How to Lose Fat with Science-Based Tools

0:00 - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've been getting my blood work done for many years now,

0:47 and that's where the simple reason that only through quality blood work, and now through the advent of DNA test can one really get a clear picture of what's going on with their health. Things like metabolic factors and hormones, all the various triglycerides. These are things that can only be measured from a quality blood test. And now with DNA tests, you can get an additional window into your current health status and the trajectory of your health. What's really wonderful about InsideTracker is that you don't just get numbers back about the specific levels of various hormones and metabolic factors, you also get a lot of information about what you could or should do in order to adjust those numbers to put you on the course to better health. So for instance, it will give recommendations about particular foods to eat or avoid,

1:33 particular exercise regimens that you might want to adopt and the frequency of those regimens in order to move those markers in the correct direction. InsideTracker has also added a new feature that makes tracking your progress and analyzing your data even easier. For those of you that use a Garmin fitness tracker such as the Garmin watch, that's now compatible with their platform. So you can couple your data from your Garmin with your blood and DNA for even more personalization and insights on your health. However, if you don't have a Garmin device, there's still a lot that you can get from InsideTracker and their tests. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit www.insidetracker.com/huberman. And if you do that, you'll get 25% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Use the code Huberman at checkout,

2:18 that's www.insidetracker.com/huberman to get 25% off any of InsideTracker's plans and use the code Huberman at checkout. Today's podcast is also brought to us by ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it, so that no one can see or sell your data. I'm familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough. A few years back I had my bank accounts hacked. I don't know exactly how it happened, but it happened. And it was a terrible amount of work to have that reversed and secured. The great thing about ExpressVPN is I don't even notice that it's running. I have it on my computer, I turn it on anytime I work at home or when traveling or in a cafe airport anywhere,

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3:53 Today's podcast is also brought to us by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink, that gives you a total foundation of vitamins and minerals and probiotics to support your health and wellbeing. I've been using Athletic Greens since 2012. And so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. I started using Athletic Greens and I still use Athletic Greens once or twice a day because it's the simplest and most straightforward way to get my basis of important vitamins, minerals and probiotic taken care off. All of those things combined to support various aspects of my health, such as brain health, such as gut health. For instance, there's a tremendous amount of evidence now showing that probiotics support gut health and that the gut brain access is important for things like

4:40 focus and cognition, as well as for immune function and various aspects of physical health, like metabolism. The list sort of goes on and on. With Athletic Greens, it has all these vitamins and minerals and various other things that are good for me, and I actually really liked the way it tastes. So the way I use it is once a day, sometimes twice a day, I'll mix it up with water, I add a little bit of lemon or lime juice. I think it tastes great without the lemon or lime juice. But when I add that, it's truly delicious to me. And I'll drink that first thing in the day, mid-morning sometimes instead and sometimes again in the later afternoon. I'm able to drink Athletic Greens late in the day and not have it keep me awake. If you want to try Athletic Greens, you can go to www.athleticgreens.com/huberman, and if you do that, you can claim a special offer.

5:25 They'll give you five free travel packs, which make mixing up Athletic Greens while you're on the road, really simple and easy. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3+K2. Vitamin D3, as many of you know, you can get from the sun, but many people even if they're already getting a lot of sun exposure, still have vitamin D3 levels that are too low. And vitamin D3 is very important for a huge number of cardiovascular, immune, metabolic and other aspects of health. So once again, if you go to www.athleticgreens.com/huberman, you'll get the five travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3+K2. Today is the third episode in our series of episodes about physical and athletic skill performance and skill learning in general. And today we're going to talk about the science of tools

6:13 for fat loss. And fat loss is something that interests a large number of people. Many people want to lose fat, many people are athletes who need to lose fat. And in general, we know that having body fat percentages that are too high is unhealthy for us. And most people struggle to lose fat. Most people struggled to lose weight generally, but most people especially struggled to lose body fat or what we call adipose tissue. Now, this is a huge topic on the internet. There's a lot of controversy. 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.

