Weight Loss Part II – Black Belt Strategies

This video follow-up to Weight Loss Pat I gets into more advanced strategies for losing weight and maintaining a lower weight by changing your metabolic set-point.

The metabolic set-point is like a thermostat in the brain and body that determines our metabolism and behavior, keeping our body fat at a set level despite changes in our diet and energy expenditure. It would be great if this thermostat kept us at a low body fat for our whole lives, but as you have probably learned from experience it’s easy for the set-point to creep up. Once the set-point is higher, our brain and endocrine system protect the set-point, making it difficult to lose weight. There are ways to lower the set-point, but it’s much more difficult than the passive increase than naturally happens each year without strategic intervention.

I’ll discuss Basic Strategies, like:

– Increase dietary protein

Eating 30 grams of protein at breakfast will make you throw off more calories as heat all day.

– Don’t snack

Having multiple insulin spikes during the day will work against your efforts to lower the set-point.

– Go dairy free

Dairy spikes insulin and insulin is part of the complex hormonal system that determines the set-point. – Decrease calorie density

– Simplify foods and avoid addictive, tasty foods

As discussed in Part I, putting a damper on your brains reward center signaling will fight the high set-point protecting behavioral drives that you have little control over.

– Use gentle cooking methods like steaming and poaching

Both to make food simpler and to avoid creating inflammatory compounds that work against weight loss.

Next we’ll get into Advanced Strategies:

– Try eating only three foods for two weeks

Using boredom to your advantage and diminishing the dopamine signaling that comes from novelty, causing you to eat more.

– Eat most of your starchy carbs at night (from paleo starchy tubers and other paleo starches)

To lower overnight stress hormones and help make to neurotransmitters and hormones that help you lose weight.

– Try Intermittent Fasting or Alternate Day Fasting

To hack the hormone system and get significantly better results than caloric restriction.

– Try the “Potato Hack”

One of the most successful strategies for weight loss that I’ve used in clinical practice. It has all the benefits of a Fasting Mimicking diet while at the same time dampening reward-driven eating behavior.

Check out Part I for some basic principles before diving into Black Belt territory.

Good luck and Godspeed.