#1 Absolute Best Way To Lose Belly Fat For Good - Doctor Explains

the number one absolute best way to lose belly fat millions of people are trying

to lose belly fat not just to look better or to fit in to their clothes

better but because belly fat is associated with all kinds of disease

from blood pressure to diabetes to cardiovascular disease and stroke

but even though all those people are trying more people than ever are having

obesity and diabetes and belly fat so in this video we're gonna teach you the

only way that you can lose belly fat and keep it off for good and it may not be

as hard as you think in fact it may even be the opposite of what you think coming

right up

I am Dr. 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 that you don't miss

anything in order to get the bigger picture to really get the full benefit

we need to understand a few mechanisms a round belly fat like where does it

actually come from what's the mechanism to actually get rid of it so along the

way we're going to talk about a few mechanisms and we're going to dispel a

few myths and if you hang in to the end then you're gonna have a totally

different picture on this than you ever thought the first thing we need to clear

up is the issue of cause and effect because belly fat is an effect and we

need to understand the cause if we're ever gonna hope to get rid of it for

good and the problem is that we all focus on the fat on the belly but the

fat is not the problem and when people talk about how belly fat is dangerous

what they're talking about is an association it is very true that it is

unhealthy to have a lot of belly fat but it doesn't mean that it's the belly fat

that unhealthy the belly fat is a reflection of something unhealthy it's

the result of something unhealthy and we need to ask how did the fat get there

because the thing that got the fat there is the dangerous thing not the fat

itself the fat is just fat it's just sitting there how does it get there and

like we've talked about before there is a disease called Cushing's and in

Cushing's we have an extremely high level of cortisol cortisol triggers

blood sugar and blood sugar triggers insulin and insulin creates insulin

resistance and insulin is a fat storing hormone insulin helps promote the

conversion of other fuels into fat and the combination of cortisol and insulin

stores it around the midsection so the mechanism of storing belly fat is

through the hormones cortisol and insulin so now we need to understand a

lot of different things about fat and which ones are safe and which ones are

dangerous because our world is riddled with myth and fat phobia so the next

thing that we need to talk about is just that fat phobia we live in a world that

for 50 years we've been told that fat is the root of all evil fat has too many

calories you eat fat you get fat we I grew up with with that mindset and I

bought into it and I ate low fat and I was miserable because I didn't

understand these things back then as we're going to talk about today fat is

not only okay but it is our preferred fuel and it is a good food source the

reason fat got such a bad reputation was that they observed a bunch of people

with heart disease and then they watched how much fat these people ate and they

said oh fat is bad they didn't reflect over the fact that these people also ate

a bunch of sugar that triggered insulin and that most of the fat that they ate

back between the 1950s to the 1980s was margarine which is the worst kind of fat

it is a pure toxin and if you eat a lot of margarine you will get sick so these

people got sick and they blamed it all on fat and especially saturated fat but

they've done lots of studies since that have shown that saturated fat is not a

problem and I'm gonna point out some things that will help you understand

that picture much much better fatphobia is based mostly on misconceptions that

we observe fat on the body and then we think that eating fat makes you fat

we've all heard you are what you eat so we think that's how it works with fat

also but we have to understand and we'll talk about this a lot that it's not

what you eat that ends up on the body it is what you eat that results in certain

hormones and after certain digestive processes and metabolic reactions end up

on the body and that is completely different what we have done is we

observe fat and we see fat and we think fats the bad guy we observe cholesterol

in in fatty plaques and we think that cholesterol is the bad guy

that's not a causative relationship it's an association and just to bring home

how ridiculous that is let's say that you come across a house burning there's

a house fire somewhere and lo and behold there is the fire department and so you

see the two together does that mean that the fire department is the bad guy that

they're causing the fire just because everywhere there's a fire you see the

fire department of course not all right it's an association which came

first we don't know from observing the association there is no causative

relationship all right we're just looking at the two together and it

doesn't tell us anything so we need to start understanding the mechanism of how

did the fire department and up there the fire was there first all right how did

the cholesterol get there the damage was there first even though it's getting

better we still have an extreme fat phobia and

I cringe every time I go through a grocery store and I see all these labels

with low fat heart-healthy low fat sausage low fat yogurt low-fat

this or that and it's it means that we're still sold on that idea that

people still buy into that mentality that low fat is better and of course

it's in every dietary guideline out there from the USDA to the World Health

Organization they tell to eat less than 30% fat overall and less than 10% of

total fat from saturated fat but it out dated in from

so next to understand where fat comes from and why it ends up on the body we

need to understand energy metabolism why does the body store fat there well

here's the reason that your body has a continuous need for energy the need for

