Transcript of Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so glad you hit play on this episode because I just finished one of the most eye-opening conversations I have ever had on this podcast. What was the topic? Burning fat and losing weight. If you're sick of dieting, if you're tired of all the fads, if you're like me and you're just frustrated because you're not quite sure what to do anymore and the things that you used to eat or that you used to do, they're just no longer working. The conversation you're about to hear is going to blow your mind. I actually thought I knew what I needed to do to burn fat and lose weight. I just had my mind blown. The person you're about to meet isn't here to sell you anything, except for what he calls smoking hot research and a whole lot of science that is going to help you jumpstart your metabolism, activate your body's natural fat burning ability, simply by, get this, eating the right foods. His message is so empowering. His passion just comes through in every word he says. His advice is specific and science-back.

So wherever you are in your health journey or your weight loss journey or whatever journey you're on, world-renowned Dr. William Lee is here to tell you, based on 30 years of scientific research, that, yes, your body can lose weight, you can burn fat, and yes, you can rewire your metabolism. And by the time you're done listening, you're going to look at your body and the topic of burning fat in an entirely new way. It is time to ditch the diet and start using science.

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I wasn't sleeping or eating well.

I just wasn't feeling myself.

I was chatting to some friends, and one of them suggested I check out VHI, Women's Health Clinic. I saw their women's health GP who connected me with a health coach for my sleep and diet and a psychologist for support. I was so relieved to have all these services in arms reach.

Vhi, because your health means everything.

Hey, it's your buddy Mel Robbins. I am so fired up that you're here. Can you tell? There are moments where you tune in and you're like, whoa, Mel has eaten something today. Well, I've eaten up our guest and everything he's going to share with you It is so exciting what we're about to talk about. It is such an honor to spend time with you and to be together. If you're brand new, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I think this is going to be one of those episodes that can change the trajectory of your life. I know you're going to share it with a ton of people that you care about. I also know you're the type of person who values your time and that you're interested in learning about ways that you can improve your health. I love that, and I love that for you. I love that for the people that care about you. If you or anyone that you care about is interested in losing weight or burning fat or just feeling better and getting healthier, holy smokes, you chose the exact podcast episode to listen to at the exact moment because Dr. William Lee is in our Boston studio, so let me tell you a little bit about him.

Dr. Lee is a renowned physician scientist and the founder and President of the Angiogenesis Foundation here in Boston, where he's educated over 40,000 and physicians, and is currently working on cutting-edge research on blood vessels and clinical applications of angiogenesis. His foundation has over 100 scientific publications and leading medical journals and textbooks. He's also served on the faculties at Tufts. Dartmouth, and Harvard Medical Schools. Dr. Lee's work has impacted more than 50 million people worldwide, and his work has led to effective prevention, novel treatments, and even reversal of diseases that span cancer, chronic wounds, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and vision loss. Today, this New York Times best-selling author of two books, Eat to Beat disease and eat to beat your diet, is here in our studios to teach you the science that you need to know to unlock your body's natural ability to burn fat, lose weight, and be healthier. So please help me welcome Dr. William Lee to the Mel Robbins podcast. Dr. Lee, I'm so excited that you're here. The way that I wanted to start is, could you tell the person that's listening what they might expect to change in their life if they take everything that you're about to share with us today to heart and they apply it?

You know what I always tell people is that it's possible to love your food and love your health at the same time. So you don't fear your food, you lean into it, and you get to really enjoy your life, finally.

I actually love that you're starting there because I feel like so many of us have a very conflicted love-hate relationship with food. I think you're about to empower us to be able to understand how to love food and also have it love your body and your health.

Yeah. And by the way, it's not about giving permission. It's really about allowing our own human nature to take over our being because we're all hardwired. Part of our humanity is based around food. That goes back to history. What I try to do is to bring it right to the present because we all have it inside us.

Wow. I've never heard anyone say it like that. So, Dr. Lee, according to our research, about a third of our listeners have set a goal to either lose weight or to start a new diet in the new year. I would love to How do you connect the dots between metabolism and how it functions and what your research has shown about those of us that have excess body fat and that are carrying more extra weight around.

Yeah, well, look, losing weight is a It's a natural goal. Most of us think about losing weight in terms of the number on a scale or maybe the size of your clothing or the comfort of fitting the comfort of fitting your clothing or maybe how you look in the mirror. It's pretty crude. It turns out that if you care about your health, if that's really your priority for losing weight, you want to burn down the fat that you can't see. Fat that you can't see is not wiggly, jiggly. It's actually located located deep inside the tube of your body. Our bodies are really... If you stand up straight and you were to do a scan across our body, it's like a tube. We've got an oval. Our organs are inside there. And really, really harmful body fat that expands, it's called visceral fat, and it wraps around our organs like a baseball glove. And when it grows, it expands everything inside the sac of your, the tube of your body, which is why your waistline increases. So the more visceral fat you have, the bigger your waistline has to be. The belt is just being expanded more and more and more.

That's different than the fat that's under your arm.

I just want to unpack this a little bit because I think if you're a person that has struggled to lose weight, you feel very discouraged and you feel a lot of frustration that the weight's not going to come off. You're making a very big distinction between the fat that might be flabby arms, versus that very stubborn fat that starts to gather around the midsection of a lot of people's bodies.

Yeah, well, look, body fat isn't all just what we think it is, right? Look, we've all done it. You're taking a shower in the morning, you step out, you're drying yourself off, you're naked. Out of the corner of the eye, you look in the mirror and you see a lump or a bump that you didn't like to see. You're like, What's the next thing you do? You step on the scale. And if that number is the exact number you were hoping for, damn, That's not what I do.

I put a towel on and hide from the mirror. Then I go eat a donut because I'm depressed. So I'm making all the wrong choices.

But then you say, Man, I got to do something about this, right? It's a realization. But the body fat you can see is not the part that's harmful to your overall health. What? Okay. Because fat comes in two different types of fat. You've got white fat, which is what you can see, and you've got brown fat, which you can't see, but I got to explain a little bit further. The word fat immediately stimulates this negative reaction in our minds. That's how we've been trained in society. But there is a situation where body fat is actually good, and it makes everyone smile. You know when that is?

When?

Babies.

Yes, that's true. They're so cute.

When you see a big fat baby pudgy, cute, you want to pinch its cheeks, and big balloon-like of arms and legs, Everyone smiles. That's how we know that fat can't be all bad. In fact, if you saw a baby that had chiseled cheeks and long, thin arms and thighs, like a runway model.

Yeah, I'd be like, somebody call child services.

911, right? Yes. Okay. The fact of the matter is that our body fat is really, really important. It actually releases hormones. It's one of the endocrine organs. Our body fat is actually an organ in our body. Wait.

Your body fat is an organ?

Body fat is an organ. It actually produces hormones, and these fat-produced hormones actually help our body absorb blood glucose. So the fuel tank actually produces the stuff that our body needs is to run the engine glucose so we have energy.

Dr. Lee, that is so cool.

And in fact, one of these hormones is called adiponectin. Now, you might not have ever heard of adiponectin. Actually, a lot of doctors never heard of adiponectin. But what have I told you? Adiponectin works with insulin, and we know insulin basically helps your blood glucose, takes all that energy. People talk about glucose spikes and high glucose and low glucose and insulin insensitivity. Look, Insulin is the hormone that is made by your pancreas in order to be able to draw blood glucose into your muscles so you have energy, so you can run. If you've got problems with your insulin, that can lead to diabetes, right? Okay. But do you know that insulin Insulin can't do the job by itself very well?

No. Okay.

Insulin needs a partner. It's like two cops on a beat.

Don't tell me it's fat.

It is adiponectin, is the hormone that insulin, which is made by fat, helps insulin do its job. Adiponectin is so important, by the way, Mel, that if I were to take a sample of your blood and send it to the lab and ask it to measure every hormone in your body, every Okay? Estrogen, thyroid hormone, you name it. I will tell you, your adiponectin will be 1,000 times higher in amount than any other hormone in your body. A thousand. Tells you it's important. Fat made by fat, by body fat. So body fat actually is good. It actually helps us, not surprisingly, use our energy. Now, if you have too much fat, guess what happens? The fat gets really, really big. It gets really, really inflamed. And now the hormone engine doesn't work anymore. You're not producing the right amount of indipendectin. Now, insulin is not going to work very well. Now, you're going to have a metabolic problem. And this is why over eating and over eating, especially low quality food, is so damaging to your body. But because it's all hardwired into us, if we take the... Realize we have the agency to be able to make those choices for better It's a quality fuel, and don't eat too much and get a little more active.

That makes me think of another question, Dr. Lee. Is there a way to lose weight and still enjoy food? I mean, how do you want us to think about this?

