One TBSP Of THIS Everyday Burns Visceral Fat For WEIGHT LOSS | Dr. William Li
OlBCMlxDXuE • 2025-05-10
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Kind: captions Language: en So, what are some foods that you can eat that actually make you feel full? And and how do you eat them? Like the people who had the higher dose, 3 tablespoons of lost more weight, lost more body fat than the ones who had one. When you're sleeping and not eating, your body is burning down fuel from your fat cells. You're actually losing weight, burning fat while you're sleeping. Well, how long do you have to not eat for this to work? So, this is actually the important part. We know that 8 hours is where you're going to start to get that benefit gut health. Turns out the latest research shows that this is as important in ways that we don't haven't fully figured out yet for longevity. When you get up in the morning, this is like a super little easy tip that I tell anybody. I do I practice it myself. And it turns out the people who wound up having the best cognition brain health in the long run were the people that had a diet. Wherever your starting point is, this is the key thing. You can always begin a healthier life and get over your own body fat. Like like you can win that battle easily by doing a couple of things. I tell the first thing you do is [Music] [Applause] to feel full, you're less likely to overeat, right? Right? I mean, it just doesn't feel good to stuff yourself to the gills. All right. So, what are some foods that you can eat that actually make you feel full? And and how do you eat them so you can kind of get to that better desired state? Well, first of all, um foods that have a lot of dietary fiber like chickpeas, legumes, lentils, white beans. I mean, you ever you ever have like a bean taco? All right. Like one bean taco will make you eat less dinner later on, right? for lunch for they'll make you eat less dinner later on. And that's because beans with all that dietary fiber actually have a satiety effect not only on your gut but also in your brain. And that's a good thing. And that dietary fiber by the way has a fringe benefit, a big one, which is that diet that dietary fiber feeds our gut microbiome. And that gut microbiome turns out to be much more important than we thought for longevity. Okay? And this is an area that I'm super fascinated by because here we are talking about gut health and anti-inflammation and autoimmune diseases and all that all the the current discussion around gut health. All right. Turns out the latest research shows that this is as important in ways that we don't haven't fully figured out yet for longevity. Supporting the gut microbiome. That's right. Okay. So, dietary fiber is important. Um, we talk a lot about protein, the value of protein on this podcast, uh, as well. Would you say that protein is is important as well? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Protein is super important as especially once you get beyond the age of 40, most people need to actually keep up and build up on their protein. So, the question is, what is your source of protein? Now, I'm somebody who believes that uh uh having a balanced diet, more of an omnivore type of diet. You're you're capable and willing to you're opening your mind to eat anything that's good for you. And and by the way, preference is also really important. You want to eat the things that are good for you that you actually enjoy eating. Like that's the alignment you're really looking for. Listen, you want to live long and live well. You want to do the things that you want to do. You don't want to actually feel like you're in a box or a cage, right? And so this is why the choice of protein becomes important. Now look, um there's a lot of data and a lot of people that say that you should cut down or cut out red meat. I leave it for the people that really take a stance for or against that. Okay? What I say is that, you know, eating meat is part of an omnivore balanced diet. You can have red meat, but you can also have poultry. You can also have fish. All right? And if you want to go into the plant realm, you've got all these legumes and you got plant-based proteins. They're all good as well. Interestingly, there was a study on longevity that looked at uh different dietary patterns to figure out um what are the patterns that seem to lead to better brain health. Brain health. Okay. So, less dementia. And it turns out and they studied um people who um ate a lot of carbs. They studied people that ate a lot of junk food. uh uh and a lot of pro and a lot of specific protein. They they studied vegetarians and they studied people with a balanced diet. And it turns out the people who wound up having the best cognition, brain health in the long run were the people that had a balanced diet better than the vegetarians. Okay? Now, we don't understand the whole aspect of it, but it just goes to show you if you take a religious style side about your foods, you might actually be missing out on something that science is still in the process of figuring out. Balanced diet is actually there and protein is a is one of those critical macros that we have a lot of choices to actually get