The TOP FOODS You Need To Eat & Avoid To LOSE WEIGHT & Burn Body Fat | Dr. William Li

How important is fruit in this factor? Or does fruit have too much sugar spiking, which I've heard from some nutritionists over the last couple of years that I've interviewed where you take a handful of grapes and the glucose monitor spikes through the roof. Is that really healthy for metabolism and living longer? Or how do we manage our fruit intake so that it's not too much? All right, so there's a kind of a myth out there that the sweet fruits, the sugar in fruits, actually are just as bad as sugar in candy, all right? And that's not necessarily the case. First, candy is just sugar and other stuff. Fruits are nutrient-dense, which means that not only does it have sugar, but it's got all these other polyphenols and dietary fiber and other aspects of small molecules and other things. Other natural chemicals are actually good for our body. Most of those, net-net, actually benefit us, okay? For the average person who eats reasonable amounts of fruit, even a sweet fruit like a mango, which is one of the sweetest fruits that I know of, totally fine. When you eat it, it'll taste really sweet. Or pomegranates, for example. Your blood sugar will spike, but I want to come back to that in a second. But you're also getting all these other polyphenols that actually will work on different parts of your body, including your metabolism, to benefit you. And so, and by the way, our body needs sugar. Our brain consumes sugar like crazy, even outside of the diet, outside of candy. And so we actually need actual sugar. If we don't have it, our body will make it, all right? So this is the whole thing. In the wellness space, in the health and wellness space, there's sort of two categories that people veer towards. They tend to make something a hero or a demon, all right? And I think that's really, the God is in the details. We need to know these details. And that actually allows us to be more reasonable. And so for me, eating fruit is perfectly reasonable if you don't have diabetes and, okay, spiking sugar, sugar spikes, all right? If you're an average, normal person, no problem. Your body is fully capable. Spiking sugar is kind of like character assassination of the food. It actually doesn't matter. Your body is supposed to have a sugar spike and then it'll actually take it down. It's just drawing energy into your cells. What I tell people is like, spiking sugar is basically like what happens in your car when you're filling it with gas. Gas tank's gonna go up, all right? But then you're gonna burn it down and your body actually stores it. So I wouldn't get wigged out about, people that are monitoring moment to moment their sugar spikes, that's interesting, but it's less important than overall what actually happens. If your body's unable to take down that sugar, that's a problem. That's a problem. The spike isn't the problem. It's the long tail of your body's, if your insulin's not working, you're not sensitive to insulin, or if your metabolism's not working, you can't take that energy in. Now you got a problem. Yeah. How do we maximize our metabolism to take in the sugar spikes of life? That's a good question. The way to actually do it, honestly, is the, not only what we eat, which matters a lot, but how we eat and when we eat. So you know that, okay, let me give you the analogy, and this will actually get a little bit into the topic of intermittent fasting, which we'll talk a lot about. I like to explain metabolism in a very, very simple way. Our body is just like a car. When you're driving your car, you got an engine, you check out the fuel tank. When the fuel tank is running low, pull over to the filling station, take out the nozzle, fill up the tank. All right, when the tank is full, click, nozzle stops putting gas in, put it back, get back in the car and drive off, and your gas tank is full. Our body's the same way. Our body's an engine. It runs, okay? And when we're low on fuel, all right, and fuel for us comes from our food, what we gotta do is pull over to the dinner table or to the restaurant or to the refrigerator in order to load up on fuel. Now, our fuel comes from food and we call it calories, but I tell people, don't get fixated on the word calories. You don't need to count every calorie you actually have. All right, the quality of the fuel matters, for sure. We talked about that a little bit, all right? So you do want the highest quality of fuel that you can put in your body. Just like if you actually put crappy fuel in your gas tank, you know, your car's gonna run, but eventually over 10 years, five years, 10 years, you're gonna be screwing that engine, all right? Your car's not gonna run as well as if you took care of it. That's kind of like the analogy for our body. All right, so how do you actually maximize your metabolism? Our metabolism is how our body takes the fuel, the food, energy from food, moves it in ourselves, and then allows our engine to power