Talk delves into the complexities of metabolic function, challenging the widely accepted “calories in, calories out” model. It explains that the calorie system oversimplifies how proteins, carbohydrates, and fibers are processed by the body, emphasizing the crucial roles of hormones like insulin and glucagon, which regulate fat storage and burning. The talk highlights significant differences in metabolic processes among various body types, illustrating why some individuals struggle with weight loss despite strict calorie control.

Practical advice is offered on optimizing diet and meal timing based on hormonal function, advocating for a personalized approach that focuses on the body’s chemical needs rather than merely counting calories. By understanding and adjusting the hormonal influences on metabolism, individuals can achieve more effective and sustainable weight management. This talk is a must-listen for anyone looking to break free from conventional dieting myths and gain a deeper understanding of how their body truly works.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:30 – Calorie System Misconceptions

01:44 – Protein and Glucagon

03:19 – Metabolic Differences in Body Types

06:15 – Hormonal Influence on Weight Management

09:42 – Practical Dietary Advice

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] So the service metabolic function, in the stream actually calories in, calories out real quick. So let’s let’s run through this really fast. And then calories in, calories out model people who tell you that calories in, calories out, or calorie deficits or calorie this or calorie that is the way that we should do everything, have a fundamental, massive, massive misunderstanding, of how the body actually works. Now, they’re not lying. They just don’t understand how the body works because they are lazy and they’re not taking the time to learn. In the calorie system, proteins are worth four and carbohydrates are worth four, which means sugars, fibers, and protein according to the calories in calories out system. And everybody who uses calories in calories out tells you that proteins, sugars, and fiber work exactly the same way in the body, which is 100%. You could not be more opposite. So carbohydrates. I’m going to take a giant out of chemistry. Carbohydrates increase insulin. Insulin is your fat storage hormone. And so once it fills it’s your glucose comes up, pushes the glucose out of the blood into the tissues. Specifically muscles network that muscles bind it into glycogen. So glycogen is basically a bunch of glucose put together. Think of it like pearls into a pearl necklace, a top of like a jeans form. And then after the rest of it cycles back to the liver, the liver converts because the insulin converts all of that extra sugar and whatnot into fact, it also stores, you know, the fact that you have floating around this fat as well. So insulin, think of it, is your fat storage hormone. Insulin will also keep the body from burning fat. I’ll walk you that in a second.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:44] When you consume proteins and your blood sugar goes lower, the proteins activate a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon. Put your body through a process called gluconeogenesis, where you actually make more sugar for your body. Because if you don’t have enough sugar, you will die. It’s critical for your blood, for it’s really good, for it’s part of your eyes. And your brain can run on ketones, but it prefers brown sugar. First run on glucose so everybody makes extra glucose via the liver. It takes proteins apart, turns them into sugars. It’s a long process. I’ll say to the boring chemistry. When it does that, it does not have any sugar to run on, so it has to run on fat. So the process of creating sugar for your body is a fat based function. And so what ends up happening is that the good begun insulin function work like this. As the insulin comes up, it’s storing the sugars. We don’t need to make more sugars. So the glucagon comes down as big as the insulin comes down and the blood sugars come down, the glucagon starts to come up. As it starts to come up, it makes more sugar. As the sugar level starts to come up, the insulin starts going back up and it stops the glucagon function. So you don’t just continually produce sugar. That’s how it works. So if you eat less sugar, your body has to make more sugar. If it makes more sugar, it has to burn the fat to make the shirt really, really simple functional fat. Now why is it that people go well, calories in, calories out works for me and everybody I work with. That’s also not accurate. So what happens is that think about this. Most people are weight loss people, right? They’re not anything else. It’s just we’re gonna work on losing weight so they don’t focus. You focus on fat. They don’t focus on anything else, just numbers on scale. Right.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:19] So who are they never going to talk to? They’re never going to talk to the 30% of the population. 