The Two Foods That Block Weight Loss
Video 1
The Two Foods That Block Weight Loss
Video 1
Transcript
Hey there, I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I have a question for you. Why is it so difficult to lose weight? I've been studying that question for most of my professional career, and maybe it dawned on you too, but I want to make it a little bit more specific. Why is it so difficult to lose weight and then keep it off long term? It's an important question. A 2019 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that by 2030, 50% of people living in the United States are projected to be living with obesity and a quarter with extreme obesity. That was 2019. Then what happened? Covid happened, and as we were all watching the news and learning that 78% of the people who were having bad outcomes from covid, hospitalization, death, 78% had overweight or obesity as we were all learning that carrying excess weight was the number one variable other than age associated with bad outcomes from Covid. What did we do? We gained weight. A lot of weight. 42% of people in the United States put on an average of 29 unwanted pounds during the very first year of Covid, and so I'm afraid, my friends, we might be hitting that 50% obesity mark well ahead of 2030.Â
Now, you might be thinking in today's climate, there are more and more people who are not thinking that they want to lose weight. They're healthy at any size, and yes, there is a minority of people living with obesity who do not show any markers for increased blood pressure or cholesterol, but research shows that give them 10 years, and 80% of them will. Now, I love the movement to improve your health no matter what you weigh, especially the focus on self-compassion and the focus on us banding together to eliminate prejudice and discrimination based on size. And I also know that there are a lot of good reasons to take off weight: to improve health and mobility; to release the pressure on the organs and the joints to increase longevity; and flourishing.Â
I'm afraid the statistics on long-term weight loss are absolutely abysmal. If you look at all programs that's high fat, low fat, Paleo, vegan, Keto, Noom, Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Atkins, Nutrisystem, Zone, what you see are essentially the same results. People lose somewhere between 2% and 5% of their starting baseline weight in the first two months. Then they may keep losing weight for a bit, but sometime between six months and one year, the weight loss stalls out and then the weight regain starts. So, by two years, typically almost all of the weight has come back, and that's why most programs don't publish two-year results at all. Now, you'll see there are two year results published here by Weight Watchers, but they're meager, right? Just 3% of baseline weight. For context, a 3% weight loss is someone starting at 300 pounds and only losing nine pounds. It's really not much. Here are the journal articles where these data are published. You can see for yourself if you want to. If we want to look at what it takes for someone living with obesity today to be at a normal BMI within one year, the odds are even worse. A very large study published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at thousands of people who were living with obesity and showed that the odds of them achieving a normal BMI within one year were lower than 1%. What that means is that the odds of someone living with obesity today of taking off their excess weight and then living in what they might consider to be their right-sized body, long term are a fraction of 1%, and people's behavior is reflecting those odds.Â
In the United States, for example, right now over 100 million people are spending money on products and services designed to take off weight, and research shows they're going to start four or five new attempts each year. What, think about that for a second. That's so mind blowing. Let me put that in a different domain so we can wrap our heads around what that's saying. Imagine a world in which students going to college and university have just a 1% chance of actually graduating with their college degree, and the other 99% were dropping out and re-enrolling four or five times each year trying to go back and get their education dropping out and then re-enrolling. We wouldn't look at those students and say they're sure pretty lazy. We would look at the system and say, that is a flawed and broken system. What I'm saying is we don't just have an obesity pandemic. We truly have an obesity mystery.Â
The problem itself doesn't even make any sense. People are trying and failing at rates that don't make any sense. And so, when Ozempic started making headlines as a weight-loss sensation, no wonder people took notice, like drowning people, grasping for a life preserver, they started clamoring for that weekly injection. Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic, became the most valuable company in all of Europe, worth $425 billion - more than the entire economy of its home country of Denmark. Let's review the basics. These new weight-loss drugs, they have a lot of different brand names. Two of them are Ozempic and Wegovy. They're the same drug, actually a drug called semaglutide, but prescribed for different conditions. Ozempic is for diabetes and Wegovy at a slightly higher dose is for weight loss. What semaglutide does is it balances out blood sugar by increasing insulin from the pancreas, decreasing glucagon from the liver, and generally reducing hunger by slowing down the digestive system. Semaglutide also works in the reward centers of the brain to shut down food cravings. You just feel less interested in eating.Â