Okay, so I like to think about it in a much simpler way. Okay. Metabolism is how your body gets energy and burns down energy, just like if you are a car. Human metabolism is really about just putting fuel in your body. Right. Once you're done eating, it's like you've stopped filling up your tank. Now you're driving back on the road about your way, you're burning fuel. That's what we do when we finish eating. We're loading up in the fuel, we're finished, now we're burning the fuel. Basically, that's how we live day in and day out. That's how we work. The quality of fuel actually matters. Now, I want to say one thing about besides quality of fuel, it's quantity of fuel. You fill up your tank, it's a metal tank, All right? And you fill it up, when the gasoline reaches a certain level, it'll force the nozzle to go to click in and no more gas will come out.

Yeah, I feel like I don't have a click, Dr. Lee.

Okay, well, imagine what would happen, and this is what happened, used to be in the old days within filling stations, no click. What's going to happen? You're going to easily overfill your tank. If you're not paying attention, the tank is going to overflow, the gasoline comes right out of the car, runs on the side of the car, around the tires, and pools around your shoes. Now you are standing in the midst of a dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. Right. Right? Okay. Now, that's what happens at the gas station. At the dinner table or the pantry or the drive-by convenience store, if you don't actually control the amount of fuel that you put in your body, because we don't have a clicker, just as you said, we can keep filling it up. What happens is that our fuel tanks are our fat cells. Our metabolism uses body fat. Body fat is very, very important. It's healthy. We want our fat cells to be... They serve as our fuel tank. When you eat, you use some of the energy just to run around, but the rest of it is stored in the fuel tank, which is our fat cells.

We call them adipose cells, adipose tissue. And when you add up a lot of little tiny little fat cells, you got a chunk of fat. Now, because we don't have a clicker, the more you eat, then you're going to fill up your tank. Oh, you're still eating? Let's fill up another tank. Fill that one up. And by the way, each Each tank car is metal and fixed. It won't expand. Body fat, fat cells can expand to three times, 300 %. You can really blow up a fat cell with fuel, meaning food that you eat, up to 300%, like a balloon, like a water balloon. So now you're still eating, let's blow up another one. Oh, you're still? Another one. One more piece of cake, one more second helping, another one. Oh, and by the way, once you run out of fat cells, guess what? I don't know. Your of fat. Your body will look for stem cells to create brand new fat cells, and now you can keep on loading them up.

Now, think about this. Wait, so you're basically... If you eat beyond the click in terms of what you actually just need for fuel, your body is designed through fat cells to create storage tanks for all this fuel. When you run out of the storage tanks in your fat cells, your stem cells actually kick into gear and create more cells to hold this energy.

More fuel tanks, exactly. Wow. This can happen over the course of your whole life. Now, excess body fat in this situation is exactly the overfilling of your fuel tanks. If you follow your hard wiring, if you fill up your tank only to what it's supposed to be and don't overflow, you will actually follow those four patterns. But how many people do you know who control their eating in a way that's mindful so you're not overflowing your field tank? And the reason I'm actually saying this is that over the course of the year, you pick the holiday, all right? You could talk about the winter holidays, you can talk about Easter, you could talk about the summer, fourth of July, you could talk about any holiday you want. All right. Thanksgiving. You're talking about the experience we've all had, which is sitting down with family and friends with incredible food in front of you. And what you want to do is fill that plate and eat it and then go back for seconds. How many of us have felt this? Every one of us. You have one more or two more forkfuls after that second plate and you're like, wait a minute.

I shouldn't have done that. You know that you've actually overfilled your tank. Absolutely. That's not the click, that's the leak. Now you're sitting in this toxic, flammable mess. And in fact, by the way, that extra fuel will indeed leak out of your fat cells eventually. When I use the word flammable, it is a very inflaming. In other words, when you over eat too many calories, you blow up your body fat, it will eventually, like a water balloon, it can't hold anymore, it starts to leak out. Now, you've got fat that leaks out all throughout your body. You know the organ that actually picks up all that fat? No. It's the liver. You've heard of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease?

No, I hadn't.

That is a condition where you over the fat flows out of your fat cells because they can't hold anymore. You've strained the storage capacity to the limit. The fat leaks out into your cells, gets trapped in your liver, and your liver becomes replaced by liver cells become replaced by fat. It used to be alcohol and hepatitis were the biggest causes of liver transplant. Now, livers are failing all around the country because of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So this is the silent epidemic It's nasty because when your liver fails, that's your detox. People talk about going to detox, going to the spa for a cleanse, detoxing. Your liver does it every single day, so we need to do that. The good news is all of this, the extra body fat, the leakiness, the inflammation, the clogged up liver that's going to fail on you, it's all reversible. If you make good choices, even if you have a lifetime, decades of making bad choices, you can actually work your, swim your way back to your baseline operating system.

Okay, I want to offer up a visual for the person listening, and I want to see if this could be helpful. So as you were talking about the fact that we all have that food is fuel, that we have a tank for fuel inside of us, and when we over eat or we just have too many calories or we're too sedentary and we're not intaking enough calories for the fuel that we need, but we're taking in more. It's like your body finds all these extra fuel tanks inside your body, and that's basically the purpose of fat cells, storing extra energy and fuel. So I all of a sudden got this visual of a pickup truck. And the pickup truck is barreling down the highway, and it's not just got a full tank of gas, but in the back bed of the pickup truck, there are all kinds of fuel cans just piled high. If I'm listening to the good news and I'm listening to your excitement about the fact that your metabolism, based on research, your ability to burn the calories and burn the fuel effectively, that it's basically the same for your life, no matter how many fuel tanks you got in the back of the pickup truck.

Then if you were to start to follow the advice, slowly but surely, that pickup bed would become empty because your internal body's ability to just drive down the highway, it is always there, no matter how much fat is stored in your body. Is that true?

That is completely true. That means you can offload that fuel. Okay. If you exercise and you're burning more fuel, that's basically throwing some of the tanks off the pickup truck, so you're lightening the load, so to speak. Great.

Now I want to know, Dr. Lee, how the hell do I lose this fat? I see all over the place 10 days to shed 20 and all these diets that keto this and do that over here and do this. What do you actually do?

Let me give you some really simple tools that anyone can actually use that they probably even heard about. One is called intermittent fasting. But I'm going to debunk that, too.

Oh, my God. So you're telling me to do it, now you're debunking it?

Let me tell you, first of all, intermittent fasting is thought of as a health fad, a trend that everybody does. You got to go, what is it, 16 hours of not eating and squeeze everything in eight hours. Hey, listen, that would be very hard for someone like me and probably like you, running around all the time. It doesn't work very well. But let me tell you that there's more than one way to get at it, and the best way to intermittently fast is to take advantage of the fact that when you're sleeping, when we're sleeping, we're not eating. When we're not eating, we're fasting. So sleeping is intermittent fasting because we don't sleep all the time. When we get up and we break our fast, which is called breakfast. All right? And that's the best way to get intermittent fasting. But I got to give you a little understanding of this because after you eat the last bite of food the night before, all right, your body is like, Okay, is that it? That's the last drop of fuel we're going to get tonight. The moment it realizes you're not going to put any more fuel in your body, your metabolism recognizes, it goes from fuel storing mode.

Come on, give some more. Let me put in my fat. Oh, no more food. Let's now switch gears. Okay? Like, literally like a Gearbox in a car. If your body is a Ferrari, all right? And you're going to switch gears when you're no longer eating, it switches into fuel burning mode from fuel storing, let's load up that body fat to fuel burning. So when you're sleeping and not eating, your body's burning down fuel from your fat cells. You're actually losing weight, burning fat while you're sleeping.

Well, how long do you have to not eat for this to work.

This is actually the important part. We know that eight hours of sleeping is the healthy amount of sleeping for all kinds of things, brain health and metabolic health and anti-aging and everything else. You want to sleep eight. It's more like seven to nine. Eight is right in the middle. Eight hours is where you're going to start to get that benefit. But let me tell you how anybody can expand their body's own hardwired fat burning, period.

Okay.

What you do is you expand it on both before you go to bed and when you get up in the morning. Let me talk about the night before. If you eat, sit down and eat at seven and you're done at eight. When you put your dishes away, no more eating. There's no midnight snacking. Don't take a bag of chips with you and sit on the couch and watch the game or whatever else you might do. Don't be nibbling. No last minute before bedtime, open and get that piece of pie. When you're done at eight, when you put your dishes away, that's it. Now, let's How do you go to bed at 11:00. I'm just going to give an example. Eat dinner at 7:00, stop eating at 8:00, put your dishes away, no more food until the next day. And no drinking. And no drinking. Actually, tea is okay. All right? As long as you don't put your alcohol. I'm talking alcohol. No drinking for sure. Anything with no more calories. Okay. Eight o'clock, let's say you go to bed at 11. That's three hours between 8:00 and 11:00, three hours. You just bought yourself three extra hours of fat burning time.

