381: Why You Can’t Lose Weight: Top Weight Loss Myths

Hello everyone! Ashley and I are back with a new episode, and today we’re bringing you a topic we have received many requests for, and that is the topic of weight loss resistance. Are you struggling to lose weight despite doing everything “right?” do you feel that no matter how much you do, how little you eat, you easily gain weight or struggle to take weight off? Well, this is an episode for you. We will be busting 3 common myths around weight loss, which will hopefully help you through times of resistance.

More about Dr. Pompa

Dr. Daniel Pompa is a global health leader and innovator on a mission to educate practitioners and the public on the origins of inflammation-driven disease, cellular detoxification, fasting strategies, and diet variation principles. Although trained as a Chiropractor, his authority comes from the victory within his own battle, having overcome neurotoxic illness that was rooted in heavy metal poisoning.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, I want to tell you about one of our sponsors, CytoDetox. Look, podcasts cost money. There’s a lot of production going around this, but we are grateful to have Cellular Detox as one of the sponsors. It’s so easy for me to talk about the product because myself and my family use it constantly as we practice what I preach. For over 15 years, I have talked about and taught doctors and the public about cellular detox.

I’ll tell you, Cyto was a breakthrough; Cyto was a breakthrough for us. It’s changed so many lives. We’re grateful that they sponsor Cellular Healing TV. It makes sense, doesn’t it? They should.

Ashley:
If you’re listening to this podcast and want to access the amazing CytoDetox product Dr. Pompa just mentioned, please visit DetoxOffer.com. Again, that’s DetoxOffer.com.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we’re bringing you an episode with Dr. Pompa himself as this is a topic we have received so many requests for. That is the topic of weight loss resistance.

Are you struggling to lose weight despite doing everything right? Do you feel that no matter how much you do, how little you eat, you easily gain weight or struggle to take weight off? This is an episode for you. Listen for these three common myths around weight loss. Hi, Dr. Pompa, welcome.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, welcome to you as well because I love doing these interviews that you do with me because I love the topics. Typically, these are really trending topics.

Ashley:
I agree; I love them, too. It’s really just bringing everything back to just what you do best and what you’ve been doing for years. We can get on some really broad topics, but what people ask for the most really are just these core ideas that you’ve been talking about for years. We’re just trying to bring them back so we can refresh everyone’s memory or bring in some new listeners really who haven’t heard this stuff before.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I always have a new take on some of the topics. This one around weight loss resistance, I don’t know when I did the last show on this topic, but I can tell you this. Since we did, it’s gotten a lot worse, meaning that everybody’s struggling. You have people who are just—I looked at the population. I can see the undereaters, the skinny-fat, a certain look that they have, hormonally imbalanced, yes, but I can see it a mile away struggling. Then I see the overeaters doing their thing.

I want to say this at the top of the show: it’s not your fault. It really isn’t. There’s a reason for this. Stop beating yourself up if you fail on diets, or you struggle with this, or nothing works for you. There really is a reason within us at the cellular level of why that occurs. There’s some unique answers. To bring that message, there are three big myths that we have to just pull apart and then weave the answers into those.

Ashley:
Absolutely, and you always simplify things in such an amazing way where people can really understand these concepts because this is a very big concept. I love how you have turned this into just the three biggest myths around weight loss. Let’s get started with these because I know I want to hear more about them. Myth Number One, and I think a lot of us have heard this one before, is that you just need to eat less and exercise more. We’re just a calories in, calories out equation.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, even if we really polled our viewers, and our viewers are really educated, something in us still believes that little message right there, even if it’s just in our subconscious, not in our conscious. The reason why is because it works, short-term; long-term, no. What I mean by that is if we cut calories and just start pounding at the gym, we all lose weight; come on. I shouldn’t say we all because there’s some people who really metabolically screwed up to keep it simple that it doesn’t even work for them anymore. In the beginning, I can assure you it worked for them. It works at some point for all of us, but again, long-term it doesn’t. That’s where people get confused.

We can lose that 10, 15 pounds by cutting calories and exercising more. Then it just stops. Ultimately, you might look a little better in clothes, but you see yourself and you go, oh my gosh, something’s really wrong. You just don’t have that normal look.