7:01 This episode is going to be rich with science-based tools that are gleaned from a variety of aspects of the literature, including the use of cold, including brown fat, including something called beige fat. We're going to talk about something called NEAT. We're going to talk about all sorts of aspects of fat loss that are governed by your nervous system. And this is I think an important gap that's missing in the discussion about fat loss. You can hear a lot of information out there about the role of things like insulin and various diets like ketogenic diets or vegan diets or Mediterranean diets. And there's some great stuff out there, and there's some really terrible information out there, and there's a lot of controversy. We did a number of episodes talking about the role of hormones on metabolism

7:48 and the role of food on mood and wellbeing. So if you're interested in those topics, please check them out. I will touch a little bit on hormones today. Things like insulin and leptin, just a little bit. But today's episode is mainly going to be focused on, how the nervous system, neurons, and some of the cells they collaborate with, like glioma and macrophages, how those encourage or can encourage accelerated fat loss. Because it turns out they can. Remember your nervous system which includes your brain and your spinal cord and all the connections that they make with the organs of the body, governs everything. It's the on switch and the off switch for immune system. It's the on switch and the off switch.

8:33 It turns out also for fat burning. And so the nervous system and the role of the brain and other neurons has been vastly overlooked in the discussion about losing fat. Now, I would be remiss and I'd probably come under a pretty considerable attack, if I didn't just acknowledge upfront a core truth of metabolic science and also of neuroscience, frankly, which is that calories in versus calories out, meaning how many calories you ingest, versus how many calories you burn is the fundamental and most important formula in this business of fat loss and weight management in general. There's simply no way around the fact that if you ingest far more calories than you burn, you're likely to gain weight.

9:20 And a good portion of that weight is likely to be adipose tissue fat. It's also true that if you ingest fewer calories than you burn, that you will lose weight, and that a significant portion of that will come from body fat. What portion? Depends on a number of factors. But that simple formula is important. On a previous episode, I mentioned the complications with the statements of a calorie is a calorie. And indeed there is evidence from for instance Robert Lustig, who's a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco has talked about how highly processed foods change the way that we utilize food, and can lead to higher incidences of obesity and other metabolic syndromes that go against the idea

10:06 that a calorie is a calorie and that's it. So a calorie is a calorie as a unit of energy, and we need to accept and acknowledge this calories in, meaning calories ingested versus calories burned formula. But the calories burn portion is strongly influenced by a number of things that you can control that can greatly accelerate or increase the amount of adipose tissue or the proportion of adipose tissue that you burn in response to exercise and food. So your hormones are important. Your thermogenic milieu, meaning how warm or how cold your body is? How cold you make it, how warm you make it? But also your level of metabolism.

10:51 Your levels of thyroid hormone and something that's hardly ever discussed, but is well supported by the scientific literature, how much innervation? Meaning how much connectivity there is, between your nervous system and fat. Today, we're going to talk about the fact that your body fat of various kinds, and there are several kinds of body fat are actually innervated by neurons. Neurons connect to your body fat and can change the probability that that body fat will be burned or not. So your nervous system is the master controller of this process, and it plays a strong role in the calories out, the calories burned component. So as usual, we're going to discuss a little bit of science. I promise I won't go too deep into lipolysis

11:39 and all sorts of things related to fat oxidation. We're going to break down that process into two important steps. And if you can understand those two important steps then the rest of the tools will be very straightforward to understand and manage. And I do believe that today you will walk away with many new tools that you could incorporate into any kind of fat loss regimen that will greatly accelerate that process, because it's grounded in quality peer-reviewed science. Throughout the episode, I'm going to talk about some behavioral tools. In fact, I'll mostly talk about behavioral tools. I will also talk about compound, supplements. Many of you are into supplements. Some of you aren't, and that's fine. For those of you that are into supplements, an important issue in a discussion about supplements

12:26 for fat loss or otherwise is going to be the quality of those supplements and the accuracy about what's in those supplement bottles and tablets, et cetera. I usually mention this at the end of the podcast, but this podcast we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E. Because Thorne we believe has the highest levels of stringency in terms of the quality of the compounds in their supplements and the amounts of those compounds. If you want to see the supplements I take, you can go to www.thorne.com/u/huberman. You can see the supplements that I take, that will also allow you to get 20% off any of those supplements, or 20% off any of the other supplements that Thorne makes. Thorne has partnered with the Mayo Clinic and all the major sports teams. So there's a very strong basis for their stringency.

