Weight Loss

Weight. It matters. A lot. Although I’m obviously not a weight-loss guy, as I prepped for Energy 101 I realized that we needed to talk about Optimizing our weight. Enter, this class—which could more accurately be called Optimal METABOLISM 101. Fact is, if our weight is off, our METABOLISM is off. Specifically, our insulin levels (which disrupts another hormone called leptin that regulates our appetite). In this class, we take a quick look at why it’s so hard to Optimize our weight and how to make it easy (or at least a lot easier!).

Robert Lustig is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at University of California, San Francisco. He has authored 120 peer-reviewed articles and 70 reviews and is a leading voice on childhood obesity. And, his YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” has been viewed over 7 million times. Obesity is a global pandemic. It’s astonishing how rapidly it’s expanding. And it’s COMPLETELY preventable. Lustig has dedicated his career to helping us understand the causes and how to “beat the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity and disease.” Big Ideas we explore include: Meeting the Darth Vader of the Food Empire (“Hi, sugar!”), two hormones driving the show (insulin + leptin), which fat you need to worry about most (big belly vs. big butt fat!), why so many diets work (reduced sugar + fiber), exercise (best ROI in medicine) and voting with ever dollar we *don’t* spend.

Want to reach your optimal weight while preventing heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancer AND while feeling energized as you live longer? Eat more fat. That’s what Dr. Mark Hyman—one of the world’s leading Functional Medicine doctors—tells us. This book is ridiculously packed with Big Ideas—walking us through the eye-opening science of why fat is awesome along with a plan on how to “reboot our biology to our original factory settings” via a 21-day program followed by a long-term plan to rock it. We explore the surprising truth about fat, good fats vs. bad fats, going pegan (think: best of vegan + Paleo), a quality carb, and dealing with root causes rather than symptoms.

Gary Taubes is an award-winning science journalist. He’s a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. In this book, we take up the case against sugar as the primary suspect for ALL of the chronic diseases that are killing us. As the back cover says, Taubes “makes the convincing case that sugar is the tobacco of the new millennium: backed by powerful lobbies, entrenched in our lives, and making us very sick.” Big Ideas we explore include: the prime suspect (= sugar), drug or food?, two theories (energy balance vs. metabolic theory), sugar as a chronic toxin (vs. acute), sugar as candy for cancer cells, and the big question: how little is too much?

Susan Peirce Thompson is a Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She’s an expert in the psychology of eating and creator of Bright Line Eating Solutions, “a company dedicated to helping people achieve long-term, sustainable weight loss.” Plus... She used to be obese and, as she says, addicted to *everything.* She integrates her background in neuroscience with her personal experience conquering her diet and other addiction issues in this super popular book. Big Ideas we explore include why bright lines are where it’s at, the susceptibility quiz, the saboteur, self-perception theory, and the four bright lines of eating.

David Ludwig has both an M.D. and a Ph.D. and is a professor and researcher at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. He’s overseen dozens of diet studies, authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and supported thousands of patients looking to optimize their weight. In this book, we learn how to conquer cravings, retrain fat cells, and lose weight permanently.

This is a *super* popular book in the Paleo movement that, as the sub-title suggests, introduces us to the Whole30 and can change your life in unexpected ways. Dallas Hartwig and Melissa Hartwig created the Whole30 that has inspired tens of thousands of people to follow their plan and change their life. I’m one of those people. I talk more about how my life changed as a result in the Note. Big Ideas we explore include +1 or -1 bite by bite, the experiment of ONE, the four tests of Good Food, are grains necessary? and your personal health equation.

Why do we get fat? It’s a surprisingly simple question that surprisingly few nutrition experts answer with attention to scientific rigor. Enter: Gary Taubes, a brilliant, award-winning science journalist. In this Note we’ll explore some Big Ideas on the importance of the hormone insulin, why carbs are kinda like cigarettes and the Stanford A TO Z Study that showed low-carb diets outperforming others.

Mark Sisson is a former world-class endurance athlete and one of the leading thinkers and bloggers in the ancestral health movement. His blog MarksDailyApple.com is one of the most-visited health information websites on the Internet. If you’re into the whole “fat is the human body’s preferred fuel” side of the nutrition world, then I think you’ll really love the book. (If you’re not, well then... :) Big Ideas we explore include how to create metabolic efficiency, how to best fuel your metabolic fire (fat = clean-burning logs; carbs = smoky twigs), the three things to go on the Rest (sugars + grains + veggie oils), how to Optimize your lifestyle (exercise + sleep + stress) and the ultimate target: enjoying the whole process!

We’ve featured two of Gary Taubes’ other great books: Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar. If you or a loved one have struggled with reaching your optimal weight while trying to follow the conventional wisdom that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more, I think you, too, will enjoy Taubes’s thoughtful perspective on just how flawed our current thinking is regarding the cause of obesity. Hint: It’s not an “energy balance” issue; it’s primarily a HORMONAL issue. The book is PACKED with Big Ideas. As in, jumbo packed. Hope you love the Note!