How effective is semaglutide for weight loss? Well, research shows that in the first two months on average, people lose just over 4% of their starting body weight, which isn't remarkable at all, but by one year they've lost an average of 15% of their body weight and the weight loss is maintained at two years. As you can see, these results tower over anything that's been available before. It's no wonder people are excited, but the experts are arguing. Some are screaming about the side effects of vomiting, stomach pain, intestinal blockage, and yes, patients are filing lawsuits about that. Thyroid tumors and loss of muscle mass. Others are saying that the side effects are manageable or overblown and that these weight-loss drugs are truly the scientific breakthrough we've all been waiting for.Â
What's not debatable is that they're super expensive. In the United States, prescriptions start at over a thousand dollars a month, and if you go off the drug, you regain the weight, which means you need to be prepared to pay month after month indefinitely, which is why research shows that 45% of people in the United States say they would consider taking a weight-loss drug, but then when they learn how much it costs, that number goes down to just 16%. But what if there were a way to get the same results without a drug? Well, I know how to do that because I've done it. About 20 years ago, I took off all my excess weight, about 60 pounds. That was a 34% weight loss with no surgery and no weight-loss drugs at all. I went from obese to slender, and I've been maintaining it now for over two decades. How did I do that? Primarily by not eating the two foods that block weight loss.Â
My PhD is in brain and cognitive sciences, so I know a lot about how this works in the brain and I'm going to explain it to you here in this video. In order to do that, I need to unpack for you the two key phenomena that are important when it comes to keeping weight off long-term. They are hunger and cravings. The general issue is that when people lose weight, research shows on average their hunger and their cravings go up. I'm guessing you can see how that's problematic, right? You can live with a certain amount of hunger and cravings for a while. Living with it long term is extremely difficult. In order to lose weight and keep it off, you've got to have a way to make hunger and cravings stay the same or ideally even go down as you're losing weight. What are hunger and cravings in the brain, in the body? What am I talking about? What causes them and how could we make them go down?Â
Let's start with hunger. Now, I actually need to be clear here. I'm not talking about hunger the way you think of it. I'm not talking about, “oh, I haven't eaten all day, and my stomach is growling, and I really need some fuel to fuel my life.” Not that kind of hunger. I'm talking about a new kind of hunger that I call insatiable hunger because it's not actually relieved by eating. It's a weird kind of hunger. It doesn't go away when you eat food. Picture this, someone's had a full dinner and now they want to watch a Netflix series that they're loving, and so they sit down on the couch, and they want some chips or some ice cream. They go get the chips, they eat most of the bag of chips, maybe they finish the bag of chips, they still want to eat more food. Now, at this point, if they consulted their stomach and said, am I hungry? The answer would be no. They can probably feel their stomach being stretched at this point. They know they don't need more food. They're not hungry in the traditional sense, but they still have insatiable hunger. The brain wants more food, the elbow wants to bend, the mouth wants to chew. It's a brain issue primarily, and it's never satisfied.Â
I need to be clear. Not everyone experiences this. Some people naturally get full when they've had a moderate amount of food, but some people, a lot of people, are experiencing insatiable hunger. Where does it come from? It turns out it's a malfunction in the hormone that makes us feel full. It's a hormone that not only makes us feel full, but makes us want to exercise. It's the magical hormone that if it's working well, keeps us at a normal body weight, at a lean body weight, just like animals out in the wild who never ever put on excess weight, and that hormone is leptin. It was discovered in 1994 by researchers who discovered this hormone in rats who'd gotten morbidly obese, who would never stop eating, who wouldn't stop eating unless you just moved the food trough. And then they would waddle over to the food trough and plop down and eat more food, and they never ever moved. Finally, researchers discovered that these rats were missing the gene that makes leptin. And what the brain has right now on board in so many of us is leptin resistance. What does that mean? Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re not hungry anymore. You are full. Not only that, you feel awesome and you feel like getting active. You want to go use all that fuel to build a hut or kill a wildebeest. That is when leptin is on board. When leptin is blocked, the brain can't see it, and we never get full.Â
How's it being blocked? Why is it being blocked? The answer is too much insulin, high baseline insulin levels, and also high triglycerides and high inflammation, yes, systemic inflammation, but also inflammation in the ventral medial nucleus of the hypothalamus where food consumption is regulated. How do we lower baseline insulin levels, lower triglycerides and lower inflammation in that part of the brain?