energy is very stable right you can't just shut down you can't you're not like

a machine or a computer where you can just turn it off you need a stable

supply of energy but the supply of energy the intake of food is not so

stable and today of course there is more food available on the planet for most

people so we don't have that urgent problem but our bodies are built during

circumstances where we could go a day or two or three without food so we had a

stable need for energy but we didn't have a steady supply does that mean that

the body shuts down that you get hungry and you say oh I guess I'm out of fuel

I'll just lay down and die no your body creates more energy so that you can go

out and have the resources to have the focus and the energy to find more food

and that's where fat comes in so during a famine you burn the fat so that you

can have energy and go find food during the feast you take the excess and you

store it right that it's so basic and it sounds so simple but it's so profound

that we have a stable need but we have an unstable supply that's why the body

has to store fat and it can store a tiny little bit of energy as carbohydrate as

glycogen and it can store an almost infinite amount of fat if it could only

store carbohydrate then it would be true that when you ran out of fuel you would

just lay down and die the species would be gone long long ago because you have

about one day's worth of glycogen but everyone has weeks and months worth of

fat so that's just how it works next we need to understand what type of

fat the body stores and it stores primarily saturated fat so it stores a

little bit of everything you're gonna find a mix of just about every fat but

the vast majority the greatest percentage of fat that is stored in the

body is going to be two fatty acids one is a saturated chain of 16 carbons

called palmitic acid and the other is a chain of 18 carbons called stearic acid

so when we're talking about belly fat we're talking about those two fatty

acids primarily we're talking about palmitic and stearic acid they are the

majority of the fat that is stored on your midsection that you're trying to

lose so now we come back to you are what you eat and people think that oh I have

stearic I have saturated fat on my belly that must mean saturated fat is bad no

it's an efficient storage form it's a great form for the body to store energy

so think about this for just a moment a cow eats grass and then we eat the cow

and the cow is full of saturated fat where did that come from

grass doesn't have saturated fat grass has virtually no fat at all but

the grass has carbohydrates it doesn't have carbohydrates we can break down but

the cow can break them down and then it takes those glucose molecules from the

carbohydrate and it turns them into fat and it turns them primarily into the

same fats that we do palmitic acid and stearic acid and if you think about it

some further then that steak also has cholesterol but grass doesn't have

cholesterol so the cow makes it okay so the food and what it turns into

are two completely different things you can have a vegan who eats plants and

their belly fad is also going to be palmitic acid

and stearic acid and a vegan can have high cholesterol without ever eating any

cholesterol so it's not about what we eat it's the type of hormones that the

food triggers that results in the different types of fat and cholesterol

that are being manufactured so the key to understand is that it doesn't matter

if you eat an excess of starch or you eat an excess of protein or you eat an

excess of fat it will all get stored as these two fatty acids stearic acid and

palmitic acid because it's a convenient storage form what does matter is that

carbs and protein and fat trigger different insulin responses and the more

insulin the more probable that you're going to store that extra energy as fat

if you eat carbs then you're going to have a high tendency to store if you eat

fat then there's a greater tendency that it's just gonna float around and you'll

burn it rather than that you're gonna store it but yes excesses will get

stored so next we need to dispel a huge myth and this is about what fuel does

the body actually burn because with a lot of popularity from the keto and the

low-carb movement where people are burning fat losing weight there's been

this notion established this idea presented that fat is the preferred fuel

and then everyone who's opposed to keto or carnivore or any low carb they say

that oh no no that's not true that fat is bad saturated fat that your body

burns primarily carbohydrates all right and we're gonna dispel this myth once

and for all I'm gonna give you the numbers straight out so some people say

well what about low fat that there were some followers that have been doing low

fat forever in the less than 10% fat say that this is the way to go and they

eat 70% carbohydrate it doesn't matter if you eat mostly carbs or protein or

fat the body will still burn mostly fat and here are the numbers basal metabolic

rate that is how much energy your body burns at rest so if you were going to

base this on 2,000 calories just to have some numbers to work with and for the

average person their basal metabolic rate is about 70% their movement is

about 20% of total calories and then there's something called thermogenesis

there are those are various processes in the body that generate heat that

accounts for about 10% so basal metabolic rate is about 1,400 calories

movement is about 400 calories and thermogenesis the generation of heat is

about 200 calories per day for the average person and this does not include

exercise so if your basal metabolic rate is 1,400 if you average on average

you're using 2,000 calories and then you exercise another 500 then that 500 is on

top of what we're talking about here at first but we'll include that toward the

end now what are the organs where are most of these calories spent well the

biggest spender in the body is the liver your liver is a little three-pound blob

of tissue that is your metabolic factory it converts chemicals into other

chemicals and nutrients it uses 27% more than a quarter of all the energy is used