11:00 to 7:00 in the morning, that's 8 hours. That's three hours plus eight hours. That's 11 hours of fat burning that you've given your body just by not eating after you put the dishes away. Now, when you get up in the morning, this is like a super little easy tip that I tell anybody. I practice it myself. Get up in the morning, don't do what your mom told you to do. When we were growing up, get out of bed, get down to that breakfast table, eat something quickly so you can actually go to school and learn something. Don't be hungry. No, we're adults, and it turns out you don't need to eat right away in the morning. Get up in the morning, take your time getting ready. For me, before I eat anything, I will go for a walk, I'll open the door, get some fresh air, maybe read a book, check my email, whatever. Wait at least an hour from the time you wake up until the time that you put the first thing in your mouth. Now, that's one extra hour. So three hours the night before bed, eight hours, that's 11 total of fasting, meaning fat burning time.

Now, add one more hour by not eating right away. And you've got 11 plus one is 12 hours. 12 out of 24 hours, 50% of your day, you've had your body burning down harmful body fat, extra body fat. That's the simplest way to use intermittent fasting, 12 hours. Now, you might say, is 12 hours enough? Yeah, because 8 hours is enough. 12 hours is a little bit better. Clinical studies have shown that 12 hours of fasting in a way I've told you actually is plenty of time to actually lose weight over time.

Are you saying that this is a tool that, based on the research, anybody can use to eat in an 8-hour window from noon to 08:00 PM? And that will help you, no matter what your health looks like, that will help you kick into fuel burning and fat burning mode without really having to even worry about the food yet that you're eating.

You don't have to break into a sweat doing that because it's all very easy. I mean, plenty of people are already doing this. But the key thing, Mel, is that you want to make sure that when you finally do eat, whether it's breakfast or lunch, you don't overfill your tank.

Well, how do you know when you're full? I know this is an odd question to ask, but I love food. Especially if I've got something in front of me that I really love, like a big, juicy burger that the kind you squeeze to try to get in your mouth and some of the juice is coming down. There is no way I need to eat that entire thing, especially if it's a smashed burger with a couple of patties. How do you know when enough is enough? And the click has happened.

Right. So it's all hardwired inside us. And the problem why we miss the cues that our body sends us that we have actually filled up our tank is because we eat too fast. All right? So when you eat quickly, right? Busy people eat really quickly. Distracted people tend to eat quickly. If you're just checking out social media, you're not paying attention and you're eating by yourself, you're just shoveling food in your mouth, you're paying attention to something else. That is a common mistake that we all make is that we're distracted and we're used to just shoveling all the abundant food that's placed in front of us. Let me just tell you something that I learned before I went to medical school to be a doctor. I did a Gap year. In my Gap year, I went to Italy and Greece, the Mediterranean. And what I was interested in studying there was the connections between food, culture, and health in those places. Now, this was long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet. I came from America. I landed in Italy. I was staying with a host family. Within a day or two, I began realizing, wow, the way that people eat in the Mediterranean is completely different than what I grew up and what I'm used to.

We in America, sit down and we're gobbling food. We're complaining about things. We're eating with somebody else. We're kvetching about some problems going on. We're eating fast. There's way too much food in front of us. Or we're eating alone. And you're eating alone. You're distracted by something else. Before long, you've cleaned the whole plate. You don't even realize what you've eaten. It might taste good, but you're not thinking about it. In the Mediterranean, in Italy, specifically, and it's as clear as day for me, you'd sit down for food. You would never eat by yourself. You would always eat with a friend or a family member or a coworker. You would take the time to order the food. When the food comes, you're not kvetching or complaining about your boss or the family or the weather or the sports team. You are sitting when the food arrives full of gratitude and talking about the joy of the food. Man, this pasta was just like my mother made. Is this the right season for it? Yeah, you should see the mushrooms that we have. How do you make it? People would talk about their food. The food that was not just something that was shoved in front, you would engage with the food.

When you're eating the food, you would taste the food and talk about the food, and people would enjoy the actual part of eating. The enjoyment of the food, the mindfulness was completely different. By the way, they never over-serve you.

Do you have a rule for that? Would you use a sandwich plate instead of a dinner plate?

Here's what I always tell for people, whatever your eye wants to actually put onto your plate. So think about a... This is the classic meal I always talk of, this Thanksgiving meal. You're all getting together, maybe you have eaten all day, and now it's all this great food that reminds you of all the happy times. You're going to load your plate up. What I tell people, that's a mistake. Whatever your eyes tell you you want to put in, only take two-thirds of that plate. Okay, two-thirds. Leave a third back. Okay. Never go for seconds. You will actually... And Just eat those two-thirds and really enjoy the taste, savor the taste. If you're a foodie like me, you enjoy great tasting food. All right? It doesn't have to be fancy. It could be super simple. It could be comfort food. Eat it slowly to savor it. Okay? That savoring the food is something I notice is always done in the Mediterranean and also in Asia. Two of the healthiest cuisines of the world.

And it slows you down. It slows you down. Dr. Lee, you have a four-week meal plan that you've designed based on almost 30 years of experience. Can you break down some of the key features for me and the person listening?

Yeah. Okay. So wherever your starting point is, this is the key thing. You can always begin a healthier life and get over your own body fat. You can win that battle easily by doing a couple of things. I tell the first thing you do is to do an assessment, a food diary is what I'd call it. Okay? Don't try anything yet. Just do what you're going to do for a couple of weeks. Take out a piece of paper or maybe even notes on your mobile device and just record what you're eating and how much you're eating every single meal.

Why is that important?

Because a lot of us don't realize what we're eating and how much we're eating. Every time you snack, pop out that piece of paper or your notes section and write it down. No guilt, no shame. This is all about just recording it. Now, after two weeks, go back and look at it. Most of us will be at what we ate, how often we ate, and how much we actually ate. By having that self-realization, by documenting it, it's like you're trying to develop an allowance. You're teaching children how to spend money responsibly. Write down what you spent and then add it up at the end of a couple of weeks, and then you'll know exactly what you did.

After recommending this to patients and researching this, what might the person who does this find or have a realization other than, God, eat a lot?

Well, I would say first the amount of food that they ate and how frequently they ate. Man, I had no idea that I ate that much and that often. The second epiphany is by identifying what food Most people go, jeez, I eat junky food. All right? Just documenting that for yourself. Again, no judgment. This is just so you can see where you are. And that's the first phase. I think then you go on to the swap in in phase. What? Swap in? What I call Swap in. Not swap out. Swap in.

Swap in. I thought you said swap. I'm like, Swap. I'm like, That doesn't sound good. You want to swap in.

Swap in. Okay. Because basically people go, Oh, so now the part, now is the part where I I have to deprive myself, right? Nope. I'm saying, listen, you know when you're not eating good stuff. Let's talk about swapping in. Take something that you love to eat that's healthy and swap it in. Okay? And there's There's all kinds of things that we love to eat that is healthy. And that's in my book, Eat To Beat Your Diet. I give lists of 200 different food items, ingredients that are all delicious that you can swap in. The reason I call it swap in is because when you're eating something, you're displacing something that is not so good for you. The more good stuff that you swap in, less room you're just going to have in your life for the stuff that's not so good for you.

Well, what I love about that is because you hear the word diet or lose weight, and you immediately are like, It feels like you're going to have to restrict. And your swap in methodology, it makes a lot of sense because if I think about it, I could eat a bag of chips and not even think about it. I'm not going to eat a bushel of apples. No. If I'm adding in something healthy, I'm probably not going to over eat it anyway.

Exactly. That's the other thing. But you might also find you'll be a little bit more mindful. So Do an assessment. Step one. Number two, swap in. Number three is then do the intermittent fasting part that I told you. Now, the key, though, with this, don't over eat when it is time to eat.

That's the two-thirds rule.

Okay. Two-thirds rule. One thing I'll tell you that's a Japanese saying that came from Confucius is called stop when you're 80% full. Now, I'm going to tell you how you know this, but there's the Japanese saying is called harahashi bunmi. Harahashi Bani. It really means just listen to your body when you're about 80% full. How do you know when you're 80% full?

I have to unbutton my pants, usually.

Okay. By the time you feel full, you've already passed 80%.

It's true. You know. I just feel that sense that, Oh, but there's just one more bite, and it's not ever as good as the one that came before.

Listen, here's an example, Mel. You know when you're parking a car in in a parking lot and there's those little cement things in front, right? You're pulling it up a little bit further, a little bit further. When you start hitting that, when you see that grading sound of your car, you've gone too far. That's what happens when you have to unbutton your pants. It's true. But if you eat slowly, and then listen, this is a very important point, you want to stop eating when you're satisfied, not when you're full. When you feel, Oh, that was pretty Good. Not when you're full. We're so trained to look at the volume of our stomach, the pouching. We're looking for... We're trained to unbutton our pants. But really, if you eat slowly and mindfully and take your time and savor your food. At some point, when you put your fork down, you're going to go, That was pretty good. I like that. That's 80%.