I sympathize for that, but the problem is that we can’t just cut calories. If it were only so simple. Again, you can take the extreme. You can cut calories to the point where people start to lose muscle, and even their organs shrink, and their immune system gets lower and lower. You can spot those people a mile away.

Exercise, come on, we’ve all seen the exercise enthusiast in the gym. They’re doing more than everyone, teaching all the classes, and this and that. You look and go, gosh, I don’t really want to look like that. How’s that working out for you? The answer isn’t exercising more. I’m a fan of exercise, but again, I call it for weight loss just the cherry on the top. It helps our hormones get better, but it’s not the answer.

Our government bodies, our—the media has made us feel like we’re just lazy. We need to just do more exercise. That’s the problem. They also make us feel like gluttons. We just have to stop eating. Again, I’m making the argument that neither of those work long-term.

Ashley:
Absolutely, because at the end of the day, weight loss is about hormones. It’s about your cellular health. Yeah, like you said, we’re not calculators. We’re not just this equation. Could you talk more about that? Why is weight loss so hormonally based? Yeah, what can we do about it?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, at the end of the day, it seems very logical if we just burn more calories than we’re taking in. It’s not so simple. Let me give you an example. We’re going to get to—you’re right in what you said, Ashley. The inability to lose weight despite what you eat and how much you exercise is a hormone challenge. We’re getting there.

Understand that if we took somebody on a caloric restriction diet long enough, long, long, long, they all end up eating very few calories: 1000 calories or under. Yet, you still don’t lose weight. Why? I’m going to make it as simple as I can without getting into all the minutia that many do get into it.

It’s this. The body has one priority over all: survival. The body, it gets in a starvation mode of caloric restriction. It will do everything to survive, including hanging on to those precious fat stores to keep you alive.

Now, it’s in a catabolic state where it needs energy. It’s not just going to die. It’s going to get energy. It starts breaking your muscle down to energy. That’s the skinny-fat look. It will pack little bits of fat where it feels harder to get, whether it’s in the belly, the thighs. Meanwhile, you might lose fat other places but that one spot because it wants to hold onto that.

The body is just trying to live, survive for another die. It’s holding onto its precious fuel. Meanwhile, you’re literally becoming more and more hormonally unhealthy, metabolically unhealthy. Your cells are just trying to survive.

You could literally get down to 500 calories a day, exercising, and still actually look flabby, out of shape. You start to look gaunt after a while. You can see the look of people. Oddly, the answer for them is feasting. They need to eat more to lose weight. That is a battle that you’re going to need a coach for because you do need to eat more to gain—to lose fat and gain your good tissues back. Again, because now you’re in that psychological pattern, it becomes very difficult from a psychological standpoint.

Ashley:
Absolutely, we’ve all be so trained. Like you said, from a young age, we’ve just heard move more, eat less. You’re really trying to unlearn these behaviors. It can be really helpful because it can be hard. It’s not so simple as just eat more. People are like, how? I don’t know how to do that.

Where do you think fasting ends and starving begins? They start fasting. They’re feeling really good. Then they start fasting too much. At what point does fasting become—it’s not fasting anymore. You’re actually doing damage because it’s too much.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a great question. Obviously, I wrote a book, Beyond Fasting. I’m obviously a fan and a teacher of fasting, whether it’s just pure water fasting or partial fasting, which is caloric restriction. The very thing, Dr. Pompa, you’re telling us not to do, you are a fan of. Because I am a fan of short times. This is part of your answer to your question of caloric restriction or water only.

However, the question is, can you fast too much? The answer is yes. Fasting is in vogue right now. I see too many people in our space fasting too much, whether it be daily intermittent fasting with not as many feast days as they should have or times of feasting. Even breaking completely away from intermittent fasting and just eating three meals a day for periods of time is going to be helpful to actually remind the body it’s nowhere close to starving. It doesn’t have to hold onto our fat stores to live and survive. We need the feast as much as the fast.

To answer your question specifically, at what point does it become starvation, well, look, there are definite signs you’ve heard me talk about when to break your fast. When the tongue goes from white, green, blue, whatever colors it turns when you’re fasting back to pink, okay, you need to break your fast. When hunger comes back, you need to break your fast. You’re getting extremely thirsty, you need to break your fast.

There’s other things. You stop losing a half-pound to a pound of body weight a day, you need to break your fast. Your body is holding onto water. That’s not a good sign.

