Which diet trends are actually worth the effort?

being triggered to eat food. Later, I'll speak with weight loss expert Liz joseph Sburg about how to create new positive eating practices and build a better relationship with all that food, glorious food. But first, the dreaded d word diets. It's the beginning of a new year, which means we've all got them on the brain. Let's talk about the whole thirty the Adkins diet, without Beach diet, the raw food diet. Diet. A trendy new weight loss method has been getting a lot of buzz lately and it is

called intermittent fasting. So my next question are the latest diets healthy? Can they help us live better and longer lives or are they just bads? There's so many diet wars and people are in such confident about it. But what's fascinating to me, is that a lot of the approaches to eating now that we're hearing about, whether it's paleo or vegan or keto or those are always for people to get healthier. They're not necessarily about weight loss anymore.

How do you enhance performance? How do you enhance health? How do you treat disease? Which I find amazing. That's Dr Mark Hymen, a physician who has dedicated his career to something called functional medicine, a biology based approach to health that impart uses food to cure what ails you? You know, said joke, I say people have FLC syndrome.

That's when they feel like crap. And when people go along with irritable bow or headaches or congestion or achiness or fatigue or depression, they don't realize how much of us connected to food. We'll get to more of that later, but first I asked Mark to walk me through a popular diets I've been hearing so much about. In fact, I've even tried, like intermittent fasting. What is it and

how does it work? So? In German fasting is one of the ways in which you can change your calorie and take in terms of when you eat and how you eat to change your biology. And historically we had hundreds of genes that help us adapt to starvation, but almost none that help us adapt to abundance, which we have now. We have more calories per person than we need. We have about two to five calories more per person in this country than we actually need, and it's killing us.

So the science of of aging and of performance tell us that if you use various techniques, whether it's fasting once a week for twenty four hours, whether it's time restricted eating, which is eating within a eight hour window, whether it's a five day low calorie sort of fasting mimicking diet, or whether it's keytogenic diets, they all do the same thing. They help to increase your metabolism, so

they speed up your metabolism. But wait time out. I always heard that when you stopped eating, it's shut your metabolism down, so you're always discouraged to do that. And that's what we used to hear the rights to get your metabolism going. That's not true, not exactly. It turns out we were wrong about that, and what really turns on your metabolism is these periods of fasting. Now historically we did it all the time. There were times of scarcity we weren't eating snacks. I mean, snacks is a

modern invention, right, there's what we shouldn't be snacking. And I think that the sign shows us that it. It increases bone bone mass, it increases muscle mass, It decreases belly fat, increases cognitive function, reduces inflammation, increases your stem cells, increases your antioxidant systems, It fixes your mitochondria, repairs your DNA. I mean, it's a powerful set of strategies that are available to all of us, and it's not that hard.

So what happens physiologically during that period when you're not eating. So let's say you're doing an eight hour eating plans, so you eat between noon and eight at night, or eleven and seven something like this. Normally, if you're just constantly filling up your garbage can with waste and you don't take the garbage out, your house is going to be a mess. And when you have these periods of restricted eating, when you're not eating, is when the garbage

collectors come and cleans up your cells. It cleans up you're all the waste products. It reinvigorates your repair mechanisms so your body can repair and heal. And the easiest way to do it is to, you know, eat dinner at six and don'tate till ten the next morning, right, or a dinner to seven and don't till eleven, and so forth. So just as long as you have that overnight fast, which we're usually doing anyway, you don't eat up until you go to bed, which most people do.

So breakfast is not the most important meal of the day, necessarily, necessarily know, all the things that I was raised to believe are being blown up. Well, you can do at breakfast. You can need from eight in the morning, you know, until four in the afternoon. That's okay too, So you can you can do whatever you want. You just want to have a period of not eating. So does that mean that I can't even have milk in my coffee?