I love that. Dr. Lee, I have so many more questions I want to ask you, but this feels like a great moment to take a pause and give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words. But don't you dare go anywhere. In fact, I want you to share this episode with everyone in your life because everyone needs to learn this, to apply it, to be able to use it. I just have so many more questions. We are just getting started. Don't go anywhere. We will have more with the amazing Dr. William Lee when we return. Stay with us. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are getting to learn the science and the research around how we can boost our metabolism, burn fat, and lose weight from the extraordinary Dr. William Lee. So Dr. Lee, what are the top five foods that we should add in to boost our natural metabolism and lose weight?

Okay. A lot of people don't know this, but there are certain foods that will fire up your body's extra fat burning machinery. Now, we didn't talk about this yet, so I'm going to quickly slide this in. You got white fat, which I told you is the wiggly, jiggly kind you see in the mirror. It's under your chin, it's under your arm.

You're looking at me when you say this. Are you saying that I have white fat under my chin? The wiggly, jiggly time.

The muffin top, the thigh, the butt.

That's white fat. Oh my God, have you seen me naked? That's your lead. You're describing me. I'm sorry, Chris.

It's also in the tube of your body, the visceral fat that expands your waistline. What do you mean in the tube of your body? Look, our body is a tube, right? Think about it. And inside the tube of our body, it's our organs, but our fat can grow inside there. Got it. Our guts are called our viscera. So visceral fat is the fat that grows around our guts. The more you load up that extra fuel, the more that fat grows, starts to strangle your organs. When it becomes inflamed, it's really dangerous. That's a dangerous fat. So you want to burn that fat down. Now, it's called brown fat. Brown fat is not wiggly, jiggly.

We love brown fat. Okay.

Brown Brown fat is close to the bone. It's not even near the surface. It's around our necks, plaster around our necks, under our breastbone, a little bit between our shoulder blades, and it's scattered in our belly a little bit. Brown fat is not white fat. Brown fat is the fat that when you activate brown fat, it fires it up like a space heater. Actually, another analogy, I forget that's even clearer, is that if you got a gas cooking range in your kitchen and you want to heat up some water to make some soup or some tea. What do you do? You go to the gas range, you turn the knob, click, click, click, whoosh. That's what brown fat does.

It burns the jiggly fat?

It burns away the jiggly fat. Shut up. Really? When you turn on brown fat, you burn down the white fat.

How the heck do I turn on the brown fat?

We originally evolved brown fat for hibernation. Cold temperatures trigger brown fat, and the brown fat burns burns down the white fat to give energy and heat. It's a process called thermogenesis. So when you hear about cold plunges being good for your metaldium- Cold showers. It does. Indeed, it does. Because cold temperatures in our body will trigger on our brown fat.

Well, now I'm motivated. So how long do I have to stand in a cold shower in order to ignite my brown fat to burn the jiggly white fat?

So listen, I'm a medical doctor, so I'm very careful to tell people that before you do something that could create a shock to your system, cold plunge or a super cold shower, you should probably talk to your doctor about it or a health care provider to make sure that you're not making a move that's not good for you. You might have high blood pressure, you might have a heart rhythm issue. So please don't just solo this on your own. You really need to be able to do this. But if you want to actually... If you get into a warm shower, turn that temperature down until it's cooler, so now you're not endangering yourself. I think if you're in there for 10 minutes of a cool shower. 10 minutes? What? Cool. I'm not saying freeze it. Oh, okay. Turn it down cool, then turn it so it is hard to stand it. Okay? And you'll start feeling it. You start feeling it. Look, go out to the winter without a coat on. You can go out there for a little while. It's true. Pick up your mail at the end of the snowy driveway. It's true.

At some point you're like, Oh, man, this is getting a little bit... When you start feeling this is getting a little bit too, stop. That's why it's true. Some people will get these ice baths. They're going to do their cold plungees in a morning. Please, when you start feeling like you're going down with a Titanic, you got to get out of there. All right? But the brown fat turns on. Now, here's a cool thing. Besides cold temperatures, it turns out that certain foods that you can eat will trigger your brown fat to turn on and to start burning down fat. Food, eating foods, can turn on your good fat to fight bad fat to burn down excess fat and lose weight.

All right, talk to me, Doc. What are the top foods we need to eat to turn on the brown fat, to burn the jiggly fat so I can lose weight?

You can find this in any grocery store, in the produce section, in the middle aisle. Let's go to the produce section, take a look. Okay. So apples. It turns out that apples have something called chlorogenic acid inside the flesh of the apple. That chlorogenic acid turns on your brown fat. Wow. And it'll start to burn down your white fat. Okay, what else is in there? What about broccoli or kale or bachchou I love bok cho. I like to cook. You cut off the bottoms, you wash the leaves, take a walk or a skillet, a little extra virgin olive, a little garlic, saute that up, a little oyster sauce, boom. That's a two-minute meal. The solforophanes in your greens. Trigger your brown fat to burn down extra body fat. Now, obviously, how you cook makes a difference. I said olive oil. I didn't say butter. Because if you actually use olive oil, guess what? Olive Olive oil, which you find in the middle aisle, extra virgin olive oil, has bioactives. People like me who study this, so I tell people, please don't try to memorize all these terms. Just trust the people like me who do the research.

We know what they are. An extra virgin olive oil, you've got hydroxy Taurazone oliocanthal. These are two mother nature's natural brown fat, triggering metabolism, activating fat-burning substances. You saute that with olive oil. Now you actually have the greens and the olive oil that will trigger your fat to turn it down.

You must be really fun to go grocery shopping with. I could see you in the...

Oh, look at the olive. You know what? By the way, if you check out my YouTube channel, I actually did a video where I went to markets all around the world, New York, and I went to one in France, to show people what I'm looking at and why I'm looking at it when I'm actually shopping. But it's easy to do. The things that you think are going to be healthy for you tend to be healthy. Then sometimes there are things that you're not sure would be healthy that actually turns out to trigger brown fat, like a can of beans can actually do that as well.

Well, let's talk about the five things that you recommend that everybody add. Because the team went to the grocery store, and we have here on the table some of the things that you mentioned. I would love for you to just point out some of the stuff on this plate. Tell us about the five things that we can add in or things that are really important to add in and why.

Okay, so let's just dive right in. One of my favorite all foods are tomatoes. I think most people like tomatoes, not just in a garden salad, but think about your grandmother's tomato sauce, or you go out to Italy and you're eating some pasta or Italian restaurant. Who doesn't like some tomato Well, it turns out tomatoes contain a natural bioactive called lycopine. Lycopine is found in nature. It triggers your brown fat to burn down harmful extra body fat. A study in Portugal showed this in a totally clear way. It took young, healthy women who were grad students, normal body size, and they told them, Just go eat and exercise the way you normally do. Don't do anything special for this research study. The only thing they did is they gave them one ripe tomato to eat an hour before lunch every single day. That's it. They measured their body composition. They put them under a scanner to look at how much visceral fat. They measured their They measured their blood cholesterol and their blood sugars and all the parameters, inflammatory markers. They found after a month of eating just one tomato a day, this is the only thing, they were able to lose one pound with just one tomato one hour before lunch.

What? That's the power of the lycopine in the tomato. You don't have to do extra exercise. You don't have to limit your calories just to eat the way you want. That just shows you how powerful a food actually is. Now, lycopine is what's doing this. If you want the lycopine to really fire up... Now, lycopine, pick a tomato off a vine and eat it like an apple, going to be good for you. It's going to do its thing. If you want the lycopine to be supercharged- I do. What you want to do is you want to heat it up, saute it, 190 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes, okay? We'll amp up the power of that lycopine by 250% because the heat will change the chemistry of the lycopine into a form your body loves to to absorb. This is why Mediterranean food, whether you're talking in Spain, Greece, Italy, heating up, cooking up that tomato sauce, simmering it gently, right? Yeah. Okay. Oh, by the way, lycopine likes to dissolve in body fat. In fact, this has been studied at Tufts University. You actually feed some young people a tomato with lycopine or foods that contain lycopine.

They are able to track where that lycopine goes. You know where it goes? No. They found it goes right to your butt, right to your thigh, it homes in.

Dude, I'm having a tomato right after this conversation.

Right into the body fat where it triggers your brown fat to fight that fat. This is amazing. Okay.

Well, you know what's so cool about this is you're using the research and the science, which you are clearly so passionate about, to truly teach us about the extraordinary power of your metabolism and how it's designed to work correctly. If you feed it what it needs, the proper fuel, it turns on for you. There are some other things that we have on the tray here. What else do these magical things do? Pomegranates.

