This is The Best Diet For Fat Loss (and it's not even close)

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. There are no fat-burning foods, no matter what you see all over social media these days. But there are foods that can make it significantly easier to lose fat, and some that make it significantly harder. Knowing which is which is the actual secret. If we haven't met, I'm Seth. I'm an ER doctor, former special ops guy, and now just a talking head here for your viewing pleasure. Today I'm going to show you which foods to eat to make your fat loss journey as quick and painless as possible. I know what some of you are thinking, no fat burning foods, what about apple cider vinegar, green tea, my daughter's kindergarten teacher swears by celery. That's fair. So let's go through the usual suspects first, because if any of them worked, this would be a much shorter video. Apple cider vinegar, the big study behind it, this hyped claim, is at 13 to 17 pounds in 12 weeks. It got retracted in 2025 over implausible data and no trial registration. So what's left is pretty limited and very inconsistent. Next up, green tea. Pooled trials show about a kilo, roughly 2 pounds, over 12 weeks or more. However, a Cochrane review found basically nothing in the studies outside of Japan. It does have some health benefits, but it's probably not the fat burner we presumed. Spicy foods. Capsaicin, which is the spicy ingredient inside of spicy foods, does bump your calorie burn. But meta-analyses, basically when they pull all these studies together, puts it around 50 calories a day, mostly at doses that most people can't even stomach. That's about half a banana worth of calories. So good luck out eating your dinner with hot sauce. Grapefruit. One 12-week trial, half a grapefruit before meals. About 3.5 pounds loss versus under a pound on placebo. So what's happening is it's probably just filling you up before the meal. And one heads up from the medical side, grapefruit interferes with a lot of medications, so check with your doctor before you make eating grapefruit a habit. Celery and other negative calorie foods. Digesting food burns about 10% on average of its calories. Celery is included. That's nowhere near a negative calorie food. And we have coconut oil and MCT oil, which I've seen on different social media channels being promoted. MCT oil pulled out to about half a kilo over 10 weeks. That's about one pound. Coconut oil showed small but unimportant effects across 15 trials. So that's pretty much a no-go as well. Thing is, every one of these has some effect. And every one of them is really tiny. None of this ---- does the real work for you. The foods that actually matter are the ones that make eating less feel easy. So that's what we're going to go into next. So let's look at what the studies show for which foods actually work then. One study had 20 adults live in a hospital for four weeks. Sounds like it would suck. Two weeks on one diet and two weeks on the other diet. The menus were matched on calories offered, sugars, fats, fibers, and macros. So pretty similar. Nobody was told to restrict anything. Eat. Eat as much as you wanted to. One diet was ultra-processed, so things like hot dogs, tater tots, sugary cereals, chips, cookies, pudding, whatever, food that was basically made in a factory. The other was whole foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, chicken, nuts, beans, plain yogurt, things like that, stuff that looks pretty close to what it started as. The total calories offered matched on paper what people actually ate. Didn't. On the processed diet, they ate about 500 extra calories a day, and they ate it faster. They gained about two pounds in two weeks. On the whole food diet, they lost about two pounds. So it turns out that food that's chemically engineered to be hyperpalatable gets eaten really fast, and you eat a lot of it. Shocking, I know. There was a pretty cool study out of Australia looking at satiety, or how full one feels after certain foods. They gave people 240 calories of 38 different foods. So they were matched for calories, just different foods, and asked how full they felt every 15 minutes for two hours after eating it. Then they let them eat whatever they wanted. White bread was the baseline, scored at around 100, and everything else got compared to that up and down. The winner, by a mile, was boiled potatoes, with a score of 323, more than three times as filling as white bread, for the same calories. Fish came in around 225, oatmeal came in around 209, oranges and apples right around 200, eggs around 150, and the loser of the group. was the croissant at a score of 47 less than half as filling as white bread which is really sad because i love croissants i mean who doesn't anyways the same 240 calories one leaves you feeling stuffed for two hours the other leaves you digging through the pantry 20 minutes later the foods that fill people up had more water more fiber and more protein the ones with more fat Scored worse. This wasn't a weight loss study though. It measured fullness for two hours, but it matches exactly what I see with my Primal 60 clients. One of the most common comments that we get is that they struggle to eat enough. This is because a plate of meat and vegetables and fruit and potatoes takes up so much room in the stomach that