13:13 Again, you don't need to use supplements. I'm certainly not encouraging anyone to use supplements if that's not your thing, but if you're going to use supplements, make sure that your supplement source is one a very high quality. With that said, I want to get started and talk about the various tools for fat loss and how neuroscience, neurons control fat loss. Before I do that, I want to set the context correctly and extract some of the key takeaways from previous episodes, because 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. In previous episodes, I talked all about the science and the details going into particular protocols.

14:00 We don't have time to do that now, and I want to get to the new material. However, there are a couple bins, a couple 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 wanted to be asleep, and get bright light in your eyes

14:45 at times you want to be awake. So get your sleep right. The other thing is essential fatty acids. I talked about this in the food and mood episode, but I also talked about it during the hormones episodes. 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 the essential part there. 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 we'll start to shift the needle in the right direction on bloodborne cardiovascular factors. The key thing is to get the levels of EPA

15:31 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, things like fatty fish, or if you're not into eating fish, you've quality meats that are grass raised 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. But the research and the literature shows that you want to get above a thousand milligrams of EPA per day, because that's when you can best support your metabolism

16:18 and position yourself for good fat loss. As well for people who have cravings issues, they crave sweets all the time, I talked about this in the gut-brain episode and hormones and food. That 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

17:04 if you take a teaspoon of that, or even a tablespoon of that a few times a day. You have to ease into that a little bit, because some people can get a little bit of GI distress from too much glutamine. 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 are high in glutamine, et cetera. 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, et cetera.. But one of the best ways to support the thyroid system and metabolism in general,

17:50 is to make sure you're getting enough selenium. Sometimes called selenium each day. 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. You don't want your selenium to be too high, you don't want a diet too high in anything. So again, sleep, sufficient EPAs, glutamine if you have issues with leaky gut or sugar cravings can really help. Get your gut microbiome, right? I may have missed saying that, but get your gut microbiome right. That does not necessarily mean you need to ingest probiotics. You can, if you want to, but you can also just simply ingest a serving or two of fermented foods per day, that can greatly assess.

18:36 So things like sauerkraut, kimchi, every culture has a different source or sources of fermented foods, those can really help the gut microbiome, and then make sure that your thyroid hormone is supported through the ingestion of sufficient iodine not too much and sufficient selenium, not too much. Okay? Sleep, EPA, glutamine, fermented foods, iodine and selenium. That sets the basis for how things like exercise, cold and some of the compounds and other things that we're going to talk about today that are I'm guessing going to be truly new to many of you that can really increase the burn factor in the equation of calories in versus calories burned. Okay? So on the one hand we have this reality of calories in,

19:22 versus calories burned. However, I would also be remiss if I didn't mention an incredible study that was done by my colleague, Alia Crum at Stanford. She's a faculty member, professor in the psychology department. Looking at how belief affects, just thinking can impact the effects of things like exercise on weight loss. These are just incredible results. What they did was they took subjects who were hotel service people that would clean the hotels and come in and change the linens and so forth. Divide them into two groups. One group, they were told moving around and doing your duties for your job, meet the standards for US guidelines for activity

20:10 and movement, et cetera. And a basic lecture about how movement is good for you, et cetera. But mostly just that their daily activities met the standards for the US. The other group, however, was given a bunch of information about how movement and their daily routine was very good for cardiovascular health, it could be good for weight loss, et cetera. And then they tracked these subjects over a period of many weeks. The take home message from this study was that simply being told that movement is good for you can lead to weight loss, et cetera. Led to significantly more body fat loss, waist-to-hip ratio changes in the direction that most people would want.