Pomegranates You can have the pomegranate seeds on a salad. You could have pure pomegranate juice. Pomegranate's pretty sweet, so you got to not drink too much of the juice. Actually, you just need about eight fluid ounces, one cup. Contains a A natural substance called elagitanins. Again, don't worry about trying to spell check it out. It's a complicated word, elagitanin. Mother Nature's pharmacy is found in the juice of a pomegranate. What that does is it activates your gut to secrete mucus, healthy mucus. How do you move stool? How do you get regular? You want to keep it all moving, right? So you need mucus. Mucus slip, slides the thing all the way down your other end. Mucus, that healthy mucus will grow a bacteria, a healthy gut bacteria called acromansia mucinophila. Mucinophila means it loves mucus. Achermancia. This is the name of a gut bacteria that everyone who's listening to this and watching this should pay attention to. K-k-k-e-r-m-a-n-s-i-a, acromansia. It turns out acromansia is a guardian of our metabolism. Acromansia activates our immune system, lowers inflammation, and this is smoking hot research. Smell. All right? I'm just telling you.

I love how you talk about this.

A piece of acromansia. So think about acromansia like an armadillo. It's got a hard shell on the outside, little pieces on it on the outside. One piece has just been discovered. It's called P9. P as in 9. That fragment of acromansia, whether the bacteria is alive or blown into 100 pieces, that bacteria, that piece of that bacteria, causes your body to produce its own GLP One, which is exactly what Ozempic and these prescription drugs are trying to do. So pomegranates grow acromancia. Acromancia will cause your body to create GLP-1. And what has GLP-1 done? It lowers your blood sugar, it helps you lose body fat.

Wow.

Okay. That's actually these discoveries that are being made. Food is medicine, right? That's what I do. It's super cool. But if you're going to drink pomegranate juice, be very careful. Here's a practical tip. Go to the grocery store, look for pomegranate juice. I tell people, So make sure it's pure pomegranate juice. Always, always, always. Check the ingredient label to make sure it's not really apple juice. It's got a little squirt of pomegranate and red food coloring. Don't do that. Get the real deal. Or just buy the pomegranate. You know why? Because when you have the whole pomegranate, you're going to get the dietary fiber from the seeds, and those seeds, the dietary fiber, feed your gut microbiome, making the acromiocetium even happier.

That's incredible. Okay. That's incredible. What does a kiwi do? Because I see Kiwi.

Kiwi's amazing because number one, kiwi is a great source of vitamin C. C is in Charlie. All right. What does that do? That lowers inflammation. If you're carrying around extra body fat, you're inflamed. No doubt about it. Just having a kiwi. One kiwi a day gives you a big dose of vitamin C to lower that inflammation, and you will feel the difference. You feel just less razzed up inside. Now, the other thing is kiwi has a lot of dietary fiber, and that dietary fiber can change your healthy gut bacteria. If it's not so healthy, it'll start to grow the healthy stuff in 24 hours. A kiwi a day, the next day, you will start seeing those beneficial effects. What?

Wait, the next day? 24 hours. So I eat one kiwi?

One kiwi. You'll start seeing the... You'll start feeling the beneficial effects. It'll take an unhealthy gut bacteria colony, start to make it a little healthier just in one day. After four days, you're going to get even more. All right? So This is why it's so important to think about this. A kiwi a day for breakfast is super easy. I love kiwi. Oh, by the way, the skin of the kiwi, amazing source of dietary fiber. But who would eat that? Who would eat that?

I don't know.

I'll tell you. Not me. I wouldn't do it either, but you know how you do it? No. Make a smoothie. Oh. Okay. Eat the kiwi with a spoon. Toss the skin into a blender to make the smoothie. It'll disappear and you'll get a huge amount of dietary fiber.

What a great tip. You should have a cooking show. I Why do you think you should have a cooking show. Talk to me about matcha.

Matcha. All right. Matcha is one of my favorite ways of having green tea. Now, we know green tea. It looks like you're drinking some green tea in front of you right now. You have it in a tea bag, so the tea leaves are steeped in the hot water and the polyphenols, the catechins, come dissolving out of that into the water, and you sip it and you get the good stuff, the catechins, which, by the way, turn on your brown fat to trigger down and burn harmful white fat.

Watch me drink my tea now.

Have a sip. All right. Now, but I got to tell you, matcha. Matcha is a heck of a lot more powerful than tea in a bag because matcha is the entire tea leaf ground into a powder. Now, you get 100% of the polyphenols. There's nothing left inside a tea bag. The whole shebang is in there and the dietary fiber. Good for your gut microbiome. So you want a dose of the polyphenols from tea. Drink matcha. You get the fiber, you get the 100% of the polyphenols. It's super, super powerful. That's been shown to burn down harmful body fat. How do we know it burns down harmful body fat? It's because it actually shrinks your waistline. You could actually lose an inch of a belt.

You drinking matcha.

By drinking matcha. That's been studied by researchers in Japan in clinical research.

All the foods we're talking about- Now, I need to clarify, though, because matcha tastes like dirty grass at times. If I want to add in a little sugar or a little something, am I killing all the benefit?

Listen, if you are struggling with the taste of matcha, which is... Listen, the reason it tastes like grass is because it's the old damn leaf in there. Here's what you do. Make a smoothie or a shake with it and just pour it in there and it'll disappear right in the background.

Dr. Lee, you're a genius.

It's the simplest way. Okay, now, so matcha is really good. Dark chocolate. Dark chocolate. Who doesn't like dark Who doesn't like chocolate? All right. Well, it turns out a lot of people get confused. They're like, Dr. Lee, you're telling people to eat chocolate? Yes, I am. The reason is because chocolate is actually a plant-based food. What? Well, chocolate is made with what makes chocolate chocolate, it's cacao. And cacao comes from the coca bean pod. That is growing from a tree. You take these pods, which are shaped like a football. They're heavy. All right. You cut them open, you peel off the outer skin, you dry it, you ferment it, you crush it up into a powder, and now you mix it into make chocolate. Chocolate is a confection, but it's made with a plant-based food. What's in that seed pod? Polyphenols up the yin-yang One of them is called proanthosianidin. Let me just tell you, the more cacao you have in your chocolate, the higher % cacao, right? You've heard about this, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 100%, right? So the higher the %, and what you want to look for is 80% or higher. You're getting a ton of these polyphenols in your chocolate, and those polyphenols trigger brown fat to fire off and burn down your harmful white fat.

Dark chocolate does it. Now, the darker, the more bitter it's going to be. So what I like to do, what I tell people, just get a little square of it and have it with coffee. You've created mocha. Bite of chocolate, sip of coffee, you've created your own mocha. And guess what coffee has? Coffee also has polyphenols, chlorogenic acid. Oh, didn't you hear me say this before with apples? That's right. Coffee has chlorogenic acid. So coffee, a cup of coffee will fire up your brown fat to burn down the harmful white fat every single morning.

Wait, so coffee with chocolate helps you burn fat?

Yep, that's a double-barreled approach.

Macha, kiwi, pomegranate, chips and tomatoes help you burn fat? That's right.

And so does edamame. You have a little thing of edamame on this plate here. Edamame, soy beans. It turns out that soy beans have been shown to trigger on the burning of harmful body fat by triggering your ground fat. And so this is actually, if you think about the foods that we talked about, these are not like crazy things. You got to spend a lot of money ordering on the internet from some crazy supplement producer. You don't have to be a bodybuilder. You don't have to be a fitness champ. The foods that we love to eat can be really healthy for us as long as you don't over eat, don't overfill the fuel tank, as long as you're keeping on moving around, so you're burning some of the fuel, and when you're not actually over eating the bad stuff. Now, we haven't spent time talking about the bad stuff because my- Well, let's talk about the bad stuff. Listen, my whole philosophy is that if you spend more time putting good things in your body, you're just not going to have as much room for the bad stuff. But let's talk about the bad stuff.

Look, we all know that there are foods that are very common that we've all grown up eating that aren't so good for us. One of the things that I got to say upfront is I don't do what a lot of social influencers do. I don't food bash, brand bash. I don't try to shame people for what they eat. Listen, I love some snacks every now and then as much as the next person. And it's totally fine because if you spend most of the time activating your body's healthy systems, the hard wiring, you can afford to take a hit every now and then. It's just putting some of that crappy gas in your tank every now and then, you're going to bounce right back. We're very, very resilient. That said, I do think it's important for people to understand that we're beginning to understand why certain foods that are not so good are really bad for you. And a great one that I always pick up with is a soda. Whether you get the blue can or the red can, or whether you have a regular soda or diet soda, any soda is really not healthy for you in the long run.

Even the zeros and the diets- Especially those. What do you mean especially those?

Especially the diets. The history of soda goes, I think, back to France, where they were serving fruit juices, and somebody came up with this entrepreneurial idea, let's bubble some things into the fruit juice and see if we can actually have a crowd plaisir. And I think that was the birth of soda. The soda fountain and everything else. You got to actually put the gas in there. Fast forward, 20th century, now you've actually got mass production of these sodas. It turns out that regular soda, regardless of what brand it is, actually contains a can of regular soda It contains seven to nine teaspoon of cane sugar. Wow. You come to my house and I offer you a glass and I put nine teaspoon of sugar in it and say, Here, have this smell. You'd go, That's disgusting. I'm not going to that, that's what's happening when you're actually drinking soda. That amount of sugar overload, carb overload. We talked about carb overload earlier. Now you're really flushing out. That tank's filling up real fast now and spilling over. But on top of that, you're overloading your metabolism. Because remember those hormones that have to collaborate to be able to really bring in the blood sugar to make sure you got enough energy.

