The 3 Biggest Lies That Keep Us From Losing Weight (Part 2) — Dr. Bill Cole

“Better Health Begins At The Cell.” -Dr. Bill Cole

(If you think your weight loss problems are thyroid related go to ColeClass.com and watch the short video (about 23 minutes) that I made for you. It’s free… You don’t even have to give me your email.)

Hey guys, it’s Dr. Cole back with Part 2 of our discussion on weight loss resistance, and today we are specifically going to focus on leptin resistance.

Today, I want to talk with you about an experiment that actually got me thinking differently in terms of why we’re seeing this epidemic of why mostly women, but again, more and more men, can’t lose weight no matter what they do. A guy by the name of George Wade, at the University of Massachusetts back in the day, did an experiment with two groups of mice. Both female groups and he gave both groups hysterectomies.

In the first group, after their hysterectomy, he gave them pretty much an all you can eat diet, and they wound up gaining a ton of weight. They actually ceased looking like mice, and just looked like blobs. That really wasn’t unexpected, right? You disrupt hormones, and then you feed these mice more than they should have, and the wind up getting really fat.

But the second group is what was amazing. That second group of mice that had the hysterectomy, he put them on a subsistence diet. Barely enough calories to exist and that second group of mice got just as fat. Think about that. They disrupted their hormones with a hysterectomy, then he put them on a starvation type of diet, and they got just as fat. That’s amazing because again, back to what I was saying in the first blog, we have been brainwashed into believing that it’s all about calories, it’s all about exercise, and it’s all about fat.

This experiment showed that when you disrupt hormones, you can turn, in this case, the mice, but what we see today in terms of women, you turn them into fat storing machines instead of fat burners. Then it’s like a computer. When you program a computer to perform a function, that’s what the computer does. When you program a person hormonally to store fat, then that’s what they’ll do. Then weight loss becomes next to impossible.

Well, that was a real eye-opener for me, and it got me thinking differently. If you are programmed to store fat, then how do you beat that hormonally? The analogy I use is like a teenage boy when he gets his hormones, right? Try to tell a teenage boy not to think about sex. That’s not going to work because hormonally, they’ve been changed. Well, hormonally if you’ve been changed to store fat, good luck trying to lose fat. That’s what we’re seeing.

A lot of you women who’ve had hysterectomies, you were able to see a difference immediately, right? You started to put on weight. It’s a common thing. But here’s what else is happening beyond actually going in and doing something radical like a hysterectomy. We’re seeing hormonal disruption happening for a number of various reasons. One of them is just the overexposure to what scientists refer to as obesogens. Chemicals that disrupt hormones and make us fat storers.

Then there are other things that I’ve talked about in some of my videos, like whenever you damage your cells from the consumption of too many bad fats, too much sugar, & too many toxins, then those cells become resistant to hormones. They can be there, the fat burning hormones can all be there, but if they can’t get in the cell, they can’t do their job.

So, that was the eye-opener for me. It got me thinking in terms of what’s really going on here. In my studies, combined with things that I already knew, for instance, like the idea that there are only two ways that we get energy. You’re either getting energy from fat or you’re getting energy from carbohydrates. Sugar, right? What we are seeing today is that people are so disrupted hormonally, they’re so resistant hormonally, that they are stuck in what we call sugar burning mode. They go from meal to meal to meal utilizing their carbohydrates as their fuel source, and their body becomes really hormonally challenged in terms of being able to burn fat.

If you’re stuck in sugar burning mode and you’ve lost the ability to burn fat effectively, how successful are you going to be at losing weight? Well, the average person if you put them on a calorie deprivation diet, they will lose some weight. But how effective is that long term? We talked about in the last blog how 97–98% of them will gain that weight back. You also have to really look at it from this perspective, too: What are you losing?

I’ve tested patients, for instance, one man, in particular, comes to my mind. Diabetic. Came into my clinic, opted not to become a patient. He went home and began dieting himself, and lost a tremendous amount of weight. Well, before he had left my office, I did a tanita body fat analysis on him. I forget what it was exactly, but he was obese. When we came back to me after having lost all this weight, I rechecked his body fat percentage. He was all proud of himself, right, because he lost all this weight. When I did the recheck on his body fat, he actually had a higher percentage of body fat than before he had lost the weight.

The analogy or the example that I would give you would be: if you lose 10 pounds. There’s a difference between losing 10 pounds of just fat vs. losing in that 10 pounds: 5 pounds of muscle, 3 pounds of water, and 2 pounds of fat. You’re actually not getting ahead. You’re actually from a body fat percentage perspective, you’re actually getting fatter percentage wise, right? So, it matters what kind of weight you’re losing, not just whether the scale is changing. That’s an issue in and of itself.