20:55 But essentially a slimming down, if you will. And all sorts of other positive effects on things like cardiovascular health. Simply by the knowledge that movement and exercise can help various health markers. So this is remarkable and it speaks to the power of the nervous system and the power of belief in governing aspects of our body and our physiology that one would otherwise think we're outside our conscious control. Now, of course, any of you that think scientifically which I imagine if you watch this podcast or listen to this podcast is all of you by now probably thinking, well, maybe they just moved around more, or maybe they stood up and sat down more, maybe they did something else that was different. And indeed there's a strong possibility

21:42 that they did things differently than the other group, but the mere knowledge that exercise is good for you, that movement is good for you, shifted their behavior and their physiology in the direction of enhanced weight loss, fat loss, et cetera. So how we think about a given set of activities affects how we perform those activities. And how we think about and perform those activities has a real effect on our physiology. So somewhere between the hard and fast rule that governs fat loss and weight loss, which is if you ingest more calories than you burn, you'll either maintain or gain weight. Typically, you'll gain weight, although not always. If you ingest about as many calories as you burn, you'll maintain weight, typically.

22:29 And if you ingest fewer calories than you burn, typically you'll lose weight. That's the kind of rule of fat loss. And yet we also have these belief effects which show, and this has been replicated again and again, that how we think about a process, whether or not we think it's beneficial can change our physiology in ways that can be beneficial to us. Somewhere in between those two extremes of hardcore metabolic science and belief of why a bunch of protocols that are grounded in quality peer-reviewed science and in physiology that you can leverage to increase the rates of fat loss. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. I love this topic and it's not that I'm so obsessed with fat loss, but rather the first the project I ever worked on in science

23:16 was thermogenesis and fat loss. I joined a laboratory as an undergraduate, and the guy I worked for loved to explore new compounds and how they impacted thermogenesis. And so we looked at how things like MDMA/Ecstasy, how antipsychotics, antidepressants, various weight loss drugs that were on the market. How those impacted body temperature and fat loss and metabolism? And we just had so much fun doing it. So if you detect a smile on my face, that's what that's about. And I also learned a lot, and I also came to really appreciate that this tissue of our bodies, adipose tissue and fat, we think of as just this unfortunate thing that's like we're told it's a core energy source

24:03 if we ever entered a famine and that's all true, et cetera. You come to realize that the cells in our body, they are there as fuel for the furnace of our body, which is our metabolism. And there's a third player. And that's where it really gets interesting. That the nervous system, neurons has the opportunity to turn up the intensity of that furnace. It has the opportunity to increase the amount of heat that we produce and therefore the amount of energy that we burn. And I was also really intrigued by something which is that, growing up, I think we all know people who can eat a tone and never seem to gain any body fat. Or people who seem to eat very little and seem to gain body fat very easily. And I was always intrigued by that. And it turns out there are a number of different factors

24:50 that relate to that. But the nervous system is the one that we can really control. Both through behaviors and what we eat, but also in terms of this thing that we call thermogenesis. There was one particular story I want to relate to, that does not suggest any protocol. In fact, I'm going to discourage you from following this protocol. Please do not try the compound that I'm about to describe. One of the favorite things that we like to do in that lab was to find rare compounds and test them. And at the time I was reading about thermogenesis and I learned about a compound that was actually discovered in the armory factories of World War II. And it was discovered because women in particular who were working in these factories

25:36 would take a brush and dip it in a compound or a paint rather, and they would then paint the numbers with a stencil onto things like bombs and ammunition of various kinds. And they were losing weight like crazy. It turns out that occasionally they'd lick the brush, and then they would go back just to get a sharper point on the brush, and then they would paint onto these various bullets and missiles and so forth. Bombs and so forth. And they started shedding all their body fat. And many of them losed, excuse me, lost a lot of weight, a significant portion of their weight without changing anything else that they were doing, what they were eating, et cetera. It turned out that that compound is something called Dinitrophenol, DNP.

26:21 And over the years Dinatrophenol, DNP has gained popularity in some niche cultures, mainly bodybuilders, athletes even in the modeling industry. It is a absolutely terrible compound for anyone to use, because it's highly fatal if your body temperature goes too high. Hyperthermia will kill you. And indeed many people have died using Dinatrophenol as a weight loss drug or attempting to use it as a weight loss drug. But Dinitophenol really illustrates a principle which is that your metabolism includes things like thyroid hormone and growth hormone, et cetera. But your body temperature and the way you utilize energy

27:06 is controlled by your nervous system. And the way Dinatrophenol works is by changing the neurons and the way that the neurons that connect to fat change the way fat burns up. So we are not going to suggest, I am not suggesting that you use Dinatrophenol. However, there are other things that you can do that can change the relationship between these neurons and the fat of your body in ways that can powerfully accelerate fat loss. And I don't know why we don't hear about these things more, but probably because most of what you see out there on the internet focuses more on what you could eat and should eat or shouldn't eat. It concentrates on exercise regimens

