Review and summary: The Fatburn Fix, by Dr. Cate Shannahan
The Fatburn Fix: Review
America is in an obesity crisis.
A $71 billion dollar industry throws diet scheme after diet scheme at us. But the population just gets fatter.
Dr. Cate Shannahan has a different take on the traditional eat-less-and-exercise-more plan that fails people over and over:
And while it may seem as if they each have different problems, the reality is their stories are all rooted in the same common soil: they’ve lost their ability to burn body fat for fuel.
The Fatburn Fix details how break out of the traditional diet trap.
As we overconsume sugar and vegetable oils, our bodies shift to burning sugar for energy instead of stored fat:
We’re supposed to be able to use our body fat for energy between meals. That’s why we have body fat! We’re not supposed to need regular snacks—or even regular meals.
[…]your body fat is full of the unusual fatty acids in vegetable oils, those unusual fatty acids in your body fat slowly but surely damage your cells. In an attempt to slow the damage, your metabolism slowly but surely makes a seismic shift from relying mostly on body fat for energy between meals to relying mostly on sugar for energy between meals.
Shannahan also has a unique take on Type 2 diabetes and its effect on our health:
Type 2 diabetes is not just a problem of high blood sugar, as we commonly believe. It’s a disease that develops as your body loses its ability to use fat for fuel.
The Fatburn Fix lays out the case for ditching sugar to restore your body’s ability to burn fat for fuel. And it provides the roadmap to get there.
The Fatburn Fix: Kindle highlights
1 The Fatburning Advantage: More Energy
When your metabolism is damaged, you lack energy. When you lack energy, you want to eat more often, and most of us seek out foods that make metabolic damage worse. It’s a trap—but you can escape if you can get more energy.
let’s define metabolism: your metabolism provides your body with energy.
healthy metabolism uses body fat to sustain your energy all day so that you don’t need to rely on food to keep your energy up.
Our body fat is designed to be the steady source of energy that lasts all day if we need it to, or even longer.
our body fat is supposed to free us up from the need to constantly think about food so we can focus on living life.
80 percent of the average American’s fat calories come from vegetable oils
Sugar is a less reliable fuel than body fat due to the simple physiologic reality that our body can neither store it in adequate quantities nor transport it through the bloodstream in adequate amounts
an unreliable fuel supply means your cellular engines will sometimes fail to fire on all cylinders.
Even though fruit sugar is totally natural and unrefined, sugar is sugar
Why your body will become far more energized as you train your metabolism for burning body fat and lose your dependence on sugar:
1. Our bloodstream can’t carry much sugar at any one time, so sugar burners suffer from frequent energy deficits.
2. We don’t have a lot of space to store sugar in our body, and only the liver can release its stored sugar back into the bloodstream.
3. If you eat more than a few grams of sugar when your glycogen stores are full, this forces your body to convert the extra into fat.
4. Foods that raise our blood sugar don’t trigger a sense of fullness.
5. Sweet-tasting foods intensify your desire for more sweet-tasting foods, creating sugar addiction.
When your body fat stops serving your brain as an energy source, the brain is pretty smart; it very quickly learns to instruct you to seek out sugar.
the key to weight loss success is not more willpower, but rather more energy.
2 The Hunger Games
Key ideas:
Healthy hunger is energizing, a quest for nutrition.
Unhealthy hunger is fatiguing, a desperate need for energy.
Restoring your fatburn transforms your hunger and creates a healthier relationship with food.
Most of my patients recall their childhood hunger experience as something temporary, a minor nuisance quickly melted away with simple distractions. Their hunger did not control their mood or energy level;
Adults should be able to knock back their hunger, knuckle down, and finish their work
The punchline of the commercial is “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” That is a surprisingly perceptive health claim.
When you feel bad after going just a few more hours longer than usual between feedings, that is a red flag indicating metabolic damage.
most people have learned to treat that energy crisis with something that will raise their blood sugar.
eleven symptoms of unhealthy hunger:
Anxiety
Brain fog
Dizziness
Fatigue
Heart palpitations
Headache
Irritability
Nausea
Shakiness
Sweats
WeaknessDoctors actually have a term for the collection of symptoms we can get when our body experiences disruptions in energy supply. It’s called hypoglycemia.