A healthy person is going to be able to move in and out of fat burning and sugar burning, right? So, in fat burning, if they’re not eating food, their body will just automatically kick in and start burning what’s available on them as a source of energy, which is their body fat. A person stuck in sugar burning mode, which a lot of you out there right now are, can’t lose weight no matter what they do. You don’t eat food for a period of time, and you start feeling shaky because your body is relying on sugar that you’re not giving it now. It’s lost its ability to tap into the fat stores. Really, it’s a dead giveaway when people can’t go long periods of time without food.

There will be many days that I will not eat breakfast, I won’t eat lunch, I won’t dinner because I’ll get home late at night, maybe eight o’clock. I haven’t eaten in over 24 hours, and honestly, I’m not even that hungry. I’m not really missing my meals like a lot of people.

I had a lady the other day, no kidding, she came in for a consult and she’s a diabetic. I told her as an example, in order to find out whether she was committed to getting herself better, I said I might have you skip breakfast since she had asked me what she could have for breakfast. I said, “You might have to skip breakfast. It’s called intermittent fasting, and I will teach you how to do it.” She was like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. I can’t go without having breakfast.”

That’s such a foreign thing to me, even though I see it in so many patients. It’s hard to conceive that people are so dependent on this regular influx of carbohydrates to fuel their needs, the idea that they would skip a meal is just abhorrent to them. It’s just so foreign. But anyway, I decided not to take her as a patient because I can’t help somebody like that. Someone who is not willing to try. But that’s beside the point.

But it’s really a dead giveaway in terms of what is happening with somebody if they can’t skip meals without getting that shakiness. They don’t just automatically shift over into that fat burning mode. So, that brings me to the hormone that I want to talk about called Leptin.

Leptin is your master fat burning hormone. It’s a hormone that was discovered in the ‘90s. When it was first discovered, the researchers figured they had found the holy grail! What leptin does is it tells your body to burn fat for fuel. It also cuts appetite. It tells us when to stop eating. They figured if they could just get people that were deficient in leptin, these obese people, who obviously they weren’t losing weight because they didn’t have enough of this hormone, more leptin by injecting them with it, then they would lose all kind of weight.

They thought this is a multi-hundred billion dollar idea. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

It worked in mice, and they were able to get mice to lose weight like that. But when they started examining humans, people that were overweight, they found that they didn’t have a deficiency of leptin. Not only that, but they actually had too much leptin. Very much like the type two diabetic. In the beginning, they don’t lack insulin. They lack the ability to utilize insulin. They become insulin resistant, right?

Well, the found out that these people that were overweight were leptin resistant. They had more than enough of this fat burning hormone, but their cells in the hypothalamus were not hearing the message in the center of their brain. So, they couldn’t lose weight effectively.

How it’s supposed to work is whenever we gain weight, whenever we gain fat, leptin is produced from the fat cells. It’s a really cool system, the way that it works. Whenever leptin is produced, we gain fat. Your body makes more leptin. Leptin goes up and tells your brain, your hypothalamus, “Hey, we need to burn body fat.” Then your brain will send that signal down and start. Your body will use fat for fuel, and it cuts your appetite. It’s a really cool system until it doesn’t work anymore.

We are seeing that the reason that this generally doesn’t work is that just like the type two diabetic, leptin can’t get it’s signal into the cell generally because of chronic cellular inflammation. Cellular damage. The receptors on the cell have become damaged, and now that hormone can’t get into the cell. So, the person can’t lose weight.

They essentially become fat storers instead of fat burners. That’s not a situation that you’re going to easily overcome. Most people like that (and you may be one of them), they are just literally stuck. They cannot burn fat, which results in their inability to lose body fat. It doesn’t matter what they do.

You understand that’s a situation that didn’t exist long ago in any significant numbers. When I owned a gym back in the mid-80s with my brother for 10 years, we would have clients come in who were overweight. We would put them on a clean diet and an exercise program. We would just clean up their diet, give them some exercise, and inevitably they would lose weight. Male or female.

Today, that is not the case. We have this ever-growing population of people who are so frustrated because no matter what they do, they just can’t lose weight. So, I hope this makes sense to you so far. We talked about the myths. Now we’re talking about this fat burning hormone, leptin, that is generally resisted in people who can’t lose weight. They’ve lost the ability to burn fat, they’re sugar burners, and they’re stuck in this mold.

I didn’t get into this, but the typical person who goes to bed at night time and fasts for maybe 10–12 hours before they go to bed, and while they’re sleeping and before they eat breakfast the next day, that person should easily just slip into fat burning mode. If it’s working right, you actually get up and be visibly leaner. But it’s not that way. Most people just have lost that ability.

So, in Part 3 of this blog series, I will explain what you need to do to break out of this leptin resistance, this weight loss resistance so that you can be like you used to be. When you did the right things, and your body was able to shed body fat. I hope this helps. Take care, guys.

God bless,

Dr. Bill Cole