Of course, you can look at different blood work. A drop in electrolytes to a certain point, you need to break your fast. These are all signs of starvation. Looking at nitrogen levels, these are signs of starvation.

It depends on your body size; it depends on who you are, but that can happen after 20 days, 30 days, 40 days. You know some people can go hundreds of days because their body tissue had so much. There’s no number is my point. It’s different for everybody.

This is another reason why because most of you aren’t trained to look for these signs of starvation. I’m a bigger fan, and I talk about it in my book, of multiple shorter fasts. Fasting people five days a month for every—for multiple months is safer and more effective oftentimes than doing longer fasts. It could be a five-day fast, a water fast, and then maybe next month a partial fast. Then another fast. Then maybe you skip a month or two.

Don’t forget that the feasts are as important as the fast. You can’t just go from fast to fast, fast to caloric restriction, intermittent fast daily where you’re eating in ten-hour windows, eight-hour windows, and then go to your next fast. Eventually, you’re going to cause more problems.

Now, here’s where people line up, Ashley. You know this. I’m against fasting. They’ve seen disasters with fasting, so they get in that camp. Fasting works. It’s the oldest therapy known to man. It works, so let’s pull people out of that camp.

Then you have the people over here that are just fast, fast, fast, fast. They’re missing another pathway called mTOR, which is an anabolic pathway that’s just as important for healing. The magic is the balance between. That’s something that I’ve taught obviously a lot about.

Ashley:
Absolutely, it’s your diet variation. It’s very proven. We do have a lot of people saying I’m fasting all the time. I’m keto all the time. I’m gaining weight. I don’t know what’s going on.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, keto does the same thing as a fast. It puts people in a stressed—and again, I’m a keto fan; don’t get me wrong, but when you’re going from fasting to keto to intermittent fasting to—this puts people in too much autophagy. That means your body is eating itself. Autophagy is amazing because it eats bad cells, creates new cells, but as healing as that pathway is, as it shuts off autoimmune, yes. Does it have all these healing, get rid of cancer cells and bad stuff? Yes, but too much of that pathway is not good.

I see today in our space more of that mistake than any. I see people going from keto, low-carb, to more fasts, to more fasts. I’ll tell you, ladies, you’re going to get hit first before the men, but eventually, the men will get hit as well. If you have a thyroid condition or adrenal conditions, then should you fast? You can and should, but should you do too much? It’s going to hit you fast and hard first.

Again, the myth, people with adrenal problems or thyroid problems can’t do keto or can’t fast. Nope, that’s not true. They can, but they can get into deep trouble very quickly. The feast is as important as the fast. I hope everybody heard that.

Ashley:
Oh, yes, absolutely. It’s important. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. People, they get so hooked on—like you said, you have great results in the beginning. You start keto; you start lowering your calories and exercising more; you do a fast and you feel amazing. You just want to keep doing it. It can be very hard to convince people.

Dr. Pompa:
Fasting and keto is not in our space put in the category of caloric restriction, but it almost can be because they still all stimulate autophagy. Autophagy is a breaking down, which can be good. Then this other pathway of eating high protein is an example. Let’s call that paleo, or maybe carnivore, or high carbohydrate. Let’s call that the Mediterranean diet, healthy high carbs.

Those can be feasts and used correctly to refed. That puts us in this anabolic pathway, which is called mTOR. That is just as healing as the autophagy. Everyone wants to camp out in either side of those. You have your paleo group, carnivore group, high protein, whatever it is, low carb, keto instead of realizing the magic is in both.

Ashley:
Absolutely, it’s all about the variation. All right, well, let's get to our next myth. We’ve touched on this briefly, but hormones. Is it so simple as go get your hormones checked? Figure out what’s going on and maybe go on some bioidenticals and just start taking hormones to balance things out. Is that something that you would recommend?

Dr. Pompa:
Look, there’s a time and a place for hormones. I’ll be the first to say it. However, the long-term game there is very difficult to win; meaning that if you take hormones, your body is going to slow your own production down. It’s going to offset another hormone. Again, there’s a time for crutches, but ultimately, if you’re not working upstream to what has ultimately affected the hormones, and we can touch on a little bit of that because I think it’s an important message, but you’re not ultimately going to win that game.