“Hypoglycemia” is Latin for “low blood sugar.” The term describes a collection of eleven symptoms that include fatigue, anxiety, nausea, dizziness, weakness, and concentration problems.
Low blood sugar is currently defined as blood sugar level under 65 mg/dl,
The brain can get energy from body fat indirectly by way of molecules the liver makes from body fat, called ketones.
Specialized cells in the brain, called microglia, can also manufacture ketones. Dairy and coconut contain special fats, called short- and medium-chain fatty acids, that the brain can use directly. The colon can convert some plant fibers into short-chain fatty acids that the brain can use directly.
this good flavor–good feeling association drives a powerful sugar addiction.
It’s a metabolic sugar addiction, meaning your body can’t easily supply itself with energy if you suddenly cut off the sugar.
If you have a sweet tooth, or if you crave starchy foods, it’s not really you that’s craving them.
A large study in England revealed that people underestimate their calorie intake by 50 percent.
3 The Diabetes Spectrum
Key ideas:
Diabetes does not develop because of a hormonal disorder.
Diabetes is better described as a disorder of energy metabolism.
The disorder begins as hypoglycemia and progresses across a spectrum.
Diabetes
Type 1 diabetes is a deficit of insulin caused by a loss of function of certain cells in the pancreas.
It’s my belief that type 2 diabetes stems from a disruption in the cellular ability to burn body fat for fuel, which leads to hypoglycemia, then insulin resistance, then prediabetes, and finally type 2 diabetes.
gaining weight does not cause diabetes. It’s the other way around: the process of developing diabetes causes you to gain weight,
The true origins of type 2 diabetes are rooted in defective energy metabolism.
Over time, compounds in vegetable oils accumulate in your body fat so that it can no longer provide your body with enough energy.
The brain
Ketones are a special kind of fuel that prevents your brain from needing sugar. You don’t get ketones from food; your liver makes ketones for your brain. As long as your brain can get ketones, you always have plenty of energy and you don’t get hungry that often.
just 2 percent of your body mass, [your brain] demands 20 percent of all your total energy (while at rest).
The brain is also very chemically sensitive, so it’s walled off behind a protective barrier. The barrier is called the blood-brain barrier, and it filters the blood, permitting only a few select chemicals to come into direct contact with the brain.
The liver breaks big fatty acids down and reassembles them into much smaller molecules that are designed to pass through the brain’s protective barrier.
Ketones are the perfect fuel for your brain, packing more than double the brain-charging power of sugar on a gram-per-gram basis.
Because your body can’t push that much sugar through your bloodstream at once, from time to time the need for sugar in the brain outpaces how quickly your bloodstream can deliver it. Whenever the brain needs more sugar than it gets, you develop hypoglycemia symptoms.
overriding your body’s safe blood sugar operating parameters causes a new set of problems called insulin resistance.
Hypoglycemia
Hypoglycemia is the first disorder on the diabetes spectrum.
If you have hypoglycemia, you are set up for progressing through the other phases. Why? Because most people treat hypoglycemia symptoms by eating larger quantities of the same foods that caused hypoglycemia to develop in the first place.
Your brain wants more sugar than it’s getting. And to get that sugar, your brain instructs your liver to elevate your blood sugar by releasing more, which raises your fasting blood sugar. Raising your fasting blood sugar is the entry point to the diabetes spectrum.
At first, you’ll only feel symptoms of hypoglycemia just before your next meal or if you have to eat later than usual. I’ve observed that most people with hypoglycemia usually have normal fasting blood sugar levels,
your brain is telling your liver to put more sugar into the bloodstream, but your pancreas is telling your fat cells to take the sugar out of the bloodstream. In other words, your body is forced to fight against itself. The brain wants more sugar, and the pancreas wants less and releases more insulin than normal, which makes you build fat faster than normal.
the net effect is weight gain.
Insulin resistance
To the right of hypoglycemia on the diabetes spectrum we see insulin resistance.
your cells can’t respond properly to insulin and your body must make more to push sugar out of your bloodstream and into your cells.
If you have prediabetes, it’s because your liver is making sugar faster than before, and your body is no longer able to control your blood sugar level as well, in spite of making extra insulin.
