The Real Cause of Weight Gain (It's NOT Willpower)

The big problem is that obsessive focus on calories, calories in, calories out. That's completely false. It's not willpower. It's not cuz they're lazy or stupid. It is the case that you're eating not real food. The diet has changed significantly. When you eat a food, your body responds with hormones. Depending on those hormones, it will decide, should I store those calories or should I burn those calories? Say you eat beef in the morning or in the afternoon with a nice salad or something. You might have a thousand calories. Or you compare that to taking 1,000 calories of Frappuccino. You feel completely different. It's a completely different experience. So don't pretend that they're the same thing. Imagine you eat 500 calories of cookies. Your insulin spikes way up. You tell your body, "Hey, take these calories and put it into storage," which is body fat. — Hi, I'm Julia. I'm lead educator at Ancestral Supplements. And today I'm joined by Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Fung is a best-selling author of The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, The Complete Guide to Fasting, and The New Hunger Code. He's a kidney specialist whose clinical work focuses on insulin resistance and metabolic disease. Today, we're exploring metabolism, why weight loss can feel so difficult for so many people, and what might be missing from the conversation. Dr. Fun, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. — So, threearters of Americans, American adults are overweight or obese and rates of metabolic disease continue to climb. This suggests that we might be missing something fundamental. When people come to see you struggling with their weight or metabolic health, uh what do you find they most often misunderstand about what is actually driving the problem? I think the big problem is that sort of obsessive focus on calories as if the number of calories is the only thing that matters to weight loss. And now this is not, you know, their fault. This is how most doctors, most dieticians, most professionals are trained that it's all about calories, calories. You hear this all the time. A calories in, calories out. You know, calories a calorie. it it's it's all this uh sort of uh language that tries to reinforce that the only thing that matters is calories. And that's completely false. So what's really important is not just the number of calories, but what types of calories, right? There's good calories and there's bad calories. And the point is that when you eat a food, it contains a certain amount of energy with just the calories, but it contains other things. And when you eat those things, your body responds with hormones. And when it responds with hormones, it sets into uh sort of uh you know, it sets in motion this whole kind of cascade. How much do you store versus burn? How hungry you are, how much satiety you have, you know, all kinds of things that happen. And so when you eat a food like beef or eggs or fish, it's completely different than eating like brownies and cookies for example, it just is. So even if they're the same number of calories, the hormone response is what our body actually reacts to. And then depending on those hormones, it will decide, should I store those calories or should I burn those calories? Am I full? Should I eat more? Like all of those things all depend on the hormones and not on just the number of calories. It's ridiculous really. Like if you think about it, say you eat a um you know, beef, you know, in the morning or in the afternoon with a nice uh salad or something, you might have a,000 calories. Or you compare that to, you know, taking 1,000 calories of um Frappuccino, you feel completely different. One of them will keep you full. One of them you'll be hungry right after. Why? Because it's very processed. It's a lot of insulin. sugar, a lot of refined calories. So, don't pretend that they're the same thing. And that's the whole point. You got to sort of balance those hormones because that's ultimately what drives your behavior because hormones run everything. It also drives how much fat we store. — Okay. So you've talked a lot about hormones and emphasized the importance of hormones to weight management and regulation over time. Um I'm assuming one of those is insulin. Can you explain you know why insulin plays such a central role in weight gain and metabolic disease and what it actually does in the body. — Yeah. So insulin is sort of the key hormone in metabolism and it's the key nutrient sensor. So it's uh when you eat it senses your body has the sense that nutrients are coming in and insulin is the main hormone. It's not an evil hormone. It's just a normal hormone. But if you have too much or too little of any hormone, you have a disease state.