I acknowledge what you said earlier that hormones are the big reason why people can’t lose weight and are in weight loss resistance, but if the answer was so easy just to take more hormones. It’s not. I think all of us have friends that have done the hormone thing; we know people that have done the hormone thing. It starts off with estrogen, testosterone. You feel better at first.

Then they end on thyroid hormone. That’s the new thing. You feel better, but yet, you still aren’t. You still have brain fog, low energy. You still have the belly or the whatever it is.

Okay, see, because there’s a bigger reason. If your hormones can’t get their message in the cell, they call that hormone resistance. Like insulin resistance, you can’t get the message in the cell. It doesn’t matter what you force your blood levels to by taking a hormone; it doesn’t.

I always use the example it’s like shouting at our kids. At first, they listen. They’re like, oh my gosh, mom and dad’s mad. Then after a while, they just don’t even listen anymore. Then ultimately, if we find ourselves whispering or talking softer, they listen better. That’s like getting our cells more sensitive to hormones again. That really is the answer. What’s driving hormone resistance and how can we get ourselves hearing our hormones again?

The last few shows that we did just one on one like this, you’ll put the links in here, watch them because we dig upstream to some of these causative factors that are driving the epidemic of hormone resistance. Typically, it’s neurotoxins. Yes, bad fats like vegetable oils, canola oils that everyone’s ignoring, even the healthy people because I go to dinner with them. I go to seminars. They don’t even ask the questions.

Ashley, I know you do. You’ve been to dinner with my wife and I. I’ll make an exception on sugar before I will these nasty rancid fats that they’re using at everything. Whole Foods, too; I’m not talking about restaurants. There’s these vegetable oils, canola oils. They make their way into the membrane, drive inflammation, create hormone resistance.

Toxins, certain toxins make their way around every cell in our body, drive inflammation, creating hormone resistance. Glucose up, insulin up, drives inflammation, hormone resistance. Okay, those are just some of the big ones. We’ve talked about them. The point is we should really be paying attention to what is creating our cells not to hear the hormones. Just taking hormones, it is a slippery slope.

Ashley:
Do you recommend that somebody—let’s say they’re not on hormones and their doctor wants to put them on hormones. Do you suggest that they just do it for a short time? Do you suggest that they try going without them for a little bit? What is your recommendation?

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s a great question. I think that if you’re going on a hormone because you can’t just get through a day, can’t function, time and a place with the acknowledgment that okay, we’re trying to figure out what went wrong. What stressor upstream is the issue? That’s why working with one of the doctors I train or someone like that is going to be a better—smarter move because if you just go to a doctor where they’re alluding that all you need is a hormone and that’s the answer to your problem, that’s short-lived at best. I would go to someone else.

Now, I also would acknowledge that many people can take hormones and feel better but actually be developing cancer. I think that anybody taking a bioidentical hormone or a hormone should at least once a year run a 24-hour urine hormone, sometimes known as a DUTCH test. Genova Labs does another 24-hour urine hormone collection where you collect your urine for 24 hours. That’s the most accurate way to look at estrogen metabolites. In some of these toxic hormones, it can build up slowly and actually drive cancer, so you could be feeling better and be developing a new and worse problem. Once, twice a year, take a urine 24-hour test so you can see what those hormones are doing.

Please understand, be looking upstream. You’re not just unlucky. You didn’t just get hormone problems because your parents did, or your mother or dad. No, there’s a reason. Find it.

Ashley:
Absolutely, and I can put a link to the urine test in here as well because it is really good to do the urine panel. Then you hit on something too just about the quality of the food that you’re eating, too. The food can really affect your hormones, too. Like you said, if you’re eating the vegetable oils, if you’re eating unhealthy meat from sick animals, this is all very driving to your hormone health.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, and if we look at causes, I’m a big fan of just 100% grass-fed in your family. Is it more money? Yeah, it’s worth every penny because, yes, the meat has hormones; the meat has bad fats, all of which affect your hormones.

Of course, organic. The toxins just in your food obviously are oftentimes hormone mimics, can put you states of estrogen dominance, lower your hormones that should be elevated. All of that is definitely can be driven by diet. Now, again, certain toxins make their way to your cells, block the connection of hormones.

