Fix Visceral Fat: #1 Way To Lose Weight (61 Tips) Dr Berg

What is the number one thing to lose weight and to burn fat? Reducing insulin.

Look down at your shoes and you see your belly. If you see your belly sticking out, you have visceral fat, and you also have liver fat. Within a very short period of time, I'm talking 2 weeks, drop 50% of your fat off your liver if you just cut out your carbs.

Dr. Eric Berg is a globally recognized health educator and one of the biggest influential voices on YouTube. He will help you reverse visceral fat and lose weight easily. And it starts with high fat and fasting.

So many people are taught to lose weight, you have to have six or seven small meals a day and keep your calories low. But that never works because you're creating these little spikes of insulin through the day. So that's really bad advice. If you just don't worry about your calories, but worry about the frequency of eating. Like even my producer, he just started doing intermittent fasting and even prolonged fasting. He lost a ton of weight with that.

So it's kind of like this: you get take the average person, and they're overwhelmed. And you start telling them to do all these different things, means they can't do it. So I say, well, what would be easier to do? Intermittent fasting or cut your carbs down? Whatever they are telling you, do the exact opposite, and that's going to work.

What is the type of fat that people should be eating to burn the most fat? Animal fat. I, I like dairy fat too, like butter. I'm not telling you you can have unlimited fat and just lose all the fat. So this is what I recommend you do if you're really struggling and want to speed up weight loss: bring it down to 10 to 0 g of carbs. Apple cider vinegar, very interesting. Two tablespoons, put in some water, uh, dilute it, and then drink that down with a straw.

This episode features Dr. Eric Berg, and he'll discuss the fastest way to lose weight without excessive exercise. Now, before we start, I just want to say a big thank you. You see, I started this health podcast about 3 years ago, and in that short time, we have grown to over half a million subscribers. And that really shows our message is getting out there. So if you've already subscribed, I just want to say a big thank you. And if you're new here and you want to lose weight and get healthy, please consider hitting the subscribe button.

And now for the episode with Dr. Eric Berg. Dr. Berg, welcome. Thank you for having me on here. I really appreciate it. Now, when it comes to losing weight and burning fat, you are arguably one of the biggest experts in the field with over three billion views on your YouTube channel. Now, my team and I have spent over a hundred hours looking at all your videos and we've come up with the best 60 tips that will help you lose weight and burn fat without excessive exercise or counting calories. And if you want any chance of burning fat, I would watch his entire video to the end. You will learn the world's easiest strategy to help you lose weight and burn fat, and a few unconventional tips that might surprise you.

So, Dr., my first question: What is the number one thing that people need to focus on to lose weight and to burn fat? Reducing insulin.

Okay. And that has to do with reducing your carbohydrates and not eating so frequently. Those are the two most important things when you're trying to lose weight.

Absolutely. So when you say focus on insulin, what is it about the hormone insulin that might make someone put on weight and put on that belly fat that people don't want?

Insulin is a hormone that is, um, has several things it does. Number one, it prevents you from tapping into your fat to lose weight. So if your insulin is too high, you cannot, uh, use your fat as fuel. And this is why people are just struggling because they don't realize that it's kind of locks everything up. So the solution is to keep the insulin low so you can actually mobilize your own fat, um, when you're trying to lose weight. Um, people assume like, "I'm going on a diet, I'm exercising, I'm going to burn up my own fat." And all of a sudden, they don't. And that's because your insulin is too high. An average overweight person has super high levels of insulin. They don't even know it. Why? Because the doctors never test that. They're just so focused on other things. But yeah, if you can keep your insulin low, and I'm sure we'll talk about that, uh, you will lose weight.

Okay, let's talk about ketosis because that kind of goes into the ketogenic diet, which we're going to talk about, and the role of lowering insulin. Do you have to be in ketosis to burn fat?

Yes, you do. And ketosis is kind of like, um, you can look at it like the burning of fat because fat can be burned directly. But also ketones are like easier, um, digestible packages of fat. You can look at it like that. So it's just another way for your body to package this fat to use that as fuel. So when you say, "Can you lose, um, weight without going in ketosis?" Well, you can lose muscle weight. But but if you're trying to lose fat, um, you're going to have to turn that fat into something that your body can use as fuel, and that's called ketones. So yes, we need to, we need to mobilize ketones to to lose weight.

Perfect. So we need to get our insulin low, and our ketones to be higher, and also our blood glucose to be lower. So that should be the combination to lose weight. So to lose weight, it's pretty easy. And to burn fat, which we're going to talk about all your best tips to to do so. I have a question about calories though, because people will probably say in the comments around, "But Dr. Berg, we need to count calories because if I eat too many calories, I'm not going to burn fat." What do you have to say about that?

Let's, let's just pretend that you were to eat 2,000 calories in a day, right? And you would eat all of those at one time at dinner. Now, if we compare that to you spreading those calories out over a period of a day, so you ate like these seven small meals, still the same amount of calories. You might think you're going to lose the same amount of weight. But what you don't realize is that there's another thing that increases insulin, and that's just eating in general. So the more frequent times you eat, regardless of the calories, what kind they are, the more insulin spikes. So then we got this like spike, spike, spike of insulin, right? So when you talk about calories, it's way more important to talk about, um, how many, how often you eat those calories versus like someone that's snacking through the day.

So many people are taught to lose weight, you have to, you know, have six or seven small meals a day and keep your calories low. But that never works because you, you're creating these little spikes of insulin through the day. So that's really bad advice. So if you just don't worry about your calories, but worry about the frequency of eating, you'll be fine.

Now, people, I know people are going to say, "Well, if you're going to eat one meal a day, you're naturally going to reduce the calories." Yeah, you're going to reduce the calories. But the reason why you're losing weight is not the reduction of calories. We've tried that for so many years. And when you start reducing your calories and don't focus on the type of calories you're eating or the time schedule when you're eating them, um, what'll happen? Your body is just going to compensate. And it's going to turn, it's going to turn your motor into a more efficient motor. So now, before when you would lose weight when you're 18, now when you're 50 years old, you have the same amount of calories, it's like you don't lose any weight. And it's not that your metabolism is slower, it's just it's more efficient because your body has adapted to that. So you can go longer with a small amount of calories.

So, so when people say that, um, they have a slow metabolism, what they really have is a very efficient metabolism. Why? Because they have years of dieting, which is low calories. Years of low calories destroys your metabolism. Absolutely. So basically, your body adapts to anything that you're going to do. So if you're going to eat 500 calories a day, it's going to downregulate everything. No wonder people don't have nice hair, skin, and nails if they have low calories, because your body's just trying to survive. But you need energy and you need nutrients to actually lose weight and to be healthy. And, and I know for you, that is your motto: get healthy to lose weight. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about in the rest of these tips.

I want to talk about types of fat because when we say lose weight, what does that mean? There are four types of fat that I'd like to focus on. Two are dangerous, one is pretty benign, and one is healthy for you. The first one is visceral fat. Can you explain what that is and why people need to focus on that?

Visceral fat is almost like a hormonal fat that gives off hormones that are not good for you, um, and, and, and other other things that create inflammation. It's like the fat around the organs, the fat inside the liver, the fat right outside the heart, which is a really interesting thing because you have this, if you actually scan the heart, you'll see this layer of fat, uh, epicardial fat, which is very, very dangerous. Uh, it can, it can actually push stuff right into the heart, like in, like inflammatory things. So I think that, um, um, if the one way to know if an obvious way to know that you have visceral fat is just to look down at your shoes and you see your belly. If you see your belly sticking out, you have visceral fat, and you also have liver fat. And because you've raised insulin for so many years, you now you have this spilloff of this fat that has nowhere to go. It doesn't even go in the, the fat cell anymore. It actually, there's, there's no more space for it. So then it actually goes outside the fat cell. The word for that is ectopic, but you don't have to worry about that. But the point is that you have all this visceral fat that then creates a lot of issues, um, especially like, um, you know, heart issues, blood sugar issues, diabetes, inflammatory conditions. And you also have something called skinny fat, where you have someone that, oh, I, I don't, I don't have a big stomach, but they eat a lot of carbs and they eat a lot of snacks. But when you look, do an ultrasound, inside their liver is filled with fat. They have fat on the inside. Yes, they have genetics that don't, don't make them look fat, but they're not very healthy. So you can't just go by the belly fat. But that's what visceral fat is.

