Transcription
I want to tell you something I figured out about 20 years ago that completely changed my body. Back in 2007, I thought I had a willpower problem. That was the story I told myself because no matter what I tried, and I tried a lot, I was hungry all the time, like actually hungry. I'd eat a healthy breakfast and then I would be starving by 10:00 a.m. I'd think about my next meal during my current meal. I'd open the fridge at 11:00 p.m. Not because I needed food, because something in me was demanding it. And the whole time I'm sitting there thinking, "What the hell is wrong with me? Why can't I just stop?" Then, something happened. I took five specific foods out of my diet. Not I ate less of them or I ate them in moderation. I took them out completely. And within the first 30 days, I lost 19 lb. Yes, 19 lb. And here's the part I really want you to hear because this is the thing that nobody told me. The cravings stopped first. The weight came off because the cravings stopped. So, check out these photos of me back then, before my transformation. I wasn't broken. I wasn't lazy. I wasn't a person with no discipline. I had five foods in my kitchen that were quietly hijacking my hunger hormones, and the second I pulled them out, my body remembered what it was supposed to feel like. So, if you ever felt like you've been fighting your body around food, this lesson is for you. I'm going to walk you through those exact foods, those five foods that I took out of my diet, why they kept me trapped, the studies on human beings that actually explains what's going on, and what you can realistically expect when you cut them out, too.
Okay, real quick, before I get to those foods, I have to break something for you because if you don't get this part, the rest won't land. It won't stick. For about 40 years, we've been taught that weight gain is simple, calories in versus calories out. Eat less, move more. End of story. And if you can't do that, well, that's your problem. You're just a glutton. You're lazy. You don't have enough discipline. Well, that story is incomplete. And in some cases, it's downright wrong. So, one of the things I learned is that I never had a weight problem. If you're watching this, listening to this, and you have 50, 100, 200 extra pounds on your body, you don't have a weight problem. You have a weight symptom. The real problem is hormones and inflammation. So many people think they need to lose weight to get healthy. That's what your doctor tells you, or your TikTok nutritionist. Lose weight to get healthy. That's not how the body works. We don't lose weight to get healthy, we get healthy to lose weight. Calories are a distraction. In 2019, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health named Kevin Hall ran what is still considered one of the cleanest studies on this topic ever conducted. He took 20 adults, locked them inside a research center for a month, and fed them two different diets. One was made of ultra-processed foods. The other was made of minimally processed whole foods. Same calories on the menu. Same protein, same fat, same fiber, same sugar, same salt, same everything. And he told them they could eat as much as they want or as little as they wanted. Here's what happened. On the ultra-processed diet, the same people, same people ate 500 extra calories a day, and they gained weight. Then they switched. Same people now whole food versions of the same meals, they lost the weight back. That wasn't a willpower difference. That was a food difference. The food was changing them. Their hunger, their pace of eating, their fullness signals. The food was changing the hormonal response. It's not the food, it's not the calories per se, it's the hormonal response after you consume the foods and the calories. And the wild part is that many of these individuals didn't even realize they were eating more. Their bodies were just chasing something. Satiety, maybe, or some signal that never came, and they kept eating to fight it. That was my life. So, when I get to these five foods right now and tell you which ones to cut out, I don't want you to hear that stuff's bad for you. I want you to hear that that stuff was engineered very intentionally to keep you hungry because human beings are the only species in the world smart enough to create their own food and dumb enough to actually eat it.
Let's get into those five foods I cut out. The first one was liquid sugar. This one's a big one, and it's not what you think. This one did the most damage to me during my younger life. Yes, I'm talking about sodas and sweet teas, but I'm also talking about fruit juices, whether it's green or actual fruit juice, even the 100% real ones, cold-pressed organic. And also, sports drinks, energy drinks. And the one that gets the most people now in 2026, the worst ones, those giant flavored coffee drinks. Yeah, the vanilla iced lattes, the caramel cold brews, the pumpkin whatever in the fall. Some of those drinks have more sugar than a slice of cake. They don't just taste like it. Here's why this category is so sneaky. There's a researcher named Richard Mattes at Purdue who's been studying this for decades, and he showed something that should be on a billboard. Your body doesn't register liquid calories the same way it registers solid calories. When you drink 300 calories of sugar, you don't eat 300 fewer calories later. You eat almost the same amount you would have eaten anyways. You see, the drink doesn't make you full. It just stacks. Then there's their Harvard Nurses' Health Study. Over 50,000 women tracked for years. The women who went from drinking sugary drinks once a week to once a day ended up consuming an average of 358 extra calories per day. And surprise, surprise, they gained weight. Now, if you do nothing else from this lesson, do this. Cut out the liquid sugar. If you have coffee, drink your coffee black. If you have tea, make it unsweetened plain tea. And you can even have sparkling water with lemon instead of sweetened beverages. If you just do this for 2 weeks, you could come back here and let me know how much this has improved your afternoon cravings and your weight loss. Because what happened to me? Gone. My afternoon cravings were gone. I lost 19 lb in the first 30 days. The 3:00 p.m. crash I used to fix with a snack, it stopped showing up. Liquid sugar isn't a treat. It's a delivery system that bypasses the fullness signals that your body has.