Hold that thought. Let's talk now about cravings. Cravings are overpowering urges with the drive into action to go get foods that you think will hit the spot. They might lead you to drive out of your way to go to a specific place that makes a dish that you really love to eat or a food that you love to buy and then go home and eat. Or it might be that you have the craving but without a specific food in mind. You find yourself wandering up and down the grocery store aisle wondering what's going to hit the spot or perusing the menu and thinking, what do I really want to eat right now? You have a nondescript craving, but it's a craving nonetheless. You're not looking for nourishment, you're not looking for healthy fuel. You're looking for something to hit the spot that is a craving.
To be clear, not everyone experiences cravings for specific foods or general cravings for foods. Some people just eat as fuel, but some of us experience overpowering cravings. The part in the brain that this is all happening in is the reward center. Deep in the brain right there, there's an area called the nucleus accumbens where a neurotransmitter you may have heard of, it's called dopamine, gets a big flood. When we eat a donut, when we eat some pizza, when we eat a food that hits the spot. Over time those dopamine receptors, they at first go, whew, yeah, that was really good. I'll take some more of that please. Over time they go, okay, we don't really need that much stimulation around here. And they thin out, they become less responsive, less numerous. And now we have a problem because at baseline we don't have enough dopamine just to feel okay. We're at the point where we need to top up with some extra food, the kind of food, I mean all day long, just to feel a baseline level of, okay, and it's called dopamine downregulation. You're literally rewiring the brain so that you crave those foods to get enough dopamine now just to feel normal. If you don't top up with those foods every couple of hours, you feel bleak, you feel itchy, you feel restless, you feel irritable, and you have a craving to go get more.
Research shows that the dopamine downregulation and someone living with obesity, it is just as bad as the dopamine downregulation with someone living with cocaine addiction. Here's the PET scan that shows that. And you could say right now, “Dr. Thompson, are you telling me that the foods that are making people obese are like drugs in the brain?” And I would say, “yes, that is exactly what I'm telling you.” And we've reached the point in the video where it's time to talk about the two foods that are blocking weight loss. Because in the brain and in the body, there are two foods that are responsible for this whole cascade of events that's leading to leptin resistance and dopamine downregulation controlling our insatiable hunger and our overpowering cravings. Those two foods are sugar and flour, and I want you to think about sugar and flour in a new way. I invite you to think about them as drugs because think about where they come from, how they're made.Â
What is cocaine? Well, it comes from the coca plant, the coca leaf to be particular, and in the Andes Mountains, hikers will sometimes pluck these coca leaves off the branches and put these leaves in their cheek and chew them as they're hiking. There's actually a scientific paper that was published showing that this is not addictive. However, if you take the inner essence of that coca leaf and you extract it and then you refine and purify it down into a fine white powder, you've now turned that non-addictive, totally innocuous plant substance into a drug. And what is heroin? Where does it come from? What is it actually? Well, heroin comes from poppy plants, and you can consume poppies in all sorts of forms, including sprinkled on the outside of your bagels, and not become a quivering, itching, needing another hit heroin addict. But when you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and then you extract it and you refine and purify it down into a thick syrupy liquid or a fine light brown powder, well now you've turned that harmless plant into a drug and look at how similar they look, right? It's clear. These are not innocuous substances. These are drugs by their very nature.Â