Please say I can have milk in my coffee, because I could do intermittent fasting, but I have to have coffee and I just don't want to drink it black. Well, here's a trick. You could use ge or butter and m C two oil, which will keep you in a ketogenic state and not basically break the cycle. Of intimating fast really, yes, is it taste good bullproof coffee, Yes, it tastes great, yummy, delicious. So not oatmelk, not almond milk, nothing like that my coffee, because that is a lot

of carbohydrates in it. If you just use fat, fat is going to keep you. That's why you get in a ketogenic diet. That's all the same things. The fat keeps you in this starvation stage because when you're in starvation or you're doing intimat fasting, that's what's happening, or increasing your body's ketones, which is a different fuel source. Right, and then you go into ketosis where you're burning fat

instead of muscles. But wait before we talk about the keto diet, because that's a perfect segue mark between the hours when you're eating. Say you eat between eleven and seven at night, Does that mean you can eat anything you want? Can I eat ice cream? Garbage? I mean that, that's the question. I mean. So here here's the truth. In studies where people don't change what they're eating, they just change when they're eating, it works, which is crazy.

It helps with weight loss, metabolism so forth. However, if you eat good food, whole food, real food. It works far better, So it helps even without changing what you're eating. But I wouldn't recommend that I do both change what and when. And you talked about different ways you could do intermittent fasting. Um, I think probably eating just in a certain time period every day is probably the easiest and most popular, isn't it. Yeah, I just start with

twelve hours. I mean it's called breakfast break fast, right, I mean most of us eat up until you go to bed. Then we wake up and eat first thing in the morning. We don't really give ourselves a chance to have that metabolic break. So just make it twelve hours to start, then go fourteen, then go sixteen, and

you'll see your body will feel better. Now, if you're pregnant, if you're anorexic, if you have some disease where you actually need to eat, it's probably not a good idea, but you can you can experiment with these these bio hacking techniques of time restricted eating, fasting, and twenty four period our period once a week, doing a you know, maybe five day calor restricted period every three months. It helps to reset your whole system and increase longevity and

activate all these healing systems. Intermitt and fasting results in something called atop Yes, so what is that? Okay, this is this is the key to all of it. So autopagy means you are eating yourself Fiji means like you fagus. That tells you you you gobble up all the waste products and you basically eat yourself and all the waste products, and you recycle all the things in your body, which actually extends your life. It actually helps repair DNA, it

helps activate all the energy mechanisms your body. And there's all the things we talked about. So autopagy is the key mechanism by which intermittent fasting, time, restricting eating, key to genic diets, fasting, mimicking dies. That's how they all work. That gives you your body the break it needs to collect and get rid of the garbage. Right, I mean, think, imagine if the garbage system stopped in New York, what would happen? Pretty quick? All the curves will be overflowing

with giant bags of garbage. You gotta have the garbage collector come every day to clean the garbage. And that's what autopogy is. It's the garbage collecting mechanism in the body. That can heal and repair almost everything. So if you're not feeding your body food, how do you know that you don't start to eat away muscle instead of fat and all the toxins and bad stuff. Well, I mean it's a matter of time, right if you if you

fast for weeks, that's what's going to happen. I mean most of us are terrified of going without food or being a little hungry because I think it's bad for us. But actually it's super good for us. And no one's gonna lose muscle within a sixteen hour window of fasting or fasting once once a week. Let's talk about keto diets because I did that as well, and I have to say I think it worked actually, but I started

feeling like this can't be healthy. I'm eating cheese, I'm eating steak, I'm eating sauce, sage, I'm eating eggs, I'm eating all kinds of things. I'm not eating fruit, which I love. I'm eating some vegetables but not many. I'm not eating any whole grains. How can a keto diet be good for you? Seriously? Well, it's been studied for years. It was using kids for epilepsy and these kids stay

on it for decades and decades and they do fine. Um, it doesn't work for everybody, So I would say it's very individual, and some people like me, for example, we call lean mass hyper responders. If you if you're a certain body type er, you know a lot of lean mass, you might actually get abnormal cholesterol from it. And it could be not as great, right, you could be tofy thin on the outside that on the inside. Right, Yes, but it also may just have adverse effects in terms

of cardiovask. But you know, there was a large study, for example, of diabetics and they put them on a Keta Jack diet and within a year six reverse the diabetes. Yeah, how is that? If you're eating cheese and you're eating half and half and stuff like that. We do. We do a whole foods keta diet that doesn't necessarily have to have all that dairy. In fact, we do on dairy free. You can even be vegan keto. There are people who are doing vegan keto, oil, avocados, nuts, and seeds.