Prediabetes can have all the same complications as diabetes.
Your fasting blood sugar is almost always higher than it should be, and it continually sets itself higher
A diet composed primarily of vegetable oils, flours, and sugars is a recipe for poor health.
By giving your brain more power than sugar is capable of providing, you will end your sugar addiction.
Part Two MEET YOUR METABOLISM
4 Flexible Metabolism Beats “Fast” Metabolism
Key points:
A healthy metabolism is flexible, not “fast.”
Your metabolism is composed of four body systems whose job is to maintain optimal body composition so you don’t get too fat or too thin.
Damage to the first body system is what sets us up for cascading damage to the rest.
Metabolism
trade in the concept of having a “fast” or “slow” metabolism for having an efficient or inefficient metabolism.
If you have an efficient metabolism, you’ll have plenty of energy all the time.
the most profound benefit of an efficient metabolism is a major mental boost.
THE FOUR FATBURN SYSTEMS
Your cellular energy generators, called mitochondria
Hormones that regulate energy storage and release
Your body fat
Your brain’s appetite control center
Fatburn System 1
Mitochondrial dysfunction is the metabolic event that puts you on the diabetes spectrum by causing a cellular preference for sugar.
Fatburn System 2
The need for more sugar disrupts the hormones that regulate blood sugar, Fatburn System 2.
Fatburn System 3
Insulin resistance disrupts your body fat, Fatburn System 3.
Fatburn System 4
Insulin resistance also causes disruptions in the brain’s appetite control system.
Regular exercise will lower your pulse and blood pressure, thus reducing your energy needs and your calorie burning.
The amount of calories you burn is tied to the amount of energy your cells need. Your cellular need for energy, in turn, is directly related to the amount of activity going on inside each one of your cells.
5 Fatburn System 1 Mitochondria: Your Cells’ Energy Generators
Key ideas:
Every cell generates its own energy supply in mitochondria.
Your ability to burn fat depends on your mitochondrial health.
Vegetable oils prevent mitochondria from generating energy with normal efficiency.
Mitochondria
our “obesogenic environment,” which refers to the set of modern conveniences that allow us to sit most of the day.
avoiding vegetable oils is the most important action you can take to improve your health.
A healthy metabolism is not faster than an unhealthy one? It’s more efficient, just like an engine in a newer car is more efficient than an engine in an older car. Mitochondria are the engine in this analogy, so they’re the part of the cell where the energy-production inefficiencies occur.
If your mitochondria function efficiently, your cells can get all the energy they need all the time, giving them the opportunity to function at their peak.
our biological engines are designed to burn a certain kind of fuel. If you provide mitochondria the fuel they’re designed to burn, they work at peak efficiency.
This efficiency, or lack of it, is the most important determinant of your overall health.
Mitochondria are incredibly fuel-flexible. They can generate energy from all three macronutrients: sugars, amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), or fatty acids.
your cells use a blend of whatever fuels may be available. The proportion of fuels available in the bloodstream will vary with diet, time of day, activity level, hormone effects, and more.
THE PROS AND CONS OF FUELING CELLS WITH SUGAR
A small amount of glucose is always present in your bloodstream and therefore readily available to serve as fuel. Exercise and stress can increase the amount of sugar in the bloodstream, thanks to stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
All sugar is sticky, and too much in your tissues can cause problems.
Consuming sugar to raise blood sugar back up again can shut off the supply of fat from your body fat.
THE PROS AND CONS OF FUELING CELLS WITH KETONES
Cells generate more ATP energy when burning ketones than when burning sugar.
The body does not store ketones and they are not available in food, so you only have access to them when your liver is making them.
PROS AND CONS OF FUELING CELLS WITH PROTEIN
always an abundance of amino acids available in the bloodstream, in the form of the major blood protein called albumin.
amino acids too must be converted to acetate to use as fuel.
A common complication of protein fueling is gout
The following myths are used to help sell energy drinks and protein shakes.
Myth: You need to fuel your workouts with sugar or your body will start breaking down protein.
Fact: Consuming sugar before a workout blocks fatburn.
Myth: You need to get protein into your body within thirty minutes after a workout or your muscles will start breaking down.