So when you have too much insulin, you also have a problem. So what does insulin do? Well, one of its key roles is a nutrient sensor. So it tells your body, hey, calories are coming in and it determines how much you should store, right? So if you have a food that stimulates a lot of insulin, then you're getting the signal, you're telling your body, hey, please store all of these calories as fat. So imagine you eat, you know, 500 calories of cookies. Your insulin spikes way up. And what happens is that since it's way up, you tell your body, hey, take these calories and put it into storage, which is body fat, right? So since you don't have any calories sort of floating around for energy, you're going to get hungry very soon after. That's why when you eat, you know, cookies and ice cream, it's not really going to fill you up for very long because all of that's gone into storage. Just like if you have, you know, you have a hundred bucks, but you put it in the bank. Well, you don't have any money to go buy anything, right? Because you've stored it away. This is the same. If you store those calories away, then you don't have any to use. You're going to go looking for more. You're going to be hungry. You're not going to have satiety. uh that kind of thing. So that's why insulin is the key hormone in uh how much weight we store versus how much we uh burn and different foods stimulate different amounts of insulin. So all that means is that some foods are more fattening than other foods. So brownies broccoli. It's like duh. Isn't that obvious to anybody with a brain? Why would you even pretend that 500 calories of cookies equals 500 calories of broccoli in terms of fattening? Are they equally fattening? No. Are they the same number of calories? Yes. But they give you completely different hormones. So again, it's the sort of there's lots of hormones involved, right? There's satiety hormones, there's, you know, sex hormones. There's all kinds of hormones are involved, but insulin is sort of the key one when you're talking about response to food. — Great. And so this idea of insulin sensitivity, a lot of people are talking about that. It's one of those terms that's out there. We want to improve our insulin sensitivity. What does that actually mean? And what are some key sort of tried andrue strategies that people could employ to improve their insulin sensitivity? Yeah. So insulin sensitivity is really um how much uh your body responds. So if your body is insulin resistant that is then it takes a lot of insulin to get the same effect and therefore insulin levels can be very high which is a bad thing because then you're going to try and store more of them away. One of the keys to um insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance, I mean they're those are just sort of flipped terms, right? um is really to eat real foods, right? And this is sort of the big push in the last dietary guidelines is to really go back to real foods. Why? Because the processed foods change um the you know change your hormonal response in such drastic ways, right? They take out a lot of the nutrients that are in there. So they're often very nutrient poor, right? You think of white flour, they've basically got all their protein stripped out, all the fats nutrients stripped out, then they have to put it back in. So that's why they call it enriched flour, right? But it's only so poor because they took everything out. So you really want to eat natural foods because they contain all those nutrients, uh not just macronutrients like fats and carbs and proteins, but also micronutrients and trace minerals and all those sort of things that are going to help maintain sensitivity. Because when you eat real foods, your body knows how to handle it. It's very hard to overeat or become very sick when you're eating natural foods. And that's really the big difference when you look at the differences between sort of what America is like now versus sort of 50, 60 years ago. It's not willpower, right? People have about the same willpower as they always did. It's not cuz they're lazy or stupid or anything like that. And that's really what the problem with the whole calories thing is that it's an implication that you're just weak, right? That's not the case at all. But it is the case that you're eating not real food, right? You're the diet has changed significantly. Like yes, the macronutrients have changed. We've gone low fat. We've gone low carb. We've done all the we've gone high protein. So we've changed that all around. But what hasn't really been focused on lately is to go with real food because the way like even if you have the same calories and macronutrients and everything, the way you process it by adding all these sort of artificial texturizers and emulsifiers and zanthan gum and maltodextrin and you know whatever other chemical you find on these ingredient lists, it changes the way your body responds to it in ways that are generally very bad for you. So that's why people