Food number two. Ultra-processed breads and tortillas. The bread that most of us eat in this day and age is very different than what your great-grandmother ate. She would not recognize this bread. Pull a loaf off of your normal grocery store shelf, flip it over, and read the ingredients. You'll find dough conditioners, emulsifiers, soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, things ending in "ate" that I can't even pronounce, and flour that's been stripped down so far that it behaves like a more like a sugar than a grain. This stuff is engineered for one thing. Not health, it's engineered for shelf life. Not your blood sugar, not your fullness, not your gut. I used to eat sandwiches all the time at lunch. I used to always go to Subway as well, I remember. And I would have the bread, the deli meat, the mayo, done. And then I was starving by 2:30 p.m. Every single time. You see that bread spikes your blood sugar fast. Insulin spikes to catch it, then the blood sugar crashes down, and now my brain was screaming for more food because it thinks I'm running out of fuel. I wasn't running out of fuel. I just ate a sandwich, but the signal's the same. Dr. William Davis has research in his book Wheat Belly showing that two slices of heart-healthy whole grain wheat bread can spike your blood sugar as much as a 12 oz can of soda or a Snickers bar. There's a concept called the second meal effect when what you ate at one meal determines how hungry you'll be at the next one. Ultra-processed bread basically guarantees you'll be hungry at your next meal. It's like a forward-loaded craving. Now, the fix isn't fancy. If you choose bread, go with sourdough bread that's properly fermented. You could also go with sprouted grain bread. It's not the healthiest option, but it's a much better option than most bread. Or honestly, what I did and what I recommend you do, for 30 days remove all bread from your diet and see what happens. I'll tell you what happened to me. I stopped having that mid-afternoon crash and it changed my entire relationship with my lunch.
Food number three, boxed pastas and processed comfort foods. This category covers like the mac and cheese boxes, the frozen dinners that say comfort, the boxed hamburger helper, the chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs. All of it. The hyperpalatable, hyper-engineered, hyper-soft foods that you can throw down in 8 minutes flat. This is the category where Kevin Hall's NIH study really comes into focus. Because remember, 500 extra calories a day just from eating this kind of food. And here's what was happening on a more recent version of the study he ran. People were eating about 1,000 extra calories a day when the food was both ultra-processed and hyperpalatable. 1,000. Not because they were greedy, but because the food was designed to be eaten that way. There's a phrase in the research world called hyperpalatable. It just means these food engineers combine salt, sugar, fat, and starches that you don't find in this sort of combination in nature. Your brain has no defense against it. It doesn't know how to stop. You see, real food has friction. A baked potato is filling. A bag of chips made from baked potato is not. If you looked at a baked potato or a potato, I should say, at the grocery store and look at the ingredient list, what do you see? One ingredient, potato. When you buy the potato chips and look at the ingredient list, what do you see? 30 ingredients, half of them you cannot pronounce. See, these foods do something really nasty. They overstimulate the reward centers of your brain while underfeeding the nutrient part of your body. So, you get the dopamine hit. You feel satisfied for about 45 minutes, and then you're hungry again because your body still didn't get what it actually needed, protein, fiber, real fat, micronutrients, none of it. When I took this whole category out, and I mean, really out, not just I'm going to have a little bit, I got them out of my diet completely. When I did that, I stopped looking in the refrigerator or pantry at 11:00 p.m. My cravings went away at night because I was finally giving my body food it recognized.