What happens when people don't eat sugar and flour? Well, this is what I teach people to do professionally. I published a study in Current Developments in Nutrition, June of 2020, and the study tracked 1,208 people who stopped eating sugar and flour for just two months. What the data showed was that it took about two weeks for the brain to begin healing, and then both hunger and craving went steadily down, down, down to super low levels so that people were experiencing low levels of hunger and craving pretty much always by the end of the study. And oh, by the way, during that two month period of time, they lost a tremendous amount of weight. Interestingly, their peace and serenity with food went up, and that's really interesting because a lot of people out there will tell you, “oh, if you stop eating dessert, you're just going to go mad because you're going to crave dessert all the time.” That's not what these people experienced. They stopped craving dessert and their peace and serenity with food went up.Â
I think perhaps most exciting in another study that I published in Current Developments in Nutrition in June of 2021, looking at 4,500 people who didn't eat sugar and flour for two months, people of a variety of ages, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond, my research shows that they lost weight equivalently fast, fast and equivalently fast, which means that not eating sugar and flour took men and women who were in their 60s and 70s and turned their bodies into the fat releasing machines of people in their 20s and 30s. You might say, “That's ridiculous. Everyone knows it's harder to lose weight. The body doesn't release weight as readily when you're above mid age. So, what gives Dr. Thompson?” Here's the deal, the reason it's harder to lose weight in the second half of life is that you don't have much estrogen. Estrogens are a class of hormones, and both women and men have them, women have more, men have less, both have them. And yes, after the age of 50, production of estrogen goes down to almost nothing. Okay? What does estrogen do in the body? Lots of things, but a key thing that it does is it facilitates the effectiveness of insulin. If you're eating a bunch of sugar and flour, you need your insulin to work really well to correct and rain in your blood sugar. If you stop eating sugar on flour, what happens is you're not messing with your blood sugar all the time. Your blood sugar stays pretty even-keeled naturally. It doesn't matter as much that you don't have estrogen on board. It levels the playing field and it makes people lose weight equivalently, no matter their age. Brilliant. Right?Â
At this point, you might be saying, “Hold on a second, Dr. Thompson, are you telling me that I should not be eating sugar and flour, either not much, or God forbid not at all? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, how would I do that? And second of all, why would I want to do that?” Oh my gosh, yes. Well, execution over the long term is a thing, isn't it? Both the willingness, but more importantly, the ability to execute over the long term. Frankly, whether your goal is to not eat sugar and flour or just to adhere to this, that, or that food program execution is going to be the problem, right? What my research has discovered is that there is one big mistake that just about everybody makes when they try to lose weight and try to stick to a way of eating, they're making a mistake, and it's keeping them from executing over the long-term. Of course, it goes without saying that it's one thing to know the one big mistake. It's another thing entirely to be able to correct it, and I will teach you how to do that in the next video, and I'll be sharing with you a little bit more about myself, like how it was that I ended up living with obesity by my mid-20s and how to all that weight to lose.Â
There's a lot to cover, but we've come now to the end of video one, and I just have one favor to ask. It's simple. It's so easy. Could you just scroll down and leave a comment below this video? Loved it, hated it. Thumbs up, thumbs down, A big aha. You had something you'd like me to do differently next time, anything. Just scroll down and leave me your honest thoughts. I read them. I care, and I would love to know what you thought of this video. You'll also see a box where you can put in your email address. By the way, if you want to know when the next video comes out, I have no way of telling you and you have no way of knowing what the link is if you don't put your email address in there, so you might want to do that too. But main thing, go scroll down and leave a comment. I'll see you when the next video. I can't wait until then.