by that little blob called your liver that's 378 calories your brain uses

about 19 often we hear the number 20 but I saw 19 in this particular example so

we'll go with that for now that's 266 calories muscles

use 18% or 252 calories and these this is muscles at rest this is before

muscles do anything that is just muscles sitting around existing their basic

circulation their their basic muscle tone is 252 calories your kidneys use

10% of your energy that is the most metabolically active organ in your body

that's the hardest working organ in your body your kidneys are just a few ounces

worth of tissue and they use 10% of your calories 140 calories your heart is also

a hard worker but not quite as hard as the kidneys uses seven percent of your

calories or 98% ninety eight calories and all the other tissues together use

the other 19 percent or 266 calories so the interesting part here is that the

liver uses 85% of its calories from fat okay it prefers fat the brain uses

anywhere from 0 to 75% so the brain is the only exception in this picture

because all the other organs they run primarily on fat but the brain can't use

fat the brain can use two other fuels it can use glucose or ketones so if you're

in a fully fed carbohydrate state then glucose is high and the brain uses

virtually a hundred percent glucose I'm sure there's like a couple of percent

ketones in there but let's say a hundred percent glucose however if you're

fasting if you're in deep ketosis then the brain uses ketones primarily and

it's a better and it's a more stable fuel the brain actually functions better

with ketones and this could make sense if we think about the fact that

hunters when they were without food for a day or two they were in ketosis but

they still had to focus they still had to function at their best to be able to

find food and to be effective in the pursuit of the Hunts that they can

survive so the brain is the exception but all the other organs use 85 to 90

percent of their calories from fat so at rest 85 to 90 percent of the

energy in the body comes from fat so when we convert all of those into

calories the heart by the way is the most fat hungry organ of all where

they're estimating 90 percent of the calories come from fat so when we

convert the liver energy from fat it's 85% is 321 calories from the brain it's

zero to 200 calories depending on if we're fully carb fed or if we are fasted

muscles use two hundred and fourteen calories kidneys use 119 calories of fat

the heart uses 88 calories and everything else uses 226 calories so

then we need to add in the movement and again this is movement without exercise

this is just the regular movement picking up things walking around doing

your thing it's not going for a mild jog or a one hour walk or anything like that

it's just moving around where you are normally and that accounts for 20% of

your calories so this is not part of the basal metabolic rate this is movement on

top so 20% of your calories are 400 calories and again 85% of movement comes

from fat the muscles prefer to burn fat at rest and they prefer to burn fat as

high as they can for any level exercise where they can keep up with oxygen

they're gonna burn about 85% fat the only change

is when you get into an aerobic when your heart rate gets over 120 when you

start huffing and puffing now the glucose component increases so around

heart rate of 120 you're at about 50/50 and then above that when you start

huffing and puffing the glucose becomes dominant but anything below that like a

leisurely walk or basic activity or even up to a medium walk you're going to burn

primarily fat so 85% of that is 340 calories and then the thermogenesis that

all the other organs everything else the body does and I didn't find a number on

that but there's no reason to believe that that would be different than the

85% so we'll go with a hundred and seventy calories on that for right now

and the reason I say that 85% is that that's just where most of the organs are

functioning the best because when the body uses fat when the body converts fat

into energy it happens in the mitochondria with something called

oxidative phosphorylation and everything seems to sort of balance out around that

85% mark and the only exception is when we're in a fight flight response and

there's a crisis or something called exercise where we raise the heart rate

and we depend more on glucose during that time that we're in that high state

of exercise so let's add up all those numbers and if we go with a conservative

and we assume that we're in a feasted carbohydrate state then this would be

zero and we end up with fourteen hundred and seventy eight calories which

accounts for 74 percent so about three-quarters of your energy of all of

your energy before exercise comes from fat

and if we are in ketosis if we're fasting or doing keto then we could have

as much as 200 calories from fat for the brain and that would put us at 84% so

very very close to the 85% that fat burning that organs used for fat burning

so what that means of course then if 74 percent comes from fat then the rest

primarily comes from carbohydrate now there's a few percent of protein in

there depending on how much you eat but for the purposes of this illustration

we're just going to exclude protein but that would throw the numbers by by a few

percent so the number of carbs that you use would be 26 percent plus whatever

amount of exercise that you do above the Arabic threshold but let's say that

you're exercising up to the aerobic threshold then it doesn't mean that

anything above that is all of glucose you're still using as much fat as you

can keep up with so all of the arabic capacity is still there as the

foundation and then the anaerobic is on top of that so I don't have an exact

number but I think you would have to exercise quite a bit to take that 26

percent up to 30 and I think that you would pretty much have to be a

world-class athlete to do extreme and aerobic workouts to get it up to 40 so

what this shows us is that fat is the preferred fuel so then you're saying

well what about the people who eat low fat how can they burn 75% fat if they

only eat 10% well this brings it back to everything that we talked about here

that it doesn't matter if you eat all carbs because your body can't store

carbs your organs prefer fat so even if you

not going to store the energy your body still converts it from carbohydrate to

fat before you use it so you might as well eat the fat and

save the body the trouble of converting it and then you're saying oh but fat is

bad it's like I heard I hear what you're saying and I believe it and it works and