You can have much different kinds of fats that are good for you instead instead of adding a lot of things that you may not want to be eating. Otherwise. But some fat in your diet is very satiating, and that's why it's good to have some fats. Absolutely, it makes you feel full. But if you eat the right fats, it actually speeds up your metabolism. There's a study, large study of a kind of study is very difficult to where you actually feed the people the food and then

you track every metabolic factor that happens. David literally did at Harvard, and you found it in patients who had six fat cards versus sixty percent carbs and ten percent fat, they had burned four hundred calories more a day. If if they were in some resistent overweight, then the group that ate the high carb diet. So if the high fat diet even the same exact number of calories. So let's say that each had two thousand calories a day, the ones who ate the high fat burned four hundred

calories more day. That literally would solve our entire obesity crisis of everybody that How do you explain that? Well, because fat activates all sorts of different mechanisms than sugar. Sugar activates, fat, storage activates, inflammation activates, fatty, liver activates all these hunger mechanisms, so you're hungry all the time. When you mentioned the carbohydrates, you're talking about refined car

behind refined car. I mean, listen, Broccoli is a carbohydrate, right, and so are potatoes, But you're talking about things like potatoes and anything. We're fine. And if you look at our diet in America, you know we need about a hundred and thirty three pounds of flour. Now, flour, it turns out, is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar.

So if you have a bread versus tablespoon table sugar and raises your blood sugar more than the table sugar because because it's so ground up, so fine, and it's quickly absorbed in your body and it acts just like sugar in your body of course, And so so people are thinking, oh, I'm having a bagel, and um, you know, it's all good, but no, it's not. It's actually probably worse than the sugar. And in fact, you told me that oatmeal is not a good thing to eat in

the morning, which really surprised me. Whole steel cut oats and you're add in fat and you add in nuts and so forth. It can be okay, but in experiments they found that feeding people oatmeal in the morning, these kids was a group of kids. They gave oatmeal, steel couldoats or an omelet same calories. The kids who ate the oatmeal more food in the day, they were hungrier, their blood sugars went higher, their insolent higher, their stress

hormones went higher. The steel couldoats was the fifty percent more food, so there was still it was better than the regular oatmeal, but still not great. And the omelet kids did the best. So I think when you look at the biology of what happens when you have a starch in the morning, I mean, Americans eat dessert for breakfast, right, Cereal bagels, muffins, pancakes. French does. And he got me off Cereal forever even I used to Yeah, you are a cereal killer, right, Yeah, So that's not a good

choice for Breknant. And you know, we were sold a bill of goods on that by Mr Kellogg and everybody bought it, Hopline and Sinker. Don't tell the kids it's one of those nutritional serials you've been trying to get them to eat. They're made with real oats to make you strong and full of energy. Real fruit flavors orange, lemon, and cherry. Every pool fool gives you all days or

than itamins, and I champion good. They're good. We'll return to Mark later in the show, but coming up after the break, Liz Joseph s Burg joins me to talk about the psychology behind your cravings. Liz Joseph s Burg is a health, wellness and diet expert who is passionate about helping people bridge the gap between wanting to lose weight and actually doing it for good. I lost sixty pounds and I work every day to keep those off, so I understand that it isn't just about waking up

and being fixed. Liz works with groups and individuals, She's even worked with me before, and the heart of her practice is not necessarily the food itself, although that's important too. It's really our relationship to food and the behaviors we consciously or unconsciously engage in that can dismantle all those good intentions. So my next question for Liz, what are some of the ways we sabotage ourselves when we try

