Why Losing Weight the Wrong Way Can Be Dangerous

If you lose weight by reducing calories--a diet, bariatric procedure, or pharmaceutical like a GLP-1 agonist--you will indeed lose weight at first. But long-term, unhealthy changes in health will develop: eventual weight regain, increased risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, frailty. And thare are now sufficient data to tell us that you also cut your life short by several years. 

The key: NEVER engage in any of these methods. If you have, there are steps you can take to compensate and specifically target the most unhealthy forms of body fat, restore youthful muscle, restore basal metabolic rate and thereby absolve yourself of these unhealthy outcomes. 

You can find a full discussion of these strategies in my new Super Body book:
https://www.amazon.com/SUPER-Body-Composition-Youthful-Contours/dp/0306835991

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Calorie Cutting Misleads
• 2:30 Falsehoods From Medicine’s Past
• 5:05 The Ponzi Scheme Of Weight Loss
• 7:00 Subcutaneous Vs Visceral Fat
• 9:05 Muscle Loss And Aging Faster
• 12:00 BMR Drop And Early Mortality
• 15:20 Preserve Muscle As First Principle
• 18:00 Fixing SIBO And Endotoxemia

Transcript

William Davis, MD: 0:00

I'd like to get you thinking a different way about how to go about losing weight. Now, this is not my speculation. This is actually well grounded now in science. A lot of this science has advanced considerably in the last decade. Unfortunately, the things you hear about are not so much the effective methods or scientific methods. What you hear about are things that make money for somebody. It could be a bariatric procedure that pays a center many tens of thousands of dollars for doing gastric bypass or lap band or similar procedure to reduce stomach volume. It could be a branded program where they provide you with meal replacement shakes or meals reduced in calories, or it could just be a smartphone app that tells you to stop eating when you encounter, say, stress eating triggers. Or it could be, of course, a pharmaceutical, most notably the recent craze for the GLP1 agonist drugs. Now, these are all, almost nearly all, not all, but nearly all modern popular methods of losing weight involve a reduction in calories. So all those methods I mentioned all involve a reduction in calories. The GLP1 agonists, for instance, reduce your interest in food, you become indifferent to food, you thereby take in less food. They also slow stomach emptying, gastric emptying, so that you feel satiated for a longer period. And that result, of course, a reduction in food and thereby calorie intake. Well, the science is quite clear, so let's go through that because I fear all the people doing these kinds of things are going to have a lot of problems in their future. And yet you haven't been told the full story that there are safe ways to lose weight, but they're going to involve some very unconventional methods. And by the way, these are the kinds of ideas I'm trying to propagate through my new book, Superbody. That is how to selectively target the most problematic forms of fat, because there are real dangerous forms of fat in certain parts of the body. How to maintain or even increase lean muscle mass, because that is the Achilles' heel of a lot of these methods of losing weight. You lose huge amounts of muscle. And that is a landmine for future health problems that we'll talk about. So add cutting calories to the long list of falsehoods, misleading, misguided pieces of advice that we've all been given over the last century. Let me draw some analogies. Telling you to cut calories to lose weight is not that different from the advice in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that the uterus was the source of hysteria in women and that the solution was hysterectomy. Hysteria, hysterectomy, okay, of course that's ridiculous, but it was the prevailing opinion for many decades and led to many, many, many unnecessary hysterectomy surgeries. Another falsehood that this was this was widely believed for many years by doctors, that enemas, enemas were a cure for fatigue, headaches, and numerous other health conditions. Another widespread falsehood that electroshock therapy was a cure for homosexuality. Of course, that's absurd, but it was done. People were subjected to this painful and sometimes very dangerous procedure, of course, for no gain whatsoever. You can't change someone's sexual orientation with passing a current through someone's brain, of course. Another widespread falsehood, and that is cut cholesterol and saturated fat and reduce cardiovascular risk. An absurd concept, because it came from this house of cards called cholesterol testing that we should have discarded decades ago. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, please see my many, many conversations about this in my books, my Wheatbelly books, Undoctor's books, Super Gut, Superbody, as well as my thousands of blog posts, my Define Health podcast, of course, my YouTube channel, where I've talked about why cholesterol is misleading and how there are better ways. There are far better ways to address and eliminate, in fact, cardiovascular risk in almost all cases. And add this cut calories to lose weight, falsehood, misleading advice to the long list of bad information that's been propagated these last this last century, really. Now, a lot of people are surprised by this conversation because they've heard that there are clear-cut and indisputable benefits. Upfront. Upfront benefits to losing weight, such as a reduction in insulin resistance, the process that underlies numerous health conditions, reduces blood glucose, it reduces triglycerides on your cholesterol panel. Losing weight can reduce blood pressure, it reduces total fat weight and can reduce measures of inflammation. So what's the problem? If there are all these upfront benefits, you can watch your waist shrink, you can watch some of the fat in your buttocks