When you flood that system, your system doesn't go so well. It doesn't function so well, it starts to derail a little bit. Listen, a single can, even two every now and then, you're going to be just fine. All right? Your body is not going to love you for it, but it'll get back to itself pretty quickly. But when I was in medical school, I remember distinctly. There was a classmate of mine, so a future doctor at the time, who was bragging that he would have two six packs of soda every single day to get through the day. I mean, that's 12 cans of soda. Jeez, think about the amount of sugar that But that person was actually putting into a system every day.

It's like 108 dispens.

Yeah, right? I mean, just think about the big pile. Now, I will tell you that the reason that the zero version, the sugar-free version was developed helped us because, well, in the 1970s and '80s, we started realizing that sugar causes you to gain weight. So let's come up with something else. Well, classic to the industrial food mindset. Let's go invent something. Let's go invent artificial sweeteners, non-caloric sweeteners. You can eat them, they taste sweet, but they don't actually add any calories. That must be better, right? Well, we thought so, except that research has shown that people who drink a lot of diet soda, they actually gain weight, too. They also gain weight, all right?

Even without sugar. But hold on, because I thought that we talked earlier about the fact that calories are fuel and there's less calories.

Exactly. You're right about that. However, we also talked about the fact your gut microbiome helps you have good metabolism and burn fuel. It turns out, and Mel, this is pretty new, within just the last few years, the discovery that our gut bacteria is very sensitive to artificial sweetener Sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners actually kill off some of the good healthy gut bacteria. Something that's well-intentioned, non-caloric sweetener, goes right down. We don't absorb any of it because it's not a calorie, goes down and feeds our gut microbiome, remember? What happens is the gut bacteria start to revolt. They don't do so well, some of the gut die off. Now, guess what? Your metabolism isn't functioning normally. You're derailed from that hard wiring, and now you start to gain weight. So food number one that I think that you should stay away from are sodas, regular or diet. That's one of the ones that you want to stay away from. Second food that I tell people to try to stay away from are these packaged health Now, you go to the airport and you go to... You see the bar and it looks like it's got granola and all that stuff in it.

It seems like it'd be a healthy bar. Take a look at the ingredient label. You will find that there are all these emulsifiers, the glue that holds the things together, sometimes artificial flavorings that are actually in there because the healthy stuff doesn't have enough sweet hit for you. Sometimes artificial coloring, sometimes So it looks a little bit nicer. Or here's another one besides the bar. You know, tree nuts are healthy, right? So you like hormones, mac and pan, pistachios, cashews, right? You go to the airport, you go to the convenience store part. Oh, let me go look for some in the health food section, there's nuts in a bag, and they're barbecue-flaved. Well, there's no such thing as called barbecue-flaved. Take a look at the ingredient label. Those are red food coloring, yellow food coloring. They've got artificial seasonings. It's not even real chili pepper. It's like artificial stuff. It's designed to light it up. Anything that's manufactured like that to be healthy, please read the ingredient label. If it seems like it's Greek or Latin or you can't pronounce it quickly, it's probably an ultra-processed ingredient that's going to harm your health. It's going to increase oxidative stress.

It's going to stress out your body. It's going to cause inflammation, maybe damage your gut microbiome. So again, I think stay away from that ultra-processed off this gut. If it looks like it might be nuclear-colored, all right, that's probably not good for you.

It's nuclear for your gut.

Nuclear for your gut. Don't nuke your gut.

Don't nuke your gut. I just love listening to you, and I almost hate to say this, but I got to hit the pause button and give our extraordinary sponsors a chance to say a few words. While you're taking a listen to our amazing sponsors who are bringing you Dr. William Lee and all this extraordinary information at zero cost, share this with people that you care about because we all deserve to have the benefit of this research at our fingertips and in our lives. Don't go anywhere because we got so much more to dig into, and we're going to be waiting for you after a very short break. So stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are getting to learn from the extraordinary Dr. William Lee. So, Dr. Lee, what else should we avoid? All right.

Another thing that you want to actually be really, really mindful of are processed meats. Now look, we all grew up with processed meats. I can remember, one of my earliest memories is going to school with a paper bag with a sandwich my mom made with processed meats. You go to the deli. By the way, do you know why they call them a delicateson or a deli? No. It's short for delicious. It was actually coming from the people that were trying to figure out how to actually sell leftover meat meat products in a way that would be delicious. A lot of these salamis, bologniz, all the stuff that you would actually see in a deli are all put together from little straps of meat that come as products of the food industry. I'm going to come back to that, but first, let's talk about why it's not so good for you.

That's disgusting. That's what you're getting when you get slice meat? That's right. No.

Yeah. Really? Yeah. Do you think that a turkey comes in a square?

Well, it It looks like a breast. I don't know. I see organic on the package because as you're saying processed meat, you're talking about like,iced meats.

Yeah. I'm talking about the kind that at the deli, they move them back and forth, they slice these things. Yes, what's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that the World Health Organization has identified that these processed meats, all right? We're not talking about like, freshly butchered, prepared at home or at a restaurant, but these processed meats contain all kinds of chemicals to able to actually get them to where they are. They have been classified as a Class I carcinogen by the World Health Organization. We're talking about Baloney, Salami, Pepperoni. By the way, I remember I had a patient once who was a former USDA Inspector. And he was retired by then. And I would love to talk to my patients about their jobs. Things that I didn't know, like the lobster guy would... What happens in a lobster boat? Well, this guy, USDA Inspector, I would say, Spare no details. Tell me everything about the inspection, meat inspection. He's like, Well, let me just tell you, I had to change my boots, my rubber boots, every four months because the stuff on the floor, the liquid from the places that made processed meats, would dissolve my boots.

Oh my God. That cued me in that there's probably stuff in the meats that are not so good for you. It's not just the nitrates. I mean, it's like the synthetic nitrates that they put in there, other preserves and coloring. But clostam carcinogen, abundant evidence that it's likely to increase a risk for cancer, especially colon cancer. Not surprisingly, right? You're eating a lot of this stuff and it goes down to your gut. But I learned something recently that when you go to the deli, and let's say you're ordering Maloney or Salami, it's a meat in a cylinder. And animals don't come in cylinders like that. But again, this is the meat scraps. And I learned about this, by the way, from a podcast called Science Versus. It's a really good podcast. What I found out, because I'm learning about this, is that originally the meat scraps were all put together, and then the US military invented a meat glue that would take scraps that you could pulverize and stick in that. You know the particle board that we actually have for wood? Are you kidding me? You go to the big boxers. These deli meats are basically the particles are meat particles that are glued together and then molded into a cylinder.

Well, it's true. It does come in a tube wrapped in plastic. I just assumed that was a part of an animal's body that's been... Totally not. Wow. If I buy, though, slice meats and it says organic, still?

I would just say, okay, look- You're killing me, doctor. Listen, by the way, I'm a reasonableist. If your favorite thing is a Baloney sandwich, knock yourself out, enjoy it, but just take the time to really savor it and don't do it very often. Got it. You know that it's not good. Listen, you know not to speed on the highway, but we all do it every now and then. But don't speed all the time because that's what's going to lead to car crash. So I'm not endorsing people to go out to eat deli meat. What I'm saying is that just like the soda, just like the nuclear snack foods, processed meat ain't good for you. All right? It tastes It's good. We grew up with it, but it's not good for you.

What else should we avoid?

All right. I'm going to tell you something you're going to be surprised by, and this is new research, and that's bottled water.

Why do we avoid bottled water?

The water isn't the problem. It's the bottle. We're beginning to realize that these bottled waters... I mean, come on. I used to carry around bottled water all the time with me. All right? You're supposed to stay hydrated, right? Right. Okay. Any vacation you go to, you're getting a bottle of water in your hotel room. It turns out that now we realize that the bottled water, the bottles of plastic bottles, are shedding microplastics into the water. So while we don't taste it, we're actually pouring plastic into our bodies. All right? Little tiny particles plastic particles. You know how much plastic we are ingesting on average every week?

No.

A credit card's worth of plastic. Really? Every week, we're ingesting it. Now, listen, we've known this for some But I used to be asked this all the time, what's the consequence of the plastic? I used to, I mean, just only a few years ago, say, We don't really know. It seems like it's probably okay. Our body must get rid of it somehow. Now we know, just in the last 24 months, this is new, all right? I'm telling you a bunch of new stuff that microplastics are detectable in the human body and they're associated with badness. Let me tell you, it was a study that came out of Italy with neurologists and cardiologists that looked at people with clogged blood vessels, cardiovascular disease, in the large vessels that feed their brain, and they were narrowed down. And what they found is that when they took out the clog, so it's like calling a plumber in to clean the drain. When they cleaned the drain and removed the plaque, the clogging of the blood vessels, they found that they could detect plastic embedded in the narrowing of blood vessels that would be feeding the brain. More importantly, they found a correlation.