to achieve a healthier lifestyle. The biggest thing that I see in my my kind of practice at this point is the not putting yourself first, the not actually spending the time to look at what you need and what's right for you and what you should be working on as the behavior that's standing in your way. Because we're all complex creatures. But most of the time, when I'm

finding is everyone is putting everything else first. Right their work comes first, They're putting they would put all of this effort into their project planning for work, but when it comes to them, they're leaving all of their skills off the table that they're bringing into other areas of

their lives. Um for women specifically, I see them giving away all of their energy and not knowing how to say no, not knowing how to take time for themselves and really create that space where we have a piece of the pie that's made just for health and wellness and and really thinking of that as a piece of our job. Do you think that's changing. It seems to me there's something going on in the culture that's saying self care is important. And I always think it's a

fine line between self care and narcissism. Maybe maybe that's not true, but you know, I do feel I mean, you could spend your whole life caring for yourself too. I mean, I think there's a balance there, don't you.

Absolutely absolutely. What I think is the mistake is the the practice of self care being a daily small practice instead of these large one off retreats or um a big massage or things like that, but these daily moments of you know, saying I am going to go for a walk, I am going to take a minute and meditate, I am going to take a few minutes to prepare healthemale, not just you know, UM do these one off large pieces that are outside of your regular, everyday life and

really making it so large instead of making it these teen My My practice is all about the smaller that behavior change, the longer lasting it will be because it is attainable and then sustainable. So I'm all about stacking healthy behaviors and once you get one solid, then you move to the next one. Well, let's talk about some things that I think I do that probably some of our listeners will relate to. Um. You know, we have

a lot of snacks in our office. We make trucks to Trader Joe's and buy all kinds of things and I might not be hungry, but they're out there, and I think oh, I'm going to have some of these honey roasted peanuts, or why not eat a few of these things. They're not that bad for you. If I have one Reese's cup, it's not so bad. It's a little one and it's dark chocolate and blah blah blah.

So I rationalized, you know, so, so how do you stop that behavior that then can make you feel like, wow, I kind of cheated, So I didn't do really well today, so I might as well, you know, Katie bar the door. I can eat everything that's not nailed down. That's my psychology. Yes, well, you're hitting on two really important pieces of what we're learning now. So a lot of my practice is now centered around the brain science of what's going on when

we're doing what you're explaining. Um, what we know now is what we didn't know even ten years ago, is that you're being triggered all the time by your eyes, your ears, your nose. If you see food, smell food, or even talk about food, you're being triggered to eat food. Our system is wired so that if we you know, when we were cavemen, if we saw the wooly mammoth, we had to eat the whole wooly mammoth. We didn't have a microwave, right, we didn't have a backpack that

we could carry it from place to place. So our system is wired that when we see the food, even if we've just eaten right, you may have had this happen. You go to a great dinner, you eat to your fill and you say it, couldn't eat another bite, and then they bring the dessert cart around. We have the ability to over eat when we see food, smell food, or talk about food. So when you have food laying around the office, every time you see it, you're going

to want to eat it. It's about learning to navigate two things. Number one, cleaning up the environment so you don't see those treats them. Then the visual stimulized and like hitting you in the phase every time you look toward it absolutely. And then the other piece that you're that you're talking about, which is it's so interesting because I lead a lot of weight loss groups and we're just talking about this this week, is is that emotional

eating piece? Right? If we could could really scan our bodies before eating that and say I have no physical hunger, right, although when we see the food and smell the food. We do get cues of physical hunger, but they're not true cues. Our mouth might water, our stomach might grumble, but we know we just had lunch an hour ago. So if we can navigate through that and go, okay, what is this what's happening? Am I stressed and my board? Am I procrastinated? Am I thirsty? Right? That is just

a huge one. Right. So um, it's this kind of double whammy of understand ending what emotional eating is. I think it's got this kind of this feels like that should be some bad thing, like you're in the corner crying eating and eating cake or something like that. That's

