Weight Loss, Paleo Diet & Calorie Partitioning

Video Transcript: 

“Hi this Dr. Ruscio and today I would like to talk with you about weight gain.

Weight gain of course, hugely popular issue, everyone has a solution gadget or gismo for weight loss. Today I would like to talk with you about some simple concepts that have been shown to be highly effective for weight loss. The first and the most important concept that we have to understand and achieve in order to lose weight effectively, and I should say lose fat effectively and really keep it off is to achieve this concept called calorie partitioning.

So, what calorie partitioning looks like is this: Every time we eat food, we end up having calories in our bloodstream and calories, generally speaking, can go one of two ways. They can go into your mitochondria, where the mitochondria will then burn them for energy and so you’ll have energy and you won’t gain fat because your calories are being burned for energy.

On the other side of the coin your calories can go into your fat cells and if you have too much calories going into your fat cells, then you get tired because you’re getting fat. What’s really a tragedy is that sometimes people will have no motivation to exercise and they think it’s because they’re lazy, but more often than not it’s because their calories are going in to their fat cells and they’re getting stored as fat. No calories are going into the mitochondria to be burnt as energy and so people are tired because they’re actually getting fatter.

The really important concept is to try to figure out how can we steer most of our calories or partition them into the mitochondria so we burn them as fuel and so we don’t gain fat, so we therefore have energy also. The way we really achieve this is by having a good hormonal milieu where we have growth hormones where they should be; catecholamines, meaning things like epinephrine, dopamine, noradrenaline, where they should be; and also adequate levels of the hormone glucagon and we’ll go over that in a little more detail in a second.

On the other side of the coin we want to avoid having high insulin levels because insulin will steer calories into the fat cells. Again, you’ll be tired and you won’t have that much energy because all of your calories will be going into your fat cells. How do we achieve this? The most important initial concept is to limit your daily carbohydrate intake to a total intake of 100g or if you’re really trying to be aggressive, 50g per day. The reason for this is because the strongest stimulator of this partitioning is going to be your carbohydrate intake. So the best way to achieve this, again, is to keep your calories in the below 100 or 50 range depending on how aggressively you want to attack this. Also, eat every 3 to 5 hours, generally speaking and opt for more ancestral or traditional foods. Things like healthy sources of protein, healthy fats, and lots of vegetables and some fruit.

This is also known as the paleo diet. The paleo diet is a great diet to be eating from a multitude of perspectives. Now if you want more information on this I will give you a few links. Now one important thing to know is that there are three macronutrients. There are proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. If you limit carbohydrates, naturally you have to have an increase in consumption of protein and fat. One of the questions people sometimes ask is: are you saying I should eat more fat and if so doesn’t fat make you fat and won’t fat cause heart disease?

Really this is somewhat of an erroneous group of assumptions to make. While going into that is really beyond the scope of this video. You can see this video here where I’ve reviewed a study published by the researcher Christopher Gardner over at Stanford. He did a great job at elucidating the fact that fat really will not make you fat, generally speaking fat is certainly not bad for your heart if used in the appropriate context so you can see more of that video there which I entitled “low fat vs. low carb.” For more information on how this whole relationship between diet, your hormones, and calorie partitioning all works you can watch my video on diet, hormones, and blood sugar.

So what if you’re someone who tries this and it doesn’t work for you or if you’re someone who has been doing this and it still isn’t working? Usually it’s going to work for everybody to some extent but not everyone will get all the way toward their fat loss goals. That may be because three things are present.

Now the first is digestive problems usually there is an infection or some kind of food allergy. Infections are things like candida or fungus, bacterial dysbiosis, worms, amoebas, parasites, and these things are actually more common than you’d think. Or food allergies, and the most common allergies are gluten dairy, soy, eggs, nuts, artificial sweeteners, and corn, just to name the big ones there. Both of these things will cause someone to have high levels of inflammation. When inflammation is high it can really cause perturbations or problems in this calorie partitioning.

There’s another very important area to look into and that is of your hormones. There’s something called the sex hormone to stress hormone ratio. Oftentimes people are under too much stress or they’ve got internal inflammation. Things like infections that we’ve talked about or food allergies that are caused and their stress hormones go way too high and they have excess of stress hormones relative to their steroid or stress hormones. Stress hormones in high levels cause your body to break down muscle and gain fat. Sex or steroid hormones are euthanizing anti-aging they cause your body to maintain muscle mass and lose body fat so the ratio of these is very important. Having a ratio that is positive on the side of your steroid or your sex hormones is very important so that’s another thing for us to look at cause that will again affect this calorie partitioning like we’ve been talking about.

The third is toxins and toxicity. Now a number of papers have been published showing that different environmental toxins can affect metabolism through different avenues. I reviewed a study published in obesity reviews that showed that certain toxins can affect thyroid function and that can poison the ability of the body to get past a certain limit point of fat loss. I also reviewed another study where plastics, different environmental chemicals have been linked with thyroid problems, weight gain, and diabetes. There are some resources for you within these three causative factors for more reading and/or viewing to get yourself more information.

You can also visit my blog where you can find all this information categorized neatly to help you navigate this. The take home message is the first most important thing you can do is achieve good calorie partitioning so you have your calories going in your mitochondria being burnt for energy and not being stored as fat. That is first and foremost achieved by limiting your daily carbohydrate intake. Secondary to that there are other things like problems with digestion, problems with the sex and steroid to stress hormone ratio and problems with toxicity that may be causing someone not to ideally respond to limiting their daily carbohydrate intake. So this is just a preview to what can be a much more lengthy discussion of each one of these items in detail but hopefully this gives you a basic idea and wets your appetite to looking into this further and try some of this

This is Dr. Ruscio and I hope you found some of this information helpful. Thank you.”