from. So, that's what I actually think about protein. Yeah, I think about it. I mean, less in terms of balance and more in terms of dietary diversity. Like, it's really important to incorporate different sources of protein because, you know, if all you're doing is eating red meat, then you're missing out on the abundance of omega-3 fatty acids in fatty fish, for example. So, for me, I feel like based on what I understand about the literature, it's it's it's there's value in it's a way of hedging your bets at the very least. like you're incorporating all of these different varied micronutrients that are found in different protein sources, right? No, that's completely true. And and this this is not so much of an argument to be a carnivore, but what you're pointing out is incredibly important. There are things that you can get in meats that you don't get as well from legumes, for example. Iron, uh, like at a high level because it comes from blood, you know, which is what you get in meat. That's really important. Omega-3s, you're not going to be getting a lot of those. Even in the animals that eat plants, you're not going to get as much as you get in fish, you know. Uh, and so I think that um, you know, as a researcher, I follow the bouncing ball of where the evidence comes from. And it turns out that while it's absolutely true, eating a primarily plant-based diet is a generally better way to go. Um, so far all the evidence from longevity perspective says that eating more diversity is actually going to support your long life. Hey there, check this out. I've got a special resource on the five science-based ways to lose fat that I made just for you, and it's free. Many of us want to lose weight for our own reasons, but I'm here to tell you that there's an even better reason to lose harmful excess visceral fat for your health. And guess what? In this resource, I share the five things that anyone can do to lose harmful excess body fat. All you have to do is click the link below to access the resource. Now, back to the video. Let me give you some really simple tools that anyone can actually use that they probably even heard about. One is called intermittent fasting. Okay? But I'm going to debunk that, too. Oh my god. So, you're telling me to do it, now you're debunking it? Let me tell you. First of all, intermittent fasting is thought of as a health fad, a trend that everybody does and you got to go, oh, what is it like 16 hours of not eating and squeeze everything in eight hours? Hey, listen, that would be very hard for someone like me and probably like you running around all the time. Okay, it does it doesn't work very well. But let me tell you uh that there's more than one way to get at it. And the best way to intermittently fast is uh to take advantage of the fact that when you're sleeping, when we're sleeping, we're not eating. Okay? When we're not eating, we're fasting. Okay? So, sleeping is intermittent fasting because we don't sleep all the time. Uh uh and when we get up and we break our fast, which is called breakfast. All right? Um and that's the best way to get intermittent fasting. But I got to give you a little understanding of this, okay? Because after you eat the last bite of food the night before or your body is like, "Okay, is that is that it? That's all that that's the last drop of fuel we're going to get tonight." The moment it realizes you're not going to put any more fuel in your body, your body, your metabolism recognizes. It goes from fuel storing mode. Come on, give some more. Let me put in my fat. Oh, no more food. Let's now switch gears. Okay. Like like literally like a gearbox in a car. If you're um uh if your body is a Ferrari, all right, and you're going you're going to switch gears when you're no longer eating, it switches into fuel burning mode from fuel storing. Let's load up that body fat to fuel burning. So when you're sleeping and not eating, your body's burning down fuel from your fat cells. You're actually losing weight, burning fat while you're sleeping. Well, how long do you have to not eat for this to work? So, this is actually the important part. We know that eight hours of sleeping is the healthy amount of sleeping for all kinds of things. Brain health and metabolic health and anti-aging and everything else. You want to sleep eight. It's more like seven to nine. Eight's like right in the middle. Eight hours is where you're going to start to get that benefit. But let me tell you how anybody can expand their body's own hardwired fat burning. Period. Okay. Okay. So, what you do is you expend it on both sides before you go to bed and when you get up in the morning. Let me talk about the the night before. All right. So, like if you eat sit down and eat at 7:00 and you're done at 8. When you put your dishes away, no more eating. All right? There's no midnight snacking. Don't take a bag of chips with you and sit on the couch and watch the game or whatever else you might do. All right? Don't be nibbling. No last minute before bedtime, open and get that piece of pie. When you're done at 8, when you put your dishes away, that's it. Now, let's say you go to bed at at 11:00. I'm just going to give an example. Eat dinner at 7, stop eating at 8, put your dishes away, no more food until the next day, and no drinking. And no drinking. Actually, tea is okay. All right. As long as you have milk. No drinking for sure. Anything with no more calories. Okay. Okay. 8:00, let's say you go to bed at 11. Okay. That's 3 hours between 8 and 11:00. 