23% population are actor wars. Actor dwarfs are your friend. You need anything they want to as much as they want to hold. But two big pizzas and a six pack of beer and they never get it. That’s like everybody knows somebody like that. Like, oh yeah, my friend Susan’s like, yeah, my friend Ritchie’s like that. Like they could eat whatever they wanted to and never gain an ounce. Right. Because their actor morphs. So in that scenario, it’s. And this is not always how it works. Let’s go with down easy. Their bodies are less sensitive to insulin and more sensitive to glucagon. So what ends up happening is that they don’t store very well, but they burn it, burn fat really, really well. And so they never gain any weight. Okay. So these people are never going to go see weight loss people. So guys who work on weight loss forget they exist. So they don’t have this whole like 20 or 30% of population is they’re blind to them. Right. And you have the guys on the other end of the spectrum where I live, where the indoors in this case, we’re not we’re highly sensitive insulin, not very sensitive to glucagon. So we store fat super duper well. We hold our insulin higher than normal and we just don’t burn fat very well. We will go through gluconeogenesis, but we don’t burn the fat nearly as the rate that other people do. These are the people that the calories in people will tell you are fat and lazy and not running their program and not doing this right. And they’re, you know, they’re just they’re cheating and they’re blah, blah, blah. And that happens across the board.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:46] I’m not saying that that does not happen. It does happen. It happens a lot. However, most of these people have been told their fat, their lacing, they can’t do it. And, you know, they workout real hard. They diet really hard. They do. Oftentimes the ones I’ve seen have worked twice as hard as some of the other people and gotten no. Aware because you guys keep putting them on rice and oats and hydration itself, and you’re basing it on a system where sugars and fiber and proteins are all basically the same. It will not work. You have to move to a hormone based view of how this works. Now, who doesn’t work for the 30 to 45%, 30 to 40% of the population that are mesas or ecto masses or meso, and those so that that blend in the center. Because if you restrict or if you will, all the body goes back and forth are equally sensitive or close to equally sensitive insulin and glucagon. And so what ends up happening is we restrict just normal fuel sources in. What ends up happening is that they will end up burning the fat to to do everything. Now, if you put those people on a higher, if you decide that you’re gonna go calories in, calories out, but you are starting to figure out that what’s the chemistry in your food actually matters. And you go, look, we’re gonna do calorie deficit. We’re gonna do really high protein. All right. So now now your mix is high protein lower on the carb. So you’re going to be a lot less insulin production and a lot less a lot more glucagon production. This you will lose fat even faster. Now if you if you put them into a workout position where they’re actually lifting weights, they will not lose the muscle mass.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:15] They will lose the fat. Because if you just cut their calories back, you’re going to end up losing muscle mass and calories, which is, I’m sorry, muscle mass and fat, which is not really the way you want to do it, which is also why judging, you know, progress, be a scale is a horrible way of judging. But that’s how it works. And so what ends up happening is, again, this group of people, these diet people have never they never talked to you. So they forget they exist. The fat people, they’ve decided that they’re just cheaters and liars, not running their system properly because their system is perfect. And in the 30 to 45% of population that they see, actually the calories thing actually works for. So that’s what’s going on. So if you’re one of the few who can’t gain weight and you’ve eaten lots and lots of calories, it’s most likely the chemistry of your body that’s keeping you from doing that. And then the guys who can’t lose weight, it’s almost for sure if you’re as long as you’re actually trying, it’s almost for sure that it’s a chemistry issue, not your effort issue. You’re not taking guys who didn’t even really work that hard changed their diet, and they were able to lose fat. So now the cool thing is, is that like I talked about this all the time, the ROI, once they start losing the fat and they realize this isn’t that hard, and they come back and they’re like, hey, I don’t mean kind of doing the thing because, like, I incorporated a little bit of what you said, but not all of it. And I lost some weight. Like, what happens if I double down? And then those guys do great because they’ve always wanted it, but they’ve always been told their fat, they’re lazy and they can’t do it. So they’ve had these mental, these mental pathways projected into them over and over and over again. And over time they went to a calorie diet. It didn’t work. And so they’re just like, I’m broken. I can’t do it. I guess I’m just a failure and I’m broken.