Dhru Purohit Show
Weight Loss Expert Shares the Absolute Best Ways (and the worst ways) to Lose Weight Long Term Using Research-Backed Strategies Anyone Can Implement Today with Dr. Allan Bacon
Wed, 04 Dec 2024
This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Bon Charge, and AquaTru. Social media is flooded with weight loss advice, much of which is unhelpful or unsustainable. From crash diets to quick-fix methods that rarely lead to lasting results, it’s hard to cut through the noise and find what truly works. Today’s guest shares expert advice and the proven strategies he uses with his clients to achieve real, lasting results. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with nutritionist and certified personal trainer Dr. Allan Bacon. Dr. Bacon breaks down the best and worst ways to lose weight, the ideal mindset for sustained weight loss, and the harmful advice often targeted at women in perimenopause and menopause. He also shares actionable tips on how often to train and strategies for changing eating habits and behaviors around weight loss. From debunking social media myths to diving deep into the latest research, Dr. Bacon offers expert insights on nutrition and training you won’t want to miss. Dr. Allan Bacon holds a Doctorate in Dental Surgery from the University of Maryland. He is a certified personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a certified nutritionist and physique/bodybuilding coach, a USA Powerlifting coach, and has over 15 years of experience formulating for leading dietary supplement companies. His work has been featured in Muscle & Fitness, Sci-Fit, the Alan Aragon Research Review, and The Personal Trainer Development Center. Dr. Bacon specializes in helping working adults master their physique, performance, mindset, and habits to achieve sustainable, lifelong results. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Bacon dive into: Best and worst ways to lose 10 lbs (00:00:36) Optimal mindset for sustained weight loss (6:46) Why weight loss becomes more challenging as we age (17:28) Damaging advice for women in menopause (24:50) Changing strategies (31:34) The power of resistance training and what the research shows (36:57) Autophagy through exercise, how to get started, and why fasting can be harmful (46:57) Ideal protein intake and the nuances that need to be considered (54:09) Minimum amount of training to build lean muscle (01:01:01) What is resting metabolic rate and the impact on calories (1:09:57) The Twin study and Three Aspects of every habit (1:12:57) Dr. Bacon’s journey and nutrition guidance (1:28:27) How to incorporate movement into your day (1:37:57) Dr. Bacon’s Why (1:43:07) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Allan Bacon’s Nutrition Guide E-book: Learn how to optimize your diet to get stronger, improve your health, build balanced meals, make smart choices at restaurants, stay on track during vacations, and more. For more on Dr. Bacon, follow him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bioptimzers, Bon Charge, and AquaTru. Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order and free gifts for a limited time. Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Black Friday sale ends December 4th. AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $150 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the best and worst ways to lose weight?
Dr. Alan Bacon, welcome to the podcast. For the last 15 years, you spent an average of three to four hours a day digging into the literature to find out what works and what doesn't work when it comes to weight loss and long-term health. And the inconvenient truth that a lot of people don't know is that it's actually pretty easy to lose weight.
Most people will lose weight, but the challenge is that 80% of them will end up gaining it back. So around this time of year where a lot of people are thinking about this goal in their life, what would you say are the best ways and the worst ways to lose 10 pounds for the person who's listening today?
I mean, the biggest thing that we need to focus on is starting to realize that this is a long-term journey, right? And so if we're looking at this as a very short-term, I just need to lose 10 pounds in a couple months, it can be a very difficult thing because one of two things happens.
Either you reach that goal and then you lose the drive that you had before because that was your main goal, or you don't reach that goal and you feel like a failure. Now, there are a lot of different tactics that we can use to achieve these types of things, but changing mindset around this is probably the first really good choice to make.
there are three main similarities between people that lose weight and keep it off long term they tend to eat mostly whole minimally processed food diets they eat out very little they don't go to fast food restaurants they tend to eat lower dietary fat rather than lower carbs now this isn't required because you can have different ratios and it's completely fine since calories drive weight loss or weight gain but that's just something that we find tends to work for the large majority of people the last thing is people who tend to keep off weight the
choices that they make in food have less variety. And this can be surprising for a lot of people because people think, well, you know, in my daily life, I want to be able to have a large variety of different foods, but it unfortunately causes something called the buffet effect.