And how does that differ from liver fat, because you mentioned visceral fat and liver fat. Is there any difference?

Um, well, there's a little, little difference. Um, because you have, um, there are certain, um, ever hear of pate, right? Which is kind of like a goose liver. And they can, they can make pate by forcing corn down their throats, like they with a syringe, they just force, force-feed these animals. There's so much food, and their livers start to enlarge by 25 times. Now, when they're enlarging, it's just filled with fat. So you can just, like, there's no more liver left. Um, so when you get an ultrasound of the liver, um, it's just kind of fills up with fat. And that's the fat that goes outside the fat cell, and it's just accumulating through the liver, and that's going to decrease the function. This is where you see this like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease thing. That it wasn't from alcohol, it's from the carbohydrates. So it's in the same area as the fat around the, um, the visceral in the lower part of your stomach. It kind of, it really starts in the liver, um, when your, um, liver starts to get fatty, and then it spills over into the other organs. U because the liver is kind of such a key area of metabolism. So anyway, it's, it's, it's hard to tell, um, if you have liver fat just, just by looking at someone, because the body will compensate for many years. But so many people, if, if they went to the doctor and got an ultrasound, it would just be like, there's, you got fat in your liver. But, u which is very dangerous because there's not a lot of symptoms initially. It takes a long time for it to occur.

Do you think that many people, if they went to get an ultrasound to check if they have liver fat, how many would actually have it without knowing it?

A lot. A lot. I mean, it's very, very common, especially if they're eating a lot of carbs. Um, I, I sent, uh, five of my patients when I was in practice to the radiologist, I paid for it, just to see if they had liver fat. And they had little, little guts. All five of them had a fatty liver. I was like, "Wow, that's, that's a high rate of fatty liver." But it's a simple ultrasound that you can get to determine that. But, you know what? I would just focus on just cutting out your carbs, going low carb, and doing intermittent fasting. And then you don't, you don't have to worry about it. Because there's no way you're going to get a, you know, you can actually within a very short period of time, I'm talking 2 weeks, drop 50% of your fat off your liver if you just cut out your carbs.

Really? What about, okay, the next fat that we're going to talk about. So we spoke about visceral fat and liver fat. So they're very, very dangerous. People want to get rid of their subcutaneous fat, I think. And this is the benign fat. Some of that is actually good for us. So can you explain how it's actually good for us to have some subcutaneous fat? But I know for women, you know, there's flabby arms, they don't like. And, you know, for men, you know, the love handles that they, they don't like. How do we get rid of that as well?

You have to first get rid of your visceral fat. I find that you just have to, you have to keep going because that is probably the last thing to go. It's a, you talk about the superficial subcutaneous fat, people hate around their their love handles. You, and especially as you get older, it's difficult. It is part of the survival mechanism because we need that. You know, our bodies have evolved to develop that fat so if, so we can go long distances without eating. And, uh, cuz food wasn't as common. So food is very common now. And so if you're eating your three meals a day with a couple snacks, you're never going to get rid of that. So then we have to, um, we need to actually even go a little bit more extreme with, uh, fasting and low carb, like lowering your carb way down to zero to lose that, especially if you get older. Now, the question is, people protest that they're like, "No, I shouldn't have to do that. You know, I'm eating normal." Well, what happened is that you've got your body in a state where it's so far out of balance, you can't eat a normal balance to get it back into balance. You have to go a bit extreme. So you might have to do like almost like a carnivore or like a zero carb diet with one meal a day. I've had people so bad to the point where, like, they've tried everything. And I'm talking like 500 calories a day for and exercising all day long. But what, what they were missing is that they were, they weren't sleeping right. So the sleep is an issue. They were, they were overtraining. They, um, and then of course, those 500 calories were not low carb, too. So there's all these little things that they need to know about to really make a difference. But I, I've had the, uh, the fortune experience to have experience with working with one-on-one a lot of people over many years to figure to see things that I would never see if I just didn't do that, just by googling, because they don't really, you don't really find this information on the internet. But, uh, there are people out there that ext doing almost everything, like exercise and calorie restriction and even low carb, where they have to even take it one step further. Maybe they need to eat one meal every other day to at least lose that additional extra. I've had to do that with some people just because the metabolism is so efficient. They can run their body on just a small amount of food. And this is, and this usually happens when they were younger. And somehow, you know, they, they did a weight loss program, a low calorie program, when they're like 13 years old. That's the worst thing to do is to start dieting very, very young because that now we set the person up for a very efficient metabolism the rest of their life.

Absolutely. I'm curious to know because you've probably helped thousands or hundreds of thousands of patients. What is one patient that stands out for you in terms of losing weight and fixing their health? Is there anyone that stands out?

Well, a lot stand out. But one, one that stood out was, um, I, and this is just, I think this is, um, relevant to a lot of people. Um, I, I have to tell you, like, actually two people, actually three. I have three examples that stand out. One was this person was so obsessed about losing weight, they would do anything. And it was on their mind 24/7. And I said, "Listen, I think what's happening with you because you're doing everything right is you are, um, creating stress with your mind." Like, cuz they're obsessed about it, every little thing, and they're one big bucket of cortisol. So this is what I told him to do. I said, "Please do this experiment. Every day, I want you to just forget about the weight loss. Go in nature, hike, take a trip. Don't even worry about losing weight. Just try like heck not to think about it all the time." I'm obsessed about it. So you know, that was the only, only week that she lost weight when she just stopped worrying about it so much. Because when you worry, you're dropped down into anxiety, and you're thinking about it, and you're going to sleep. That's not good for weight loss. So you really have to have a relaxed, non-stressed viewpoint. Because stress can activate cortisol, which then activates sugar and insulin. There are certain people that go through so much stress that they can develop diabetes from that. Um, even when they're injected with synthetic prednisone, they can get fat from that. So that's one thing, like stress component. You have to really kind of like have a relaxed state of mind with that.

The second example was a lady who, um, was exercising six hours a day. And I'm not kidding, six hours a day. I mean, like, are you kidding me? Like, talk about overtraining, seven days a week. And it just was, it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I said, "You're overtraining." Um, so I eventually convinced her, and she cut down the exercise, not just hours of day, but like, just several days where they, she didn't exercise. And finally, she started losing weight. And that was like shocking to her. And, um, I mean, there's other people who I get them to do like a high-intensity workout, like maybe twice a week, or even once a week, versus like five times a week. And they lose weight because of that, which is, it's kind of like, um, counterintuitive.

And then the last story was a, a lady who, um, lifted, I think it was like 2 million pounds over a course of a year and lost one pound of weight in a whole year. And so when we worked with her, we basically, in the, she, in 3 months, she lost like, I think, um, 29 lbs. Okay. But, um, what I found was her sleep. She was getting like a few hours of sleep at night. And here's another, another little factor: like, most of the fat that you burn is at night when you're sleeping, not during the day. So you have to fix the sleep first before you get into losing weight. So these are, these are all just other factors that you need to like look widely, or else you're going to, you can be unsuccessful. You know, and these are things I stumbled on just by working with people and figuring things out. It's like, you got to look at the whole package. And, um, there's always a reason why they're not losing weight. And sometimes it's sleep, sometimes it's stress, sometimes it's overtraining.

Well, I hope to cover all of those tips that you, you just mentioned, because I do think people try to find the perfect diet. I do think they try to, um, you know, focus on it too much. Maybe they cheat, get, get off the wagon, and then they find, "Why am I not losing weight or why am I regaining weight?" But it's really, if you follow these simple steps and avoid certain things, which we're going to talk about, weight loss seems to be effortless. And it's the losing the right type of fat, which is important.

The last fat, getting back to types of fat, that I just want to mention is brown fat. This is what we want more of. Why is that?

Now, the question is, why is it brown? Why is it, you know, because fat's normally like a yellow, white, beige? Um, that's because it's has a really dense mitochondria. These are energy factories of the body, and it makes it just different color. Um, brown fat, um, it really will help you lose weight faster. And so, question is, how do we stimulate more brown fat? How do we actually activate that? One of the best ways is cold immersion, right? Um, so I don't know if you have, do you have a cold therapy or a cold tank?

You know, I'm currently in Dubai, and it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so no, I don't have that currently.