The people who had plastics embedded in their blood vessels had a four-fold increase, four times increase in having a fatal heart attack or stroke. Wow. Okay, that's serious stuff. Subsequently, we've actually discovered you can actually find plastic in the brain. In fact, you can take a kitchen scale and measure two human brains, and you know which one's got more plastic, and it's heavier. You can measure it. You know like you're measuring flour for making cookies or whatever. You could actually measure the amount of plastic in the human brain. And we found plastic in the blood circulation. We never looked at it before, but in a blood, vial blood in a doctor's office, if you looked for it, you can actually find plastic circulating in it. We've actually found plastic in human testicles. We found it in human semen. Don't ask me how it gets down there. It's also found by urologists who are actually doing surgery. They've actually found it in the flesh of the penis, embedded in there, probably from years and years and years of being exposed to plastic.

Now, I don't mean to... It sounds terrifying, But what should you be drinking your water out of glass?

Number one, let me just give you some real practical stuff. If you want water, put it in a glass container, not a plastic container. For those of you who are bringing your water bottles to the gym, get a metal one or get one that's lined with glass on the inside. Take the plastic ones, toss them out immediately. When you go back to the kitchen, go root around your drawers and your cabinets and anything that you might have once used to store leftovers, the plastic stuff, plastic containers, the plastic top, out it goes. Replace it with ceramic or glass. Cups in your cupboard, You've got the ceramic mugs, you've got the glasses for your guests. You might some plastic ones that are not there. You got it at a ball game or whatever, out.

Throw it out. Now I feel like an idiot because I've handed you a silicone glass, so it doesn't make... Don't drink out of it, Dr. Lake.

Listen, I'm telling you, microplastics are a big deal. Now, I'll tell you, it's almost impossible to get away from microplastics. They're everywhere in the environment. They're in the new carpets. They're in the HVAC systems in our house.

Yeah, but that's different than actually ingesting it in your food.

We breathe it in and it gets into our body as well. But you're right. What I'm trying to say is that for foods that you want to avoid, you want to stay away from plastics whenever you can. That means don't microwave something with a plastic top or with a saran wrap on top. That means don't buy food that's pre-packed in plastic, those quick eat meals that you actually have. It's got a big plastic thing that you nuke in a microwave and you put a fork to let the steam out. All that stuff is just coating it with plastic.

And obviously impacting our metabolism.

We believe that Those... By the way, people have been talking about this for years. Maybe these microplastics are endocrine disruptors, and that's why we're actually having problems with our hormones. I don't know. I haven't seen enough data on that. I mean, listen, I'm a scientist, so here's the thing about scientists, like a real scientist, and I know you've talked to a bunch of them. A real scientist will tell you what they know, but they'll also tell you when they don't know something. And I don't know enough information about hormone disruptors and microplastics, but I do know because I'm a vascular guy, I study blood vessels. I do know that the little particle bits that are stuck in your blood vessels are linked to real serious health outcomes and badness. For me, one of the things besides processed meats and nuclear foods and sodas I would say stay away from water in a bottle, or water in a container that's plastic, because you have a choice. You can get one out of glass.

You have very strong opinions about what we do on airplanes.

On an airplane?

Yes. What not to drink or- Okay.

Well, listen, to do my research and to work with my colleagues, I do travel quite a bit. I know a lot, as I'm sure you do, about sitting on a plane. One of the things about planes that's crazy is that we're instinctively served beverages and foods. If you're like me, I'm working on my laptop and somebody comes by and hands me something, my instinct is, I take it, right? I mean, it's free. What thing? You paid for it, but it seems like it's something that I should eat. Well, there's a couple of things that I don't do. I don't drink coffee or tea on an airplane. The reason I don't is because a lot of people don't know this, but the water from your coffee or tea comes from a tank in the airplane. They don't clean that tank but once or twice a year. Eew. You know what happens when you actually have a container you don't clean very often? It's pretty disgusting. And I don't even want to go into the chassis of an airplane to take a look at the rusty old tank with all the crud that's in the bottom that they are actually using and pouring out.

Listen, the place where the flight attendants are actually making the coffee looks pretty clean. The coffee looks okay. I can't taste anything, but I'm somebody that I know enough that I care about what I put into my body, and I would rather get a glass container of water or coffee or better I yet. Bring your own thermos, metal thermos or glass thermos. Fill up your own coffee, all right, after security, and bring it on. Now you know that you actually have something reliable that doesn't have weird stuff. Listen, a rule of thumb for anybody listening to this, keep weird stuff out of your body. Any chemicals, anything you can't pronounce, anything you have no idea why it's there. Now that I told you about meat glue, it's stuff that you just don't really want. Even if we grew up with it, listen, there's so many things that we're getting smarter about things that are good for us, but we're also getting a little smarter about things that are not good for us.

Well, Dr. Lee, I think one of the things that's really confusing is that there's just so much information. Where I want to go next is, since there's a lot of people around the world that may live in a place where it's really hard to find local produce or they can't grow it themselves, what is the optimal place where you should be grocery shopping? And is there a difference between farmer's market and going to your local market or grocery store?

Yeah, that's a big question. I'm a pragmatic person, practical person. So I say, if you're going to buy food, buy the The best quality food you can within the most convenient place that you can as well. Whatever you're able to get access to. Again, I try to be very careful not to make people feel bad that they can't go shop at a fancy organic farmer's market. A lot of people can't.

Let's say you can't. You're listening to this, you can't. How do you, Dr. Lee, go into a grocery store? What have you discovered based on your research? If you're going into a grocery store, how do you shop?

When I go to the grocery store, I go to the produce section first. It's usually in front of the store. I'm looking at the stuff that they put closer to the entrance, which happens to be, if you read this little sign that they put near the foods, if it's grown locally, like local apples or local strawberries, whatever. It's seasonal. That's the seasonal stuff that hasn't taken an airplane ride from South America. I've been sitting in the back in a box for a couple of days. That's All the stuff that's a little fresher coming in. And local, when food doesn't have to travel, it's going to be fresh. I mean, think about when you get on a plane, you fly someplace far away, you're not fresh that same day. You got to take a shower, get a good night's sleep. Same thing with the food. So local, you're fresher. So I look for that. Even in a regular grocery store, usually the stuff they put closer to you, if you read the signs, is going to be closer. But that doesn't mean that the other foods that they have aren't so good for you. A lot of greens are grown in places where you can get produce grown and farmed and picked all year round.

That's fine. I go to the Middle Isle, by the way, and you're supposed to stay out of the Middle Isle. That's also a myth. I will tell you the Middle Isle has some really, really amazing healthy foods. What? Okay, You got to actually put your filter on so you're not looking at the chips and the candy and all the ultra-process stuff that you might... Snacks you might get there. But you think about it, you get extra virgin olive oil is there. Lentils and legumes are there. Cans of beans are on there. One of my favorite beans are actually a simple can of white navy beans. I love them. I don't know why. When I was a kid, I must have had a nice soup or stew with them.

Are they going to help me burn fat?

They are. How? Studies have been done by the University of Toronto, looking at people that have metabolic syndrome. They already had a little too much body fat. It turns out that by giving people the equivalent of one can of beans to eat five times a week, so not every day, five times out of the week, they could actually shrink the waistline of people by shrinking body fat in the tube of the body, visceral fat, by an inch over the course of a month. Now, how does that work? Well, it turns out that there's fiber Dietary fiber in beans. Now, how you cook them matters, obviously. How you serve it matters. Use a traditional recipe and you get like beans stew with the rosemary and olive oil and chopped shallots or onions in there. I mean, it's going to taste really good. Trust me on this because I can make that myself. What it does is that that dietary fiber feeds your gut microbiome, your healthy gut bacteria. Thank you for doing it. They release substances that help to streamline your metabolism so you use your energy more efficiently. So middle aisle. Oh, another group of foods in the middle aisle that get bypassed.

Obviously, dried fruits, you can actually get cranberries, strawberries, apricots, you can get in the middle aisle. But here's something that a lot of people don't pay any attention to, and that is tinned seafood. What? Tinned seafood. Okay.

Okay. What am I doing with tinned seafood, Dr. Lee?