Food number four, seed oil-loaded dressings, sauces, and condiments. Most of the dressings, sauces, mayonnaises, and condiments on the grocery store shelf are built around industrial seed oils, soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, canola, sunflower. They are produced and refined at high heat with solvents, and they're processed, they're reheated, and during the processing, they produce something called oxidation byproducts. Basically, these are compounds your body has to deal with, things that didn't exist 100 years ago in human diets. I remember reading a study that actually put in my last book, Metabolic Freedom, from a toxicologist, Dr. Martin Grootveld. He analyzed french fries that were cooked in these seed oils, and he found that about 25 french fries, which is equivalent to a large order of french fries from like McDonald's. These 25 french fries produced the same amount of aldehydes as smoking 25 tobacco cigarettes. That means essentially one french fry or one potato chip or one serving of a salad dressing with seed oils is kind of equivalent to a tobacco cigarette smoked when it comes to the aldehydes that are produced. Aldehydes are carcinogenic cancer causing. And what's crazy is that these seed oils are in 80% of our food supply. So, don't fall for the front of the label marketing claims. Read the ingredients list. You want to avoid the following. These are the ones. These are the eight fats with a ninth bonus here that I got out of my diet that lowered inflammation, lowered insulin, and helped me burn fat. Okay, write these down. You have corn oil, canola oil, canola's called rapeseed oil in the UK, cottonseed oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil, grapeseed oil, and I even stopped taking fish oil because that in most cases is inflammatory. I swapped them for saturated fats and monounsaturated fats. These were fats that are anti-inflammatory, stable, not processed, very clean for the body. So, these are the good fats. I made the swap here and I want you to make this swap. Avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, grass-fed ghee, beef tallow, and duck fat. That simple swap goes a long way. Now, it's very tricky because when you buy your salad dressings, your condiments at the grocery store, it's going to have these inflammatory fats. So, some of the clean companies out there that I swapped to that are seed oil free are going to be Primal Kitchen, Chosen Foods, and there's a few others out there that are changing all the time, so just make sure you read the ingredients list.
Food number five that I removed from my diet, which is actually a liquid, was alcohol. I know, nobody wants this one. I didn't want this one, but I had to learn the hard way. Here's what alcohol actually does to your body. And I want you to understand this really carefully because the science is brutal. Back in 1992, there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine where they gave healthy people a moderate amount of alcohol and then measured fat metabolism for the next several hours. That is your body's ability to burn fat, the actual oxidation of stored fat for fuel, your belly fat, your visceral fat. And they found that it dropped by approximately 70% 4 hours. 70%. Think about what that means. You can do everything else right that day, train hard, eat clean, hit your protein, and then you have two drinks at dinner, and for the rest of the night your body is essentially it stops burning its own fat. It's busy dealing with the alcohol because alcohol is a toxin to your body and your liver has to prioritize getting rid of it over anything else. Oh, but it gets worse because there's separate research from a guy named Youmans. I don't know if I'm saying his name correctly, but it's shown that alcohol increases appetite. I think we all know this. But we we understand it makes you hungrier. Research is is backing this up. It lowers the part of the brain that tells you stop eating. So alcohol is doing three things all at once. Number one, it's empty calories. Number two, it's shutting down fat burning. And number three, it's making you eat the exact foods you're trying to get rid of in your diet. Look, you don't have to quit forever, but maybe do it for 30 days and watch what it does for your health and for your fat loss. I know it was tremendous for my transformation.
Okay, I want you to just take a breath for a second. If you're watching this, you're listening to this, and a bunch of stuff is clicking for you, the late night cravings, the 3:00 p.m. crash, the can't stop once you start thing, the sugar pull, the I just ate but I'm still hungry feeling. I need you to hear something. This was never a character flaw. That was a biological response. Your body was doing exactly what it was designed to do in an environment full of foods disguised and created to override your fullness signals. You don't beat that with willpower. You can't out-discipline a system [clears throat] that was built to outsmart your discipline. You beat it by removing the foods that were creating the cravings in the first place. Once those foods are out, the cravings calm down, usually within a week. And once the cravings calm down, the weight comes off without feeling like it's a daily war. That's the whole game.