However, it's a good thing to have. Yeah, you need one because think about this. Um, when you get into even like, I tried less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was that was too cold for me. So I went to 50 degrees, which is still cold. Every cell in my body is like, "Don't do this." So I just basically just go, "No, you're going in, you're going in." And I go in, and, um, it's freaking cold. And your core temperature has to stay at 98.6. It's very dangerous for it to go down below that. So how could you possibly go into a cold immersion and have your core temperature stay at 98.6? It's because your body shifts to brown fat, and those mitochondria are no longer making ATP energy. They're basically making heat. They're converting the ATP to heat to counter this. So it's like a super inefficient, wasted, uh, way of wasting a lot of fat. And that's what we want, right? I mean, the more fat you can waste, the more fat you're going to lose. And then even like when you're in keto, ketosis, and you measure your urine or your ketones, you like, there's, you're peeing out ketones, you're peeing out your fat, you're breathing out your fat. But another way to waste this fat is just to go in the cold immersion. And even if you did like, you know, work up to like a minute and up to five minutes, a few times a week, up to, I do 11 minutes a week, um, you, you'll actually lose some weight. And at first, I didn't even believe that. I thought, "Yeah, that's not going to really do anything." But no, you can actually, you can do that.

Another way to stimulate brown fat is with the high-intensity interval training, where you're using your whole body to really spike that intensity. And, um, you're like, just your body heats up real fast, and you're just like, you're just like blowing up that mitochondria to dump a lot of that fat and turn it into energy really fast. So, um, these are just like, these are things that you can use to enhance your weight loss. But I will say, I will say this: the, the reason, the main reason why I use the cold therapy is because what it does with my brain. I mean, like, it just, I can think better, I'm happier, it brings me up with my mood. I need very little bit of editing when I do videos because it just, I don't know, it's like it just makes you really sharp. It's really wild. It's probably like having a cup of coffee or something where you feel that sharpness. That's kind of what a cold plunge is.

Okay, let's talk about your story because you were once a very unhealthy person and doctor, and now you've helped so many people fix their own health. Can you share your story in terms of your health journey and what changed?

Uh, it's kind of weird because I had, uh, I was like the worst patient. I, I mean, you take some people that are junk food junkies. I was even worse. I, I would eat, not just, uh, just a little bit, but I couldn't stop eating once I started eating. Like, even like Halloween, I would eat the whole bag in one sitting, right? I would be going through the cupboards looking for sugar. So even if you look at my genetics, that's what it says, like I have a problem with sugar. If I start, I can't stop. Um, I would snack. I used to, when I was 16, I worked at a theater making popcorn for people. So I would bring bags, garbage bags, popcorn. Me and my father would sit there eating at TV and just like eating this massive bag. I, so I abused, I kept doing that, and I never ate anything healthy until I got in my late 20s. All through college, I had heartburn. I had, so I started starting getting very, very unhealthy. Hit the bottom at 28 years old. So I would be living on massive pasta, cereal, crackers, biscuits, waffles, pancakes, everything. So, and I, and then I think right around the time I, I says, "Well, I think what I need to do is become a vegan because that's where you get healthy." So I started doing carrot juice, beans, grains, rice. Oh my gosh, did I feel, I almost like I turned, I just got really sick after that. That was like the worst mistake because I was bloating, I was in bed all the time. So eventually, I was, um, I'm like, "What is going on?" Cuz I was in practice, and people would be coming in with these little problems, and they didn't know I was way sicker than them. And of course, I didn't even know anything about food or so, I, I didn't talk about it at the time. But then one day, I was looking at this book called, uh, Mastering the Zone, and I just read the introduction to the book. And it, it was talking about insulin, which I remember a little bit in school learning about it, but they don't teach you to apply it to your body, um, or anything like that. They didn't connect the dots with carbohydrates. So just kind of this separate little thing. Insulin regulates blood sugars. So I, it said that, um, insulin creates these problems. And then they said there's another hormone that does the opposite, it's called glucagon. I'm like, glucagon? Oh, I remember that. And the way that you trigger that is by consuming meat, red meat. I'm like, "Oh, okay." So the next morning, I ate a buffalo burger, not my cereal, my muffin, and it was like someone that took a helmet off my head. I was just like, "Oh my God, my brain feels so much better." Because it would take me till 11:00 just to wake up mentally, and my eyes are all blood sugared. So all these things cleared up, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." I told my wife, I said, "This is a miracle." You know? So of course, we, I radically dived, dived into what I, what I need to do. And I, I did a combination of lowering carb and increasing more protein. Those two things, and that was the most miraculous thing. So of course, then I started telling all my patients, and they were getting results. And then I, I just, I, I became obsessed with this topic. So I started to get up early, 4:00, study it, get home, study it on the weekends, to the point where I never stopped doing that. So I, I just kept accumulating more and more knowledge and practice and testing things out till we kind of refined, um, what I do, what I did in my practice before I went in, just to just do YouTube. But that's like the short version of of me. A junk food junkie, um, completely had almost every problem that any patient ever had. Any, I mean, like I had arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, um, pre-diabetic, kidney stones, like I've had it all. I mean, and, um, so I, I can relate. And, uh, I, if I didn't have those problems, I would not be doing any videos of unhealth, cuz it kind of like from personal experience, right? I would never have that that experience. So experience comes with a package, right? You have to go, kind of suffer through the experience. But what I learned from that was huge, you know? So it, it, it's very beneficial to to extract the the knowledge from experience.

Now, as Dr. Dr. Berg mentions, dialing down the carbs and increasing your healthy red meat is not only going to help you lose weight, but also fix chronic health conditions, as Dr. Berg experienced himself. Now, as you drop down the carbs or go zero carb, you might experience some side effects like headache, nausea, and fatigue. Now, all this is very normal, especially at the beginning. So what you can do is do the salt trick. Add some high-quality salt to your meals, and also add it to your water. But if your symptoms still persist, I would highly recommend that you lean on an electrolyte one that has sodium, potassium, and magnesium, because this is so important for proper brain and body function. And that is why I have LMNT as a sponsor of today's episode. Personally, I like to use a high-quality electrolyte like LMNT because it has a science-backed mix of sodium, potassium, and magnesium without anything artificial and no preservatives. And I like to use the raw unflavored option, half a sachet in my morning coffee, and the other half a sachet I put in my water during the day. And LMNT has also released a new flavor for summer, lemonade salt, for a limited time. And my husband loves to add this to his sparkling water. It gives a nice refreshing twist in the heat. And right now, LMNT is offering my viewers this free sample pack on every order. So you're going to get eight single servings of LMNT to try for free. So if you want this, just head to drinkelement.com/theprimalpodcast.

I want to talk about five things that people need to avoid when they want to get to a healthier diet, which is in every single food out there currently. Five things to avoid if they want to lose weight and lower the inflammation, burn belly fat. The first one is industrial starch. What is that and where is it?

Well, I just happen to have on my, I'm on my desk now, so I can show you. It's a powder starch. It's a powder. I mean, even if you look at certain products out there, right? On my, this side here, this is a regular, um, pop-tart. But over here, we have an organic pop-tart, right? All the organic ingredients, how beautiful that is. So this must be better, right? But if you look at it, they both have the same amount of starch. And, um, starch is, um, not listed on the label as starch. It's hidden. And first of all, what is starch? Starch is basically just kind of a chain of sugar molecules. That's all it is. And so when you cook it and process it, it becomes very, very, um, unstable where to the point where it can break down really fast. So starch is not really, it's not even sweet. So because it's in these chains, so what, so you can eat a lot of it without even knowing it's like oversweet. And an average person consumes close to 275 lbs of starch, um, a year versus 150 pounds of sugar per year. So they eat a lot more starch. And this industrial starch can spike your blood sugars higher than actual sugar. So it's hidden in modified food starch, modified corn starch, and maltodextrin. So these are just terms to just, you know, hidden starch. And this is why if you don't understand the label, then you won't, we won't pick it up. But we're consuming this starch. And I think it's even a worse problem than actual sugar because we eat more of it. It's used as a filler, and it spikes your blood sugars more than actual sugar. I have some carnival and keto approved foods that have industrial starch in it. So for example, some bacons can have this starch in it, shredded cheese, protein powders, flavored collagen powder, low carb breads, and flavored jerky. So even if it's carnivore, keto, all of this low carb, healthy, you can still have this, um, starch in it, and that can stop people from losing weight.