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Chapter 2: How do mindset shifts impact weight loss?
And when the buffet effect is in play, it tends to increase cravings and food drive dramatically, and it drives a massive intake of energy, essentially. And so if we start to focus on these three things, it gives us a little bit of a guidance of where we should be going, but whether or not they're going to work for you is very person specific.
And I think that everybody can benefit from a whole minimally processed food diet. I mean, if we look at the data surrounding it, it's not that ultra processed foods are inherently bad. It kind of depends on how they fit within an overall diet. The problem with them is they definitely contribute to the obesity epidemic that we have. They're hyperpalatable. They have a lot less nutrients.
They have a lot less fiber. They have a lower thermic effect of food. And I think that people understand that they tend to have less nutrients and they tend to have higher calorie levels. But I think that one of the things that they don't realize is that the thermic effect of food aspect is a very real thing.
The thermic effect of food is simply the energy that's required to metabolize and absorb the foods that you eat. And on an average person, it can be up to 15% of your total daily energy expenditure. That is a large amount of calories burned. Protein causes the largest increase at 20 to 30%. Fats are zero to 3% and carbs are five to 10%.
Now, having said that, the macros and calories alone aren't what tell the whole story. Because when we look at diets that have whole minimally processed foods at their base, we actually see a 50% greater increase in thermic effect of food compared to an ultra processed food diet. We also see less glucose induced fat storage.
And it's not surprising that because of a lot of these things, we see a 51% greater increase in obesity risk for those that have a mainly ultra-processed food diet. We also see 60% risk for low levels of lean muscle mass for people that have ultra-processed food diets. So these ultra-processed food diets tend to hit us on a bunch of different levels.
Understanding that this is one of the keys to be able to take control of your weight, take control of your health, take control of your longevity and overall life is a really important thing. So then getting down to strategies, because we want to know practical strategies that we can bring into play. And we have to understand what's happening when we're attempting to lose body fat.
And people worry that as they lose body fat, they're going to run into some things called metabolic damage, which is a technical myth. But there is something called metabolic adaptation that does exist. A metabolic adaptation is the process that your body goes through to prevent that weight loss effort. So we know that we should likely be moving more.
We know that we should likely be eating less calories overall. And as we lose weight, our body has a mechanism that it puts into play to prevent that weight loss. Because historically, caveman times, we're thinking, hey, if I'm losing body fat, this is probably a bad thing. Today, it's a little bit different.
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Chapter 3: Why is weight loss harder as we age?
So if you are moving a lot, particularly in people that have very active jobs, nurses, teachers, agricultural jobs, you could be burning as many calories as a whole other person without even realizing it. And this metabolic adaptation, the way that it can stall out our weight loss efforts and the way that we can get into this weight regain that you were alluding to earlier that is such a problem,
is because as we've lost this weight and the severity or the level of weight loss itself is what really drives these two adaptations, the increased hunger and the lowered meat levels. The total weight loss tends to drive those. Now, when we monitor these and you can do it as a proxy through step count and figure out, hey, when I started this fat loss journey, I was at 8,000 steps per day.
And now after I've lost 20 pounds, I'm all of a sudden at 6,000 steps per day. That's a lot of extra calories that you're losing and you're burning as the burn during the day. And so what we find a lot of times with this weight regain is because of those increased hunger levels, we start to snack more, which means we are taking in a lot more calories than what we were originally doing.
And then we move less. And that extra calorie burn that we lose from this daily activity tends to cause us to creep up and up and up. And so these two mechanisms in combination can be a real pain for people that are trying to keep the weight off.
A lot to unpack there. I'm going to start off with the first ones and so much great information. Let's tease it out because I think you just blew our audience's mind. So we got to make sure we unpack each and every single one. So everybody understands what exactly you meant by every single thing. Let's start off with the mindset piece.
You talked about the importance of having the right mindset approach when it comes to embarking on a weight loss, but really what people are looking for is fat loss most of the time on their journey. Give us a compare and contrast. When you look at your clients who lose fat specifically and keep it off, versus the ones who maybe fall off track.