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Transcript
Hey there, I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I have a question for you. Why is it so difficult to lose weight? I've been studying that question for most of my professional career, and maybe it dawned on you too, but I want to make it a little bit more specific. Why is it so difficult to lose weight and then keep it off long term? It's an important question. A 2019 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that by 2030, 50% of people living in the United States are projected to be living with obesity and a quarter with extreme obesity. That was 2019. Then what happened? Covid happened, and as we were all watching the news and learning that 78% of the people who were having bad outcomes from covid, hospitalization, death, 78% had overweight or obesity as we were all learning that carrying excess weight was the number one variable other than age associated with bad outcomes from Covid. What did we do? We gained weight. A lot of weight. 42% of people in the United States put on an average of 29 unwanted pounds during the very first year of Covid, and so I'm afraid, my friends, we might be hitting that 50% obesity mark well ahead of 2030.Â
Now, you might be thinking in today's climate, there are more and more people who are not thinking that they want to lose weight. They're healthy at any size, and yes, there is a minority of people living with obesity who do not show any markers for increased blood pressure or cholesterol, but research shows that give them 10 years, and 80% of them will. Now, I love the movement to improve your health no matter what you weigh, especially the focus on self-compassion and the focus on us banding together to eliminate prejudice and discrimination based on size. And I also know that there are a lot of good reasons to take off weight: to improve health and mobility; to release the pressure on the organs and the joints to increase longevity; and flourishing.Â
I'm afraid the statistics on long-term weight loss are absolutely abysmal. If you look at all programs that's high fat, low fat, Paleo, vegan, Keto, Noom, Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Atkins, Nutrisystem, Zone, what you see are essentially the same results. People lose somewhere between 2% and 5% of their starting baseline weight in the first two months. Then they may keep losing weight for a bit, but sometime between six months and one year, the weight loss stalls out and then the weight regain starts. So, by two years, typically almost all of the weight has come back, and that's why most programs don't publish two-year results at all. Now, you'll see there are two year results published here by Weight Watchers, but they're meager, right? Just 3% of baseline weight. For context, a 3% weight loss is someone starting at 300 pounds and only losing nine pounds. It's really not much. Here are the journal articles where these data are published. You can see for yourself if you want to. If we want to look at what it takes for someone living with obesity today to be at a normal BMI within one year, the odds are even worse. A very large study published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at thousands of people who were living with obesity and showed that the odds of them achieving a normal BMI within one year were lower than 1%. What that means is that the odds of someone living with obesity today of taking off their excess weight and then living in what they might consider to be their right-sized body, long term are a fraction of 1%, and people's behavior is reflecting those odds.Â
In the United States, for example, right now over 100 million people are spending money on products and services designed to take off weight, and research shows they're going to start four or five new attempts each year. What, think about that for a second. That's so mind blowing. Let me put that in a different domain so we can wrap our heads around what that's saying. Imagine a world in which students going to college and university have just a 1% chance of actually graduating with their college degree, and the other 99% were dropping out and re-enrolling four or five times each year trying to go back and get their education dropping out and then re-enrolling. We wouldn't look at those students and say they're sure pretty lazy. We would look at the system and say, that is a flawed and broken system. What I'm saying is we don't just have an obesity pandemic. We truly have an obesity mystery.Â
The problem itself doesn't even make any sense. People are trying and failing at rates that don't make any sense. And so, when Ozempic started making headlines as a weight-loss sensation, no wonder people took notice, like drowning people, grasping for a life preserver, they started clamoring for that weekly injection. Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic, became the most valuable company in all of Europe, worth $425 billion - more than the entire economy of its home country of Denmark. Let's review the basics. These new weight-loss drugs, they have a lot of different brand names. Two of them are Ozempic and Wegovy. They're the same drug, actually a drug called semaglutide, but prescribed for different conditions. Ozempic is for diabetes and Wegovy at a slightly higher dose is for weight loss. What semaglutide does is it balances out blood sugar by increasing insulin from the pancreas, decreasing glucagon from the liver, and generally reducing hunger by slowing down the digestive system. Semaglutide also works in the reward centers of the brain to shut down food cravings. You just feel less interested in eating.Â