You're right, you're right. Because it's, um, they, even the Atkins bar, I mean, just read the ingredients on that. It's, this is why you can't go by, you know, keto on the label or low sugar, even, because a potato chip is, is no sugar. So you're like, "Oh, okay, it's no sugar." Yeah, but it's starch, which is a sugar. It's a hidden sugar. Okay, so that was number one. Number two is seed oils. You've done a lot of work on exposing the inflammation behind seed oils. Do you have any seed oils there on your desk?

Of course. That is the worst thing for our health. Why is that? Well, it says it's heart healthy, so it must be heart healthy. I mean, you take this very unstable, genetically modified seed, like corn or soy, and then you're going to put it through a machine to extract it. You got to use chemicals, right? Hexane, which is petroleum product. They have to, and then we have to deodorize it, decolorize it. And then you, you tell me, how does this stay, even they put it in liquid, they put it in transparent bottles, how does it stay be preserved? It's an very delicate oil. I mean, that's kind of a question. So industrial oils are very high in omega, something called omega-6, and that means it's inflammatory. Um, and these are make up 20, at least 25% of all of our calories. And for someone to say that, "Oh, it's safe because there's no studies that show that it's not bad." That doesn't mean it's safe. It's just like common logic. We consume way too much of this, and it's pretty deadly. And I mean, we can talk an hour just on this topic if you want. But it's, um, seed oils, um, like, here's a, here's a cell, okay? Inside of a cell, um, on the outside of your cell, you have membranes. Around all these little things on the inside, you have membranes. These membranes have different fats in them to allow things to go through the membrane. The problem with seed oil is they incorporate, they become part of your membranes, making your membranes basically very inflamed and brittle and rigid. And if we take a look at the surface area of a cell, and if we took all of your cells in your body and stretched out the surface area, it would be 90 acres of space. So we have a lot of incorporation of these seed oils into our membranes. And once they go in, it takes like a year and a half to come out. So this is a huge experiment we're doing. And I, I predict that this is going to be a class action suit with heart healthy. They're going to have to take that off because it's not true. It's not heart healthy. Uh, I, I predict that's going to happen. Um, but some people say, "Why is it on there for so long?" Well, look, look what happened to trans fats. It took 90 years to get rid of trans fats. And it's still in our, what about tobacco? How long did it take for that? Or all the other things that in our environment? So unfortunately, there's all sorts of different things industry uses to keep them on the market as long as possible to make the most money. Um, but if you're watching this, uh, I would highly recommend that you substitute your seed oils for something healthier. Okay, so just a list of the seed oils: canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, grape seed oil, rice bran oil.

Okay, next one is sugar. I think we know that sugar is going to cause weight gain and belly fat. But there is some types of sugars, like for example, artificial sweeteners, that also contribute towards weight gain. Can you explain that?

So there's two types of artificial sweeteners I want to talk about. One is artificial sweeteners like aspartame, things like that, Splenda. Um, these are things that, um, I think it's sucralose, that are made from chemicals, like adding chlorine to sugar. They're chemicals. And, um, they really have been shown to disrupt our microbiome and create a lot of problems. Um, but if we have, but then you have also the artificial sweeteners that are, it's called sugar alcohols, which are different. And you see them a lot in the keto field, like, um, xylitol, uh, erythritol, things like that. That's not made from chemicals. It's made from fermenting sugar. They ferment it, and it's a different process, and it's definitely healthier. U but it does in some people create some digestive problems. So you got to be careful with that. But artificial sweeteners are made from chemicals. In fact, um, back, I think it was in the early 1900s or even late 1800s, a chemist was researching with petroleum, and he got some on his hand and he tasted it, and it was sweet. And that was the start of artificial sweeteners, like from petroleum. And I'm like, "What?" So again, these things have been on the market for such a long time. So people, well, they must be safe because they're generally recognized as safe. Well, that was a loophole they're trying to get rid of now. But, uh, unfortunately, the regular consumer has been, you know, duped for so many years. It's now they're in a state of confusion. So that's kind of what you and I are trying to do is just to sort this out for people. So when we mentioned the starch, seed oils, and sugar, that is in processed packaged foods. So they use that combination to make it tasty and delicious. But I think people don't know that it's that combination that makes it really hard to lose weight. So if you eat whole, unprocessed foods, follow what we're going to talk about, they'll lose weight effortlessly. But I do want to mention two more things. Um, MSG, they add that to food, which is a flavor enhancer. You mentioned generally recognized as safe, but it's not safe for us.

Yeah, this is just a gen, when it has a gross, generally recognized as safe, that means that, um, the industry can actually just do their own studies and say, "Yeah, it's safe." So there's no third-party independent research on that. So you can't even go by that. Don't trust it. Um, but, um, MSG is what they give mice in the obesity, uh, studies, so that can fatten up a mouse really quick. And they can, it causes them to just eat a lot of food. And, um, even when you go to certain restaurants where they put a lot of MSG, boy, you could just, it's like, "Wow, this tastes so good, I can eat more." But then an hour later, you're hungry because it affects your blood sugars. So it's kind of a hidden way, a hidden, uh, thing that increases insulin, unfortunately. So you have to read the ingredients. Like, even in, um, cottage cheese, commercial cottage cheese, they add MSG. I'm like, "Really? Do you have to add that?" So I'm always reading labels.

Now, last one, artificial colors. Now, what do you think about this? Red dye 3, red 40, that can contribute indirectly towards belly fat as well because it causes inflammation.

I did a video on this relating to methylene blue, which is pharmaceutical grade, uh, food dye, which is a dye. It's like a blue dye versus the red dye, which is food grade. When something is food grade, it's, there's still impurities, there's heavy metals in there. That, so it's not as strict as pharmaceutical grade, which actually has very little impurities. So some of these drugs are pharmaceutical grade, they're, they have less chemicals than some of these additives that they're using. The colorings. But they found that if they add these colorings, people will think that they taste better, so they sell more. If you were to buy a box of cereal that, I don't know about this, but, um, if you bought a box of cereal that was, um, kind of didn't have a lot of colors, you wouldn't sell as much. It wouldn't be as appetizing. So, um, that's why they add all these multi-colors. And it, it, it actually increases appetite and flavoring, even though it's just a coloring. But these dyes are are toxic, and they're petroleum-based, and they're just, you know, it can really mess up your, your body. There's, it creates neural issues, inflammation, it's, um, it's a toxic, it's a carcinogen. Um, now, if we were to compare the dyes to the amount of industrial starches, this starch is way worse, okay? Because you're eating so much more of it with a little dye. And I never, I'm not saying that a little dye won't kill you, but I think if we just look at relative bad ingredients, it's the, it's the starches that are really bad, and then the seed oils, and then the sugars.

Absolutely. I just thought that added in because people probably don't know that they add dye to enhance the coloring of foods.

Well, if you do the organic, no dyes, pop-tarts, you know, you can get no dyes. But is that really much healthier? No.

But do you know how people could know if they're eating healthy food? They could get the Dr. Berg Junk Food Meter. This is a new app you have, which is brilliant, because people don't have to be an ingredient detective. Can you tell us more about that?

So I just, I just built this little app. It's a free app that you could just scan your, your foods and at the grocery store and in your, uh, in your pantry. And I just wanted to focus on three things, the three deadly things, which actually makes up the majority of all the junk food: you know, starches, um, sugars, and, and seed oils. So you, it just basically shows, uh, uh, how much of that is in that food. And it's going to shock the heck out of you because, um, when you start scanning these foods and you get that visual, uh, then you're going to be, it's like a, you're going to learn really quickly what to eat, what to avoid. So it's a great little cool, quick tool that you could scan and just see, see what's in your fridge. And so I, I, I go into people's houses sometimes and I'll do a scan of various foods, and they're just literally shocked of how much hidden sugar as starch is in the majority of their foods and the seed oils. And so now you can get a, a visual on it because if it's hidden on the label, then you're not going to know about it. So here you are going along eating what you think is healthy because it's hidden. So this kind of like puts a big huge flashlight on these root cause culprits to your health that you're not aware of.

Absolutely. So I'm going to leave the link for that app in the description of this episode. Let's move on to things that we can actionably do to lose some belly fat, lose some weight, lose a visceral fat. Okay, intermittent fasting. When you eat is very, very important. Let's first talk about why is it that every time you eat, you stimulate insulin?