I LOVE (!) Susan Peirce Thompson and her work. A few years ago, we featured her New York Times best-selling book Bright Line Eating. <- A book that combines the science of willpower and nutrition?! I’ll take it! In that book, we learn about the fact that Susan used to be obese and addicted to everything. As in... EVERYTHING. What makes her especially awesome is that she went antifragile on it and got a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences so she could understand what the heck was going on. She’s now an Adjunct Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She’s also an expert in the psychology of eating and is the creator of Bright Line Eating Solutions— a program (and community!) that has helped thousands of people live “Happy, Thin, and Free.” This book is the Cookbook to her Bright Line Eating movement. Of course, this book is packed (!) with Big Ideas. For now, I’m excited to share a few of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!

Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney are two of the leading academic researchers who have been studying the efficacy of ketogenic diets for decades (a combined 50+ years between the two of them). Phinney actually coined the hyphenated word-phrase “keto-adapted” to describe the process that typically takes at least 2 weeks to go from burning primarily sugar for fuel to burning primarily fat for fuel. In addition to being brilliant, iconoclastic, contrarian scientists (my favorite kind), Volek and Phinney are also funny. In this book they walk us through the SCIENCE behind why a well-formulated (← IMPORTANT distinction!) low-carbohydrate approach works. If that’s your thing, I think you’ll dig it. Big Ideas we explore include: Who invented low-carb? (hint: look back ~1 million years), the A to Z study (how's your insulin?), the metabolic whodunnit (solved: carbs), exercise (think: wellness tool not weight loss tool), and the battle to bliss (see ya there!).

Phil Maffetone is one of the world’s all-time great endurance coaches. In addition to coaching the best triathlete ever (Mark Allen), he’s also toured with The Red Hot Chili Peppers as their wellness coach (he considers them endurance athletes) and he’s coached legendary music producer Rick Rubin—helping him Optimize and lose over 100 pounds in the process. He’s a fascinating, iconoclastic guy who’s been preaching the power of burning fat for fuel for FOUR decades—demonstrating that it’s not only an optimal approach to endurance fitness but to our optimal health as well. In this book, Phil focuses his big brain on what he calls the “overfat” pandemic. He uses the word “overfat” to describe people who have “excess body fat sufficient to impair health.” Overweight and obese people fall into this category. AND... Even people at a “healthy” weight can be overfat. In fact, according to his research, 90% (!!!) of Americans fall into the “overfat” category. (Yikes!) We'll take a quick look at why we should care, figure out if we (and/or our loved ones) are overfat, look at the #1 cause and then focus on the solution so we can become optimalfat! :)

Satchin Panda is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of circadian biology. This book is a FANTASTIC distillation of what he and his colleagues have discovered and how we can apply those insights to our modern lives. I highly recommend it. Want to, as per the sub-title of the book, “lose weight, supercharge your energy, and transform your health?” Then pay attention to your body’s infinitely wise internal clock!! As Dr. Panda tells us: “The Circadian Code is a revolution in the way you think about diet, exercise, work, learning, and technology. Instead of counting calories or limiting food choices, you will learn that there is a right time to eat so that you can actually burn calories while you sleep. There is also a best time of day to exercise, to work, and to rest. Your body already knows this code: you just have to become aware of it and then follow its rhythm.” I’m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas so let’s jump straight in!

As we’ve discussed, in the Mastery phase of our Heroic Coach program, we recently marched through our fundamentals: Eat + Move + Sleep +

One of my favorite parts about creating our Heroic Mastery Series is that it forced me to go to the next level of clarity on the most important aspects of our philosophy.

In our last +1 (#1,000!!), we celebrated our gritty Heroes who have hammered all 1,000 +1s. One more time: Go you. Welcome to the

Dr. Joseph Mercola has worked with over 25,000 patients. His website, Mercola.com, is the most popular natural health website in the world—with 25 million (!) people visiting the site every month. In this book, Dr. Mercola distills his favorite, most potent wisdom into “9 Simple Ways to Sidestep Illness, Shed Excess Weight and Help Your Body Fix Itself.” Big Ideas we explore include a quick look at those 9 effortless healing principles, the #1 thing you can do to optimize your health, the best fuel (sugar or fat?), the importance of breathing right and the ultimate choice: degenerate or regenerate?

The Plant Paradox. In a nutshell: The plants that nourish us can also hurt us. Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned cardiologist and heart surgeon. He’s a former professor at Loma Linda University and has authored 300+ peer-reviewed articles on using diet and supplements to eliminate a bunch of diseases. And, to put it in perspective: He’s Tony Robbins’s doctor. Big Ideas we explore include Rule #1 of nutrition (and life) (hint: STOP eating/doing stuff that doesn’t work for you), the little edible enemies that are taking you down, the vagus nerve and it’s communication from your gut to your brain, how fruit might as well be candy and 90% new you in 90 days.

Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist and is one of the leading thinkers/writers/practitioners in the Paleo or Ancestral Health movement. The essence of this book is the that while there are general principles of nutrition that work for everyone AND... Ultimately we need to figure out what works best for us as individuals if we want to rock it. Big Ideas we explore include: the fact that one size diets do NOT fit all (remember: "rough" tools vs. precision tools), discordance theory (there's a mismatch between our genes and our environment!), an anti-inflammatory diet (aka Paleo aka Phase I), personalized nutrition (aka 7-Day Carb test aka Phase II), the other pillars of health (sleep, stress, move, connection), and genetic + environmental lotteries (what to do if you lost them--lol).