Fact: Exercise triggers the signal for muscle growth, and you have a window of twenty-four to forty-eight hours to consume protein before the signal fades. Unless you are a muscle-bound bodybuilder, you can easily consume more than you need, which forces your cells to convert the excess protein to fat.
Myth: Eating excess protein makes you build more muscle.
Fact: Too much of anything is too much.
Vegetable oils
If you’ve avoided butter and cooked with vegetable, corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, or safflower oil, you might have been surprised to learn that these oils are unhealthy.
canola is no better than the rest of the bunch.
The problem is not that nutrition is hopelessly complicated. The problem is that the science is driven by special interest groups, politics, and money.
The idea that saturated fat is bad for our arteries was never true and it never will be.
Vegetable oils are central to Big Food profitability.
Hydrogenated oils are unhealthy sources of saturated fat.
The fat in our foods actually contains a blend of different kinds of fatty acids. Butter does contain a lot of saturated fatty acid, but it also has a lot of unsaturated fatty acids as well.
To be a good fuel, a fatty acid needs a good deal of stability.
Fueling with unstable fatty acids can damage the mitochondria, and fueling with unstable fats on a regular basis can damage the rest of the cell.
I call these stable, more energizing fatty acids the “clean-burning fats.
Coconut, lard, and butter are all examples of good saturated fat sources
“saturated” refers to the fact that there are no empty spaces on the molecule where another molecule could potentially react.
WARM-WEATHER PLANTS MAKE CLEAN-BURNING FUEL. COLD-WEATHER PLANTS DO NOT.
the polyunsaturated fatty acids in cold-climate oil seed crops like canola, corn, and soy are bad for us because they are unstable.
The idea that saturated fat clogs arteries came from a scientist named Ancel Keys, who was unaware that fat travels through the bloodstream in special particles called lipoproteins that prevent all kinds of fats from clogging our arteries.
Olive oil, peanut oil, and the oil from today’s most revered nut, Sir Almond, are all examples of good monounsaturated fatty acid sources.
Missing one set of hydrogen atoms means there is one empty seat at that long fatty acid dinner party.
The term “polyunsaturated” refers to the fact that there are two or more (“poly” means “multiple”) pairs of missing hydrogen atoms. This leaves two or more empty spaces on the molecule where another molecule could potentially react.
polyunsaturated fatty acids come in two major categories, omega-6 and omega-3.
Omega-6 tends to promote inflammatory reactions that help us fight off infections and clot our blood. And omega-3 tends to oppose those inflammatory reactions and clotting factors so they don’t get out of control.
Oxygen can actually crack the molecule open at one of its double bonds, exposing bond energy that causes a major problem. The cracked-open polyunsaturated fat forms a dangerous kind of molecule called a free radical.
When your metabolism is healthy, your body is well-appointed with a huge variety of antioxidant defenses in the form of enzymes.
The trans fats I’m referring to are made in factories; they are not naturally present in food.
Some trans fats occur in dairy products and are actually very good for us;
The more frequently your mitochondria are forced to burn unstable PUFA fuel, the worse your mitochondria function and the more free radical cascades and oxidative stress your cells are forced to endure.
6 Fatburn System 2: Hormones That Control Blood Sugar
Key ideas:
Insulin controls your blood sugar by building fat.
Insulin also makes you hungry and tired after you eat sweets or starchy carbohydrates.
Slow-digesting carbohydrates prevent insulin spikes, and are part of your metabolic recovery plan.
Insulin
In my view, the vegetable oil reduction is actually more important than reducing carbs.
healthy people don’t need to consciously regulate their blood sugar.
In the 1970s, my father recalls, when he was in medical school, the official blood sugar norms were lower, between 65 and 75. Today, a normal blood sugar range is officially 75 to 99.
more than half of US adults are now insulin resistant,
in general berries and melons are lower in sugar, and dried fruits are very high in sugar.
pasta, potatoes, bread, and rice are nothing more than piles of sugar as far as your body is concerned.
Because it takes some time for your digestive enzymes to break starchy carbohydrates down and thus release the individual sugar molecules, it takes a little longer for those sugar molecules to get into your bloodstream.