3 hours. You just bought yourself three extra hours of fat burning time. 11 to 7 in the morning, that's 8 hours. Okay? So that's 3 hours plus 8 hours. That's 11 hours of fat burning that you've given your body just by not eating after you put the dishes away. Now, when you get up in the morning, this is like a super little easy tip that I tell anybody. I do. I practice it myself. Get up in the morning. Don't do what your mom told you to do. Right? So, when we were growing up, get out of bed, get down to that breakfast table, eat something quickly so you can actually go to school and learn something. You don't be hungry. No, we're adults. And it turns out you don't need to eat right away in the morning. Get up in the morning, take your time getting ready. And for me, I will before I eat anything, I will go for a walk. I'll open the door, get some fresh air, uh maybe read a book, check my email, whatever. Wait at least an hour from the time you wake up until the time that you put the first thing in your mouth. Now that's one extra hour. So three hours the night before bed, eight hours, that's 11 in total of fasting, meaning fat burning time. Now add one more hour. Okay, by not eating right away and you've got 11 + 1 is 12 hours. 12 out of 24 hours. 50% of your day, you've had your body burning down harmful body fat, extra body fat. That's the simplest way to use intermittent fasting. 12 hours. Now, you might say, "Is 12 hours enough?" Yeah, because 8 hours is enough, 12 hours is a little bit better. Clinical studies have shown that 12 hours of fasting much in a way that I've told you actually is plenty time to actually lose weight over time. So, are you saying that this is a tool that you that based on the research anybody can use to eat in an 8 hour window from like noon to 8:00 p.m.? Yep. And that will help you no matter what your health looks like. That will help you kick into fuel burning and fat burning mode without really having to even worry about the food yet. You don't have to break into a sweat doing that because it's all very easy. I mean, plenty of people are already doing this. But the key thing, Mel, is that you want to make sure that when you finally do eat, whether it's breakfast or lunch, you don't overfill your tank. Well, how do you know when you're full? I know this is a kind of an odd question to ask, but I love food. Espec like especially if I've got something in front of me that I'm really love like a big juicy burger that you know the kind you squeeze to try to get in your mouth and some of the juice is coming down. There is no way I need to eat that entire thing especially if it's a smash burger with a couple patties and so yet I like how do you know when enough is enough and the click has happened right? So, it's all hardwired inside us. And the problem why we miss the cues that our body sends us that we have actually filled up our tank is because we eat too fast. Oh, all right. So, when you eat quickly, right, busy people tend to eat really quickly. Distracted people tend to eat quickly. If you're just checking out social media, you're not paying attention and you're eating by yourself, you're just shoveling food in your mouth, you're paying attention to something else. That is a common mistake that we all make is that we're distracted and we're used to just shoveling all the abundant food that's placed in front of us. Okay, let me just tell you something that I learned before I went to medical school to be a doctor. I did a gap year and uh in my gap year I went to Italy and Greece, the Mediterranean and what I was interested in studying there was the connections between food, culture and health in those places. Now, this was long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet. I came from America. I landed in Italy. I was staying with a host family. Uh, within a day or two, I began realizing, wow, the way that people eat in the Mediterranean is completely different than what I grew up and what I'm used to. We in America sit down and we're gobbling food. We're we're we're complaining about things. We're eating with somebody else. uh we're caveting about, you know, some problems going on. We're eating fast. There's way too much food in front of us and um uh or we're eating alone. Yeah. And you're eating alone. You're doing you're distracted by something else. And before long, you know, you've cleaned the whole plate. All right. And you don't you don't even realize what you've eaten. It might taste good, but you're not thinking about it. In the Mediterranean, in Italy specifically, and it's as clear as day for me, you'd sit down for food. You would never eat by yourself. You would always eat with a friend or a family member or a co-orker. All right? You you would take the time to order the food and when the food comes, you're not you're not caveting or complaining about your boss or you know the family or the weather or