it up to do whatever it is we're doing. Blinking, speaking, jogging, running, lifting, whatever it is you're doing, all right? That's what our metabolism actually is. Now, you put food in your mouth, that's fuel. Your body senses the fuel, produces the hormone insulin. Insulin actually takes that fuel in, right? You put it into your fuel tank. Your fuel tank, your body's gonna run on it, but then any extra goes into your little fat cells, your fuel tank, your gas tank, no big deal. And the little gas tank gets a little bit bigger because it's filled with fuel, all right? And then when you stop eating and the fuel gets loaded up, the insulin levels would go down, all right? And then you're off, you're driving away from the filling station. That's simple, all right? Now, our body is rigged so that when we are putting fuel into our system, eating, all right? It's like putting gas into our tank of our car. You can't burn the fuel. It doesn't want to burn the fuel. When you eat, it doesn't wanna burn it. Right, right, because it makes sense. You wanna actually load up, not deplete. You're storing up, all right? And that's like your car in the filling station, you turn off your engine when you're filling up your tank, all right? Rest. And then when you're filled up, then you can drive off again. So we shouldn't be moving while we're fueling. Shouldn't be. Can, you can, but you shouldn't be. It's an override, right? So we can override that stuff, but you shouldn't be. So you're asking about how to optimize it. How do you take advantage of what your body's hardwired to do? Now, think about it. When you're at the gas station and you're filling gas in your tank, when the tank is filled, there's a click, no more fuel comes out. Imagine what would happen if there was no click. The tank would fill up. It would come out of the tank, overflow, down the side of the car, around the wheels, pool around your feet, and you are standing in a dangerous, flammable mess, right? Yes. Now, when we eat food, we don't have a clicker to stop us from putting food in our mouth, okay? We should. We should, but we don't, all right? And so what happens is when we actually overeat, okay, eat too much, so this is the how. Eat too much, what winds up happening is we're putting a ton of fuel into our system. Now, there's no leaking of the food out. It won't pool down around our feet. Our body quickly stuffs it, right? So it has all the energy it needs. It stuffs some excess into the existing fat cells. Existing fat cells get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. All right, oops, now you filled them up. They're like tight water balloons, about as big as they'll get. Now the body still got fuel to store. What does it do? It makes more fat cells, and now it fills those up, and then makes more, fills those up. Now you can see why when you overeat, you have too much fuel, why you gain weight, and you develop too much body fat. Now, what happens is that fat grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger over time. It's a big, it goes from a little bit to a bigger mass. It needs a blood supply, okay? So it actually reaches out to try to grab more blood vessels to feed it, but if you're overeating, and the fat is expanding so fast, because you're just storing fuel, and you're not able to, it's not able to get blood vessels fast enough, or blood supply fast enough, guess what, the middle of it starts to die. It's called hypoxia, and that middle of the fat behaves like a tumor. It starts to die, and when it dies, it becomes inflammatory. This is why when you have too much body fat, it becomes a dangerous inflammatory situation, just like if you're standing in that filling station with the gas overloading, spilling out over on your feet. And what happens when the body stores too much body fat, and we have that much inflammation in the body fat? Yeah, well, first is it derails your metabolism. All the hormone, natural hormones. We should talk about what fat normally does, because that's another big myth that has been, you know, that science has actually started to help us rethink what body fat actually is. But basically, our body fat normally protects us. It's a cushion, it's a space heater. It'll burn extra energy, but it also is an organ in the body. I don't know if people don't realize that. Fat is an organ. Like your pancreas, like your liver, like your kidneys, your fat is now really, truly an organ. It's an endocrine organ, which means that it secretes hormones, all right? The three hormones, it secretes 13 hormones that we know of, but the three that are most important, one is leptin, which basically is a volume switch to your brain for your appetite. When your fat makes leptin, it tells you, you know what, slow down there. Hey, buddy, you're not that hungry. All right, so it turns it down. So the volume goes down. So you need that. I got more of that. I need more of that to turn it down for me. Now, the other hormone it makes is called adiponectin. Now, many people won't have heard, some people might have heard leptin. They may not know adiponectin. Adiponectin is the hormone that if I were to take a vial blood from you and measure it in a lab, is 1,000 times higher in level than any other hormone in your body, 24-7. And the reason is adiponectin allows insulin to pull energy into your cells. So you need that. And your fat, healthy fat, makes adiponectin. All right, very, very important. Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called The Greatness Mindset, and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, The Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. And then the third hormone that is of utmost importance is called resistant. And resistant basically is the break to the adiponectin, what's gas pedal. Gas pedal, adiponectin, lots of energy. Break, resistant, slow down there, buddy. All right, and so these three, leptin, adiponectin, resistant, they're made by normal, healthy fat. So what happens when fat overgrows and it becomes inflammatory? All of those hormones go haywire. They're not behaving the way they should be behaving. You're not pulling in energy, all right? You're not actually absorbing, you're not absorbing energy. Your hunger mechanisms are not working right. You're overeating, all right? And then you can't stop your ability to sort of trigger your metabolism when it needs to start and stop. That gas break thing, completely messed up. On top of that, you've got inflammation that spills out from your fat, all right? And when it spills out from your fat, that's kind of like the gasoline leaking out around your shoes at the gas station. In the gas station, it's flammable. In your body, it's inflammatory. It screws up your immune system. It sets you up for diabetes, sets you up for cancer, sets your blood vessels up to narrow, so you wind up or set up for stroke and heart attack. It's all bad. Excess fat is all bad. Excess body fat, but don't forget, one of the things that I started saying is that some fat is absolutely critical. In fact, we need normal fat. Fat is good until it's bad. So we don't want to fear it, we want to tame it. If someone has got, I mean, someone's listening or watching this right now and they're thinking to themselves, man, I've just struggled my whole life with my body weight and I've, you know, life happened and, you know, kids or divorce or just career changes and just life just happened and just, it got away from me. And they're 50, 70, 80 pounds overweight. They've gained that excess body fat that they know they don't want to have, but they don't want to beat themselves up because that doesn't help them either. You know, they've beaten themselves up for too long and that almost makes them want to eat more bad foods because they don't feel good about themselves. How can they emotionally and psychologically break free while also changing their habits and know that this is a journey? It's not going to happen in two weeks and lose 50 pounds and stick, but it's like, it's going to take time and it's going to be a journey. What can someone in that position start to think and do to start seeing consistent results, do you think? Yeah, well, there's two main things I talk about in my new book. One is actually time your food. Figure out what time you eat and don't eat. And secondly is choose foods that actually can help your body fight fat. That's a little bit of a surprise that you can eat foods to lose weight, to fight extra body fat, but it turns out science tells us that's actually true. Wow. And it's studied in people as well. Let's talk first about the timing of food. All right, remember I told you when your insulin level is high, because when you're eating, you can't burn fat. So when your insulin level is low, when you're not eating, your body switches into fat burning mode. When does that actually naturally happen? When you're sleeping. Most people when they're sleeping are not eating, right? And then what happens when they get up in the morning, they eat breakfast, they're breaking their fast. So sleeping is fasting. It's very normal. It's not necessarily invented as a new fad or a trend. It's actually how we're body's wired. And so if you follow the wiring, the hard wiring of our body, the operating system of our body, when you're sleeping and not eating, your body's burning down fat. You've got extra weight, extra body fat, take advantage of what your body naturally wants to do. Now, how do you actually give your body the most chance to burn down extra body fat? Sleep. Let me just kind of like set out some hypotheticals. Let's say you sleep eight hours. You go to bed at 11, wake up at seven, all right? During that time, your body's actually burning fat, okay? Which is good. That's gonna get you over time to get to your fighting weight, so to speak. How much fat do we burn with eight hours of sleep, do you know? It actually depends on how good your sleep is. It also depends on when you ate before you went to bed. It also matters