stress, you know what? I'm going to put on YouTube and do a five minute or 10 minute yoga flow, which is going to help me manage my stress. Okay, great. I might want to do two minutes of breathing and see if I still want to snack at the end of it. You know what? I may feel so I've not had any time to myself. I'm going to run myself a bath and chill out and relax in the bath and listen to a podcast. You know, whatever it is, or maybe I've had a row with my partner and I don't feel close. You know what? I'm going to go and give them a hug or give my

my pet cat or dog a hug. It's just a simple way. It's such a simple exercise, but it is devastatingly effective because very quickly you start to, you start to build in an awareness of why you're engaging in these behaviors. And then once you know, you're empowered to change, going back to one of your earlier questions about diets, the one of the reasons why many diets don't work in the long term is they don't consider this component. It's just, this is that, you're the, eating plan to follow. It's the what we eat without thinking about why we eat. And I think you get much better results when you do all the fits because I want to teach people to be their own expert. So that exercise, yes, it works for food. The truth is, Liz, it works for any behavior you're trying

to reduce. If you spend too long on Instagram in the evening, if you spend two hours scrolling every evening, okay, do the three Fs and find out what is it because you'll often find, I don't mean you, it's the same with me. What we'll often find is if we're feeling a bit lonely, we've not really connected. We instead, we kind of look for this pseudo connection online. So, you know, we're not getting that nourishing connection from a partner or a close friend. So we're, which I'm not saying you can't connect online properly. You can. I don't think it's the same. But we're often getting this low grade connection online and we keep scrolling because we're not quite getting what we want. We're just getting this inferior sort of substitute, so we keep scrolling. And again, it just helps you understand that,

you know what, maybe I'm going to phone my mum and catch up with her, or maybe I'm going to phone my college friends and catch up. And often you find you don't want to scroll afterwards or you don't want to snack afterwards. So I think it's a very powerful exercise. It's almost deceptively too simple. But if anyone is listening to this and they're struggling with sugar cravings or Instagram scrolling or even alcohol, give that a go for a few days. And I've got a hunch that it will start to help. I love that. I love that. I'm definitely going to try it in regards to both the ice cream on the couch because I definitely do that. And then also in regards to the scrolling on Instagram, because I need to work on that as well. And Liz, I just want to say it takes the blame off you,

right? Because I'm not saying don't do it. Sometimes, you know what? You're going to say no. You know what? I've had a bad day. I want some ice cream. I actually don't have a problem with that. The problem comes from when you wake up the next morning full of guilt and shame. That's where the vicious cycle starts. Accept it. Oh, that was my way of managing stress. Once you're empowered, you can sometimes say, yeah, you know what, I'm going to eat this because it's going to help me manage my stress. But I'm not going to make myself feel less worthy about myself. That's where things start to go wrong. The shame, the guilt then leads to all kinds of negative compensatory behaviors, which just creates a whole mess. So I think this is a really compassionate and fun exercise to do. And I really hope that people try it. Okay, I have a little speed

round. So these are just things that come up in the conversation around weight. And I would just like, like your quick take on them. We've already talked about caffeine a little bit in terms of keeping it early in the day. But do you think that there's anything else we should be considering in terms of sometimes people think caffeine is like, oh, have more caffeine. it'll help boost your metabolism. It's good for weight. Are there any other sort of thoughts you have about caffeine and weight? No. The only thought I have about caffeine and weight is simply get your caffeine to work for you so you sleep well at night. If you sleep well at night, that will do more for your weight than any metabolism benefit that you think caffeine may or may not

have. What about fruit? A lot of people say that fruit can't be part of a healthy diet in terms of weight management. I don't think fruit is as much of a problem. as many people think. Now, look, again, it depends on the context, right? If somebody is significantly overweight, they have fatty liver where you've got a lot of fat stored in your liver that you can often get diagnosed by your doctor or you can have, you know, raised what we call LFT's liver function test on your lab results. You know, having too much fruit may not be the best thing to have, but for most people who are trying to lose weight, you know, a bit of a bit of a bit of, of fruit now and again, I don't think is a huge problem. I think there are far bigger things to focus on,

which is reducing how much processed food you're having and increasing how much whole food you're having. For most people, put your focus there as opposed to your focus on whether fruit is good or bad. Intermittent fasting. Is it a way to encourage disordered eating or is it a really healthy strategy that we should be incorporating? Again, you're getting at bored of this answer, but it depends. For some people, it is the best thing they can do for their health. And in the book, actually, I talk people through how to determine what you should be doing and if you should be doing anything. I'm a fan of time restricted eating where you eat all the food you're going to consume within a eating window. I think 12 hours, you eat all of your food within 12 hours. That's kind of what all humans were doing