the sports team. You are sitting when the food arrives with full of gratitude and talking about the joy of the food. Man, this pasta was just like my mother made. Is this the right season for it? Yeah. You should see the mushrooms that we have. How do you how do you make it? People would talk about their food. Okay, the food that was not just something that was shoved in front. You would engage with the food and when you're eating the food, you would taste the food and talk about the food and people would enjoy the actual part of eating. The enjoyment of the food, the mindfulness was completely different. And by the way, they never ser over sererve you. All right. More. So, do you have a rule for that? Like would you use like a sandwich plate instead of a dinner plate if you tried it? So here's what I always tell people. Whatever your eye wants to actually put onto your plate, right? So think about a this is the classic meal I always talk of Thanksgiving meal. Like you're all getting together, maybe you have eaten all day and now there's all this great food that reminds you of your all the happy times. You got to load your plate up, right? What I tell people that's a mistake. Whatever your whatever your eyes tell you you want to put in only to take two/irds of that plate. Okay. Two thirds. Leave a third. Leave a third back. Okay. Never go for seconds. All right. You will actually and just eat those two/3s and really enjoy the taste. Savor the taste. You know, if you're a foodie like me, you enjoy great tasting food. All right? Doesn't have to be fancy. It could be super simple. Uh it could be comfort food. Eat it slowly to savor it. Okay, that savoring the food is something I notice is always done in the Mediterranean and also in Asia. You know, two of the healthiest cuisines in the world and it slows it down. You know, Dr. Lee, you have a 4-w week meal plan that you've designed based on almost 30 years of experience. Can you break down some of the key features for me and the person listening? Yeah. Okay. So, wherever wherever your starting point is, this is the key thing. You can always begin a healthier uh uh life and get over your own body fat. Like like you can win that battle easily by doing a couple of things. I tell the first thing you do is to um do an assessment, a food diary is what I call it. Okay? Don't try anything yet. Just do what you're going to do for a couple of weeks. Take out a piece of paper or maybe even notes on your mobile device and just record what you're eating and how much you're eating every single meal. Why is that important? Because a lot of us don't realize what we're eating and how much we're eating. Every time you snack, pop out that piece of paper or your your notes section and and write it down. No guilt, no shame. Uh this is all about just recording it. Okay. Now, after two weeks, go back and look at it. And most of us will be surprised at what we ate, how often we ate, and how much we actually ate. All right? By having that self-realization by documenting it. You know, it's kind of like uh you're trying to develop an allowance. You're teaching children how to spend money responsibly. Write down what you spent and then add it up at the end of a couple of weeks and then you'll know exactly what you did. And after recommending this to patients and researching this, what might the person who does this find or have a realization other than god I eat a lot? Well, I would say first um the amount of food that they ate and how frequently they ate. Man, I had no idea that I ate that much and that often. All right. So the second epiphany is by by identifying what kind of food most people go, geez, I kind of ate I kind of eat junky food. All right, just documenting that for yourself. Again, no judgment. This is just so you can see where you are. And that's the first phase I say. Then you go on to the swap in phase. I call swap in. Not swap out. Swap in. Oh, swap in. I thought you said swap. I'm like swamp. Like I'm like that doesn't sound good. Okay. Swap. Right? Because basically people like go, "Oh, so now the part now's the part where I actually have to deprive myself, right?" Nope. I'm saying, "Listen, you know, when you're not eating good stuff, let's talk about swapping in. Take something that you love to eat that's healthy and swap it in." Okay? And there's all kinds of things that we uh love to eat that is healthy. And that's in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. I I give lists of 200 different food items, ingredients that are all delicious that you can swap in. The reason I call it swap in is because when you're eating something, you're displacing something that is not so good for you. The more good stuff that you swap in, less room you're just going to have in your life for the stuff that's not so good for you. Well, what I love about that is because you hear the word diet to lose weight and you immediately like and it feels like you're going to have to restrict and your swap in like methodology. It makes a lot of sense because if I think about it, I could eat a bag of chips and not even think about it. I'm not going to eat a bushel of apples. No. So, if I'm adding in something healthy, I'm probably