27:52 which we will also talk about. But the burn factor, your thermogenic environment is one of the, if not the most important factors in this business of fat loss. And since I'm a neuroscientist that's what we're going to talk about. So let's talk about fat utilization. Let's talk about how fat is converted into energy which is sometimes also called fat burning. What I'd like you to know is that this is a two-part process. Okay? In reality, there are many biochemical steps. And if you log onto the internet, or you open up a textbook and you want to learn about fat utilization, you're going to see a lot of chemistry. And I'm happy to go deep into that chemistry if you like.

28:40 But I think most of you are probably interested in what are the leverage points? Where can you exert control over this process in ways that benefit you? So I'm going to focus mainly on those. Okay? This is not to upset the aficionados and I will put in some nomenclature, but here we go. There's two parts to this process. One, is fat mobilization. And the second is fat oxidation or utilization. Okay? So the first thing that has to happen for body fat to get burned up or used and reduced is that it has to get mobilized. And that's a process called lipolysis, but I actually don't care if you know the name lipolysis, you just have to move that fat out of the position

29:29 that it's in. You have to get it out of the fat cells. All right? Fat cells can be visceral around our visceral organs or they can be subcutaneous under our skin. Most people are thinking about subcutaneous fat when they think about fat. So here's the deal. And if you want more detail, great, I'll touch on that in a bit. But basically stored fat has two parts that are relevant here. It's got the fatty acid part, and that's the part that your body can use. And that's attached to something called glycerol and they're linked by a backbone. So already, probably too much chemistry for both of you. But what you want is you want to break the backbone. So if you just can remember to mobilize fat, you got to break the backbone between glycerol and these fatty acids. Okay? That's accomplished by an enzyme called lipase,

30:16 but you can forget all that if you want. Remember, we're just trying to mobilize fat. So the first step is to get those fatty acids moving around in the bloodstream to get them out of those fat cells. And then they can travel and be used for energy. And that second part, remember first part is mobilization. The second part is oxidation. Is then those fatty acids, those are potential fuel. They're just potential fuel, but you haven't burned the fat yet, you've just moved it out of your fat cells. They're going to go into cells that can use them for energy. And once they are inside those cells, they're still not burned up. You need to oxidize them. Think oxidation is the burnup part. They need to be moved into the mitochondria

31:04 and then they can be converted into ATP into energy. So just to really zoom out again to make sure I don't lose anybody. You got to mobilize the fat, then you have to oxidize the fat. In other words, you have to mobilize it, then you actually have to convert it into energy. If you just mobilize it, and you don't convert it into energy, you don't oxidize it, it can be returned to body fat. And many of the things that the nervous system can do, is to increase the mobilization of fat, but also the oxidation of fat. Okay? So you have two opportunities to burn more fat, and both of those opportunities are governed by your nervous system. By neurons that literally send little wires that we call axons into fat and release chemicals

31:50 that provide a stimulus for more of that fat to be mobilized, and then later for more of that fat to be burned up. Okay? So we could go really deep on this, but I'm not going to go much deeper than that, because this isn't a biochemistry of fatty acid metabolism lecture. This is about how to burn fat using your nervous system. But remember, there's a mobilization step, and then there's an oxidation step. I think anyone of you, all of you should be able to internalize that. Mobilize then oxidize. Okay? Mobilize then oxidize. So what are these neurons that connect a fat doing? What are they releasing exactly? How do they actually increase fat mobilization? And how do they increase fat oxidation? Burning of fat.