who eat real foods uh and pe places around the world that focus on real foods, they generally do much better and I think that's been the big difference sort of with the American the modern American diet is that roughly 70% of it is ultrarocessed. — So say we take an individual who maybe was pre-diabetic or was developing some insulin resistance. they started adopting a more whole foods approach like you're suggesting and potentially lowered their fasting insulin and improved their blood sugar markers. Maybe they've adopted a low carb approach yet they still feel really stalled in their weight like something is still missing. What other factors do you think are overlooked or what would you be paying attention to next for that individual? Well, you have to look at the nutrients again because even if you're eating natural foods, you have to understand that the modern uh factory farmed food is actually not the same as those ancient foods. So, if you think about foods in the past, they're grown in soil uh that was relatively rich. Um now, what happens is that you have factory farms. So you take, you know, one year's crop and because of the crops, they're nutrient depleted, right? Then you put back in fertilizer, but fertilizer doesn't have all the nutrients that you need. And same with factory farms, right? So factory farms that grow cows and all this sort of thing, they give them often like grains, for example, as opposed to grass because cows are supposed to eat grass, but a lot of times they give them grain because it's cheaper and easier to feed them that way. So again, you're not getting all the proper nutrients that you might get if you ate these sort of more natural foods. So that's something to think about when you're uh thinking about supplementing. Um you know, make sure you're getting that whole thing. You know, in the past, people ate sort of natural foods and there's this whole, you know, farm to table, so make sure it's fresh. And there's the nose to sorry farm to table and then there's the nose totail which is making sure that you eat all of the foods that you know you get from the animal right and that's a very good practice because of course it respects the that the animal has had sacrificed their life uh for us to survive. So you're not just throwing away you know half of the animal and taking the best pieces you know like you're eating the other pieces and that's a very traditional practice. You see it a lot in sort of Asian practices where you know certain foods are much more incorporated that we wouldn't necessarily consider uh eating. You know things like tripe for example and you know um liver and kidney and heart and so on. It's not necessarily what's in the American diet but it is in other places where they do eat sort of this nose totail and then you know try and get it as local as possible. So farm to table. So all of these sort of buzzwords have a reason. They're buzzwords. They're actually good practice and you know make sure that you get enough nutrients. — And if we zoom out and think evolutionarily, humans developed in environments without ultrarocessed foods, without year round availability. So they really had to take advantage of all the nutrients they had access to. So what role did organ meats, particularly liver, play in these sort of more traditional diets across cultures? So liver sometimes is called nature's multivitamin because a lot of nutrients get stored there. Um so a lot of the B vitamin group for example vitamin D although it's relatively low you mostly get vitamin D from the sun but of the meats vitamin D uh is highest in the liver um but also things like choline and selenium and stuff. So a lot of these trace minerals do get stored. So in other parts uh in in other parts of the world the liver is actually very highly prized sort of uh organ because it is so high in that. So you see in traditional um you know uh cuisines and stuff like fog raw and chicken liver and beef liver and stuff liver and onions a lot of these have been sort of very highly uh valued in in modern day society. We like the muscle meat, but remember that's only one organ. It's a big organ, but muscle is just one organ, and it's going to have the same. So, if you're eating the same thing over and over again, you may not get all the nutrients you need. So, eating all the organs is actually a good practice to make sure you're getting the sort of full range of uh nutrition. Now, you know, the other thing some people think is, well, I can just take a multivitamin. And that's possible, but you have to understand that it might be good, it might not be good, right? Because it's not natural. So, you don't know what it is. Some chemist figured out how to synthesize the vitamin. It's not a natural occurring vitamin. And also, they basically, you know, tried to figure out what the best blend is. So, is it a good blend? Is it a bad blend? You don't

actually know. So they generally throw everything in there. So there's something called food synergy which is that maybe the proportions of the nutrients is plays a role. So in that case then eating a natural food such as liver not only provides you with sort of nature's multivitamin but in the right proportions and you also have to look into how bioavailable it is. Right? So these are so take iron for example. So iron is available in two forms. You can get it as inorganic iron, which is um basically if you to take some scrapings off your iron pan, that's inorganic iron. Um or you could get hem iron, which is the sort of organic form, which you would find in things like liver, for example. The heem form of iron is a whole molecule with the iron in the middle and it's easily absorbed and it doesn't cause a lot of constipation which the inorganic iron tends to do because it's in a form that's sort of natural and our body has evolved to deal with right we haven't evolved to scrape our iron pan and take some flakes off every day sort of thing right so not just the number of nutrients but the type of nutrients even if it is the same nutrient like iron it can available in a different form that is much more bioavailable, which means that when