and thighs shrink. So what's the problem? The problem is weight loss achieved by reducing calories is essentially a Ponzi scheme that is upfront benefits, long-term, major deterioration in health. You're setting yourself up for all kinds of problems later on. So let's talk about some of the problems associated with the conventional methods of losing weight by reducing calorie intake. Well, one problem is that those methods, whether it's GL2 anagonists, bariatric procedure, or a low calorie program, specifically target loss of subcutaneous fat over abdominal visceral fat. Let me tell you what that means. So subcutaneous fat is the fat just beneath the skin that may accumulate, say, in your neck or buttocks or thigh or other parts of the body. It's a relatively benign form of fat. It may add pounds of weight-bearing stress to your knees and hips, but beyond that, it's really not a source of problems. It's metabolically inert, essentially. It's abdominal visceral fat, fat that encircles abdominal organs like the intestines, liver, pancreas. That's the problem because it is very inflammatory and it exports inflammation to the rest of the body. And it also triggers formation of fat depots or storage of fat in other parts of the body, for instance, around the heart, epicardial fat, and that dramatically increases risk for heart disease. It also causes infiltration of muscle with fat, so-called myosteatosis, which accelerates loss of muscle, loss of muscle mass and strength, and amplifies all the problems associated with weight loss. So conventional methods of losing weight specifically target loss of a less problematic form of fat, subcutaneous fat, and is less effective in targeting the most problematic forms of fat, abdominal, visceral fat, and those other so-called ectopic forms of fat, like around the heart, pancreas, kidney, and muscle. A really big problem with losing weight by reducing calories, regardless of method, is loss of muscle. We now know with confidence that almost all, not all, but almost all methods to lose weight involve about 25% of the weight loss is muscle. So if you lost 40 pounds, for instance, by taking, let's say, a year's worth of WIGOV or Ozempic or some other method, and you 40 pounds, of that 40 pounds, 30 pounds was fat, mostly subcutaneous, including around the face. That's why there's a so-called Ozempic face, the acceleration of facial aging. Of the 40 pounds, 10 pounds is muscle. Now think about 10 pounds of muscle. Think about 10 pounds of ground beef on your kitchen counter. It's a huge amount of muscle. You stop the drug, say, a year later, because most people can't afford that forever, right? You stop the drug, you regain more fat than you had at the start, typically 32 to 34 pounds or more, almost no muscle regained, and so you have far less muscle, more fat, measures like insulin resistance, triglycerides, blood pressure, blood sugar, risk for dementia, breast cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes are now greater now than it was even before you lost the weight. Another consequence of losing that much muscle is a reduction in basal metabolic rate. And all that means it's the rate, or BMR we say, the rate at which your body burns calories for the work of living, breathing, digestion, production of enzymes and proteins, all the things your body does without your conscious control. So that requires energy, and that's reflected in this value called a BMR. When you lose weight and thereby lose muscle, your BMR drops because BMR is principally dependent on muscle mass, how much muscle you have. So if you lose a bunch of muscle in your weight loss effort, your BMR drops. We now know with good science from our own National Institutes of Health, that's for all practical purposes a permanent effect that lasts for years. What this means is that your BMR drops, you're much more likely to be exposed to all kinds of diseases, your immune system is impaired, you're much more likely to encounter frailty, fractures, falls, loss of independence, institutionalization, and we now also know that you're likely to die several years younger than you should have. And you can see in this graph, this is one such study, we have in aggregate about 60,000 people who've been tracked for as long as 10 to 20 years. And this question asks, what happens to people who lose weight mostly by some method of reducing calories? They die several years younger, especially if you lost more than 10% of your body weight. So a 180-pound woman who loses 18 pounds, or a 240-pound man who loses 24 pounds, you're likely to die if the proper action is not taken. You're likely to die several years younger. And so let's put this all together. Reducing calories, regardless of the method used, can reduce your lifespan, amount of time you're on this planet, by several years. The more weight you lose, the more likely you are to die. And those last few years, much more likely to be characterized by false fractures, frailty, loss of independence, institutionalization, increased risk for dementia. And so this is what the conventional approach to weight loss does to you. Now, if there's one thing I want you to walk away with after you recognize just how dangerous it is to reduce calories to lose weight, is that muscle mass, preservation of muscle mass is key. Now, a lot of ladies will say to me, Well, I don't want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don't worry, you can't. No woman looks like that, right? And we're not going to be talking about going to the gym for an hour a day, five days a week. No, no, we're not talking about things like that. We're talking about preservation of the kind of muscle you should have had in your 20s or early 30s. So recall also that as we age, we lose about a third of our muscle mass. Of course, you'll see this in elderly men and women with skinny arms and legs, who have a hard time standing, getting in and out of a car, climbing stairs, carrying groceries, just daily because of