32:35 Well, there are a couple of things that they release that encourage that process. And the main one that you need to know about is epinephrine or adrenaline. The conversion of these fatty acids into ATP in the mitochondria of cells is favored by adrenaline. Okay? And adrenaline is released from two sources. Adrenaline is released from the adrenal glands, which set a top our kidneys and our lower back. And it's also released from the so-called sympathetic nervous system. Although that name is a bit of a misnomer, because it has nothing to do with sympathy, has to do with stimulating alertness and promoting action of the body. There's a big mistake in the literature

33:22 that is finally being corrected among those who know. The mistake in the literature is that the adrenal glands and the release of adrenaline is what stimulates fat loss and fat oxidation. In fact, it was thought for a long time that adrenaline swimming around in your body of when you're fasted, because fasting can increase adrenaline or when you're engaging in intense exercise or when you're stressed is going to promote fat oxidation. That's actually not the case. The adrenaline that stimulates fat oxidation, the burning of fat is coming from neurons that actually connect to the fat, not hormones like adrenaline that are swimming around in your system. It's a local process.

34:08 And this is very important because it means that, what you do, the specific patterns of movements and the specific environment you create that can stimulate these particular neurons to activate fat, meaning to release fat, to mobilize it and then to burn it, is going to be a powerful lever that you can use in order to increase fat loss. So what have we said so far? We've said that you've got to mobilize and you got to burn fat and that your nervous system is in control of that process. It's not just about calorie deficit. Okay, so let's talk about how to activate the nervous system in ways that it promotes more liberation, movement, mobilization of fat

34:54 and more oxidation of fat. So one of the most powerful ways to stimulate epinephrin which is also called adrenaline from these neurons that connect to fat and to thereby stimulate more fat mobilization and oxidation is through movement. But I'm not talking about exercise. The type of movement that I'm referring to, is extremely subtle. And some of you may be familiar with this type of movement, but I'm guessing you're probably not familiar with what I'm about to tell you, which is that shiver or shivering is a strong stimulus for the release of adrenaline epinephrin into fat and the increase in fat oxidation and mobilization.

35:41 But shiver is not just induced by cold, and there are other subtle forms of movement that can greatly increase fat metabolism and fat loss. There was a group in England during the 1960s and 70s that discovered a pathway by which subtle forms of movement can greatly increase fat loss. This is the work of Rothwell and Stock. It's very famous in the thermogenesis literature. And I learned about this early on, when I was an undergraduate and I asked, how did they come across this? And here's how the story goes. They were aware that some people overeat and yet don't put on weight.

36:26 Other people overeat even just a little bit and they seem to accumulate extra adipose tissue. Now, this is long before all the discussions about microbiome and hormone factors, you know it was long before many of the hormone factors besides insulin had even been discovered. What they did was they examined people who overate and did not gain weight. And what they observed was that those people engaged in lots of subtle movement throughout the day. In other words, they were fidgeters. And that's what they call them. I'm not going to do the British accent version of fidgeters. But Roth and Stock were British. What they found were people that overeat but don't gain weight as a consequence.

37:12 And in fact, many people who had low levels of body fat had a lot of resting tremor, not of the Parkinsonian type, but they would bounce their knee while they were sitting, when they would talk, they would engage in very angular movements, they were sort of electric. In fact, now in science, I was chuckling about this as I was diving back into this literature, because the other day I heard a wonderful lecture on a totally different topic from a colleague of mine and we all adore him. He's over in Europe and he's this tremendously successful scientist. So we like to poke fun at him. And every one of his movements is incredibly electric and staccato. And he's rail thin and he eats like a horse. And so it fits very well into the discovery of Rothwell and Stock who discovered that fidgeters people that bounce their knee,

37:59 people that have a head bob while they're listening, people that nod a lot, people that stand up and sit down a lot throughout the day, and people that pace burn anywhere from 800 to 2,500 calories more than the control group in the experiments that they looked at. And indeed, there's been a modern look into all this, and these numbers check out that simply moving around a lot, even if those are subtle movements, greatly increases the amount of energy that you burn. And people who overeat, the people who can have the second or the third doughnut or doughnuts at all and don't seem to put on weight to the same degree, they are people that move around a lot even when seated. They're are people that will often move their limbs

38:46 very quickly as well. There even have been studies that have explored other things that correlate with fidgeters. Fidgeters stand up very quickly at the end of a lecture or they start to gather their things very quickly, whereas non fidgeters don't. So dogs like my bulldog Costello, definitely not a fidgeter. Every movement is incredibly slow and deliberate. Sitting down as a process, if you ask him to sit down and sort of a slow motion. You ask him to get up and he kind of looks at you sighs and stands up. The fidgeter is the opposite of that, right? You say, how are you doing? They go, great. So even sometimes their speech will be accelerated although not always. But staccato movements, fidgeting, et cetera. And in 2015, and again in 2017, there've been studies that have explored this,