not going to overeat it anyway. Exactly. That's that's the other thing. But you might also find, you know, you'll be a little bit more mindful. So do an assessment. Step one. Number two, swap in. Okay. Number three is then do that intermittent fasting part that I told you. Now, the key though with this, don't overeat when it is time to eat. That's the twothirds rule. Okay. Twothirds rule. And one one thing I'll tell you that's a Japanese saying that comes came from Confucious is called stop when you're 80% full. Now, I'm going to tell you how you know this. Um, but there's a the Japanese saying is called harah hachi bunmi. Harah hachi bunmi uh really means just listen to your body when you're about 80% full. How do you know when you're 80% full? Well, I have to unbutton my pants usually. Well, okay. By the time you feel full, yes, you've already passed 80%. It's true. you know, like I just I kind of just feel that that sense that oh, but I just there's just one more bite and it's not ever as good as the one that came before. Listen, here's a here's an example, Mel. You know, like when you're parking a car like in a in a parking lot and there's like those little cement things in front, right? Like you're pulling it up a little bit further, a little bit further, and you know, like when you start hitting that when you hear that grading sound in your car, you've gone too far. That's what happens when you have to unbutton your your pants. So, but if you eat slowly and then listen, this this is a very important point. You want to stop eating when you're satisfied, not when you're full. When you feel, h that was pretty good. Not when you're full. We We're so trained to look at the volume of our stomach, the pouching. We're looking for we're trained to unbutton our pants, okay? But really, if you eat slowly and mindfully and take your time and savor your food, at some point when you put your fork down, you're going to go, "That's pretty good. I like that." That's 80%. Hey there. If you're ready to take control of your health using the power of food, then I encourage you to check out my Eat to Beat Disease online course. More than 4,000 people from 80 countries have taken it, and now they know how to eat to beat disease, and you can, too. I personally developed all the material in this course, drawing from my latest research and my years of experience. It's designed to give you practical science-based strategies that you can use to boost your health every single day. To learn more, click the link below. Yeah, I know. I'm I'm glad you brought that up because apple cider vinegar is one of these areas that um has both myth as well as fact. And this is one of the things that I really enjoy doing is as a researcher and as a as a scientist as well as a doctor. How do we actually find the truth behind the myths? And then for the myths, how do we actually break those myths? How do we bust the myth as we say in order to arrive at what's real and what is actionable? So here's the thing. For years, I have heard from uh mostly friends that they were drinking apple cider vinegar often in the morning time uh for various health applications. And I was I had always been very skeptical, you know. I mean, vinegar is pretty strong. It can taste good in cooking, but it's a very strong substance to have by itself. and and and I always thought, you know, if you put uh that strong vinegar in your mouth, you're going to be dissolving the enamel in your teeth, uh which can't be good for you. And it doesn't matter if it's apple cider or some other type of vinegar. Of course, apple cider sort of took on this mythic uh uh um reputation of being something especially healthy. So, was it the apple? You know, is it something in apples? Like these are the things that a scientist like me begin to ask. But more more importantly, I I when it came to weight loss, which exactly as you said, Luke, weight loss tends to attract a lot of attention, which quickly becomes sort of a populist idea, like people want to believe something that might not be true. Uh so uh so I was always skeptical about apple cider vinegar and weight loss, but then the research starts to uh come out and this is where I as a myself as a scientist I have to be honest by saying you know I can assume one thing but if new data comes out that I I look at and I I critically evaluate and the data shows that something is true or untrue I've got to I've got to go with the data. So with apple cider vinegar, I was astounded to see that uh researchers in Japan had been studying a dose dependent effect of apple cider vinegar on metabolism and that's weight loss. That's actually reduction in body composition when it comes to visceral fat. Uh that's lowering of inflammatory markers in the blood. You know the real research that one does in food as medicine, not the woo woo stuff. Um, and what I saw was really quite remarkable. First, uh, in in one of these research studies, they gave people, uh, what they called low dose, which is one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar versus high dose, which is three tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. So, if you imagine in your kitchen taking out a bottle of apple