How effective is semaglutide for weight loss? Well, research shows that in the first two months on average, people lose just over 4% of their starting body weight, which isn't remarkable at all, but by one year they've lost an average of 15% of their body weight and the weight loss is maintained at two years. As you can see, these results tower over anything that's been available before. It's no wonder people are excited, but the experts are arguing. Some are screaming about the side effects of vomiting, stomach pain, intestinal blockage, and yes, patients are filing lawsuits about that. Thyroid tumors and loss of muscle mass. Others are saying that the side effects are manageable or overblown and that these weight-loss drugs are truly the scientific breakthrough we've all been waiting for.Â
What's not debatable is that they're super expensive. In the United States, prescriptions start at over a thousand dollars a month, and if you go off the drug, you regain the weight, which means you need to be prepared to pay month after month indefinitely, which is why research shows that 45% of people in the United States say they would consider taking a weight-loss drug, but then when they learn how much it costs, that number goes down to just 16%. But what if there were a way to get the same results without a drug? Well, I know how to do that because I've done it. About 20 years ago, I took off all my excess weight, about 60 pounds. That was a 34% weight loss with no surgery and no weight-loss drugs at all. I went from obese to slender, and I've been maintaining it now for over two decades. How did I do that? Primarily by not eating the two foods that block weight loss.Â
My PhD is in brain and cognitive sciences, so I know a lot about how this works in the brain and I'm going to explain it to you here in this video. In order to do that, I need to unpack for you the two key phenomena that are important when it comes to keeping weight off long-term. They are hunger and cravings. The general issue is that when people lose weight, research shows on average their hunger and their cravings go up. I'm guessing you can see how that's problematic, right? You can live with a certain amount of hunger and cravings for a while. Living with it long term is extremely difficult. In order to lose weight and keep it off, you've got to have a way to make hunger and cravings stay the same or ideally even go down as you're losing weight. What are hunger and cravings in the brain, in the body? What am I talking about? What causes them and how could we make them go down?Â
Let's start with hunger. Now, I actually need to be clear here. I'm not talking about hunger the way you think of it. I'm not talking about, “oh, I haven't eaten all day, and my stomach is growling, and I really need some fuel to fuel my life.” Not that kind of hunger. I'm talking about a new kind of hunger that I call insatiable hunger because it's not actually relieved by eating. It's a weird kind of hunger. It doesn't go away when you eat food. Picture this, someone's had a full dinner and now they want to watch a Netflix series that they're loving, and so they sit down on the couch, and they want some chips or some ice cream. They go get the chips, they eat most of the bag of chips, maybe they finish the bag of chips, they still want to eat more food. Now, at this point, if they consulted their stomach and said, am I hungry? The answer would be no. They can probably feel their stomach being stretched at this point. They know they don't need more food. They're not hungry in the traditional sense, but they still have insatiable hunger. The brain wants more food, the elbow wants to bend, the mouth wants to chew. It's a brain issue primarily, and it's never satisfied.Â
I need to be clear. Not everyone experiences this. Some people naturally get full when they've had a moderate amount of food, but some people, a lot of people, are experiencing insatiable hunger. Where does it come from? It turns out it's a malfunction in the hormone that makes us feel full. It's a hormone that not only makes us feel full, but makes us want to exercise. It's the magical hormone that if it's working well, keeps us at a normal body weight, at a lean body weight, just like animals out in the wild who never ever put on excess weight, and that hormone is leptin. It was discovered in 1994 by researchers who discovered this hormone in rats who'd gotten morbidly obese, who would never stop eating, who wouldn't stop eating unless you just moved the food trough. And then they would waddle over to the food trough and plop down and eat more food, and they never ever moved. Finally, researchers discovered that these rats were missing the gene that makes leptin. And what the brain has right now on board in so many of us is leptin resistance. What does that mean? Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re not hungry anymore. You are full. Not only that, you feel awesome and you feel like getting active. You want to go use all that fuel to build a hut or kill a wildebeest. That is when leptin is on board. When leptin is blocked, the brain can't see it, and we never get full.Â
How's it being blocked? Why is it being blocked? The answer is too much insulin, high baseline insulin levels, and also high triglycerides and high inflammation, yes, systemic inflammation, but also inflammation in the ventral medial nucleus of the hypothalamus where food consumption is regulated. How do we lower baseline insulin levels, lower triglycerides and lower inflammation in that part of the brain?