Refined wheat, rye, and other flours will get into your bloodstream almost as fast as table sugar.
breakfast is actually the worst time of day to eat starchy carb and sugar because doing so will spike your insulin, and cortisol and insulin have opposite effects. Cortisol is all about burning fat and giving you energy. Insulin is all about building fat and making you sleepy.
If you wait to eat your carbs later in the day, you’ll typically have considerably less cortisol in your body, and your body can release a good deal less insulin.
when it comes to carbs, procrastination is a good thing because putting off carbohydrate until later in the day is better than being a carb early bird.
Insulin’s job is to get glucose sugar out of your bloodstream and into storage ASAP.
three places in our body that store sugar: muscle, liver, and fat.
Insulin stimulates fat cells to take in sugar from your bloodstream. Sugar and fat are completely different molecules, so your body fat can’t store sugar. It has to convert it into fat first, using specialized enzymes within the fat cell that reshape sugar’s carbon atoms one by one, separating and rearranging them, in order to build them into a fat molecule.
long as there’s more than just a trace of insulin in the bloodstream, we cannot easily burn body fat.
insulin shuts down the enzymes that release body fat into the bloodstream.
Once you’ve become insulin-resistant, eating anything sweet or starchy makes your insulin go much higher than normal and keeps your insulin high for a longer-than-normal amount of time.
This not only keeps your body fat locked in storage; it also blocks your liver’s ability to make ketones for your brain.
Insulin resistance is a result of a metabolic one-two punch. As I’ve argued, the first punch comes from vegetable oil, which damages your mitochondria so your brain grows dependent on sugar. And the second punch comes from your brain forcing your liver to pump out more sugar than your blood is designed to safely carry.
your liver can make sugar from protein. But forcing your liver to make sugar from protein is not a good idea.
Most low-carbohydrate and keto dieters restrict all carbohydrates, without making a distinction between carbs that are refined and those that are unrefined.
Foods like beans, nuts, and intact whole grains—not whole grain flours—won’t spike your sugar or your insulin
test of insulin resistance is the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio. A standard fasting cholesterol panel includes these numbers. To calculate, simply divide the triglyceride number on your report by the HDL number. If the result is under 2, you’re in pretty good shape. If it’s under 1, you’re in very good shape. If it’s over 2.5, that’s a strong indication of insulin resistance. Between 2 and 2.5 is probable insulin resistance.
if you’re resistant to insulin, that is a good indicator that you may be losing sensitivity to other hormones as well. That’s why I would suggest that anyone who has thyroid disease, low testosterone, leptin resistance, infertility, or irregular periods consider getting some assessment of their insulin sensitivity.
the less hunger you experience and the less often you need to eat.
7 Fatburn System 3: Your Body Fat
Key ideas:
Toxic amounts of polyunsaturated fat make your body fat dysfunctional.
Dysfunctional body fat causes fat buildup in your arteries and organs.
Blood tests and certain symptoms help you recognize body fat dysfunction.
Body fat
more complete understanding of body fat comes only when you think of it as a living dynamic tissue, like an organ.
Your body fat is called adipose to distinguish it from dietary fat.
A man or woman of healthy weight carries about 100,000 calories in storage in their adipose,
Whenever insulin levels rise for any reason, the liver shifts gears, converting from fatburning to fat building.
When the liver is in fat-building mode, the free fatty acids arriving at the liver will be packed it into a special fat-transport vehicle called a lipoprotein.
insulin controls whether fat released from the calorie closet will be burned for energy or stored in the calorie closet again.
inflammation—and not saturated fat, cholesterol, or even carbohydrates in moderation—makes wayward body fat accumulate around your waist,
Those people with healthy body fat are called metabolically healthy obese, and those with unhealthy body fat are called metabolically unhealthy obese. The differences are easy to spot—you can tell simply by looking at where a person’s body builds the extra fat.
If you are in the metabolically healthy category, your body is better able to accommodate more fat. This means you are a person who puts their fat in “all the right places,”
When I see someone with a beer gut, skinny legs, or fat under their chin around their neck, I know that their metabolism isn’t healthy and therefore neither is their fat.
No area of medicine has been more corrupted by bias than the field of preventive cardiology.