Also, your control tower for your hormones sits in your brain. It’s your pituitary hypothalamus. Think of a control tower at the airport. You see that big, really high tower? Believe it or not, there’s people in that tower.

There’s an intelligence in there that is letting every plane land at the right time, directing every plane to say this runway, go to that runway, do this, that one. Timing, go ahead, you take off, you don’t. You delay for five seconds. All of that is happening by an intelligence in that tower. Same with your hormones.

There’s something called the hypothalamus. That’s the intake of information. We have three more planes wanting to come in on blah-blah-blah. Okay, and then the outs. Okay, yep, clear Runway Three. That’s the pituitary driving the information to the hormones in the body, to the thyroid, to the adrenals, and the hypothalamus taking all the information in.

When that runs smoothly, hormonally healthy, weight loss resistance no more, energy, no brain fog, all great, but when that control tower is not right, nothing works. It’s like the drunk guy the night before staying out late shows up in the control tower and he’s making bad decisions. Planes are coming too close and possible catastrophe. We don’t want that. Those are neurotoxins.

Studies show that most neurotoxins end up in the brain. Guess where? In that control tower, the hypothalamus-pituitary. A lot of hormone problems are driven from the control tower down.

My point is that you have to work with a practitioner that really gets that. We’re looking at what’s going on in the brain. In the nerve system, the neuro-immune system. Real immunity comes from that nerve system. Your hormonal system, the brain drives it all, so we want to consider that.

Ashley:
Yeah, and we’ve done full episodes on this other thing like that topic of obesogens, these fragranced things people spray in their hormones. I’ve been to people’s homes. I know that it’s not about calories when somebody doesn’t eat, they sip on diet soda, and they spray air freshener in their home, and they have plug-ins everywhere. I’m like, it’s not about the food. This is why you’re overweight because you have all these chemicals in your home. I can’t even go into homes like that. I feel like my hormones just get messed up for like a week or longer.

Dr. Pompa:
Put that person that you just described—oh, and washing your clothes in regular detergents and using fabric softener: endocrine disruptors. Then you put your clothes on and it’s absorbed right into your bloodstream. That’s the way we apply a lot of hormones, transdermally. Guess what, endocrine disruption transdermally. All of that is happening every day.

I don’t care what you eat. Eat the diet that Ashley and I eat and you’re still not going to lose weight because you’re creating hormone resistance. You’re poisoning your control tower. Bad information in, bad information out. It doesn’t matter. You could try to play the game of taking hormones. It might work for a short period of time.

Ashley:
Yep, exactly. You’ve got to get all that stuff out of your environment for sure. All right, well, this leads to the third myth of weight loss. That is that there is a perfect diet for everybody. You’re going to tell us, this is the diet you need to do. That’s going to work for everybody, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, one diet fits all. Here’s the diet. You stayed long enough that here is the diet. If you do this, this diet, this is going to work for you. Obviously, you’re not going to hear that from my lips, but you’re hearing it from every media source going on and social media. Everyone has the diet. Everyone makes an argument for their diet. If you just do this, if you just do that. Not so simple.

The magic isn’t the diet. The magic is the dietary change, changing the diet, forcing change. I don’t want to get deep into the science, but there’s a premise called hormesis. It’s a scientific principle. If you sit on the couch and do nothing, couch potato, not good. You will degenerate. All kinds of bad things will happen. Yes, you will probably start to gain weight because your hormones won’t be right because you do nothing.

The other side, I talked about the aerobics instructor, the exercise enthusiast wearing herself down, beating herself or his self down every day. We see those people in the gym. Hormesis shows that too little, too much ends up creating a negative outcome. There’s a hormetic zone, a stress zone.

Literally, the right amount of stress forces the body to adapt. When it adapts, it uses hormones to actually adapt, whether it be growth hormone, norepinephrine. There’s a lot of different hormones. The cells become more sensitive to hormones. That adaptation phase is called a hormetic zone where the body adapts, gets hormonally optimized. I call it hormone optimization. Low and behold, after a while being in these stress zones, magic happens.

Yes, exercise is a great example of that. If you exercise the right amount and you change the exercise to keep creating new adaptation, you will get better and stronger. If you keep doing the same exercise, your body doesn’t need to adapt anymore, so you don’t benefit. Therefore, the key is changing the exercise, new stress, high reps, different exercises, different machines. Whatever it is, you change it. You force the body to adapt. How does it adapt? Hormone optimization and you get better.