you take it in, you get a lot more out of it. In organic iron, you often have to take five or 10 times the dose. Like for example, hem iron is available in a dose of 11 milligs, whereas you need to take 300 milligs of inorganic iron because there's like 30 times more iron, but most of it just goes straight through you into your stools. So the bio availability, but also the proportion. So eating these sort of natural uh foods is in my opinion much more preferable to taking some kind of other multivitamin like a daily vitamin or something like that. Yes, you'll probably do fine. You'll probably do okay, but are you going to do as good as you could with a natural food? My guess is no, just because it's sort of like to me it's like the argument between breast milk and formula. You'd probably do fine on formula. like a whole generation grew up in the 70s with formula. But I think as we went through people recognized, hey, breast milk is really better because it's natural and it's what we've evolved to have, right? Same thing with these natural foods. This is what we've evolved to eat. So, this is just going to be better because that's what's meant for us, right? It's not some chemical uh concoction of vitamin A and B and C and D and E. Let's just have everything, right? a little bit of inorganic iron and magnesium. So, the form of it is important. The proportions are important. So, the natural foods is generally going to be better for you. — And so, for people today who are hearing this and thinking like, I don't have access to organ meat, maybe they don't actually want to eat it. How do you think about potentially addressing these nutrient gaps in a realistic more food first way? — Yeah. And that's where ancestral supplements has really uh sort of pioneered this approach which I think is fantastic right it's taking sort of real food and making it easily available. So like for example the liver instead of having to eat liver they basically take it and put it into a capsule. They freeze strap put into capsule. So you don't have to eat the liver you can take the capsule but what you're getting is liver. you're not getting a bunch of chemically derived substances that look like liver, right? And you know, to me, that's if you don't want to eat liver or you don't like the taste of liver or heart or whatever, um then yeah, this is a great alternative. I mean, it's essentially the same thing, but in a more convenient, um package, but you're still maintaining that sort of whole food approach that whole avoid ultrarocessed and vitamins. you know, multivitamins and stuff by their very sort of the way they're made, they're ultrarocessed because they're basically chemical chemically synthesized, right? So, this is not it's not like you're taking a bunch of reagents and putting them in a beaker and making vitamin A and then sticking it in a pill, right? You're taking liver, freeze drying it, and that's it, right? So, it's a much more natural process. It makes a lot of sense to me that it would be, you know, advantageous um because of those things that we talked about. Mhm. So, final question. For someone struggling with weight or insulin resistance who feels like really discouraged or stuck, what is the most important principle you'd want them to understand about their body? — I think that the most important principle really is to understand that what we're trying to do is balance hormones, not calories. Um, we tried that whole calorie balancing approach. I mean really, who hasn't tried it, right? Everybody's done it. I've done it. You've done it. Practically like 90% of people have done it. It hasn't worked

right? So rather than taking the approach that, hey, let's look at the chemical structure of this and how many calories are in this, let's take this approach that let's just focus on eating real foods in a real manner. Right? So this is the way we used to eat. Let's go back to it because you know, they had food back, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago, but it was real food and they didn't have these problems. So maybe the problem is not the calories because of course real food has calories too, but maybe the problem is the processing, right? So let's get away from all the processing and get back to sort of whole foods. And this then will lead to better balancing of our hormones, which health, weight loss, that kind of thing. So I think it's important to sort of think about it from a hormonal standpoint. Insulin is very important and it plays a role in obesity as I talk about in the obesity code. It plays a role in hunger like I talked about in the hunger code. So lots of different factors but it always comes back to hormones because really hormones really run our whole body but the hormones also need the balance of the nutrients and the real food to support it. — Well Dr. Fun, thank you so much for this discussion. I think what I've learned and what really stands out for me is that sustainable weight management and optimal metabolic health really comes down to two things. It comes down to understanding that our hormones are very influential in our metabolic health and also that we need to be giving our body optimal nutrition. So keeping your insulin low and being mindful of insulin matters, but so does giving the body these raw materials it needs to function well. So, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your valuable knowledge with our audience. — Thank you. Well, if this conversation changed the way you think about insulin, weight, or metabolism, share it with someone who needs to hear