Because there's a, in your small intestine, there's another hormone. I'm not going to get into the details, but it's basically just eating alone, it'll start to raise your insulin from a from the small intestine trigger. And so that, that, that's another hormone that will kind of indirectly raise your insulin. And then because you're, you're preparing your body because one purpose of insulin is to drive glucose into the cell. So it's preparing.

Your body to accept glucose. But the problem is, if you do that over a period of time, especially in large amounts, the body will start to go, "Wait a second, no, you're giving too much. Let's close the door." And now we have to create resistance of that insulin because you're doing too much. And that's called insulin resistance. So now you can't get fuel, you can't burn fat. So, so now, um, it's going to cause you to want more sugar to try to push that through. So it's a never-ending cycle.

Well, to the point where insulin resistance is literally behind 90% of chronic illness. Cuz when you have that, then you have this compensation of more insulin, and then you get more inflammation, and more disease, and more blood sugar issues. Um, and then now the question is, how do we correct this? Well, intermittent fasting will make that receptor for insulin more sensitive. So now we can undo this whole thing fairly quickly with doing not eating so often. So we recommend starting with just skipping your breakfast, right? And then do that for a while. And then just have the principle of, eat when you're hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. You know, versus on the, you having this habit thing where you're constantly just eating because everyone else is eating. And then, you know, you one day you might eat one meal, the next day you might eat two meals, but don't snack. Just eat more at that meal. Make sure you have like some more fat to make you more satisfied. And you're going to find just doing that is going to start fixing this insulin problem, your blood sugars, you start losing weight, and, um, have less inflammation. And it's probably one of the most potent things you did you can do for yourself, um, as a starting point, not even necessarily worrying about what you eat, but just doing intermittent fasting. Okay? And then, then start increasing the quality of food. And as you reduce your, your sugars and and starches, the cravings will go way down. And that's really why, why it works, is because your hunger and craving goes away when you do intermittent fasting. So it makes it easy to do.

I have a question about the intermittent fasting. If someone does that but doesn't change their diet, how much weight could they lose? They can lose a lot. Yeah. I've had people like even my producer, um, he will not change his diet. Well, he has recently, but, um, he just started doing intermittent fasting and even prolonged fasting. And, uh, he lost a ton of weight with that. So it's kind of like this, you get, take the average person, and they're overwhelmed. And you start telling them to do all these different things, they can't do it. So I say, "Well, what would be easier to do? Intermittent fasting or cut your carbs down?" And they go, "Oh, I can cut my carbs down, but I have to eat." I'm like, "Okay, good. Start with that." Or I can do intermittent fasting as long as I don't have to change my diet. Okay, fine. Start with that. So at least it's something better than nothing.

As Dr. Berg mentions, there are two really easy ways to lose weight: lowering the carbs or fasting. Now, if you choose to lower the carbs or go zero carb, you're going to get incredible results. You see, with a zero carb diet, also known as a carnivore diet, I have seen hundreds of success stories, people losing 50, 100, 200 pounds, while also reversing chronic conditions like heart failure, low thyroid, even diabetes. And I experienced this myself when I went carnivore five years ago. And the one thing that kept me on track, and also my community, was support through our carnivore doctors. You see, I had the same questions, questions about cholesterol, how much protein and fat should I be eating? And that's why I created a private carnivore community to help you get the best results with medical support, with carnivore doctors, and the ones that you see on this health podcast. So if you'd like to try the carnivore diet and get medical support, just head to go carnivore.com and try our free 14-day carnivore challenge.

I have to ask, there is a study that says that if you eat earlier in the day, it's better for weight loss and for your fasting results. Is that true? Uh, the window was 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Now, if you look at that study, it's with certain populations, certain, certain, uh, people. It's really hard to know if that's going to work for everyone. So it's, it's kind of like, I, I think it's, you can try it and see how it works for you. But honestly, um, some people, um, do better if they fast earlier in the morning. And with me, um, I, I did that experiment with myself. I ate earlier in the day, but I didn't eat later in the day. And, and that really, I really liked it because I slept better. I slept better. That was the thing. But, but then, um, I like to rotate it. And then some days I'm like, I, I just don't want to eat anything in the morning. I'm not even hungry. So why am I going to eat? So I'm just riding the wave cuz I, cuz I slept all night, I was fasting all night. And then what am I going to eat? So I think what, what you should do is ride the wave. Eat when you're hungry. Tell you, let your body tell you what to do. Then try not to eat too late. Maybe you could eat at 4:00. That would be awesome because then we got say 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. That's like five or six hours before you go to bed. I mean, that would be awesome. But the snacking at night is the killer for most people. Is just, that's going to raise, definitely going to keep you up at night urinating, um, because it's going to create insulin resistance. So, um, I think out of all the things, um, and especially if you compare snacking to like in 1950, they didn't, you know, your mother says, don't eat, don't ruin your appetite, right? Um, the snacking you haven't, I don't know if you've been to the grocery store recently, but they have entire aisles of snack food. I know it's hard to believe, um, but there's a lot of snack foods out there. And so we know people are eating them, but it's, it's the killer. It's, it's, it's terrible.

Well, I'm curious, um, I'm actually curious how many people incorporate fasting with a keto or a carnivore or a low carb lifestyle. So if you're watching, you should leave that in in the comments and let us know. Because the combination of the both is most powerful as opposed to just doing one or the other. But do what you can do. Let's move on to the next one.

I love this. Fat. And fat. The type of fat matters. If you want to burn fat, what is the type of fat that people should be eating to burn the most fat? Animal fat. That's the best. Animal fat, um, not seed oils. So animal fat is going to be the best fat. You know, and also, I, I like dairy fat too, like butter. Um, also, I think, um, the oil from fish is good. If you're eating the fish with the oil, like even like, um, I eat, I, I like the skin on there for the collagen, but also salmon has a lot of fat in it too. So that's going to help you with the omega-3 fatty acids. But, um, don't buy like lean hamburger, get the fattier type. Uh, I like this, I like sausage, red meat with the fat. I love lamb. I'm really into lamb. Uh, we have our own lamb on our, my farm. I never thought I'd like lamb that much, but lamb fat is the best in the world. I'm, I'm loving it. So, um, animal fat is super healthy for you. And we know it's true because they will tell you it's going to be the worst fat for your heart, right? There's like saturated fat is, is going to kill you. Then we know that's absolutely the reverse of that. Because the way that I, um, the universal truth for me is, whatever they are telling you, do the exact opposite, and that's going to work. I just found that to be true. You know, especially looking at Wikipedia. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, um, question about fat. So when it comes to eating fat, people ask, if I'm eating fat, how do I lose my body fat? Well, if you keep your carbs low, your body has no choice but to go after your reserve. If you're doing sugar, your body's going to use that for fuel and not burn your own fat. But when you're adding this, um, this fat and you're going low carb, you, you're going to, you, you become a fat burning machine. And you're not creating any scarcity. But, you know, here's the other thing about, and I want to, I'm glad you brought this point up because I'm not telling you you can have unlimited fat and just lose all the fat. It's, it's not real. So this is what I recommend you do. When you start this, increase your fat. Super satisfying. That's going to allow you to go a longer period of time without food. So you're going to do more fasting right off the bat versus lean things and low fat. And then let's say now you're actually, wow, I can do intermittent fasting. Everything's going great, right? Then maybe not add additional fat like the MCT oil and all this extra fat. Just eat the fat that normally comes within the food. Okay? And what'll happen? Your body will then go after your own fat more because it's going to burn, needs ketones. So it's going to have to go with that. And then, then you're going to hit your ideal goal. Okay? Then you're going to probably go, "Oh my gosh, now I don't want to lose any more weight." Will just increase your fat at that point and make the adjustment so you don't get too thin. Which is actually a better problem to have. Yes. So fat is a lever that you can pull that when you first start the ketogenic diet, eat more fat to get fat adapted. Then pull it back as you get fat adapted. And then your body will start to release its own adipose fat tissues.