Okay, does this work for diet change? The answer is yes. The body uses the same hormone strategies. When you change your diet, it goes, ut-oh, we have to change; we have to adapt. Now, you’re doing keto. Oh, now you’re doing high protein. Okay, we have to adapt. The microbiome has to change.

All of these hormonal changes take place every time we change our diet. How many people are doing it? Very few. The reason? You started eating this particular diet and it helped you. There you are eating the same eight foods all the time, but they’re healthy. That’s great, but the problem is you have to change your diet to create the adaptive stress and therefore adapt with the hormones and hormonally optimize.

We said in the beginning that most weight problems or weight loss resistance is a hormone issue. By forcing the body to adapt by changing the diet, you hormonally optimize and can breakthrough weight loss resistance. I don’t care what diet you’re on now, change it.

Now, there’s ways to do it: feast-famine weekly where you do high protein days or a high healthy carb day and then a day maybe you eat once or twice. You eat less. It doesn’t matter. You can do it weekly; you can do it monthly; you can do it seasonally. In my book, I give strategies in Chapters Three and Four in what to do and how to do it. Ashley helped me build a lot of those strategies out. The point is that the magic isn’t one diet; it’s the change.

Ashley:
Absolutely, because someone will—like you said in the beginning of this conversation that someone starts a diet. They have amazing success. They’re like, this works. They keep doing it harder and harder.

They’re like, all right, well, I’ve hit a wall. I’m going to lower my carbs more. I’m going to fast an extra hour every day. I’m going to fast an extra two hours every day. They keep making it more and more restrictive. That is the opposite of what they should be doing really.

Your body loves a change. It loves a new way of eating. It loves a new style of fasting. You need to switch it up, which is—

Dr. Pompa:
Most of the answer, especially regarding health because we’re dealing with vitalistic intelligent organisms here, the human body, are counter-intuitive, meaning it’s not what you think. It seems so logical if I just do this and exercise more or cut my—it seems so logical, but it’s just not the way the body works. The body’s Number One priority is survival. It wants to survive, but therefore, because of that, it reacts with this hormone cascade.

A great example is right now it’s in vogue is all the ice showers or baths, cold therapy. It’s an example of applying a stress, forcing the body hormonally to adapt, and then getting a very good outcome. If you take the baths, for example, you get in for like two, three minutes. The body thinks it’s going to die. It raises a hormone called norepinephrine. That hormone creates growth hormone to surge up. It de-inflames the body. All these amazing things happen.

Now, if you would stay in that bath for six minutes, most people would get the exact opposite. They’d end up inflamed; they would end up maybe dead, hypothermia, depending on the temperature of the bath. They would end up with negative things. That’s that hormetic zone that we’re talking about.

We need to apply stress to the human body, but we have to be clever. Back to our fasting conversation. Is fasting a stress and does it apply to hormesis? The answer is yes, it is a stress, and yes, it does apply; meaning, I believe we’re genetically made to fast. Without it, I think it’s a mistake.

Okay, we need to fast, but can we fast too much? Yes, where we create too much stress. The body doesn’t adapt. Just like the cold bath, the magic is fasting at the right amount. Then the feast makes the fast work even better, by the way. That’s what people are missing.

Ashley:
Yeah, absolutely. If somebody were to ask you, God, I just feel really motivated. I would love to fast for 15 days. Would you sooner ask them to consider three five-day fasts a month or two apart?

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Ashley:
More is not better in this case.

Dr. Pompa:
With times of feasting in between, 100% yes.

Ashley:
Absolutely, yeah. What is your favorite kind of feast day?

Dr. Pompa:
I love days where I just eat three, four meals in a day. When I do that, I automatically take in more calories. My feast day is probably higher calories. Now, again, if I ate the amount of calories I would on that day, every day, I would get belly fat pretty darn quick.

That’s the confusing part. There’s truth to taking in more calories than you can burn. When you do it in the short time, it doesn’t work like that. It tells my body it’s not starving, puts me in that anabolic state, gain muscle. I do. Then it makes my fast work all that much better.