Hold that thought. Let's talk now about cravings. Cravings are overpowering urges with the drive into action to go get foods that you think will hit the spot. They might lead you to drive out of your way to go to a specific place that makes a dish that you really love to eat or a food that you love to buy and then go home and eat. Or it might be that you have the craving but without a specific food in mind. You find yourself wandering up and down the grocery store aisle wondering what's going to hit the spot or perusing the menu and thinking, what do I really want to eat right now? You have a nondescript craving, but it's a craving nonetheless. You're not looking for nourishment, you're not looking for healthy fuel. You're looking for something to hit the spot that is a craving.
To be clear, not everyone experiences cravings for specific foods or general cravings for foods. Some people just eat as fuel, but some of us experience overpowering cravings. The part in the brain that this is all happening in is the reward center. Deep in the brain right there, there's an area called the nucleus accumbens where a neurotransmitter you may have heard of, it's called dopamine, gets a big flood. When we eat a donut, when we eat some pizza, when we eat a food that hits the spot. Over time those dopamine receptors, they at first go, whew, yeah, that was really good. I'll take some more of that please. Over time they go, okay, we don't really need that much stimulation around here. And they thin out, they become less responsive, less numerous. And now we have a problem because at baseline we don't have enough dopamine just to feel okay. We're at the point where we need to top up with some extra food, the kind of food, I mean all day long, just to feel a baseline level of, okay, and it's called dopamine downregulation. You're literally rewiring the brain so that you crave those foods to get enough dopamine now just to feel normal. If you don't top up with those foods every couple of hours, you feel bleak, you feel itchy, you feel restless, you feel irritable, and you have a craving to go get more.
Research shows that the dopamine downregulation and someone living with obesity, it is just as bad as the dopamine downregulation with someone living with cocaine addiction. Here's the PET scan that shows that. And you could say right now, “Dr. Thompson, are you telling me that the foods that are making people obese are like drugs in the brain?” And I would say, “yes, that is exactly what I'm telling you.” And we've reached the point in the video where it's time to talk about the two foods that are blocking weight loss. Because in the brain and in the body, there are two foods that are responsible for this whole cascade of events that's leading to leptin resistance and dopamine downregulation controlling our insatiable hunger and our overpowering cravings. Those two foods are sugar and flour, and I want you to think about sugar and flour in a new way. I invite you to think about them as drugs because think about where they come from, how they're made.Â
What is cocaine? Well, it comes from the coca plant, the coca leaf to be particular, and in the Andes Mountains, hikers will sometimes pluck these coca leaves off the branches and put these leaves in their cheek and chew them as they're hiking. There's actually a scientific paper that was published showing that this is not addictive. However, if you take the inner essence of that coca leaf and you extract it and then you refine and purify it down into a fine white powder, you've now turned that non-addictive, totally innocuous plant substance into a drug. And what is heroin? Where does it come from? What is it actually? Well, heroin comes from poppy plants, and you can consume poppies in all sorts of forms, including sprinkled on the outside of your bagels, and not become a quivering, itching, needing another hit heroin addict. But when you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and then you extract it and you refine and purify it down into a thick syrupy liquid or a fine light brown powder, well now you've turned that harmless plant into a drug and look at how similar they look, right? It's clear. These are not innocuous substances. These are drugs by their very nature.Â