39:32 using some modern metabolic tracking and indeed simply moving a lot, being a fidgeter, bouncing your knee, standing up and pacing several times or many times throughout the day led to considerable amounts of fat loss and weight loss when people were ingesting the same amount of food, if they overate, they were able to compensate and burn off that food. And if they were trying to lose weight and they incorporated this fidgeting protocol of deliberately trying to fidget more and move around during the day, pace, stand up more quickly, sit down more often, sit down and stand up more often rather. They found that they greatly increased their weight loss anywhere from 20 to 30% increases.

40:17 And in some cases, you know, there always those few people who burned a lot more. It seems to work best in people who are already slightly overweight. So for people that are overweight, who are kind of averse to exercise, fidgeting might actually be a good entry point. And 800 to 2,500 calories is a considerable amount of calories when you really think about it. Now, why am I telling you this? Well, there's clearly a tool to export from this, which is that you can increase the amount of calories burned without having to go on additional long runs. I do hope that people are exercising regularly because it's so important for other aspects of brain and body health. But nonetheless, we are all time limited and we are not all so ready to embrace exercise.

41:04 I have a family member who has been slowly coaxed into exercise, but if I were to tell her, for instance, you need to fidget more, she'd probably go for it. So this is a powerful way to increase the calories that are burned. Now, that's great. And you can think about the protocols. But I want to nest that protocol in what I said before, which is that, fat is controlled by these neurons and the epinephrin they release. You might say, well, how could these little micro movements lead to so much caloric burn? And that's where it really gets interesting. Rothwell and Stock and others that they worked with, subsequently found that these little fidgety movements, the engagement of certain aspects of our musculature

41:52 that are nothing like exercise. It's not these large coordinated or rhythmic body movements, but rather subtle little bits of fidgety movement. And here I am doing a lot of fidgety movement as an example, tapping the pen, this kind of thing. I was probably that kid in class most of the time. And I was like, I try not to do it to irritate people, but I was definitely a knee bouncer. I'm not particularly lean or not. But I was definitely... This is a common activity for me. People that do that sort of thing, it turns out that it's not the kind of caloric burn that we normally think of, of like, oh, you'll running, lifting weights, swimming, yoga, et cetera. Those subtle movements of our core musculature, not just the core, but all our limbs and our musculature,

42:37 those low level movements, they trigger epinephrin release from these neurons, and they stimulate the mobilization of fat. And then that fat is oxidized at higher rates. And I find this fascinating. I wish more people knew about it, which is why I'm telling you about it today. This has nothing to do with exercise in the traditional form, and yet 800 to 2,500 calories per day. That's a considerable amount of fat oxidized. If you are in a calorie maintenance mode or if you're sub caloric, that's going to add to it still additional fat loss. The data on this are tremendous. I'll link to a few studies. If you're really interested in learning about what's called neat. N-E-A-T which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

43:23 NEAT. So what's the protocol? Fidget. If you're really interested in burning calories and you already exercise, you want to burn more or you don't have the opportunity to exercise or you're averse to exercise for whatever reason, fidgeting, movements, staccato movement, standing up, walking around, pacing, all the sort of nervous activities that were so critical of other people and sometimes in ourselves are actually mobilizing and oxidizing a lot of fat and a lot of energy. And while this probably won't compensate for chronic overeating, the caloric burn from this is considerable, and very likely can offset a meal that had excessive calories or a kind of steady state of eating too much.