Cholesterol is also the building block of a number of important hormones, including testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol.
Most doctors think eating cholesterol makes our cholesterol go up. That’s not true. You might be surprised to learn that one of the most powerful factors causing elevated cholesterol is burning body fat, as that makes your LDL cholesterol go up. Another factor elevating your cholesterol is eating whole foods that are naturally high in fat, especially saturated and monounsaturated fats, which makes your HDL cholesterol go up.
If lipoproteins are FedEx delivery vehicles delivering fat, the oxygen molecules in your blood are flying bullets that can shoot the tires on the delivery truck, causing accidents that spill triglyceride into the bloodstream. Because men have more oxygen in their blood than women, as well as more iron, which accelerates the reaction, the deposition of fat along the arterial wall happens more quickly, putting men at risk for heart attack and stroke a full ten years earlier than their female counterparts.
8 Fatburn System 4
Key ideas:
Your brain’s appetite control center matches your calorie intake to your calorie need automatically.
An inflamed appetite control center cannot do this, making sustained weight loss nearly impossible.
Rebuilding your brain with healthy fats transforms overactive hunger into cravings for nutrition.
Hunger
people who are metabolically healthy do not get hungry unless they’ve been extremely active, skipped a couple of meals, or have been undereating for a few days in a row.
A healthy hunger is designed to direct us to nutritious foods with savory, salty, and sour flavors.
so many people are metabolically unhealthy that, as we saw earlier, normal hunger has been replaced by a dangerous kind of hunger. This dangerous hunger can occur just a few hours after eating.
abnormal hunger is not about getting nutrients. It’s about getting sugar into your brain.
After all that exercise, your muscles generate myokines, special hormones that signal to your brain that they’re going to do some rebuilding and could use a shipment—or two, or three—of raw materials.
Leptin’s specialty is telling your brain how much energy you have in your body fat.
living on vegetable oils—as we now do—has turned us into a nation of rarely sated, chronically hungry junk food seekers.
Vegetable oil is high in linoleic acid
our body fat has ten to twenty times the linoleic acid concentration of body fat from a hundred years
vegetable oil promotes hunger has to do with driving up inflammation that suppresses the feeling of satiety.
Taste aversions may occur because an inflamed hypothalamus is not functioning properly and can only process the relatively simple flavors of blander-tasting foods, driving a preference for processed foods like crackers, pasta, and chicken fingers, severely limiting a person’s food options so that it can be very difficult to follow a healthy balanced diet for very long. In a sense, inflammation forces your hypothalamus to make you seek out the least nutritious foods in an attempt to at least “understand” whatever it is you’re eating.
The most satiating foods are those high in both cholesterol and energizing saturated and monounsaturated fats. This is why most people can’t eat much more than three or four eggs—which amounts to less than 240 calories—before feeling we’ve had enough.
any weight loss programs that don’t account for the need to heal your appetite control systems set you up for regaining lost weight.
shift your mind-set to the more immediate goal of eliminating overactive hunger.
our carbohydrate consumption is about the same today as it was in 1900, when our rates of obesity were about a tenth of what they are now.
we’ve increased our sugar consumption over what it was at the turn of the last century by about 65 pounds per capita per year,
decreased our consumption of flour quite a bit more, by about 100 pounds per capita per year.
9 Fatburn Assessment Tools
I have seen a consistent pattern of patients falling into one of three groups:
Those patients who are able to maintain their weight at or near what it was when they graduated high school into their retirement are buzzing with energy.
By contrast, those patients who chronically struggle with weight quite obviously hesitate while considering how to navigate the climb on and off the table without getting hurt. These people are sometimes the very same people who talk about how in their younger years, back in high school or college, they were able to work hard and play hard.
A third group of patients sits between those two extremes. They don’t quite burn fat optimally, but manage to sustain their energy by adopting a strategy of planning small snacks.
The Fatburn System Assessment is a test that I’ve developed over the years.
The lower the number, the less often your body generates energy from body fat and the more severely your body tissues suffer from inefficient energy production.
[see book for quiz]
10 The Fatburn Fix Plan How the Plan Works
Key ideas:
You will follow five rules from day one of the plan and continue indefinitely.