Now, once you pull all these bad stuff out of the diet, the question I get asked all the time is, "Okay, but what do I actually eat instead?" Because if your old breakfast was a bagel and flavored coffee, you can't just delete that and just eat air. The single biggest thing that helped me and still helps me now stay lean at around 12 to 14% body fat year-round at the age of 41 was this. Getting enough protein. Because when you actually hit your protein target, and almost most people don't even get close, your hunger hormones, they quiet down. There's research from Heather Leidy at Missouri using fMRI brain scans showing that when people eat a high-protein breakfast, the reward centers in their brain that drive food cravings later in the day are measurably less active. They're not white-knuckling it. Their brain just stopped asking for more food in the first place. The problem is a lot of people struggle to hit their protein requirements every single day. Now, it's always best to get your protein from whole foods, ideally animal-based foods like chicken and beef and eggs and fatty fish. And the number that I started hitting that really helped me overcome these cravings, the same number I give to all my students all across the world is this right here. 1 g of protein per pound of your ideal body weight. So, if you currently weigh, I'll give an example, if you currently weigh 195 lb, but your goal weight, your ideal body weight is 145 lb, then you want to aim to get 145 g of protein per day. For a lot of people, that takes a lot of effort. It's hard to do. So, that's where something like a high-quality protein shake can be a valuable asset here. This is something I started doing. However, the problem with most protein shakes out there is that it falls under the category of a processed food for most of them. So, I've done a lot of research and I found a clean source called Equip Foods protein. I mean, it's got minimal ingredients. It uses grass-fed, grass-finished beef isolate. There's no soy. There's no artificial sweeteners. There's no inflammatory seed oils. There's no junk fillers. And they also do third-party testing to make sure it's contamination-free. And I've read those reports from the company. Like, it actually tastes pretty damn good. The one I have here is cookies and cream and it tastes like like cookies and cream. So, I usually just use a scoop of this with either a cup of cold water and an ice or I'll put it in my coffee or I'll have it sometime during the day to kind of fill in those protein with yogurt. You may have seen some videos I've done on that topic. Anyways, if you want the protein powder I'm using and recommending, you could head over to the first link in the description box below or scan the QR code on the screen. It'll take you to this page. You can see their prime protein. They've got a whole bunch of different flavors. Uh chocolate, vanilla. The one I have is cookies and cream. I'm going to actually add I love vanilla, too. I'm going to add that to the cart. You could subscribe and save or try once. You do get a discount exclusive to my community. Uh that's automatically applied. And if you're somebody who's trying to take care of your skin, your hair, your nails, your joints while you lose the weight, because losing your weight in your 40s is not the same as losing weight in your 20s, then you might want to consider their collagen, which stacks very nicely with it. I actually take take both. So, they have a grass-fed collagen. Uh vanilla is what I also get. I'm going to add that to the cart. And then you simply check out. As I mentioned, the coupon code is automatically applied. So, if you want to supplement with a high-quality protein, that's an option. But like I said, eat protein, eat whole food source protein. So, for me, when I follow these tips, I lost 19 lbs in those first 30 days. A lot of that in the beginning was water weight and inflammation. See, when you stop eating ultra-processed food, your body lets go of a lot of held water and stored sodium for the first 10 days. So, if you start this protocol, you might see 5, 7, even 10 lbs of weight come off your body in the first week. It's not fake weight loss. It's It's substantial. It's significant. Don't discount it. But as you fully commit to this and go and do it for 30 days, I've seen people lose up to 44 lbs in 30 days, like John Miller. Some people will lose 20 lbs. But you're not chasing the weight loss. You're focused on health. Remember, you get healthy to lose weight, not the other way around. But it's not even the number on the scale that's the headline here. The headline is what stops happening. The craving stop. The 11:00 p.m. fridge raid stops. The brain fog stops. The mood swings around food will stop. That's the actual transformation. The weight loss is just a side effect of you getting healthier.
And hey, before you go, I've got something I want to share with you. You're going to be the first person to know about this. I have a brand new book coming out called Keto Flex Revise. It's being released July 21st. In this book, I give you the exact step-by-step protocol. It's a 45-day system to burn fat instead of sugar, healthy food swaps, 50-plus fat-burning recipes, and it's customized for men versus women, and women who are cycling versus women who are postmenopausal. It's the advanced version of my latest book Metabolic Freedom. And when you order today, in any format, paperback, Kindle, Audible, Spotify, and I narrated those audios myself, we're going to give you some free chapters as a free download as soon as you pre-order the book. So, head over to the link in the description box below, the second link down below, or head over to ketoflexbook.com, or simply scan the QR code to pre-order and get your free bonuses right away.
And lastly, thank you for getting to the end here, and if you're watching, listening to this, and you're still beating yourself up, I want you to let yourself off the hook. The problem was never that you loved food too much. The problem is that the food was designed to make you hooked on it. Your body was reacting exactly the way it was built to react. It responded to a signal. Pull the signal out, and the response goes away. That's the whole shift. That's the whole lesson. If something clicked for you here, share this lesson with somebody you know it can make a huge difference in their health journey. I want to thank you for watching, thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one. And hey, if you enjoyed this lesson, I just published a video on a miracle liquid, a fat, a highly anti-inflammatory fat that could double, in some cases triple, your results with your health. This video's gone viral. You're going to want to check this out. Here's a clip from that lesson, then click the video on the screen coming up in a few seconds, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Flip your body into healing mode in just 1 day. [music] This changes everything you thought you knew about olive oil, and it could change your life. Most people think olive oil is just something you drizzle on your salad or cook with occasionally. But when you use it the wrong way, you're completely wasting one of the most powerful meta-