The Science of Fat Loss: How Neurons Control Fat Burning
Fat loss is something that interests a large number of people. Many people want to lose fat, and many people are athletes who need to lose fat. In general, we know that having body fat percentages that are too high is unhealthy for us. Most people struggle to lose fat, and most people especially struggle to lose body fat or what we call adipose tissue.
This is a huge topic on the internet. There’s a lot of controversy, and there’s some great stuff out there, and there’s some really terrible information out there. Today, we’re going to talk about some things related to fat loss and that are powerful for fat loss that I’m guessing most of you have never heard about before. You may have heard about a few of them, but I’m guessing you haven’t heard about all of them.
Calories In Versus Calories Out
Before I get started and talk about the various tools for fat loss and how neuroscience neurons control fat loss, I want to set the context correctly and extract some of the key takeaways from previous episodes. If your foundation of health and your foundation of hormones and your foundation of metabolism isn’t right, it’s going to be very hard to get the most out of any kind of exercise or fat loss protocol.
We don’t have time to do that now and I want to get to the new material. However, there are a couple of bins, a couple of items that you should make sure you’re getting correctly. And if you’re not perfect about these, don’t worry about it. Most people are not perfect about them. I’m certainly not perfect about them, but we should all be striving to get quality and sufficient sleep.
I did four full episodes on sleep and how to get better at sleeping through things like light exposure, temperature, timing your sleep correctly for your so-called chronotype if you’re a night owl or a morning person. That’s the first four or I think five episodes of The Huberman Lab podcast. Get your sleep right, get your light exposure right, avoid bright light in your eyes at times you want to be asleep, and get bright light in your eyes at times you want to be awake.
We need fatty acids. They are vital to so many aspects of our health. You don’t have to get them from supplements. You can if you want to, but you need to get them from your food. They are essential. There’s a reason there’s an “E” in the essential part of the fatty acids. There are multiple kinds, but for the antidepressant effects, where the levels of fatty acids that will promote good mood and also healthy metabolism and will start to shift the needle in the right direction on bloodborne cardiovascular factors, the key thing is to get the levels of EPA that you ingest above 1000 milligrams per day.
So that doesn’t mean just taking a thousand milligrams or more of say fish oil or krill oil or whatever your preferred source is. It means getting above a thousand milligrams of EPA, which may require that you ingest more essential fatty acids than just a thousand milligrams per day. That of course can be done through food sources, like fatty fish, or if you’re not into eating fish, you have quality meats that are grass-fed, can do that. There are other sources of essential fatty acids of course also from plant sources, so look those up online. It’s really easy to find.
Cravings and Supplements
But the research in the literature shows that you want to get above a thousand milligrams of EPA per day. For people who have cravings issues, they they crave sweets all the time. I talked about this in the gut brain episode and hormones and food. You have neurons in your gut that are craving. They’re seeking essential fatty acids and they’re craving and seeking amino acids from your food.
Now, these are not supplements that they crave per se. They’re craving those things because that’s what your body needs and your brain needs. But those same neurons will respond to sugars. And so many people who are craving sugar can satisfy that sugar craving by giving the neurons, so to speak, what they actually want, which are amino acids and essential fatty acids. That includes EPA, but also things like glutamine and amino acid that can really reduce sugar cravings. If you take a teaspoon of that or even a tablespoon of that a few times a day.
But glutamine has also been shown to improve symptoms of leaky gut. It’s a powerful amino acid. And yes, you can also get it from food, things like cottage cheese or high in glutamine, etc.
Thyroid and Metabolism
And then finally, you can’t really position yourself to have a strong metabolism if your iodine levels aren’t correct and your thyroid levels aren’t correct. You can overdo iodine, so you don’t want to do that. A lot of table salt has iodine added to it, but some people need to add iodine by ingesting things like kelp, etc.
But one of the best ways to support the thyroid system and metabolism in general is to make sure you’re getting enough selenium, sometimes called selenium each day. A simple way to do that is to ingest the highest concentration of selenium food that I’m aware of, which is Brazil nuts. One or two or three of those per day, you’ll have more than enough selenium to meet the thyroid needs.
Conclusion
So, to recap: get your sleep right, get your light exposure right, avoid bright light in your eyes at times you want to be asleep, and get bright light in your eyes at times you want to be awake. We need fatty acids. They are vital to so many aspects of our health. Get your gut microbiome right. Get sufficient EPA’s, glutamine if you have issues with leaky gut or sugar cravings can really help. And make sure you’re getting enough selenium each day.
