The Undoctored Approach to Spectacular Weight Loss

Transcript:

I call this the Undoctored approach to spectacular weight loss. The Undoctored program, as detailed in my new book, Undoctored — Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor, is targeted primarily towards improving health, dramatically improving your health, but, you can think of excess weight, even obesity, as a reflection of poor health.

As you get healthier and healthier, weight should fall off of you, effortlessly. This is not a “diet”, where you are deprived of calories, have to move-more-eat-less, all that nonsense. This is setting health right. It’s making you healthier. Yes, you can lose spectacular amounts weight on this program, but all the while, you’re gaining dramatic advantages in health — so much so that numerous, really hundreds, of health conditions … go away: Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, seborrhea, psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, fibromyalgia … on and on and on — all discussed in the book, by the way.

If you have Type 2 diabetes or hypertension, and are on drugs for those conditions, you will want to refer those discussions in the book, because there are some pitfalls. You can’t do this, because you’ll have to reduce the medications, or stop them, right away, or else you’ll have dangerous reactions: low blood sugars, low blood pressure. So please do not do this without exploring those issues further, as discussed in the Undoctored book, also in my Undoctored Inner Circle (membership website).

What is the Undoctored program? Well, part of the Undoctored program is what I call the Wild-Naked-Unwashed program. I call it that because, what it means is, is we’re reverting as humans, back to the way that we lived and existed and survived for millions of years. Did you know that obesity is unique to the relatively modern age? Of course the spectacular obesity that we see now is unique to our age.

If you look at primitive people, who live outdoors, who forage for their food, and hunt, don’t limit calories, right, don’t exercise just for exercise sake — they exercise because they have to, in hunting or tracking an animal — or are going long distances to find food — there is no such thing as obesity, or being overweight, in those populations. They’re all slender. If you were to follow their BMI (body mass indexes), while ours are typically 28, 30, 35, and higher (consistent with overweight and obesity), they’re typically 18, 19, or 21. They are wonderfully slender. They’re not deprived of food (there are populations that are deprived). For the most part, wild living populations, over the eons and centuries have not been deprived. They have lived vigorous lives, with plentiful food, and yet there’s virtually no obesity.

We are, in the Undoctored program, reverting back that kind of lifestyle, drawing from the lessons we can take from those experiences, but incorporating modern conveniences. Because I don’t think you want to go out and spear yourself a wild animal, and skin it yourself. We’re going to incorporate, we’re going to borrow, from those primitive experiences, and apply them in our modern world.

We start with a nutrition program. The basic principle of the nutrition program is that we eat no wheat, nor grains. That’s an extensive conversation for that rationale. It’s discussed in my Wheat Belly books. It’s discussed in the Wheat Belly blog, videos, and as well as the Undoctored book and blog. There is a rationale, but that alone; elimination all foods made of wheat and grains, is incredibly effective for starting your weight loss, so much so, it sometimes scares people.

One of the effects of grain elimination is a rapid reversal of inflammation and inflammatory edema. People will lose say, 5 pounds, 6 pounds, 7 pounds in the first week. Only some of that fat. A lot of it is inflammatory edema, but that’s good, right? If you’re less inflamed, it makes future weight loss even easier. You even see it on your face. You’ll see a reduction in the proportions of your face. Your eyes get bigger because the around-the-eye puffiness goes away. So, we start with wheat and grain elimination.

We also introduce a limitation on carbohydrates. We use a very specific limitation called “net carbs”:

net_carbs = total_carbohydrates minus fiber

… very easy to calculate from the smartphone apps or nutritional analyses, one of the handbooks for carb counting, or just go on some website like nutritiondata.self.com that will give you total carbohydrates and fiber, so you can calculate your net carbs. We subtract the fiber because fiber is not metabolized as a carbohydrate, although it gets counted as a carbohydrate on nutritional panels. We go no higher than 15 grams net carbs per meal — very important, but second in power to elimination all wheat and grains. That’s the first step.

The second step in the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program is to replenish iodine. About 20% of modern people are deficient in iodine. If you don’t have enough iodine, you will not lose weight, nor will you have normal thyroid status. You can have health problems long-term, so it’s very important to get iodine. We supplement iodine, and the dose I feel is ideal is 400 to 500 micrograms — not milligrams (mg); — micrograms (mcg or µg) per day. We get that from either potassium iodide drops (very inexpensive) or kelp tablets (dried seaweed, very inexpensive), because we’re not getting enough from salt. You’d have to use a lot of iodized salt to get your iodine, because it’s very volatile, evaporates, once you open the canister — it’s gone within weeks. So that’s very important: iodine.

Vitamin D: the effect of vitamin D on weight loss is not big, but it helps … may only be a few pounds, but it really helps. And Vitamin D is so wonderful for overall health, making your thinking more clear, giving you energy and clarity, increasing bone density, improving metabolic measures, like reducing insulin, blood sugar and blood pressure. So, vitamin D is useful to so many things anyway, but it’s also contributes your program.