I eat low carb but I just can't make myself eat fat and here we're back to

the fat phobia we've heard it so many times that fat is bad fat is bad

saturated fat is bad it causes this and that and it's just not true most of the

studies like I said they're based on margarine and they're based on grain fed

meat these studies are not based on people

who eat high quality meat who eat high quality vegetables who eat nuts and

seeds and whole food and who cook from scratch it's based on processed foods

and chemicals and fake food the vast majority of cells in your body prefer

fat they burn about 85% fat even though they can burn both protein and glucose

and fat the brain is an exception it doesn't use protein it doesn't use

fat it uses glucose and ketones and the only other exceptions the major

exceptions are red blood cells because they have no mitochondria they have no

nucleus it's a different type of cell but the total mass of red blood cells is

very small and the metabolic activity of a red blood cell is very low because it

doesn't do anything except sort of float around and carry oxygen so the red blood

cells the lens and the retina in your eye

they have no mitochondria they cannot use fat they use glucose only but the

total energy consumption of these tissues is probably less than 1% okay

it's not going to change these numbers significantly at all so I

wanted to share a little study that I found to illustrate and sort of

reinforce some of these points and we don't want to base all of our opinions

on one study but they can still kind of help point us in the direction

especially when the results are incredibly clear they had known that

stearic acid the saturated long-chain fatty acid that we talked about the 18

carbon they had found that it could reduce the spread of metastatic tumors

and they also knew that visceral fat belly fat could increase and promote the

spread of metastatic tumors so then they figured if we can find a way to reduce

the visceral fat then maybe we'll have a tool to reduce metastatic tumor spread

so the the cancer part is just sort of an aside here but it's an interesting

note we're going to focus on the visceral fat the belly fat that we're

talking about so they fed four groups of mice they fed them either stearic acid

the saturated fat they fed them linoleic acid from safflower oil or oleic acid

from corn oil and one group was fed a low fat diet so what happened total body

fat didn't change a whole lot even though the visceral fat went down by 70

percent however the lean body mass increased in the mice fed saturated fat

and the final thing they found was that the blood sugar was dramatically lower

in the mice fed saturated fat so all of the things that were looking for in

diabetes and metabolic syndrome all the things associated to belly fat to

visceral fat to the so-called dangerous fat it is all about insulin it's about

the hormones that create the storage and when you feed the body a good stable

solid food a stable fuel source then we reduce the insulin and

improve all these markers so the number one absolute best way and the only way

to lose belly fat forever is to do it by reducing insulin resistance because

insulin is the hormone that puts the fat there and you do this by reducing the

sugar by reducing the carbs and by increasing the fat but not the plant

fats not the safflower oil and the corn oil and the soybean oil you do it by

increasing the saturated fat which is a stable neutral good fat it doesn't get

oxidized it is inflammation neutral whereas all the plant oils are high in

omega sixes which means that they promote inflammation through an

inflammatory pathway you reduce the carbs you reduce the frequency of meals

because every time you eat anything you stimulate a little bit of insulin the

longer you go without food the lower the insulin is allowed to drop don't be

afraid of saturated fats eat a good amount of saturated fats and

monounsaturated fats from a good source like extra-virgin olive oil and the only

word of caution is that when you hear that something is described as good

don't think of it as a superfood don't think that the more you eat of it the

better everything is going to be and it doesn't matter if it's saturated fat or

blueberries or chocolate or turmeric or garlic okay eat a moderate amount eat

what fits into your diet eat until you get full practice I'm intermittent

fasting cut your carbs fill up with fat until you're full but don't think that

when you're full it's gonna get better if you eat a little bit more okay we're

not talking about that get that idea of super food out of your head it's just

fuel it's good fuel if it's natural it's bad fuel if we messed with it if we

destroyed it or altered it or pulverized it then it's not good anymore but if it

is resembling the way we got it out of the ground or off the tree or we

hunted it down then it is a good food if you're going to lose belly fat for good

it's not about the number of belly crunches it's not about the number of

calories it's about reducing insulin resistance if you enjoyed this video

make sure that you check out that one thank you so much for watching and I'll

see you next time