And if they're your clients, they probably are not falling off track. But let's say the general population, what's the difference between the mindset of somebody who loses weight and keeps it off and the person who yo-yos year and year and year again and again?
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Chapter 4: What damaging advice do women in menopause often receive?
There's two things that come to mind. There is goal setting and then there is a restrictive mindset. And so the people that have issues with maintaining a healthy lifestyle, because it really is an entire lifestyle change. The big issue is that people look at this as a diet and a diet seems like it has a timeframe or that's something that you do and then give up.
But what we want to do is we want to make this a lifestyle change. If you go into this viewing it as restriction, you're gonna have a real problem. It's going to mentally cause issues. It's gonna fight back. So what we wanna do is we wanna switch things to an abundance mindset or core value eating.
Now, core value eating looks at it as rather than saying, I can't have this or I'm not allowed to have this. It's more of a focus on, well, what can I add to my diet to bring benefit to my life and my goals? And so if we switch it from I can't have chocolate or I can't have popcorn or whatever the food choice is that you're saying you can't have and switch it to, OK, well, can I have more fruits?
Can I have more dairy? Can I have more lean, unprocessed meats? Can I have more of these other beneficial constituents to my diet? Well, what's great about that is it's both a positive choice that you're making to have those foods. And secondarily, a lot of those foods have a lot of fiber. They're very satiating. They've got a ton of nutrients.
And when you're taking in these types of foods, you take in overall less calories throughout the day, secondarily, without even thinking about it. So you're eating less chocolate. You're eating less popcorn chips or whatever it is you're just trying to move away from.
And I want to emphasize, I'm not saying that these foods are good or bad, but there's certainly a continuum of there are more nutritious foods and then there are less nutritious foods. And making the majority of our diet based off of these more nutritious foods comes with a lot of benefits. And satiety and sustainability are part of that.
And then the other part of the equation is switching our goal setting process. And what I found historically happens with people, especially when they first start out on a fitness journey. is they'll set goals either with timeframes or a scale weight or something that they just can't control.
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Chapter 5: How can we change our eating habits effectively?
When you have goals that are based on outcomes, it becomes very problematic from a longevity perspective and it becomes very problematic from a motivation perspective. If you tell me, hey, I'm 190 pounds and I wanna get down to 160 pounds. I'll say, okay, well, what happens at 160 pounds? Like what's special about that number?
The typical response is, well, that's what I weighed in college or that's what I weighed at this point in time.
And I'll say, okay, well, if we're going to be bringing in weight training as we should be since all the benefits of lean muscle, if we're looking for the best health, injury reduction risk and everything that we can, if you add some lean muscle, wouldn't you conceivably be heavier at similar body fat levels and look better overall, but the weight wouldn't align with what you originally thought was the right answer to the question?
And then they say, oh, yeah, well, you know, I guess the weight itself isn't exactly what I want. But, you know, I want to have this done in like four months. Can you control how much weight that you lose over that time period? And so we run into all of these issues if we set outcome based goals that we can't control. It doesn't foster the right way of reinforcing habits or routines.
And it sets you up for failure because it's something that you definitely can't control and something that can become a distraction for you. So instead of using outcome-based goals, I think using something like a habit-based or routine-based goal becomes a very, very beneficial thing for people that want to do this right and continue to be able to do this long term.
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Chapter 6: What role does resistance training play in weight loss?
And by a habit or routine-based goal, I mean pick things that you can control that will start to move you towards what you're trying to achieve.
can you eat whole minimally processed foods for 80 of the meals that you have can you eat or can you walk eight to ten thousand steps per day can you get eight hours of sleep per night i know that's a huge ask in today's society but is this something that you can set because we have largely control over these things can you drink 100 ounces of water per day use these as your signs of success if you continue
to take the things that you can control such as nutrition activity through movements sleep the stress management techniques that you use you know put those into play multiple times per week and set it in your calendar like you would a job if you start to do these things those habits and routines will start to build and it'll start to change your identity and changing your identity from the person that you were to the person that you want to become is a very very powerful thing
And it's essentially fake it until you become it if you don't truly believe it. And one of the simplest things that I recommend to my clients, I recommend to everybody that asks these questions is if you have anxiety about what you should do, ask yourself, what would a healthy person do in my situation? And I say that because I think that most everybody generally knows what they should be doing.