I want to move on to protein. And the types of fat. Is the good fats? Butter, ghee, tallow, coconut oil, avocado oil. All the stuff that we're told not to eat, but that's the truly good stuff that we should eat. Let's move on to protein for fat loss. Why is that important? Well, first of all, most of your body is protein. And I found that when I started eating the highest quality protein, which is in red meat, which, which is exactly what they tell you to avoid. Uh, so we know it's true. Um, boy, is that nutrient, that nutrient, nutrient dense. Low carb. There's no carbs in red meat. And it's going to help you get into ketosis. And it's super satisfying. Now, what's interesting about meat is it does increase insulin just a little bit, but it also really spikes the opposite hormone, glucagon. So I'm not going to get too technical with you, but all you need to know is that you will never screw up your blood sugars by eating meat. Okay? Especially red meat. It's going to help you if you have low blood sugars or hypoglycemia. Uh, instead of eating sugar, eat meat. Protein. This is, this is like the most important, um, macro nutrient that you can have. Because think about it, how much, how much protein do you have in your body? All the neurotransmitters, like a lot of the hormones, all the tendons, the ligaments, the muscle, even in your bone, you have all this protein. So out of all the things that we need, we need a lot of protein in our diet. And most people do not get the quality. They do a plant-based protein, which is really crappy stuff. You need like high quality, nutrient-dense protein that's in red meat that has the trace minerals, has iron, has, um, all these other factors in the red meat that will, um, help you feel better and stimulate your metabolism. Um, so in fact, I, person, this is my opinion. I think out of all the things you can eat, the absolute most healthy thing you could eat in the world is red meat. And I did a whole video on this. And of course, I'm talking about grass-fed, grass-finished. I'm not talking about, you know, something you get at the, the convenience store.

It's quite interesting because you called, um, the superfood. What is then the number one food that you think is best if somebody wants to burn fat? The best fat burning food. The exact food that they tell you to avoid, which is red meat. Either beef, bison, buffalo, or, um, or lamb. And so, um, now if we take a look at all the different meats, you have all the grain-fed animals, and they have grain-fed beef and things like that. When you do grass-fed, you get a much natural, healthier animal. But here's the problem. 99% of all the grass-fed beef is actually grain-fed. And the way that all, most cows are raised on grass, but the last six months of their life, they bring them to the, uh, they, gra, they feed lot, unfortunately, where they give them a space of 24 square feet. That's like 1/16th of a parking slot. That in your car, they get no space. They're fed the waste product from ethanol, which is this terrible grain product with hormones. And, and so they can even put them grass-fed, right? Because it was grass-fed. So it's very, very, um, generalized as far as the specifics. But you want 100% grass-fed. That means they're grass-finish too. So now you're getting an animal that is like super healthy. Um, and of course, I have, I'm lucky because I, I have my own cattle on my property. And not just grass-fed, but they eat weeds, they live on a mountain, they get a lot of exercise, they drink water. So I can control that. But not everyone has that, you know, ability to do that. But you can go to the farmers market and get your own, your meat. But even when I went to Europe recently, I was like, they really care about the welfare of their animals. In America, it's so bad. It's like, so yes, it's a little more expensive. Um, but, you know, when we're, I think it's a good investment because what you could do is when you go fasting, you eat le, you're going to be saving so much money on the frequency of all the snacks that you ate, and the meals that you'll have. A little extra money that you reinvest in the quality of that food. So when you're doing 100% grass-fed, this, it's like, uh, it's like an Olympic athlete muscle that you're eating. And it's super healthy for you. And you'll feel better too. Um, when I eat it, I can tell the difference. So, um, literally, you could live on that. I mean, that's called carnivore. Yes, it is.

Okay, how much protein do we actually need to eat? It's really hard to figure that out because you have a lot of variables. You have your age, your ability to digest the protein, male, female, your genetics, all these things. I, I would just, I would just recommend, um, seeing how much you need and seeing how you feel and make those adjustments. You don't want to overdo it and eat too much. But I would say for an average meal, maybe 7 to 8 ounces of protein. I'm not talking about the weight of the steak. I'm talking about the protein itself in there. Actually, no, no, I am telling, I'm talking about the weight. So, so when you talk about the actual protein in steak, you have to realize like a lot of it's water, believe it or not. So you can't go by the weight of that's not the same as protein. So we're talking about the amount of amino acids inside that protein, which is different. Like even like an egg has seven grams of protein. So I, I would recommend in a meal for me, it'd be four eggs. That's perfect for me. Some people might need three, female, two eggs, you know? So it's one of those things where I would make some adjustments and try a little bit more, a little less, right around that, you know, per meal, seven to eight ounces, maybe six to eight ounces per meal. That's what I'd recommend. That's, and that's a good amount. So if we eat two to three meals a day, no snacks, that's a decent amount of protein.

Let's move on to carbohydrates. Do you think carbs block fat loss? They do. They do. They do block fat loss because what, what increases insulin is carbohydrates. How many carbs do we need to eat to get into a fat burning state? What's like the minimum, maximum? So the maximum, they say is less than 50 grams. Okay? But I, I recommend like less than 30 grams. If you're really, uh, struggling and want to speed up weight loss, bring it down to 10 to zero grams of carbs. Okay?

Do you think that's why people get good results on the carnival diet? Yeah, that's, that's a big. I mean, like you're, you're just taking that insulin equation, you're bringing it way down, like zero carbohydrates. And then you, if you do it, uh, with a wide range of of proteins and healthy fats, like eggs and fish and bone marrow and get your collagen, um, then you're, uh, providing the body with, um, a wide range of things to consume. Um, so yeah, and you're dropping inflammation, you're dropping potential things someone can be allergic to, especially irritate, you're eliminating a lot of things that could irritate the gut.

Let's talk about seven healthy foods, healthy foods that you need to avoid. They're not really healthy. Now, you mentioned this in this wonderful video again, if we eat these healthy foods that we shouldn't be eating, that is actually going to cause you to put on weight. Now, the first one is low-fat yogurt. Low-fat anything. Why should we avoid that? Yeah, because, uh, they're going to have to increase the carbs in there. So low-fat, check out the carbohydrates in the yogurt. Oh my goodness. In a little tiny yogurt, they have, I mean, if you think you're getting your probiotics, it's just a joke. You're getting a little bit of probiotic, which doesn't ever do anything with tons of sugar and tons of starch they put in there. And then they put preservatives in there. And the reason why they're taking out the fat, the main reason is because you can make much, the dairy farmers or the large industrial farmers can make a lot more money if they sell the cream and the butter and then sell the skim milk. So they've really set it up where they don't want you to have whole milk or more fat. It's just too expensive. But this whole mantra of low fat has been completely wrong for 50 to 60 years. So, um, when I buy yogurt or kefir, I want it whole fat. That's what I want.

Now, the next one might be a bit obvious, but, um, oatmeal and porridge. That I was told that was very healthy, but it's really not healthy for you. You had the instant oatmeal, and it's like, it's going to spike your blood sugar. And they add a lot of sugar to it. I will say my father in, in 1948, right? He, I looked at his school, um, picture, and these kids look super healthy. And I said, "What was it back then?" I said, "What did you have? Did you have cereal?" They, they did have oatmeal back then, right? But it was the slow cook one, right? Which is didn't have the sugar, didn't have all this other stuff. So obviously, if you, if you're eating that, you know, and you, and you didn't just screw up your metabolism, it probably was okay. You know, but nowadays, if with all the other additional things they add in there, it's not good. So you have the slow cook oatmeal versus the instant. I still don't recommend it because, um, there's, there's glyphosate on there, which is a chemical that you don't want to have in there. And there's other issues. But, um, if you're trying to get into ketosis, you don't want to have oatmeal. Okay?

So the next one, we mentioned which was Atkins products, or anything labeled keto or carnivore or low carb. Just don't eat it. You mentioned that one. Let's skip to the next one. Juice. Healthy juices. People are going to say, "But Dr. Berg, I make my juice at home. It's really healthy." Hey, listen, it's juice, right? It comes from, it's nature. Well, you're still refining it. You're taking out the fiber. So now we get a pure juice will spike your blood sugar. And, and of course, the juices that they sell at the store are preserved, they're cooked, they're pasteurized. So, um, I used to do the juicer's juices when I was a vegan. And, um, I had such a blood sugar problem because you're doing concentrated fructose, which is the, your only, your liver can handle that, and that creates other issues. Um, I would stay away from that. It's, it's, uh, there's the same amount of, uh, sugar as a soda in these juices, if not more. So, um, not good.