I love just increasing calories by increasing meals. I also love high protein times. I’m in one of those times right now where not only am I just doing a high protein day or two, I’m doing a month of high protein, just high protein. I’m putting myself in an anabolic healing state. Now, if I stayed there, would I age prematurely? You bet you. That’s why people speak negatively about mTOR, but it’s great when you do it for shorter periods of time.

Ashley:
Absolutely, yeah, exactly. There is one other thing that you said about calories matter to an extent. We’re not discounting that. I talk to people who drink a 700 calorie bulletproof coffee a couple times a morning. I’m like, well, that’s probably a little excessive.

Let’s say they want to lose weight. They are completely understanding what you’re saying. They want to just try these strategies. They’re like, but just give me an idea. Is there a certain amount of calories I should avoid going over or—because some people do get caught up in numbers. If they’re a numbers person, what are you telling them to focus on really?

Dr. Pompa:
Look, I think if you’re a numbers person, be a little careful. I think that focus on your numbers on your feast days. If you want to hit a higher number, do it very—what do you call it, intermittently. If you want to hit a low number, do it very intermittently. In my book, which you can put the link for to purchase, but I talk about even weight-wise, how to know what a good partial fast number would be for your weight and even what a high protein.

Okay, to give you an idea. High protein, which stimulates that mTOR, typically what bodybuilders do. They do a gram of protein per pound of lean body weight. If you’re 125 pounds lean, 125 grams of protein a day will put you massively in mTOR, in an anabolic state.

Calories, again, I think that if you’re a bigger person, getting above 2,600 calories is going to put you into mTOR for sure. If you’re a medium-sized person, above 1,600 calories will probably do it. If you’re a small person, it could be right around even 13 to 1,600. I’m just giving you ranges because that’s what many of you need, but the fact is, on a feast day, eat more than you normally do, either protein, or calories, or carbs. On a famine day, eat less than you normally do, either protein, calories, or carbs.

Ashley:
That’s great. I love it. Then there was some other things that can come into play, too. This usually feeds into the hormone picture, but making sure your sleep is adequate. If you’re not sleeping, you are not losing weight. That is huge for many people.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Ashley:
There’s a lot of emotional things involved as well, so maybe seeking out some emotional wounds and traumas that you might need to overcome.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s huge. It’s a stress. It affects your hormones. It affects the control tower. We’ve done a lot of shows on both of those topics for that reason. Look upstream to the stressor that’s ultimately affecting your hormones.

Ashley:
Yep, exactly. I love this topic so much. I could talk about it seriously all day. I’m going to put links to some of these other episodes we’ve done about hormones, and sleep, and stress, and trauma, and all of these things that just—they’re all just pieces of the puzzle. Do you have any final words, Dr. Pompa?

Dr. Pompa:
Let me tell you, one of the things that we talk a little bit about oftentimes is our thoughts. You set a new way of thinking with a new intention. Because we talked about myths, I want to be cognizant of the fact that you have to change your major premises to change your decisions underneath that. If one of your major premises is one of the myths that we said, set a new intention. Set a new thought pattern because it’s going to be very difficult to break out of your daily behaviors.

We start by changing our premises, our major belief. Then we have the ability now to think differently and apply new habits. Here’s a little tip. Apply new habits to old habits. Then you end up with a new habit.

Ashley:
Exactly, I love it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation. I’m sure your audience will as well. All right, thanks, everyone, bye.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks to one of our sponsors, CytoDefend. Look, in a time like this, I think that our immune system and keeping our immune system up right now is more important than ever. I can also tell you that I pay attention to the things that keep my immune system on par and healthy. So glad that CytoDefend is one of our sponsors here on Cell TV. It’s a product that I use, my family uses.

Hopefully, you’ll check it out. By the way, you can check it out with the link right here below. If you want to try a free bottle, you can actually get a free bottle; just pay the shipping. I think you’ll reorder after that but check it out.

Ashley:
If you’re listening to this podcast and want to access the amazing CytoDefend product Dr. Pompa just mentioned, please visit FreeImmunity.com. Again, that’s FreeImmunity.com.

That’s it for this week. The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered as substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you would like to purchase some of the supplements mentioned on this show, please visit the site, AsSeenOnCHTV.com, and use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. Again, that’s AsSeenOnCHTV.com. Use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. As always, thanks for listening.