Phase I prepares you for weight loss in Phase II.
The best time to start a new exercise regimen.
The five rules of the Fatburn Fix Plan
1. Eat natural fats.
2. Eat slow-digesting carb.
3. Seek salt.
4. Drink plenty of water.
5. Supplement with vitamins and minerals.
Phase I
During Phase I you are ending the overactive hunger that drives you to snack or fall back into old habits.
Phase II
During Phase II, your focus shifts to weight loss. Thanks to the work done during Phase I, you will have improved your ability to use body fat for energy and can now safely cut calories without causing further stress to your metabolism.
the hardest part of making positive change is the
part where you have to figure out if you actually want to make the change or not.
11 Five Rules That Fix Your Fatburn
RULE #1: AVOID VEGETABLE OIL
commit the six most common bad oils to memory: canola, corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, and safflower.
Condiments, sauces, and dressings are especially tricky because on the front they will say they are made with olive oil, but when you turn the bottle around to read ingredients, you’ll see soy or another vegetable oil listed first,
DO Eat Natural Fats
animal fat and warm-weather plants like olive and avocado.
are high in the fatty acids we call saturated and monounsaturated.
Because they are stable, they burn cleanly.
Manufacturers love bad oils because they’re cheap and have no flavor. That means they can use vegetable oils to essentially “water down” the main ingredient.
By optimizing body composition, the average person will reduce their food intake by 30 to 50 percent.
RULE #2: USE SLOW-DIGESTING CARBS
Some carbohydrate-containing foods make you gain weight, while others can help you lose it.
you need to avoid are sweets and starchy carbs.
Sweets also includes most fruits and fruit juices. It doesn’t matter that fruit has natural sugar. Sugar is sugar. The fruits we grow these days are so overloaded with sugar, they have relatively little else to offer in terms of nutrition.
The fruits lowest in sugar are berries and melons.
DO EAT SLOW-DIGESTING CARBS
Whole wheat flour is not a slow-digesting carb because the process of pulverizing grains into flour destroys the structure of the seed.
slow-digesting carbs are more structurally complex than the starchy carbs, potatoes, rice, refined flours, sweet beverages, and most fruits.
Nut flours are good sources of slow-digesting carb
morning. If you want to eat anything sweet, or treat yourself to something starchy, the best time of day to do that is with or after your dinner.
RULE #3: SEEK SALT
DO NOT Believe the Claim That Salt Causes Health Problems
A chronically low-salt diet makes it hard for your body to maintain normal function.
Salt Reduces Hunger
Salt Makes Healthy Food Taste Better
Salt Improves Your Digestion
Salt gives your body two essential minerals, sodium and chloride. Your stomach needs chloride to make hydrochloric acid and your liver needs salt to make bile salts.
Salt Improves Your Energy
Salt Improves Bone Health
when your diet is chronically low in salt, your body can experience a kind of internal starvation.
low sodium levels force cells in the bone to start dissolving bone matrix in order to extract sodium for export into the bloodstream. Restoring salt balance by eating enough can easily prevent this.
How Much Salt Is Enough?
Optimal intake is actually between 5 and 10 grams per day, or 1⅓ teaspoons to 2⅔ teaspoons. You may need even more if you drink a lot of coffee, sweat a lot, or take medications that make you lose salt,
There’s almost no chance you’ll get too much salt in your diet.
RULE #4: DRINK WATER DO NOT Drink Soda, Juice, Heavily Sweetened Beverages, or Beverages
Containing Sucralose or Saccharin
Newer low-calorie sweeteners that are popping up in beverages are stevia, monk fruit, and coconut sugar. Even though these are natural and won’t cause cancer or colon polyps, I recommend you consider limiting or avoiding these as well. The reason in this case has to do with how sweetness itself affects your body and your brain.
First, sweet taste releases fatburn-blocking hormones. It’s not just sugar that makes your body release insulin; it’s anything with a sweet taste.
