100 Million People Dieting For 20 Years... Here's What Happened. Real Doctor Reviews Strange Outcome

If a hundred million people dieted you would expect them to lose some weight

right, but is that what happened? In this video I will comment on a study

published this month in the Jama Open Network. It's a Journal by the American

Medical Association and I want to comment on their strange and unexpected

findings. Coming right up

Hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete

and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything. So this was a very large study it was over 48,000 people followed over

a number of years and they found some things that didn't expect to find and

this has been commented on it's been written up by WebMD and Newsweek and a

lot of other people the first number they reported in the

study was the number of people who were trying to lose weight in 1999 that

number was 34 percent of people had been trying to lose weight sometime in the

previous year and in 2016 that number had gone up to 42 percent so this

represent over a hundred million people one of the head researchers in the study

was Dr. Lu Kee and he said the following - "Where weight loss efforts are increasing

we can expect a decreasing trend of obesity, but it is not decreasing." In

other words they expected people to lose weight but it didn't happen I mean

that's reasonable if a lot of people want to lose weight and they try to lose

weight you would think that would be the outcome but from 1999 the body mass

index on average in the u.s. went from 28 to 29 point four and the limit the

the number where it turns into obesity by definition is 30 so it's like just

the cutoff or going from over weight to obesity so the average American is now

only a few tenths of a point away from obese the average weight in that time

period went from a hundred and seventy-six to a hundred and eighty four

pounds so more people are trying to lose weight and on average the population

went eight pounds heavier and if we look just a little bit further back and we

look at obesity in 1980 it was 15 percent in 1990 it was 23 percent

1999 31 % and today obesity is 40 percent of the population the percentage

being overweight went from 47 percent in 1980 to 56 in 1990 65 in 1999 and 72

percent in 2016 so more people are trying to lose weight the body mass

index is going up the average weight is going up the rate of obesity is going up

the rate of overweight is going up so these numbers are raising some eyebrows

they're having people maybe for the first time question if the guidelines

are really right can we really follow the advice and lose weight so these

numbers come from something called NHANES - National Health and Nutrition

Examination Survey and it's been ongoing for decades and they keep this going so

they can get ongoing data and they ask people in the survey what are you doing

to lose weight and people are saying that they are eating less they are

eating fewer calories they are exercising more they are increasing

their water intake they're eating more fruits and vegetables and salads they

are decreasing their consumption of sugar candy sweets junk food and fast

food and they commented in the study and they said that most of these measures

had improved sharply okay the number of people attempting these things have

increased sharply so it wasn't just like a slight change so more people are

trying and they're trying harder and yet not much is happening so if they're

doing all these supposed right things but they're not getting any results then

why is that happening so they try to explore these reasons in this research

paper so in this research paper they also try to explore the reasons why this

is happening if people are trying harder and they're doing all the things that

are recommended then why is weight and obesity and BMI

going up instead of down and the head researcher dr. Lu Qi one

of the points that he suggested was - "Maybe they are trying to diet but aren't

pursuing it in an effective manner." Well that kind of goes without saying that

obviously if they're not getting any results if the results are opposite of

what they're doing then it's not an effective manner and then he goes on to

saying "Many of them might not have implemented weight loss strategies or

applied a minimal level effort." So in other words he's saying that sure the

people may be trying they may be saying that they're trying to lose weight but

they're not either actually doing it or they're not trying hard enough so again

it comes back to the idea that the suggestions the rules the

recommendations are just fine but there's something wrong with people's

character they're just not trying hard enough they look for more explanations

and they say that "Adherence is the primary factor associated with a

successful response to a weight loss attempt." In other words you have to stick

to it and people aren't sticking to it so why is that? They suggest - "However

adherence to such modified diets, which is the best predictor of success in any

dietary modification, is very difficult to maintain. So again they say you gotta

stick to it but it is really really hard so people don't so then what do we do if

we have to eat less calories but then we get hungry so we can't keep it up then

now what do we do so to kind of summarize the paper they

say the following - "Taken together these findings suggest a need to increase the