cider vinegar and and pouring three tablespoons in it into a into a a small cup. All right. um that three tablespoons is pretty easy to actually to drink if you had to. It's a quick shot. Um uh uh well, they studied this daily over the course of a month. that what they found indeed is that people who had any apple cider vine apple cider vinegar um compared to a placebo, which is drinking water, uh that uh uh that that any apple cider vinegar would actually shrink waist circumference, which is the size of your waist. And the waist circumference reflects how much fat is in the tube of your body, right? So, and that's visceral fat inside there. So, uh, over the course of a month, apple cider vinegar drinkers had a shrinking of their waist circumference. So, and they had less body fat, uh, and their inflammatory markers also went down and they actually lost, uh, weight when you looked on a scale. That's pretty amazing to me that you can do a a study to show that this works. Now, couple of fine points. The people who had the higher dose, three tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, lost more weight, lost more body fat than the ones who had one tablespoon. And that's a dose response, which is a good sign that there's something real biologically going on. All right. Um, usually if it's sort of look, you can have different kinds of dose responses. This one was pretty convincing that something was working. uh if a little bit is good, a little bit more uh can actually have even a greater effect and and loss more fat. Um and the fact that was that the type of fat that was lost was visceral fat. That is the harmful inflammatory fat that we really want to deal with, you know, um especially by the way in Southeast Asians that that's really the kind of the apple uh uh shape that people can become as they get older. And the apple is really where the waist size expands because you wind up actually growing more visceral fat. Visceral means guts and visceral fat is a fat that kind of grows naturally grows around the guts. But when it builds up, you expand your waist size. So you want to kind of reverse that. Apple cider vinegar actually works. Now couple of things about it. When you break it down into what is actually happening because I, you know, I always ask, does something work in people? doesn't work in people, you know, like we've cured cancer in mice all for years. Doesn't mean that it's going to work in people, but something that works in people now, it's worth going back into exploring how what's the mechanism of action, you know, like like an inquiring scientist always wants to know. So, guess what? It's not the apples in apple cider vinegar. It's not the apple source. It's the vinegar. It's the acetic acid. All vinegar is made with acetic acid. In fact, acetic acid is a definition of vinegar, which is another name for vinegar. The chemist, the chemists call acetic acid, the chefs call it vinegar. All right? And vinegar uh actually works by preventing fat cells in our body. These fat cells are called adiposytes. Adipose fat site cell uh vinegar acetic acid prevents fat cells from expanding. All right? And it also impedes your body's own ability to make new fat cells. So we, you know, we all are born with fat cells. They expand. It's our fuel tank. If if you are still eating and you're building more fat, your body can make new fat cells with stem cells. So now you actually create more fuel tanks and you can grow your fat mass. Acetic acid prevents the first fat masses from from blowing up like expanding and it prevents the new ones from growing as well. We think that that's really the one of the primary mechanisms of action acetic acid or vinegar. What does that mean? That means that apple cider vinegar is good. That's been shown in clinical studies, but it means that other vinegars are also good. white vinegar, red wine vinegar, uh uh there's all kinds of vinegars you can actually make um with a variety of different uh uh uh fruits and vegetables, frankly, that can all be fermented to create that acetic acid. Um if you take a look at uh countries in Asia, they have black vinegar, fermented vinegars. There's a whole, you know, go into any store that carries a variety of vinegars and you will be blown away by the uh by the diversity of how you create vinegar. My health tip, anybody who is interested in exploring this for themselves is if you are whatever the vinegar is, please pick up the bottle and read the label for the ingredients because you want to make sure that it really is indeed true apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar and it doesn't have other ingredients added to it because many times well-intentioned uh companies will want to doctor up or put additives into a vinegar in order to make it more appealing. Great example is salad dressing. Salad dressing is made with vinegar and oil, but in a salad dressing, they'll put all kinds of things in there to make that product seem more appealing. And those additives can actually be detrimental to your health and detrimental to your metabolism. Hey, if you like that video, then you're going to love this one. Check it out.
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