RULE #5: SMART SUPPLEMENTATION DO Supplement Vitamins and Minerals
Magnesium oxide, 250 milligrams. There are many brands available; for example, Nature Made. Zinc picolinate, 22 milligrams. Example: Solgar.
identify four categories of foods that all traditional (preindustrial) cultures around the world had in common. They are: Fresh food like salads Meat on the bone like chicken legs rather than skinless boneless chicken Fermented and sprouted foods like live-culture pickles and sprouted grain bread Organ meats like liver
Protein powders are extremely popular. Most are by-products of other industries and also used for animal feed, fertilizer, or industrial manufacturing.
Whey protein powder, for instance, is a by-product of making yogurt. It used to be sold to pig farms and institutions for the old and infirm because it was cost-effective. Now it’s sold as a health product. Greek yogurt produces more whey, and the rise of Greek yogurt parallels the rise of whey protein powder in stores.
the most important antioxidants in your body are the antioxidant enzymes your body makes in abundance as long as your diet contains enough nutrients, especially the minerals previously discussed.
I would much rather see you take the money you were spending on supplements and spend it on tasty food.
12 Phase I
IN THIS CHAPTER YOU’LL LEARN TO:
Gain freedom from snacks.
Take small steps toward long-term habit change.
Make meals that keep your energy up between meals.
Eating strategies
In Phase I, Baby Steps, I want you to focus on eliminating all eleven hypoglycemia symptoms that may be making you feel like you need to boost your energy with a snack.
swap out energy-draining ingredients for energizing clean-burning fats and slow-digesting carbs.
Changing habits is actually easier if you don’t think about it as giving up something, but rather as changing one behavior to another.
Dessert is a planned post-meal treat, and eating it right after the meal means it’s not going to have the fatburn-blocking effects of a snack.
A simple snack attack is not associated with any of the eleven hypoglycemia symptoms, and while you may feel a little hungry, it will go away without eating.
A complex snack attack will make you feel bad in one of those eleven ways, and it won’t quit until you do something to boost your cellular energy.
Whenever you can turn two episodes of calorie consumption into one, you’re improving your metabolic health.
While going cold turkey works for some when quitting cigarettes and alcohol, it rarely works with sugar:
Step 1. Consolidate your sweet consumption to one treat per day only.
Step 2. Now reduce the sweetness in that treat.
Step 3. include a small portion of slow-digesting carb at meals a few days a week
13 Phase I Metabolic Rehab: The Accelerated Plan
Your goal during this phase is to smash your hunger with clean-burning fats. Formulating your breakfast, lunch, and dinner around the five rules, you may find that you go for days without feeling the slightest hunger twinge. Now you’re ready for keto.
To accelerate your fatburn, you’ll need to consume no more than 50 grams of carbohydrate per day.
the worst time to include carbs is with breakfast and the best time to get those carbohydrates is with dinner
To get the benefits of keto, you need to keep your total daily carb counts between 20 and 50 grams.
the original burger, from Hamburg, Germany, was bunless? Legend has it that at the 1904 World’s Fair, the vendor selling hamburgers ran out of plates. Improvising, he bought some rolls from the vendor next door, sliced them in half, and voilà, the American burger!
Soup Is Good Food
when rice is integral to the soup, swap it out for riced cauliflower,
When beans are a major player, cut the normal amount down by a third to a half and amp up the meat and/or the veggies.
14 Phase II Lasting Weight Loss
Use intermittent fasting and other strategies to safely cut calories and accelerate weight loss. Reboot your appetite control system so it can “see” the body fat you have and use it to generate energy. Extract your sweet tooth and start craving real foods.
By fasting, you learn to get in touch with true hunger—the hunger for nutrition rather than for energy.
Traveling is a great time to practice skipping meals, because in many cases there’s just no good food available.
Being hungry for nutrition rather than energy makes life simple. Your cravings align with your body’s needs rather than conflict with them.
The widely accepted practice of eating three square meals is a by-product of the industrial age,
Another strategy is to set up guardrails around what time of day you can and can’t eat. In this case, people choose a window of time to eat and otherwise don’t count their meals. So for example, they’ll only eat between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
There’s no clear benefit to fasting for days in a row unless it makes your life easier.
Child psychologists say kids need to try a new food ten times before their taste buds decide if they like it or not, so give your taste buds the same training period.
For a non-bodybuilder to add a full pound of muscle can take months of dedicated exercise. The increase in calories burned by having that new pound of muscle is less than 10 per day.