overeating is extremely difficult. Fat loss gets a lot easier when you physically can't fit more into your stomach. So, If I could pick one thing to put on every plate first, it's protein. When you lose weight, you don't only lose fat, you lose some muscle too, usually. But muscle is a thing that you want to keep. And fat is a thing you're trying to lose. So you don't want to lose the wrong one. In the trials, people eating high-protein diets in a calorie deficit lost more fat and held on to more muscle than people eating less protein. Just makes sense. It helps with hunger too. So how much should you eat? I did a whole video on this before. I'll try to remember to link it. But the short version is around 0.6 to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. And try to get around 25 to 30 grams at each meal. The best way to get it is from whole foods, things like fish and eggs. Those both ranked way up on the fullness list, chicken, beef, whatever you like. You don't have to use protein powders, just getting protein at every meal. If you can't get enough from whole foods alone, you can supplement it with high quality protein powder if you can stomach it. All right, now let's talk about vegetables, fruit, and nuts. Fat loss means eating fewer calories than you expend. That's just how it works. The trick is doing that without eating less food because you want to feel full. You don't want to feel like you're starving all the time. Vegetables and fruit are mostly water and fiber. So you get a big pile of food for very few calories. That pile fills up your stomach and it takes a while to eat. There's a trial on this where researchers took 97 women with obesity and gave them no calorie targets. Both groups were told to cut back on fat. One group was also told to eat more fruit and vegetables. A year later, the fruit and vegetable group had lost more total weight. They actually ate a larger amount of food, and they reported being less hungry. So, bigger plate full of food, less hunger, and more weight loss. It's a pretty good deal. In three studies following over 130,000 people for up to 24 years, people who ate more fruit and vegetables gained less weight over time. That was whole fruit, though. Juice, like fruit juice, is associated with weight gain, not fat loss. Nuts are one people worry about a lot because they're loaded with calories. But in 55 trials, adding nuts to people's diet didn't cause weight gain. A handful of nuts is fine. Wow, that sounds really bad. I apologize for that. Just don't eat the whole can while, you know, you're binge-watching Netflix and then you're binging a can of nuts as well. Anyways, so. Let's pull all this together real quick for you. Make it easy. Protein at every meal. Beef, chicken, fish, eggs. Fish and eggs both ranked way up on the fullness list and beef did pretty well too. Aim for 25 to 30 grams per meal. Starch. Potatoes boiled or baked. Remember, they beat white bread by more than three to one. Sweet potatoes work too to give you some variety. If you're struggling to get enough carbs, you can add in some rice. It's simple, it's easy on the stomach and it gets the job done. But it is not as filling as potatoes, so just watch how much of it you're eating. Vegetables, any of them, and plenty of them. Fruit, whole fruit, any kind. Apples, oranges, both scored high on the fullness list, but basically any fruit works. But that's whole fruit, not fruit juice. And then nuts and seeds, a handful, not a canful. Alright, what is not on the plate? Well, anything that comes out of a factory in a wrapper. That's the stuff that had people eating an extra 500 calories a day without even trying. Now, As for dairy and beans, because I know that somebody's already probably typing away at a comment below, they are not the enemy. I don't consider them that way. Some trials where people were cutting calories, adding dairy led to a little more fat loss, roughly a pound or two, and studies lasting a year longer, it made no real difference. Yogurt looks to be the best in the big population studies, but you don't need it for fat loss. And the reason I don't recommend it in the primary food list that I just mentioned is that a large number of people around the world don't digest milk sugar well, and it can be known to be inflammatory Beans are similar. The research shows some health benefits, actually some pretty good health benefits, but they leave a lot of people very gassy and very uncomfortable in the GI system. So that's completely up to you on how you handle that. I recommend stripping them out for 60 days and then adding things back one at a time and see how they make you feel. You might be really surprised at what you find was the cause of your discomfort or acne or eczema or whatever it is this whole time. What I've said here forms the basis of the diet I recommend for my clients. If you want all of this done for you, the nutrition, the workouts, the daily habits, and like a community of other people doing it with you, I run a challenge called Primal 60 that hands all of this to you in a simple to use app. You just log in, follow the plan and hit your goals. We start on the first of every month. Check the link below for more info to get signed up. I can't wait to see you there and to see the changes that are ahead of you. Until next time, y'all. Keep moving.