not it at all. It's for me. The definition is eating any time that physical hunger isn't present, and in this new environment where where food is literally readily available at every moment, Yeah, I I we laugh that that people are so dramatic about their meals, and many times when I start working with somebody, they're eating at least three meals a day, usually two snacks and probably something

after dinner. And we just don't need that much food, right, So we've just been kind of marketed to and convinced that, you know, we need to have all of this food and that we can't just walk down the street to any you know, any Starbucks and get a full meal. So it's one of those things where you kind of have to back away from the drama if if you can begin to kind of see it for what it is. What other things have you learned from some of your success stories who you've helped, I mean, how have they

changed their habits? Well, that's so interesting. It's I've actually just helped my sister lose over a hundred pounds, which has been one of the greatest experiences of my life, right to have her be in my groups and working through my program and to lose this weight. And she has struggled with this hundred pounds for most of her life,

and this has been such a dramatic change. And I think what it does come down to is this understanding that it's a self love thing, right, what what you how you feed your body, how you treat your body, especially when it's over a hundred pound weight loss is a lot about learning to say, Okay, that's not good for me, and I love myself enough to say that I am going to move away from those choices. So

there is this really deep thing. It's an intimate and deep thing that has to happen for people for them to be ready. Um, because so much of food is used perversely as punishment. You know, I referred to kind of being bad by eating something like a piece of a doughnut, and then you're like, well, I wasn't really good today, so I am just gonna, you know, go whole hog and I'll start fresh tomorrow. I think that's a real tendency, and it's it is a form of

punishment for being quote unquote bad or making bad choices. Well, and again, what we now know from brain science is whenever we feel guilt and shame, we actually highlight the reward system in our brain. Is that lights up like like just crazy. So when we feel guilty or shameful about a choice that we make, right, so, oh, I ate the cake when I didn't plan on eating the cake, we feel badly like you're expressing, and then we get

our reward system lights up. For most of us who have a food love, we go right to more food. If it's gambling, you've seen it. You're you're losing at the table. What do you do? You push in? More so, when we learn this, and and that again was this big learning for a lot of my clients is that, oh, that's exactly what I'm doing. I am each time I feel bad about a food choice or I make it a punishment for myself, then I go and I do more of it. So really, the antidote to that is

what we now know gratitude. Gratitude lights up and releases serotonin and gets it flowing for you. So if you can kind of say, well, I ate that piece of cake, but I only ate one and really be grateful for something, even if it's a tiny little thing, that release of serotonin can override the reward system and you can be in to make real change because it was never the one piece of cake that got you in trouble. And I think that's what my sister is really talking about.

It was that self loathing, that repetitive self loathing of eating the cake, feeling terrible, beating herself up and then eat more. Yeah, and I know it from a life of I've had a way to shoot since I was fourteen, So I think that makes me uniquely qualified to help people because I know what it is. I've done it myself. I've done what you're talking about a hundred times, So tell me how to stop that. I, for example, me, I ate a piece of a doughnut this morning, um,

which I normally wouldn't do. And I'm trying to say that's okay I ate a piece of a doughnut. That doesn't mean that I you know, this whole attitude that I have to eat that all. Now It'll be okay for me to eat as much as I want today because tomorrow I'll start afresh. So what can I say to my help that I ate a piece of a doughnut? What you're talking about, which is another piece of this

brain science? And are these habit the habit loops? So people are always talking about habits, right, And a habit has three parts. It's got a trigger, then there's a routine, and then there's a reward. What you've created so nicely in your life is a trigger of one small off behavior which you've deemed as bad. And I used to be so neurotic. I would do it when I ate a piece of gum that sure wasn't that was sugar free?