And so if you're out at a restaurant and you don't know what to get, what would a healthy person get in my situation? If you have some anxiety about going to the gym or you just don't feel like going today and, you know, you're really trying to build that habit of going two or three times per week, ask yourself what a gym rat would do.
the fact that we're asking ourselves these questions allows us to cut through the noise because if we don't think about this from what would somebody that has those values do we will often procrastinate and the most important thing is taking that first step so by pretending that you are that person or putting yourself in the mindset of that person it helps you become that and it really helps with long-term sustainability you know a lot of our audience feels that
Hey, I never really had a challenge maintaining a healthy weight when I was in my 20s or maybe early 30s. And then something shifted. In your experience, from especially working with a lot of people that are in the 40 to 60 demographic, both men and women, but particularly women, what do you think is the driver of that?
What's true based on the evidence and what's also not false, but maybe something that people are not aware of that could be responsible for this feeling that they have? The holidays are officially upon us and you know what that means. It can get a little bit crazy, a little bit stressful this time of year.
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Chapter 7: How does exercise affect autophagy and fasting?
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This is a great question because it's one of those things that I think becomes a hangup for a lot of people because they don't know what's going on and that makes them feel powerless. So by educating people in this realm, we can actually give them the ability to make the choices that can actually get them through this.
And so the first thing that ends up happening, this is, for some reason, it's always your 30s. It's like I turned 30 and then this happened and now all of a sudden I've gained 10 pounds and I don't know what, you know, where did I go wrong during this period? When we look at the research, there was a researcher called Ponser and his colleagues did a very well-run study, very large sample.
I think it was 6,400 people, men and women, looking at resting metabolic rates over time. And they checked ages everywhere from 18 to about 80, I believe. Don't quote me on the exact ages, but it's somewhere within there. They found from 20 to 60, resting metabolic rate does not change. Flat out doesn't change as long as we account for lean muscle mass, activity levels, all those types of things.
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Chapter 8: What is the ideal protein intake for weight loss?
If those hold steady, resting metabolic rate never changes.
Is that the same as this idea that people say, oh, I used to have a fast metabolism, now I have a slow metabolism, or is this a different idea?
That's a little bit different. Having a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism is resting metabolic rate in general. Although it could be the neat that we talked about earlier because a lot of times when someone says I've got a fast metabolism, it's because they're constantly moving.
And if you twitch and move around and you've got a really active lifestyle, if you talk with your hands like I tend to do, I'm keeping it under wraps because there's a microphone in front of me. But when you're animated like that, you burn a lot more calories throughout the day just naturally without thinking about.
And I want to come back on that. We're going to talk a bunch about that. But sorry, I distracted you from what you were talking about. You were sharing about this study and you were saying that it's super fascinating. Your metabolism is the same, basically from 30 to 60 or 20 to 60. There's no big changes that are there based on this study.
So we know that the resting metabolic rate is not the reason that you're having these issues. So if you didn't have the issues before and then all of a sudden you're starting to notice a big difference in your 30s or 40s or whatever it is, we know that it's not your resting metabolic rate. So great. Well, what is it?
this is where we start to have a lot of complicating life factors that come into play you know you've just started having kids you're getting a job that's much more stressful you're sleeping a lot less you're reaching for more fast food because you're so busy and you're having these problems and you know without even thinking about it you're going to the gym a lot less you're going out with your friends a lot less you're no longer doing that ymca basketball league that you used to do in your 20s and so this combination of moving less and eating more i mean just like with metabolic adaptation
has started to take its toll on your body composition and health and so the next question that comes into play for women is well what happens you know in in the perimenopause period because this certainly starts to kick in in many women starting in their 40s and um there's a lot of misinformation out there about this and if you make sure to continue to exercise if you make sure to continue to eat correctly
we don't seem to see a difference, regardless of menopause status, as long as age is taken into account. Now we do see a shift to central adiposity. That means that women, once they've gone through menopause, will gain body fat more in their stomach than they ever have before.
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