Now, follow me on this, right? When I When I was a kid and I saw a round can of tuna fish. Now, I've been to my friend's house often enough when I was a kid, one of those things got opened up, it smells fishy and it smelled just like wet cat food. Yes. All right? So I'd I stay away from that stuff my whole life. Then, when I was doing my research, I realized that I was wrong and that tinned seafood is a delicacy in the Mediterranean with really healthy diets. They call them conserve us. They're conserving it, they're preserving it. They catch fish on a boat. It could be squid, it could be macaron, it could be sardines, it could be tuna, it could be a whole bunch of different kinds of fish. They cook it right away, they steam it, and then they pack it in extra virgin olive oil. Now the fish has got omega-3. Healthy omega-3 is good for your metabolism, helps you burn harmful body fat. Now they're packing in olive oil. Now it's nice and moist. And olive oil has got the hydroxetraxal and olioquanthal that helps activate your brown fat.

Then they chop up little herbs and flavoring, reasoning, and they put it into a tin. The reason they did that in the Mediterranean is because in the months they couldn't go out fishing. They would actually want to have omega-3s. Now, they didn't call them omega-3s. They just call them protein, and they call them delicious local foods. But if you go to Spain, Portugal, south of France, Italy, Greece, and you If you look at some of their little food stores by the shore, you'll have stores packed with these conserves, and they are delicious. Fastest lunch I've ever had is you get a hunk of sourdough bread, sourdough because it's a fermented probiotic food. The sourness of sourdough bread comes from a bacteria called Lactobacillus. It makes lactic acid, which gives you the tangy sour of sourdough bread. It's great for you. Hunk of sourdough bread, reach into my pantry, pull out a tin of conserves, pop it open with a fork. I've got myself a really delicious when I open some pickles or something, now you get some more fermented foods. That's a way of getting a really tasty mouth watering lunch. What I do, by the way, at night, if I'm so busy, I don't have time to cook dinner, but I'm hungry, right?

And I'm like, Oh, I got to eat something, but I didn't plan dinner or I missed dinner. What do I do? I'll take a pot, boil some water. I'll look for some good pasta, ideal organic pasta. I'll boil it up. I take a stainless steel pan. You know what I do? I heat it up with a little extra virgin olive oil, and I will crack open a tined seafood thing. Might be macaron sardines, could be anything. Mussels, clams, squid. I will just caught those up real briefly, and I'll throw them right into the cooked pasta. Heat it up, take a little tube of Double concentrated tomato paste, a little squirt in there, flip it around a couple of times, and man, my whole house smells great. Now I've gotten a gourmet meal. I just made myself with Conservas, you find in the middle of the grocery store.

More importantly, all of those things help me lose weight.

And they're not expensive. Yes. Okay, so this is- Dr..

Lee, that's the trifecta.

That's right. So again, middle aisle. It's got lots of good stuff. You got to filter out all the bad stuff, but go for the good stuff that you can actually find. That, to me is really the important thing is that my message is that you should really try to align the foods that you love to eat that research has discovered can help you burn body fat, improve your metabolism, help you stay healthy you or get to that next level of health and eat reasonable amounts of it, prepare it with the other ingredients that are actually going to light up your health, and just enjoy.

I love that. Dr. Lee, you have been so generous and so passionate, and I feel unbelievably empowered by everything that you've shared with us. I know that the person that's listening is like, Okay, what do I do? What do I do? This is a lot. What do I do? For the person listening who who wants to lose weight, who would like to really focus on simple steps to take to unlocking the power of your metabolism and losing some weight this year and just generally being healthier, what are the top three things that you would recommend the person listening do immediately starting today in order to achieve those goals using your research?

It's going to be a lot easier than you think.

Great.

First thing is for your beverages, don't drink anything except for coffee, tea, or water. Now, I drink coffee all day long. Don't put dairy milk in it. You can use nut milk. It's fine. Dairy contains saturated fats, but more importantly, those saturated fats bind to the good bioactives in coffee and tea, and then you don't actually absorb them. They just get flushed down your system. So for beverages, all right? Eliminate all the beverages for water, coffee, tea. That's one thing that you can do immediately. The second thing that I would actually say is cut down or cut out on ultra-processed foods. Now, ultra-processed foods, basically foods made by a factory containing 20 or more ingredients, most of which you can't pronounce and you don't know why they're in there. It's that old saying that your grandmother wouldn't recognize them as food, and they don't look like the original food that they were. It sounds like it's not punitive. It's just that if it comes in a box or a can, it's got to read the ingredient label. If it seems like it's not the food that you'd recognize, you couldn't make it yourself. You can't make animal crackers yourself at home.

Most people can't. That's an ultra-processed food. Cut down or cut out those. And instead, swap them in with what I would say plant-based foods. I'm not telling you to be a vegan. I'm saying just start adding some things that are more in the veggies side of things. And it doesn't have to be even green. Green It's good. Definitely eat green, but it could be colorful, red, eat the rainbow, as they say. That's a swap in that is actually in with the good stuff and then cut down or cut out the other stuff. That's the second thing. The third thing I would actually say is don't eat too much. Eat slowly so you can actually pay attention to your body's signals. Eat what tastes good to you, like your preferences, but don't eat too fast. Let your body signal to you when you're satisfied, but before you're full. I'm good. We've had that, right? I mean, you're eating with friends and they want you to keep on eating, and you're like, No, I'm good. I'm good. That's what you want to aim for. Not that I'm full. I'm full. I'm good. Thanks. I'm good. Aim for that, all right?

Because that actually limiting the volume that you eat is going to be a big start for helping your own hardwiring start to burn down that extra fat, along with a plant-based food, along with a coffee and a tea. And by the way, even water, cold water, can actually help you burn down body fat by increasing your metabolism. You know why? Because cold water in the core of your stomach, the core temperature, guess what? Triggers your brown fat. Oh, it's cold. That must be hibernating. Let's go ahead and fire up that brown fat so you'll start to burn down some extra body fat just by drinking cold water. Those are good food-related things. And then And I would say, and this is a topic for a whole other conversation, is get in motion. I'm not telling... You don't have to hire a trainer. You don't have to go to an expensive gym. You don't have to buy workout equipment for your basement when you've got other things to do with your money. But stay in motion. Go for a walk. You got a bike? Go for a ride. You got a friend? Go out and gossip with your friend and go for a walk outdoors.

That's the thing you want to do. Those things burn down energy. They take energy. They consume your fuel. Food by alone is very, very helpful. Food plus movement, exercise, really good. That's like the... Those are two things, a double-barrowed approach that anybody can do very, very easily.

How can following your advice about the food to add into your diet this year improve the quality of your life?

Listen, if you felt that some of the foods I was talking about made your mouth water, then you know that following Following this advice is going to make you appreciate your food. Okay, here's a... And by the way, by when you appreciate your food, your quality of life automatically increases. This is what I always tell people like, Oh, man, I don't know if I could eat healthy food. What I tell people is, go to your local Mediterranean or Asian restaurant and just get the menu. Come back home with a magic marker. Probably don't steal the menu. Ask if you could borrow one at home, and just circle the foods that you actually like. Then I will tell you, it's very easy to find the ingredients in those foods that light up your metabolism that can help you burn down body fat, and don't eat too much of it. Just savor it.

Dr. Lee, what are your parting words?

The same words I started with. Love your food to love your health. That's my big belief. I think that everyone can have joyful eating if you follow your preferences and just be mindful that you should just really enjoy and savor the healthy food that you already love.

I'm going to tell you what I love. I love you. Dr. Lee, I know the audience is just going to go crazy over everything you just taught us. And so I absolutely have to have you come back and talk about metabolism. And if you love spending time with Dr. Lee, I'm going to tell you something. I want you to send your questions in. Just go to melrobins. Com or put them in the comments below But melrobbins. Com is the best place to put him because I know that you are going to want more from him. So Dr. Lee, we are going to have you back. I'll make sure that we bring the audience questions, but I just cannot thank you enough for spending some time with us here in our Boston studios and really, truly empowering us with everything that you just shared.

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lee, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I also want to thank you. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to something that is going to improve your health. I wanted to be sure to tell you, in case nobody else does today, that I love you, and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life. There is zero doubt in my mind that if you take everything to heart that Dr. Lee shared with both you and me and you try it, you're not only going to feel better, you're going to get healthier, and that is going to help you live a better life. All righty, I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode. You're absolutely... Is it normal for somebody to talk to you and be salivating? I feel my mouth watering. The fact that you've hit play and you've taken the time to listen to this tells me that you're the person who not only values your time, but you're also interested... I got too much saliva in my mouth. Dr. Lee is a renowned physician scientist, and he is the founder and President of the Anniogenesis...

Oh, Jesus Christ. There goes our bloopers. How do you say Can you just give me the word angiogenesis? That I understand. Okay.

Whenever you drink your tea, you never put the tea nearby. You never respond to it.

This is my husband. It's super annoying. Okay, keep going. All right.

Don't nuke your gut.

Don't nuke your gut.

And the more you actually put- I'm sorry to laugh.

Is that a medical term?

That's a medical term.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, Tracy. Are you not just laughing? You're amazing. Oh, and one more thing. No, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. Stitcher.