about 50 years ago on the planet. It's only in the modern world now where we're consuming food for more than 12 hours. Most of us, that would be, you know, start breakfast at 8 a.m. finished dinner by 8 p.m. or 7 till 7. You know, very, very achievable for most of us. I think that even knocking it down to 10 hours can be helpful for some people. But the truth is, for some people, it doesn't work while it makes them more stressed. So again, for some people, it's life changing. For others, it causes more problems. Alcohol. Can that be part of a healthy life? if you have, if you're struggling with your weight, can alcohol be incorporated? Is there a best type of alcohol? Yeah, it's a good question. Look, alcohol is a tricky one. Can you lose weight and

drink alcohol? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, take it to an extreme. There's many alcoholics out there who are really struggling, who are very, very underweight, right? So it's, it's clearly possible to drink alcohol and lose weight. But let's go to a less extreme case. You know, alcohol has all kinds of health consequences on the body. Yes, there's the calorie content of it. That's what it does to your eating behavior afterwards. Often we're hungrier. We want to snack more after we've had alcohol. But I think the biggest concern when it comes to our health, and in particular, weight loss is its impact on our sleep. We know that alcohol can do a couple of things to our sleep. It can fragment our sleep. So we're waking up regularly. And it can make our sleep a lot lighter. It tends to

really affects something called REM sleep or REM sleep, which is a very deep form of sleep that you get in the later part of the night, you know, in the morning time is when you get that, that REM sleep. And I spoke to Matthew Walker on my podcast recently about this. And, you know, we're now calling that part, you know, that type of sleep, emotional first aid. It's a great type of sleep to process your emotions, to process any trauma, to rewire memories. in a more helpful way. And alcohol specifically reduces how much REM sleep you're getting. So, what is best practice? I get it. Some people really enjoy consuming alcohol. They like to unwind with alcohol. You know, we're all individual. We're all unique in terms of how it can affect the quality

of our sleep. The best guidance is drink it earlier in the evening. Really, if you can consume your alcohol, again, within three hours of going, you know, if you can finish consume your alcohol about three hours or so before you go to bed, you're giving your body a bit of time to metabolize it and it and to reduce how much impact it has on your sleep. But yeah, you can do. I'm not saying you have to give a alcohol. Generally speaking, I think most people are healthier and feel better when they're drinking less, though. We've covered so much information in this episode. I would love to just leave listeners with one piece of really pragmatic, actionable, low-hanging fruit that they could try starting incorporating their life today or tomorrow, that they would start to experience

a real change or difference. Yeah, so I think the best three tips for you are that the three habits, the three daily habits I recommend in the new book, lift, connect and reflect. They are super easy and they're super effective. So top line is this. Lift something reasonably heavy every day. and all I'm asking you to do is keep something like a dumbbell or kettlebell in your kitchen. And if all you do is once a day when you go to make something in your kitchen, you pick up that weight five times in each arm, that will start to make a difference to how you feel very, very quickly. So that's the first one. Connect for five minutes a day, intentionally connect with another human being. Ideally in person, if not in person on the phone, if not on the phone, maybe on a video call.

But just don't distract yourself, really try and connect with that person. And you'll probably find you engage in less unhelpful behaviors afterwards. And the third and final tip is reflect every evening. You could do it in the morning if you want, but I think it's quite a nice one for the evening. Or maybe you want your kids are in bed or, you know, just before you go to bed at night, ask yourself two questions. What went well today and what can I change going forward tomorrow? Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your immense amounts of wisdom on this episode.

You have so much content out there. Obviously, people should check out your new book, which is called Feel Great, Lose Weight. Where else should they start if they wanted to get more from you? Yeah, look, I mean, I'm sort of super lucky with my podcast. It's the most listened to Health Show in the UK and Europe now, which is just incredible for me to believe that many people want to hear me having conversations each week. but every Wednesday new episode of Feel Better Livemore comes out. They can check out my website, Dr. Chastody.com, or Best Places on Instagram,

or I've just started on Clubhouse actually in the last week, which I'm giving a go. But I'm in all the social channels. I'm on Clubhouse, usual places. So if there's something people have got a query with, we didn't get to today, do find me a DM on one of these channels, and I'll do my best to get back to you. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share all of your. knowledge with us. Not at all this. Thanks so much for inviting me on your show.

I hope you loved this episode with Dr. Chatterjee and I hope it gave you the science and the real information to ignore a lot of the social media and media messaging and feel empowered to do what's right for your body. If you love this episode, remember to check out my other Ask the Doctors. We've got anxiety, gut health, longevity, hormones, skin health, and I have a happiness episode coming up that I am so excited to share. I would also love to hear any topics that you want me to cover on future Ask the Doctors or episodes in general. So definitely shoot me a DM on Insta. I'm at Liz Moody with any requests. If somebody sent you this episode, tell them thank you for me. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. And thank you for choosing to listen and

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