Sure sure? So this this is just a thought pattern that you've habitualized, which is do something that is out of some sort of rule book that you've created in your mind, which is is now the routine is to feel bad and the reward is to go further get more of that serotonin releasing food because of the guilt and shame. Yeah. Yeah, it's really strange when we look at the habit patterns in you know, under an m R I, they live on these sort of embedded roadways

and they don't go away. That's the other part is you have to create awareness around this new pattern, alternative or alternative, Yes, exactly. So this alternative habit for you would be like when there's a perceived mistake, I'm going to just make a plan around the next meal and make it a healthy one. When we create new habits, the other thing to really understand is it's quite uncomfortable

the new habit. You won't be comfortable. You'll still hear this jargon going on about how you were bad and how it doesn't matter because you've already messed up and whatever those words are that that you which is super mean, by the way, Yeah, like, why are we so freaking mean to ourselves? Well, I think society sort of imposes it. You know, this deprivation chic and it's sort of like it's an all or nothing world, right, You're good or bad, and there are very few shades of gray, I think

when it comes to life in general. Right, Yeah, so I think that you have to kind of fight that talk briefly for us, Liz about the role of technology and helping either interrupt these habits or establishing better ones. Yeah. So, I am super passionate about technology and the role that it's going to play. I believe it will be the tide that turns this obesity epidemic because not only is it allowing us to connect to people that we would

never be able to connect to. Right So, I'm going to run an online course this week where I'll be able to I'm working with people in Singapore and Australia. Right So we would never have a have had a chance to connect. They would never have heard my voice. And community and support critically important, isn't it. If If there's anything that I could could have someone take away from this is like the tendency in weight loss and

weight management is to go it alone. It's just the natural human tendency to either feel guilt or shame or like I should be able to do this on my own. What I've learned over eighteen years in this business is that really the secret sauce is accountability and support. Find in community, being with like minded people. It's everything. Liz has a new book out called Target one hundred, the

World's Simplest weight loss program in six easy Steps. You can also learn more about Liz and how she might be able to help you by visiting her website, Liz Josefsburg dot com. When we come back, Mark Hyman's recommendations for a diet that could help and heal you. A lot of Mark Hyman's work is focused on food as medicine, which can be hard for us skeptics to wrap our heads around. But as the director of the Cleveland Clinics Center for Functional Medicine, he's seen the benefits of a

change diet firsthand. We had a patient come into our center in Cleveland Clinic. She was sixty six. She had type of diabetes. She was on influent, she had heart failure, she had kidneys starting to fail, her liver was fatty, she had high blood pressure. Piliaments in three days, just changing her diet to a whole foods dies Essentially, it's a very low sugar, anti inflammatory, whole foods, high fiber, high fight and nutrient diet whin three days shows offer insulin.

In three months, she reversed her heart failure, reverse to diabetes or kidneys got better, blood pressure would normalize. She lost forty three pounds. Any years she lost a hundred and sixteen pounds, reversed everything, normalize her blood sugar. I mean her blood sugar was running like three all the time, and it was just perfect on nothing. And she saved twenty dollars and co pays for her medication like insulin. And imagine if we scale that across the country and

use that. But doctors don't know how to use food is medicine. They eat better, exercise more, and that doesn't really do anything. So you know, obviously that's a bit of an obvious thing, type two diabetes because of the heart failure, kidney failure. Right, But there are other diseases that I think are really interesting that you wouldn't necessarily associate with food that you are treating. And give us a few examples of autoimmune disease is a great example.

So many people suffer from automune disease, whether truma, arthritis, lupus, and food plays a huge role because your gut is where six of your immune system is. And when you damage the gut like we do with our diets and glyphosate, antibiotics, acid blocking drugs, and processed food, all damages are gut. It breaks down that immune system and the barrier breaks down the gut and you leak in food proteins and

bacterial toxins, and that activates inflammation. So by using diet, eliminating inflammatory foods things like gluten and dairy, getting rid of all the processed foods, adding whole foods, often autommune diseases can have dramatic improvements. Well, let's just do some foodness and closing. Are there any uh dues? And don't because one of the frustrating things about educating people is the science seems to be changing all the time, and

sadly it makes people not trust science as much. So our eggs good for you, or its gluten good for you or bad for you, is very good or bad, and if it in fact is highly individualized, how do you determine what is best for you? Great questions? So I think you know with all the science we have and all the different debates and all the different diets. The best advice I've ever heard was from my ca palm, which is eat food, meaning real food right, not processed food,

not mostly plants, not too much. So it doesn't mean be vegan. It just means eat a lot of vegetables and plant foods, don't over eat, and eat real food. So I think there are basic foundational principles to break through all the myths. It should be real food, right. We should be eating good fats. We should be eating lots of vegetables and fruit. We should be eating lots of nuts and seeds. We can have whole grains and beans.