promotion of effective strategies for weight loss including calorie reduction

and increased physical activity among all adults attempting to lose weight. So

here's the problem they just keep reiterating the same dogma

over and over you gotta eat less exercise more fewer calories in more

calories out but it doesn't matter if the problem is that the guidelines are

wrong or if the problem is that people can't follow it or won't follow it

because the end result is the same people are not losing weight they are

gaining weight year by year and here's the problem I have with blaming it on

willpower because if it was all about willpower that were fat because we don't

have the willpower to not eat when we're hungry then does that mean that we had

willpower prior to 1980 that since 1980 we have given birth to a couple of

generations without willpower that willpower was just something that was

prevalent it was common it was a human trait prior to 1980 no obviously not

okay willpower is not what has changed so we

have to start asking why what is it that makes people hungry if people are eating

more than they're burning which is obvious because weight is going up why

is that happening what are the foods doing what are the

hormones doing what are the factors that influence hunger because we can't just

blame it on people if this many people try for that long and it's not working

we've got to change something there was also an article in WebMD about

the same study and they talked to some other people one was dr. Lee Kaplan and

he had some other views on this phenomena he said that these results

clearly indicate that there's a fundamental flaw in the way that we have

been told to lose weight and dr. Lee continues there is one obvious

conclusion we can draw the way we have been told as a population to lose weight

doesn't work and of course I can only agree with that and it's refreshing to

hear it a source that's actually even being

published on Web MD and dr. Lee has some insight that gets us a little bit closer

to the actual problem he says - "Eating less and exercising won't

work long-term because your body regulates how much fat

it carries and that regulation is outside your personal control." so there

is one of my favorite words, regulates, it means that living things have

behavior living things adapt to the circumstances so if the body is behaving

a certain way it's because of something the body has been exposed to it

regulates I do have to disagree though with the last part of his statement

where he says that that regulation is outside of your personal control because

he is right in one sense but he's wrong in another because in the moment when

you're hungry your hormones are telling you to eat you don't have personal

control in that moment over those hormones especially not more than once

you can be hungry for a little while but you can't be hungry the rest of your

life but what you can do is you can change the type of foods that you eat

that will change the type of hormones that your body produces that regulate

hunger so over time if you eat different foods then you have different hormones

and you won't get as hungry so in that sense you have a lot of control over

to regulate your hunger and your fat storing and fat burning so it's very

refreshing to hear that viewpoint spoken by someone in a in the medical field but

then of course it's just as disheartening to hear how they suggest

to solve the problem because then dr. Kaplan suggests "A true cure for obesity

is going to require medications or therapies that help readjust the body's

self regulation of fat. Once you realize this is biology then you need a

biological and medical solution." so this is why I have this channel it is

to help people understand the difference between a holistic approach and a

medical approach an allopathic approach in the allopathic approach we treat

symptoms in a holistic approach we treat the whole organism we help the organism

function better so that the symptoms go away and that is the key that we have to

understand in this that the body does not require chemicals to regulate this

if even if it was possible that they find a drug and medication a chemical

that could force or trick or guide or help the body into regulating fat

differently it would be imposing your will on the body and it would have side

effects all drugs have side effects and I'm not saying that they would never

ever be a case where that wouldn't be appropriate but for the vast majority of

people they can just change the behavior that created the problem and then the

body will come back to balance we just have to understand what those things are

and they're certainly not about eating sugar and bread and processed foods and

vegetable oils and six meals a day because that's what created the problem

we just have to understand how do we reverse the problem and then how do we

live like people lived before this problem was present what did people do

so the single biggest issue that we have in this whole obesity situation is that

we treat the weight as the problem all of these people if you ask these 100

million people what their goal was I bet you that 99.9999 some percent would say

I want to lose weight I bet you hardly any of them said I want to get healthy I

want to get my body into balance so that it learns how to regulate this weight

and that I can find a normal weight for my body type I bet you that

hardly ever happen and everyone including the the doctors and the

dieticians and the policymakers and the people trying to lose weight they all

see the weight as the problem but the excess weight the obesity is a result of

an imbalance we have to understand what the imbalance is and we have to fix that

imbalance and if you watched any of the videos on this channel you know that we

have a whole library that talks about in the mechanism there's one hormone in the