Next one is mayonnaise. Try to find a mayonnaise, um, that doesn't have soy oil. I mean, again, it's the seed oils. So you, this is, mayonnaise is a, a super great way to get a lot of hidden seed oil in your body. They have avocado oil, but some of that kind of tastes rancid. I'm still trying to find something that I can do. But you're going to have to bite the bullet and just make it yourself out of olive oil, you know, if you want to make something. Or because I guess just preserving it is, is a difficulty thing. But, but all these mayonnaise and these other condiments that just are filled with the seed oils that are going right into your membranes and replacing them with this rancid, uh, this, this, this fat that's just disgusting.

The next one is agave nectar and even raw honey. Um, this is quite controversial because people are going to say, well, like, for example, raw honey, that's very healthy. I get the Manuka, I get this best one. But again, it comes down to insulin. Yeah, I wouldn't put those two in the same category. Let me just talk about agave. Agave nectar is like 80% fructose. Boy, that's, that's going to really mess up your liver because, um, only the liver can metabolize fructose. So it's like, it's going to create a lot of problems. So agave is really bad. Now, honey, um, is, is been around for a very long time. I mean, think about this, like, was it 30,000 trips to the beehive to make one pound of honey? They have to work really hard. And then we take their food and we eat it. Um, and I'm talking, you, I'm not talking about in, like, fake honey, like real honey. Real honey has some therapeutic benefits for the, you know, sore throat, um, also antibacterial. It, it's a very interesting product that takes a lot of work to create that honey. I personally can't do honey because it affects my blood sugars. Um, some people, if they haven't screwed up their metabolism, can do a little bit. Um, but our bodies weren't designed to consume large amounts of honey every day, all year long. Maybe periodically here and there, we might have ran into a, a beehive that we got some honey, which was a rare occasion. But we're dealing with a population that has a lot of insulin problems. So they shouldn't start going, starting eating honey. It's not going to help them because of the, there's still sugar in there. Unfortunately, it's, it's better, but it's not okay to consume large amounts of honey.

Okay, let's move on to the foods that we should be eating. Foods and drinks. I've got 12 here, but there's more of them. Um, this is going to be under the classification of keto, carnivore, low carb. So people can follow. And it's, you know, what you're talking about, keeping the insulin low. First one is not a food, it's a drink. Why is coffee amazing if you want to lose weight? It actually has polyphenols and it's actually good for your b, your gallbladder, your liver. If you're having this organic coffee, which I do. I'm actually, um, addicted to coffee now. That, that's probably why I'm justifying it's good for you. And, and I think there's a lot of benefits to coffee. Believe me, it's like, I've never felt any bad effects from drinking coffee. Um, but, um, the dark roast is, uh, better than the medium roast because the way they dark roast it, it can actually have lower amounts of, um, mold toxins and things like that. Um, I do not, um, recommend just the regular coffee from Starbucks because it's just like, first of all, it's not organic. And, um, there's a lot of pesticides in coffee. So that's not good. But if you make your own or find something organic, uh, I think there's, there's some health benefits, especially to the liver. There's some data that shows it can help with the fatty liver, um, longevity, um, because you're getting these polyphenols and it's good for your microbes. But it does have caffeine. So I have one small cup of coffee in the morning. If some people do a lot, I, I was just got back from Italy, right? So you can imagine the amount of super strong coffee that people are consuming all through the day. I don't know how they survive on that. But my liver can only tolerate like one per day. And probably because I abused it. I used to drink Cuban coffee by the pot fulls all the way until midnight when I was in college. So maybe that's why that is. Dr. Berg approved that we can have coffee. That's fantastic. Most of us love coffee.

Okay, eggs. You eat four eggs a day. How is that good if you want to lose weight? It's not like a, uh, all the protein that people consume is from muscle, animal muscle. This is like a, a completely different type of protein. Um, there's more protein in the yolk if you look at the weight compared to the white. So eat the whole egg. It's a, it is the best source of bioavailable protein that you can eat. It goes right in. It helps with your amino acids. Plus it has choline, which is good for a fatty liver. Plus it's loaded with vitamin A for your eyes and your sinuses and your skin. It has zinc, it has biotin. There's all these great additional nutrients. It's literally like a multivitamin mineral product. Only thing it doesn't have is vitamin C. But other than that, it's, um, it's like a complete food. And, uh, this is why I consume four a day.

Okay, apple cider vinegar. Very interesting. Two tablespoons before a meal. Yeah. Put it in some water. Um, dilute it and then, uh, drink that down with a straw because apple cider vinegar is great to, uh, help stabilize blood sugars. It can help reduce cravings. But also, you can actually, it can be used as a fuel by your body. This is why I give it to my, my cows too. Put some in their water. And they like, I had, I have people come to my farm like, "What, why your cows this, the, uh, the hair is so shiny and it's just look, they look beautiful and healthy." I think it has to do with what that apple cider vinegar does to their digestive system. It helps them digest. And so it helps the microbes as well.

Okay, avocado. Why is that great? Well, for, for some people, it's good. Some people kind of bloat from it. But other people, um, it's a, it's a, it's a fatty vegetable type food. And, uh, it's just one way to get some additional types of, uh, uh, fats that, um, are not going to be in other foods. So it's, it's satisfying. And I like to put salt on it and make, um, put it on my salad. So I, I, I will, I'll consume them, you know, maybe several times a month. Now, I'm not, I refuse to spend three or $4 per avocado. I'm not going to buy those. I just, I don't care how good they are. Like at the store, it's like out of season. It's like, are you kidding me? Like that's crazy for this little tiny avocado. No, that's interesting.

I've watched a few of your, what you eat in a day, and you say that you eat the same thing. What, what do you eat in a day these days? Okay, so I live on a farm. I have access to my, um, my pork pork sausage. Okay, I'll eat that a lot. Okay. But sometimes I'll have beef or deer. So I'm kind, I'm eating that with each meal, right? As my main thing. And, I, I also have raw cheese. Found a place in Virginia that sells raw cheese. Or of course, I've had in Europe. I'd be doing, I'd be in heaven, right? It's hard to find raw cheese. So I'll do, or I'll do goat's or sheep's cheese. But I, I eat this cheese with every meal. I'll put mustard on it. I'll, I'll cook with an onion, a small onion. I either fry it or have it raw. Every single day. Maybe a little garlic and stuff. And then I will, um, one of those meals, I have two, we'll have, um, a salad. And no, I, I don't have 10 cups anymore. That was long ago. I might have like five cups of arugula. And I'll put extra virgin olive oil from Italy, this really high quality stuff. I'll put a little bit of, uh, vineg, um, basic vinaigrette. I put nutritional yeast on there and shred the real parmesan cheese, which is not parmesan from Italy, of course. And I'll shave that on there. And, so that's like really boring. I, I will also do a no sugar, little chocolate thing in the afternoon. Dark, very, very dark chocolate. I'll do that. And sometimes I'll do, um, this type of yogurt with elder. I don't know if you've heard of that. So yes, I'll do that yogurt. Um, and, uh, sometimes with pecan, sometimes without. But I don't do a lot of nuts anymore. So anyway, that's kind of what I'll do on a standard basis. And it's delicious. And, of course, I'll do one of those meals will have like four eggs. And, and sometimes bacon. But, you know, I calculated, of course, I have pigs and I make my own bacon, right? I calculated the cost, my bacon per pound. Take a wild guess. $1, $2. Try $2.44 a pound. If I were to sell it. Oh, because it's such high quality. Yeah. And I, and I don't sell my meat. I, I just, I, I kept my pigs too long, like for four years. And I calculated how much food I fed them. I'm like, I told, I said, "Karen, we just spent $49,000 on that one pig." And she was like, "What?" So it was very, super expensive. And I calculated the cost of that bacon per pound was, I'm like, "Wow, that's crazy." But anyway, it's, it's high quality. And if anyone watching wants to buy a pound, no, I'm not gonna. No way. That's so, that's so expensive. But okay, it's good to source good quality bacon because as we said, they can put some industrial starch in bacon. So look at the ingredients. Make sure everything that you're eating has got proper ingredients.

The next kind of foods in a class is to, um, eat protein-rich meals. Like for example, grass-fed meats, wild-caught salmon, full-fat protein in its whole source. That's going to help people lose weight. Yeah. And also the skin on the fish too. That's the collagen. Because you're doing protein and it's low carb.