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:59] Now the system we were using was broken. So what ends up happening is that those guys just go crazy. They’re like, I finally found a system that works, and I can eat all these great foods and I can work out, and I feel amazing. And so they actually start making pretty solid change. So that’s always fun. But if you’re one of those guys who either can’t lose, can’t gain weight, or you can’t lose the fat, it’s a chemistry issue. It’s a hormone issue. It’s not a calories issue. Now 100%, the amount you take in matters tremendously. And so I’ll walk people through, like how to read the macros and how to do everything and how to how to choose food A over food B and you know, that type of thing, how to replace it. Because typically around it’s like I say, bringing your ten favorite foods and the ten foods you never want to eat again. And I’ll build a diet will have you lose fat. And people go, okay, it’s cookies and chocolate and it’s, pizza. And it’s, you know, good breads and, you know, these are the five, but all we gotta do is just reset the chemistry in your five. So, you know, again, it’s a hormonal function. You know, fasting works really, really well. But you have to get into it properly. And you also have to understand that when you fast the macro function, the facts, the proteins, the carbohydrates, well, the fats in the carbs aren’t really that big of a deal because your body makes those right, makes cholesterol. So if you run on that, it makes sugars. So you run on that. All you have to do is make sure the methylated B vitamins, the the omega three fatty acids, the coke you like, the things your body needs functionally to work are there. And so, you know, supplementation helps out quite a bit. But a lot of times when you move even these big guys into, into a fat oxidizing state, they’re not that hungry.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:42] And so a lot of times what happens is once people get their diet ready, they’re not going to be like, hey, how important is breakfast to you? Here, this this is the stuff I the same response. Oh, I love breakfast food. I’m like, okay, sorry, not what I meant, you know. How important is the meal like? Oh, you know, lots of times I just eat it and associate because it’s the most important meal of the day. Like what’s not? So we end up, you know, skip that one. Take yourself a month, drink your coffee drinker, drink your water, whatever it is, and just skip that one. And then when you get to lunch, tell me how that works. And people are often like, oh, I’m, I’m ready to eat when I get to lunch, break, eat lunch. You know, from from the, from the, you know, giant plethora of meal options you’ve got. Eat that and we’ll see our dinner and have some who are like, I’m not that hungry at dinner, right? You don’t have to eat that much. So if you want a little bit, you know, a little bit if you don’t eat at all though. And so we have a lot of people who end up, you know, eating one pretty decent sized meal a day, whether it’s dinner or lunch or whatever. And then they eat something small here and there, and then all of a sudden it’s just like, wow, this is really, really helping that the body doesn’t need that much food to actually functionally move along. So, you know, it’s it’s what are the nutrients that are. And so it’s not really that your body needs calories as much as it needs metabolic chemistry function. So your methyl A B vitamins, your mega three fatty acids like, you know, CoQ10 the chemistry that your body requires to actually function. So that’s how a lot of this works.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:10] So if you’re if you’re struggling to gain weight or you’re struggling to, you know, lose the fat, then look to the glycine function, looking to, you know, so the, the the hormonal function on glucagon, versus insulin, you know, that’s really the place to do it. Find guys like me who actually taking the time to learn it. I had to learn it because I wasn’t in the morph and I did the real low calorie thing. I did the, you know, you got a carb load, you’ve got to go eat the carbs because the carbs are great. And I actually had a chemistry teacher who told us that fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate. And he was a he was nectar more. So that’s a fun thing for to hear. But yeah, as soon as I figured it out and I was like, oh, this is how it works. And I started changing the chemistry function of the body. That’s when I started swapping everything. So like from January, now I’ve swapped about 30 pounds of fat for 30 pounds of muscle. So my path was a little bit extreme, but, you know, other people have been able to do it. So it’s one of those things that at least now that you can kind of know how to play it, it works out quite a bit better. So if you guys are on a calorie system and you’re not getting the results you want, you need to start looking at it from a hormonal standpoint, because hormones tell your body what to do and sees you understand how the body actually communicates and actually works, it becomes a lot easier. So because of questions with that has questions that charge one second, or dropping in the comments. Thanks for your time.

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