We shouldn't be eating foods that aren't food right, food like substances full of chemicals added as hormones, antibiotics, processed ingredients. Obviously those are not good for us. So those are the foundational principles, like called the Peagan diet, which is kind of a joke, you know, making fun at pay you and vegan, but it's essentially just these foundational principles everbody agrees on, and then within it you kind of kind of have to think about quality. Right, So what

is the quality of what you're eating. Are you eating an egg from a factory farm where the chickens have been abused and where there's lots of antibiotics used and there's arsenic and the feed or are you getting a paste ad egg which is dark yellow oak, full of nutrients and antioxidants and good omega three fats uh you know. Are you eating a feed lot cow, which is again

processing way that's not good for them the planet? Are you or eating a re generally raised grass fed beef with much more nutrient density, without hormones antibiotics that restores climate rather than harms the climate. So there's a way of thinking about this where you you don't have to pay attention all the noise, but you figure out what what makes common sense for you. And then as far as personalization, that's really key. Everybody needs different type of approach.

For example, as we age, we need more protein. When we're younger, we can get away with different kinds of approaches. So it's real, it's really pay attention to the smartest doctor in the room, which is your own body. It'll tell you what it likes and what it does, and like, you just have to pay attention and one quick thing that you mentioned aging When I heard you speak about your last book, you talked about how much muscle mass

you lose as you age. That's why weight varying exercises are so important, or any food is important to eat as you age, because I think that's one of the reasons I'm getting a little belly because the muscles in my stomach aren't as strong as they used to be. And that's why men kind of get those big bellies because some of their muscles because right absolutely, because also

the sugar in the start. I mean, I think that the the the quick answer is that as we age, we lose muscle if we don't do something about it. We have to put energy in the system. And there's really three key components of that. First, you need adequate protein as you age, and it can be plant based protein or animal protein. If it's plant prostein, you might need to add extra amino acids like lucine because that is necessary. And and as you age, you need more

to sugar causes muscle loss. Sugar cause and starting yes, sugar and star arch cause you to gain belly fat and lose muscle. Just by switching your diet to a higher fat, lower starch diet. I've done that, and I've got more muscle and I'm sixty than I did when I was thirty without changing my exercise routine. So so it's basically cutting out the starch and sugar, adding more good fats and having the right kinds of protein and not and and each me on that that will help

prevent the muscle us as you age. And then you add on top of that the exercise and strength training, yoga, you know, things like that can really be helpful. Can you be my personal health Google? Can you see my coach? Mark? I know, but I need you on a more regular basis. Seriously. Can you help me come up with an eating plan and an exercise plan or a life plan or a meditation plan. Markheim Is latest book, Food Fix, How to Save our health, our economy, our communities on our planet,

One Bite at a Time, is out in February. You can also find more inform nation about Mark's health missions, his cookbooks, and his own podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy Pharmacy with an F at his website d R Himan dot com. And that does it for this week's episode. I hope you all learned as much as I did listening to it. I don't know about you, but I'm trying to do intermittent fasting. And yes, I'm even drinking my coffee black and I'm kind of liking it after a few days.

You can keep up with Next Question by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your favorite shows. You can also check out my morning newsletter It's called wake Up Call at Katie Kurrek dot com. And of course you can follow me on your go to social media channel or all of them. Until next time and my Next Question, I'm Katie Couric. Next Question with Katie Couric is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Kurrik Media. The kative producers are

Katie Currik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements. Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagan and Lowell Berlante, mixing by Dylan Fagin. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie curik dot com and follow us on

Twitter and Instagram at Katie Kurik. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,