body that is like a sledgehammer in terms of power compared to all other

hormones in the body and that is insulin insulin is a fat storing hormone when

you have a high level of insulin you become insulin resistant insulin will

store excess food and insulin will make you eat more food insulin resistance

makes you hungry insulin resistance prevents you from using stored fat that

is the fat storing mechanism that dr. Kaplan was talking about and the vast

majority of people can regulate that themselves by reducing the carbs and

reducing the sugar and reducing the frequency of meals again like we talked

about in a bunch of different videos about the mechanisms the tools that you

have to do this but it is not about calories because once you try to cut

calories you become hungry when you teach the body to regulate hormones you

eat fewer calories because your body learns to regulate there's a world of

difference there one works and the other doesn't so to really understand this we

just have to look at the really simple facts that what did humans do before

1980 we didn't live all these tens of thousands of years and where we were

lean and we had a properly functioning hunger

mechanism and then all of a sudden we got to 1980-1990 and humans became

deficient in some drug or some chemical that helped us regulate it okay the the

chemical whether it would help or not it's not the problem because it's not

that we were missing it when we stayed thin for all those tens of thousands of

years prior to 1980 so in order to understand insulin we just have to

understand that it's really really simple insulin is a hormone that is

released in response to food intake if you eat sugar or carbs then you will

trigger a lot of insulin if you eat protein you'll trigger less and if you

eat fat you trigger hardly any so the more sugar and carbs you eat the more

insulin you trigger the more insulin resistant you will become over time so

in order to reduce insulin resistance all you really have to do is reduce

sugar reduce carbs and reduce the number of meals when you eat six times a day

you're telling your body to produce insulin and to store the excess six

times a day if you eat twice a day then you have a whole lot more time where

you're not telling your body to store fat it's really not any harder than that

the trick comes in it's very simple but it's not easy because life is hard life

gets in the way they it's difficult to find food anymore if you go to the store

there's maybe 50 things out of 50 thousand that help your health and the

other interfere with your health and it's also difficult because we tend to

look at each other we tend to listen to hey what did that person do and one

person says oh all I did was go I just skipped snacks I ate three meals a day I

didn't change anything else I ate bread and pasta and meat and vegetables and I

lost all the weight well that's great for that person but for most people who

are insulin resistant that's not going to do it so don't listen to that person

and say oh well this is unfair because this stuff isn't working for

me this is working for you you just might have to take it to a different

level so what people have found works really well for 90 plus percent of

people is ketogenic diet very low carb or intermittent fasting or a combination

of the three and then some people have to go down to one meal a day and some

people have to go down to one meal every other day but whatever it is then you

have to do that to reverse the insulin resistance and then once the insulin

resistance has been reversed now your body is going to be in some sort of new

balance you may not ever be able to go back to eating six meals a day but

you'll figure out what that balance is over time the key to understand though

is that when you reduce insulin resistance you get less hungry when you

start doing these things you get less hungry and that's the whole problem this

is why these people fail over and over and over and over because when they cut

calories without reducing insulin resistance they get hungry and you can

only be hungry for so long so now the greatest weight loss experiment in human

history has been recorded the results are in JAMA Open Network published them

and they didn't seem to learn a whole lot they noticed that it failed

miserably and then they suggested that we continue doing the same thing but

that we increase the promotion of doing the same thing and it's still not going

to work then dr. Kaplan suggested that you know this really isn't gonna work

this is the wrong way we've been told the wrong thing you just don't have any

control we need medication and that is equally frustrating to hear because we

are seeing people who are doing this and they are changing their lives and

they're changing other people's lives by by sharing it so keep studying and keep

trying and keep learning enough that you can figure this out and how it works for

you if you enjoyed this video then you're going to love

that one and that one thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the

next video