We also supplement magnesium. Now, magnesium itself does not cause weight loss, but typically, when you do this program, people experience muscle cramps. For unclear reasons this lifestyle unmasks your magnesium deficiency. So we’re all deficient at the start, because we filter our water and some other reasons. So it’s necessary to supplement magnesium. I advocate supplementing 400 to 500 milligrams per day of elemental magnesium (as the magnesium alone, without the other components of magnesium supplements, like magnesium malate or magnesium citrate). My preferred form is magnesium malate, to provide 400 to 500 mg of magnesium per day, divided in two or three different doses. You break them up so they don’t give you loose stools — very important so you don’t have those cramps, which could be painful. It also provides long-term benefits like reduction in blood pressure, reduction in heart rhythm disorders, reduction of migraine headaches, and many other benefits.

Fish oil: for its Omega 3 fatty acids (and not krill oil, and not flaxseed oil — flaxseed oil is good for other reasons but not for this reason). The EPA and DHA Omega 3 fatty acids in fish oil don’t help you lose weight; they make weight loss safe. If you lost ten pounds, say, in the first couple of weeks of the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program, where’d that ten pounds go? Well, its first mobilized as fat into your bloodstream: triglycerides and fatty acids. Those could be dangerous. What fish oil does, at the dose we use, is to blunt the flood, the rise of those fatty acids and triglycerides. It makes it safer for you to lose weight at a rapid clip, as we do in this program.

I advocate 3600 milligrams of EPA and DHA per day, divided in two. If you use a low potency preparation, capsules for instance that only contain 300 mg; of EPA and DHA, that’s going to be 12 capsules a day. You’re better off using high potency capsules, or even liquids. It’s wonderfully effective for making weight loss safer for you as well, as providing other benefits such as protection from Alzheimer’s dementia, cardiovascular disease, protection from cancer and many other effects.

Lastly, cultivation of bowel flora: this is the most complex part of the six basic strategies in the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program, but it is very, very important. This requires months of effort. It requires a combination of several things: we start with a high potency multi-species probiotic. I think the best approach is to buy a probiotic that provides at least 50 billion (billion with a B) CFUs (colony forming units) per day, and provides at least 12 different species of lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, and some others. Because we’re trying to generate species diversity in our gut, we start with a high potency multi-species probiotic.

After several days of that, we weave in prebiotic fibers. You’ll find a detailed discussion about that Undoctored book and Undoctored websites. We get prebiotic fibers because they nourish the micro-organisms in our colon. You cannot rely on a probiotic alone, because if you do, you will fail. It’s insufficient, like having a garden and failing to fertilize or water it. The prebiotics are kind of like the water and fertilizer for your garden. You must get prebiotic fibers. We aim for 20 grams per day. Start low, about 10 grams per day for the first week or so. Build up to 20 grams per day.

These come from some unusual sources, because the primitive sources you probably don’t want to get, because it requires you to dig in the dirt to find underground tubers and roots. We don’t want to do that, so we get it from such things as green unripe bananas, raw white potatoes, inulin powder you buy at the health food store, small servings of legumes like kidney beans, black beans, white beans, chickpeas, hummus, etc. You’ll find tables of the prebiotic fiber content in the Undoctored book. You can kind of a guesstimate getting around 20 grams per day, because that’s where the maximum benefits derive, including facilitation of weight loss, bowel regularity, reduction of colon cancer risk (which is dramatic) and metabolic improvements like reduction in blood pressure, reduction in blood sugar, reduction in triglycerides, rising HDL, improved sleep, reduction in anxiety, and many other benefits.

Lastly, we also encourage the use of some fermented foods. Fermented foods act kind of like a probiotic. The fermented foods don’t have the species diversity of a probiotic, but it can have substantial counts of one, two, or three species, so they help also. These are such things as fermented veggies, which are very easy to make, and those instructions are provided in the Undoctored book: how to ferment, say, radishes, or onions, as well as yogurt and kefir. Those are also sources for your probiotic organisms through fermented foods.

Put this all together, and this adds up to what I call it 2+2=11 Undoctored effect. That is, each component by itself exerts some benefit, but you put the whole thing together and you get this magnificent, spectacular effect on regaining control over health, including spectacular weight loss.

Now, if you do not lose weight on this program, or if you lose let’s say 20 pounds, and then you plateau, but you want to lose another 30-50-100 pounds, whatever — but it stops — it’s not that the program doesn’t work. It means either there’s something wrong with your health, or you’re doing something wrong in the program. This is covered extensively in the Undoctored book, as well as numerous videos on the Undoctored Inner Circle membership website. I encourage you to go to either of those resources, but start with the book.

There’s an extensive discussion on the factors to go through, the checklist to go through; the factors to consider, if you encounter failed weight loss. Most people identify one or several causes that can be addressed, and then once again your weight-loss proceeds. Don’t give up just because you don’t lose weight. Address the health factors, because some of those health factors are not benign. For instance, if you have unrecognized hypothyroidism (under-active thyroid gland), that has tremendous cardiovascular implications: heart attack, sudden cardiac death — that’s not a benign thing. Up to a third of people have unrecognized, undiagnosed hypothyroidism. It’s very important for you to consult that list of factors if you encounter weight loss plateau. Identify the causes that apply to you, and then correct them, and the vast majority of people then enjoy the weight loss that they want to lose.