I want to come back to that bacon for a second because, um, when you buy commodity pork, like for $3.33 per pound of bacon at the store, you have to realize that, and this is something that people don't realize, as soon as that baby pig gets weaned off the mother, they about, weigh about 40 pounds. They have to get that pig to about 250 to 300 lbs before they slaughter them. How do they do it? It goes to a feed lot. The space that an average pig gets is the size of a bathtub space. Their whole life. And they feed them the waste grains from the ethanol and some other cheap grains, which is ridiculous. And, and then hormones and steroids. And then they, they never get a chance to, um, to go and pasture and have anything else. So that's what you're eating. And then they, to make it smoke flavor, they put liquid smoke in there. And they're adding all sorts of things to that sugar, you know, and then they sell it to you really cheap. So when you're debating whether I should have pasture-raised from a small farmer versus save a couple bucks, you need to support the small farmer because it's really, we've got to stop that. It's just, it's so bad. And we need more transparency. And I, I think there is a connection between the health of the animal and the health of you when you eat it. What do you think? Absolutely. And that's why if you focus on ruminant meats, um, especially, that's why the red meat is such a superfood. You do want to get the grass-fed meat. But I'm just mindful. I do see in the comments, people that are on a budget. Even if you're on a budget, if you can buy the best quality ruminant meats possible, that's always better. And again, it's going to lower inflammation. All this is just a conversation on how we can lower inflammation.

The last one was just, um, bone broth and MCT oil. I do want to move to sea salt. That is very important to add to your lifestyle and diet if you want to lower inflammation and lose weight. Why? It's really wild. It's electrolyte. When you start doing, um, low carb and intermittent fasting, your body is going to dump a lot of, um, glycogen. And that's a, that's like a stored sugar in your liver. And with that comes a loss of fluid and electrolytes and things like that. If you don't add the salt back in there, um, as one electrolyte, you, you're going to get muscle weakness and cramps and fatigue. And so especially you do prolonged fasting, don't forget about the sea salt. Um, I made the mistake of, it was like, why am I getting all these tight muscles now? I'm taking enough magnesium and potassium. And, um, then I ate something and I added like way too much salt. And I noticed, oh my gosh, that created a huge change just by adding in that electrolyte. So I think we underestimate the amount of salt that we really need. Sea salt. So when you're doing low carb, keto, not high carb, because when you do high carb, you're going to retain sodium. But when you're doing low carb, you need a lot more sea salt than you think. Experiment with it. If you have any type of body issues, whether it's muscle related or fatigue or can't sleep at night, just add that sea salt in there, especially even before bed. And just notice the difference. It's significant. It actually lowers cortisol, helps you sleep, helps the muscles. And, uh, it's that little missing thing that's so easy to put back. We know it's true because what do they tell you to avoid? Absolutely.

What is the best exercise to burn fat, Dr. Berg? So there's a couple things. Long walks are great because it lowers cortisol. And people can lose weight if they go on hikes and they go long walks where they're they're not really raising cortisol, but they're actually kind of burning up the adrenaline and low stress. But long duration hikes, those are all really, really good for fat burning. I will say, uh, if you com, if you, um, combine that with periodic high-intensity interval training. And I, I think that the combination of those two will put you in a place where you're burning the most fat. And I like to flip tire up a hill. I, I'll do certain types of, um, high-intensity full-body workouts. And, uh, my body thrives on that. Some people don't like that, they do the jogging or whatever. But the high-intensity thing is, it's, it's an easy workout because it's short, but it's high intense. It's going to help your muscles. It'll help, um, burn more fat. But most of that fat will occur when you're sleeping one to two days later. So high-intensity interval training to burn fat and long, slow walks, not the jogging, again, opposite to what we have been told.

The next thing I want to talk about is, um, autoimmune issues and thyroid issues. Very indirect, but that can, if you don't fix autoimmune issues, it's going to affect your ability to burn fat. Yeah, because of inflammation. And inflammation can keep you insulin resistant. So one of the secrets, Dr. Core from Brazil, has a protocol for autoimmune. It's like, he has a 90% success rate. And it's using high doses of vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 also helps your blood sugars. It helps insulin resistance. Most people are deficient. They're not getting enough sun. An average person, as a maintenance, needs 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3. It's like 20 minutes in the sun. But because of where we live, well, even like in Dubai, right? You have people that are, you have all this sun, but they're, they have these different, um, the clothing cuts, the sun down. They're the most vitamin D deficient. And they had the most diabetes because they're eating all the sugar as well. Because I've been there and I know their diet. Deadly combination. So vitamin D, super, super important. That's another topic. I have like, I think 289 videos on. We can talk more about that. But yeah, so autoimmune, sometimes to put people in remission for, with, you need to go up, up to 50 to 60 to 70 to 80 to 100,000 IUs of vitamin D3 every day to put a person in remission.

Final question. We alluded to fast. That insulin is the main thing that we have to lower to burn fat. Let's talk about numbers for fasting insulin. What is too high? Well, if you start doing, you know, check with your doctor on this, but, you know, like mine was two, so that's nice and low. I haven't done a lot of experiments with people with, to look at their numbers to tell you because here's the problem, like trying to even get doctors to do an insulin level. And so, and even I was in practice, I couldn't get many doctors. So, so people will kind of, they'll just, uh, they'll find a doctor they can work with and start doing that evaluation. And you want to bring it down below five. What's your experience on that? Um, so anything over 10. So I've had clients that I've worked with were in my, uh, carnivore keto group. Some of their insulin levels were like 50, then it went down to 20. Um, and then anything, they say the doctors I work with, anything over 10, um, it's still a bit high. If it's under 10, it's pretty good. The sweet spot is two to five. It's very good. And if you go carnivore, it gets to that. Carnivore keto, it gets to that area, especially if you're metabolically inflexible. So if we look at, um, just ketones, how to get your ketones higher, right? We have to lower that insulin. That's what we're trying to do. Is trying to lower the insulin, right? So you start going low carb, and then your ketones might come up to like one or two. And then, then we, exercise. Oh, three, maybe four if you're lucky. If you do a lot of exercise. And then we start doing more fasting. And then prolonged fasting, where you're not eating for 72 hours. Now we get up to five, right? Maybe six. It, so these are all things too that we can lower insulin, increase ketones, and it's a direct relationship. So when we're talking about lowered insulin, we're really talking about higher ketones. Trying about if you're trying to increase your ketones, just lower insulin. So this is why going 100% low, like no carb, which is carnivore, you're going to put a lot of support in in doing what I just said. And then if you add exercise on top of that, and then fasting on top of that, make sure you have your electrolytes too. That's very important. Then you, you have things that you can do to control your own health. There's always something you can do to improve it. And so what we're trying to do here is give people out of tips so they can actually, uh, they might not be aware of a tip that they could, you know, like a, a different hack that we just reminded them of or told them about that they can now be successful.

Was there any tip that I missed? Cuz I, I think I've covered everything. Uh, was there anything that we didn't speak about? I think, I think it's kind of like, um, it's not a tip, but just don't learn from your own mistakes and experience. Learn from the mistakes of other people in this community, this large community. Um, you have amazing data based on lots of experience that you can just piggyback off of. Why, why do you have to make, you know, go through the process that I did to try to figure it out? Why don't you just, you might not have a problem now, but eventually you will because it takes time. Just learn from our mistakes so you don't have to make them. How about that? Absolutely.

Dr. Berg, thank you so much for your time. You are a wealth of information. Um, and all the work that you do has helped millions, or even billions of people out there. So thank you so much. If people want to find you, where can they find you? Uh, one of my YouTube channels. You can go to, just search Dr. Berg. You can find me or my website, drberg.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And I'm sure we're going to see you very soon. My pleasure. Thank you for joining me today on this episode with Dr. Eric Berg. If you'd like to know more about the Primal Podcast, you can also find me on other social media accounts. I'm on Instagram and on Twitter under the name of the Primal Podcast. And if you love this episode, please consider subscribing. That's an excellent zero-cost way to support what we do here. Now, if you love this episode, you can also watch another similar episode with Dr. Paul Mason. He'll talk about the easy way to lose weight without counting calories, why fiber never works, and why you don't need to exercise intensely if you want to lose stubborn fat. Finally, thank you for your interest in root cause healing, and I'll see you next.