who you are, right? And lots of other stress factors. The way you think about yourself, your identity, your- Totally, totally. So the things that you talk about, sort of like this really harnessing your, knowing yourself and harnessing your strengths and healing from the inside out, that is critical for getting good, using those eight hours. Now, let's talk a little bit about when you're actually eating last, because if you're sleeping eight hours, 11 to seven, okay, because you're not eating and you're burning fat, let's say that you- When should your last bite be and by? Exactly. So I'm trying to give you analogies that people can understand very easily. Let's say you eat dinner at seven o'clock, all right? And you finish dinner at eight, all right? Put your dishes away at eight, all right? That seems pretty reasonable for most people. After eight o'clock, and you go to bed at 11, do not snack. No nibbling. No midnight snack, no nibbling. No cookies. No waiting for the- No chips. No chips, no waiting for the dessert at the end. All right? Now you've gained three extra hours from eight o'clock when your dishes get put away, all the way till you go to bed, don't eat. I don't eat, it's fine. You know, in the beginning, you might have some habits, like, oh man, I should- Don't. That's the habit you wanna break, okay? And here's the why. Because if you don't eat, your insulin levels will go down quickly, all right, from dinner. And then what'll happen is you get those three extra hours added onto the eight hours that you have that your body's doing what it's doing. So does that mean you can still have tea, or like a carbonated water, or like a sparkling water, just nothing with zero calories? No calories, right? No food, okay? Especially no desserts. No noshing on those little sweet things, nibblies at night. What if there's a little lemon in the water? Lemon's okay. That's okay. Yeah, yeah. No sugar. Gotcha. So then what happens, now you've actually built yourself eight hours of sleep, three hours of extra time. That's a bonus, okay? Get up in the morning, let's say you get up at seven, right? Don't do what your mommy told you to do when you were a kid, which is roll out of bed, eat breakfast, get on the school bus to get to school, right? That's how we're all conditioned. Here's what you wanna do. Get up, brush your teeth, take a shower, get dressed, take your time to get oriented to the day. I usually don't eat anything for about an hour after I get up, and I'm perfectly fine, you know? It's really habit that makes you wanna sit down and pour a bowl of cereal, all right? Now you've gained an extra hour. So that's 12 hours now, right? Now you got 12 hours, okay? You got 12 clean hours. That's half the day. With no food. With no food, your body's burning. It's different than 16 and eight, but it's the same principle. 16, eight, intermittent fasting, like now you gotta really push it so you're squeezing all your foods in eight hours. May not work for everybody, but what I'm trying to empower people, you know, to be great, you don't need to go to 16. 12 gets you into great zone. Wow, really? Think about it, because how many people do you know say, you know, I get eight hours of sleep, but then when you really talk to them, they're actually eating late at night. Right before they fall asleep. Yeah, now you're cutting into your burn time. Interesting. All right? Wow. So that's one thing, is really sort of the timing of your meals. Oh, by the way, I mean, I'm sure this has happened to you as well. Busy people sometimes skip breakfast, for whatever reason. Skip breakfast. Yeah, or sometimes skip lunch. All right? Totally fine. You can think about that when it happens, that you're buying yourself extra fat burn time. All right? And so for people who, you know, in that scenario you gave, you know, somebody who's overweight and has been struggling with it and say like, you know, this is what happened to me. Here's a really simple way, just to get a little bit discipline. Diary out, journal out when you normally eat, when you stop eating, when you go to bed. And what I say in my book is that, you know, try to create a 12 hour food window that you're going to open up in the morning. What time do you open the window that you're going to eat? And then what time are you going to close the window that you're not going to eat anymore? You know, believe me, you'll be fine if you don't eat after dinner, when you put your dishes away. And you'll be fine if you take a little extra time before you sit at the breakfast table. Guarantee you, you know, like you're going to be just fine and you're going to be healthier for it. What I tell people is that health does not happen in the doctor's office. Health care does not happen in a doctor's office. That's sick care. Right. Health care actually happens when you're between the doctor's visits. That's what we got to do for ourselves. And finally, the science is beginning to deliver on the whys. That's what's important.