the loss of muscle. And when you lose muscle, as I mentioned, your BMR drops, and it guarantees, it virtually guarantees that you will regain weight even if you maintain an intensive exercise program that includes resistance exercise with weights and other machines, and maintain a low calorie lifestyle. This has been proven time and time again. Lose weight by cutting calories, lose fat, mostly subcutaneous, lose a lot of muscle. Regain over time because of the reduction in BMR. Regain fat, no regain muscle, and you've programmed your body for long-term deterioration and in many instances a premature death. So key is preservation of muscle. So that's the conversation I want to cultivate. And so I want you to get you thinking about this. So while most people think of things like creatine or exercise or resistance training as the only things you can do, there's actually a lot more you can do. First of all, the best thing is never lose weight by any of those methods. Whether it's a low-calorie diet or bariatric procedure or a geotagonist or other pharmaceutical, don't do it. Because once you do it, it's really hard to claw your way back and absolve yourself of all those long-term complications. We're going to do some things differently. We're going to address SIBO and endotoxemia. SIBO, SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that is now epidemic in the U.S. population, actually worldwide, but worse in the U.S., because primarily the overuse of antibiotics. So even a single course of antibiotics kills off hundreds of beneficial species of bacteria in the colon. And those beneficial species were helping suppress some of the unhealthy pathogenic fecal microbial species. And when we lost all those beneficial species, those fecal microbes are allowed to overgrow, overproliferate, and then remarkably ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine. Small intestine is ill-equipped to deal with this flood of trillions of fecal microbes. And so these fecal microbes that only live for a matter of minutes to hours, this huge turnover, and when they die, they release their toxic compounds, some of which gets into your bloodstream because the small intestine is very permeable. That's called endotoxemia. That is a major driver of weight gain in the abdomen and erosion of muscle. So we're gonna, one of the first things we're gonna do is address SIBO and thereby reduce endotoxemia, giving you better control. And we're gonna do it with microbes, not with antibiotics. You know, antibiotics got us here in many ways. You may have heard this. If you take a course of antibiotics, even one, it's very common to gain on average eight to nine pounds just in the first few weeks after that antibiotic, long-term, even worse. So I refuse to believe that an antibiotic to kill off these fecal microbes is part of the solution. Let's instead bring back order, restore some of those lost microbes, and get control over the overproliferation of fecal microbes in the small intestine. We're gonna do it with microbes. We're also going to pay attention to microbes that influence two very important hormones that helps determine where fat is deposited or not deposited and how much muscle you have. And these two hormones are oxytocin and cortisol. So we're gonna address specific microbial species that give you back control over those two very important hormones. Lack of oxytocin means loss of muscle and amplification of appetite. Cortisol reduces muscle mass, it erodes muscle, raises blood glucose, and accelerates deposition of abdominal visceral fat. We're gonna correct both of those hormones, and it also makes you feel better as well as look better. We're gonna talk about restoring important nutrients lacking in modern life, such as vitamin D or magnesium. You, if you've been following my conversations, you're familiar with these, you know that these are nutrients that impact insulin resistance and inflammation, two major drivers of weight gain. We're gonna work to correct it so that we remove the contributions of insulin resistance and inflammation to weight. We're gonna also restore dietary factors that have been lost because of this enormous blunder that was made in dietary guidelines telling us to remove dietary sources of cholesterol and saturated fat that also caused people to abandon consumption of organ meats, such as stomach or brain, or tongue, or heart, which were rich in nutrients, but specifically relevant to our body shape and composition conversation, collagen and hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid, by the way, one of the few fibers that is sourced from animals, not from plants. Most fibers come from plants. Haluronic acid is a rare exception. It comes from animals, and it has major body shaping potential if used properly. Not topically. I know a lot of ladies like hyaluronic acid used topically. We're going to use it orally for its body shape modifying effects. And then you know what? You can add some resistance efforts. It could be going to the gym using the machines a couple times a week for 15 minutes. It could be push-ups or pull-ups in your home. It could just be raking the leaves with a rake, digging in your guard. But things that involve use of your muscles does help. But it's not the cornerstone. It's just icing on the cake. So what I hope to propagate is one, make everyone aware that conventional methods of losing weight are dangerous. There are safer ways. And by the way, there are safer dietary approaches also that I talk about. And then there's this menu of strategies that includes addressing SIBO and endotoxemia, addressing factors that influence insulin resistance, replacing dietary factors absent from your life. Add it all up, and you're given control, huge control over where fat is located, how much you have, your muscle, your BMR, and you have better control over shape and body composition. And so if this interests you, stay tuned to these conversations here, as well as my new Super Body Book.