What happens when people don't eat sugar and flour? Well, this is what I teach people to do professionally. I published a study in Current Developments in Nutrition, June of 2020, and the study tracked 1,208 people who stopped eating sugar and flour for just two months. What the data showed was that it took about two weeks for the brain to begin healing, and then both hunger and craving went steadily down, down, down to super low levels so that people were experiencing low levels of hunger and craving pretty much always by the end of the study. And oh, by the way, during that two month period of time, they lost a tremendous amount of weight. Interestingly, their peace and serenity with food went up, and that's really interesting because a lot of people out there will tell you, “oh, if you stop eating dessert, you're just going to go mad because you're going to crave dessert all the time.” That's not what these people experienced. They stopped craving dessert and their peace and serenity with food went up.Â
I think perhaps most exciting in another study that I published in Current Developments in Nutrition in June of 2021, looking at 4,500 people who didn't eat sugar and flour for two months, people of a variety of ages, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond, my research shows that they lost weight equivalently fast, fast and equivalently fast, which means that not eating sugar and flour took men and women who were in their 60s and 70s and turned their bodies into the fat releasing machines of people in their 20s and 30s. You might say, “That's ridiculous. Everyone knows it's harder to lose weight. The body doesn't release weight as readily when you're above mid age. So, what gives Dr. Thompson?” Here's the deal, the reason it's harder to lose weight in the second half of life is that you don't have much estrogen. Estrogens are a class of hormones, and both women and men have them, women have more, men have less, both have them. And yes, after the age of 50, production of estrogen goes down to almost nothing. Okay? What does estrogen do in the body? Lots of things, but a key thing that it does is it facilitates the effectiveness of insulin. If you're eating a bunch of sugar and flour, you need your insulin to work really well to correct and rain in your blood sugar. If you stop eating sugar on flour, what happens is you're not messing with your blood sugar all the time. Your blood sugar stays pretty even-keeled naturally. It doesn't matter as much that you don't have estrogen on board. It levels the playing field and it makes people lose weight equivalently, no matter their age. Brilliant. Right?Â
At this point, you might be saying, “Hold on a second, Dr. Thompson, are you telling me that I should not be eating sugar and flour, either not much, or God forbid not at all? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, how would I do that? And second of all, why would I want to do that?” Oh my gosh, yes. Well, execution over the long term is a thing, isn't it? Both the willingness, but more importantly, the ability to execute over the long term. Frankly, whether your goal is to not eat sugar and flour or just to adhere to this, that, or that food program execution is going to be the problem, right? What my research has discovered is that there is one big mistake that just about everybody makes when they try to lose weight and try to stick to a way of eating, they're making a mistake, and it's keeping them from executing over the long-term. Of course, it goes without saying that it's one thing to know the one big mistake. It's another thing entirely to be able to correct it, and I will teach you how to do that in the next video, and I'll be sharing with you a little bit more about myself, like how it was that I ended up living with obesity by my mid-20s and how to all that weight to lose.Â
There's a lot to cover, but we've come now to the end of video one, and I just have one favor to ask. It's simple. It's so easy. Could you just scroll down and leave a comment below this video? Loved it, hated it. Thumbs up, thumbs down, A big aha. You had something you'd like me to do differently next time, anything. Just scroll down and leave me your honest thoughts. I read them. I care, and I would love to know what you thought of this video. You'll also see a box where you can put in your email address. By the way, if you want to know when the next video comes out, I have no way of telling you and you have no way of knowing what the link is if you don't put your email address in there, so you might want to do that too. But main thing, go scroll down and leave a comment. I'll see you when the next video. I can't wait until then.
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