44:12 And it also starts to open up all sorts of thoughts and discussion about when you travel, you tend to eat foods that are kind of outside your normal ones. We tend to eat foods that aren't so great for us, we also tend to be a little bit more sedentary when we travel we're on the plane, et cetera. But all of that aside, just the use of something like low-level movement. And it's almost like a tremor, but also these select short, small fidgety movements. I'm intentionally doing a lot of these today. So you have examples that you can use to select from if you like. These can have a major effect on fat loss and it raises a second tool. If these low, meaning these small movements that we engage in trigger epinephrin adrenaline release

45:00 from these neurons of the sympathetic nervous system that innervate fat and increase fat mobilization and oxidation. Now, it should make sense why shivering is one of the strongest stimuli that one can incorporate to stimulate fat loss. Now, shivering is almost always associated with cold. We think shivering, we think cold, because when we get cold, we shiver. And there are two ways that shivering can increase fat loss. And there are several ways that you can use shivering, you can leverage shivering and you can leverage cold to accelerate fat loss. But you have to do it correctly. And most of the people that are using cold and frankly suggesting cold

45:46 as a means to increase metabolism fat loss are suggesting the exact wrong protocol. In fact, the one I'm going to recommend is 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the typical protocol that you'd hear about. So let's talk about how to use cold and how to leverage shiver as a particularly strong stimulus to increase fat loss through mobilization and oxidation of these fatty acids. So in recent years there's been a growing interest in the use of cold for various things like, improving stress tolerance, improving metabolism, recovery from exercise. I've talked about a number of those things and the uses of cold on this podcast. In fact, did an episode on how to supercharge performance through palmer cooling, cooling the palms

46:33 in specific ways or the bottoms of the feet. And if you're interested in that, and how to improve performance in endurance and strength, you can check out that episode. But most people out there are using cold exposure typically by taking cold showers or by getting into cold water of some other kind, a lake or a river or a cold bath or an ice bath. And they are doing that probably with mixed goals, meaning they both would like to increase their metabolism and burn fat, as well as improve mental resilience. Since today, we're talking about accelerating fat loss through the use of science-based tools. I want to emphasize a study that was published in nature just a couple of years ago,

47:19 showing exactly how cold increases metabolism and fat loss. Okay? So we have several kinds of fat. Three kinds in fact. We have white fat, white adipose tissue, and we have brown fat or brown adipose tissue. And there's a third kind which is beige adipose tissue. White fat is the type that we traditionally think of as fat, subcutaneous fat. And it is not particularly rich in mitochondria. It is there as an energy storage site and we have to mobilize the fat out as we talked about before and burn it up elsewhere. Brown fat largely exists between our shoulder blades and on the back of our neck, between the scapulae.

48:07 And it's rich with mitochondria which is why it's called brown fat. And brown fat has a particular biochemical cascade whereby it can take food energy, it can take food, basically, break it down and convert it into energy within those cells. And there's some additional steps involved, but unlike fatty acids from white fat which have to travel elsewhere get broken down in mitochondria and convert into ATP, et cetera. Used by the mitochondria rather. Brown fat is thermogenic. It can actually use energy directly. It skips a step, and I don't want to get diverted by going into all the biochemistry of it. Beige fat is sort of in between. It's white fat that could be brown fat,

48:55 because it has some mitochondria in it, but not as many as brown fat. Now, cold exposure does several things. Making ourselves cold can allow us to build up mental resilience because getting into cold of any kind, doesn't matter if it's a cryochamber, doesn't matter if it's a cold day and you forgot your sweater or your parka. It doesn't matter if it's an ice bath or you're lying down in the snow. Cold causes the release of adrenaline from your adrenals. And it causes the release of epinephrin from these neurons that connect to fat. Now, the big effects of cold on metabolism and fat burning are going to be through two routes. One, is that if you expose yourself to cold,

49:44 you have the opportunity to trigger activation of brown fat as well as to convert more beige fat into true brown fat. So you essentially create a stronger or a hotter furnace. That's the way to think about brown fat. It's like a furnace. And so with this principle that we started with a calories in versus calories burned. What you're doing is you're increasing the amount of burning, you're increasing the burn of energy by increasing the intensity of the heat inside you so to speak. Okay? I'm talking here kind of metaphorically. Now, how can you do that? Well, if you get into cold water or an ice bath or a cold day, and you try and remain calm and resist shivering,

50:32 you actually short circuit this mechanism for increasing brown fat thermogenesis. The paper published in nature shows that it is shivering itself that causes the brown fat to increase your burning, your burn rate and your metabolism. And it works like this, when you get into cold and you shiver, the shivering that low level movement of the muscle, those small movements triggers the release of a molecule called succinate. S-U-C-C-I-N-A-T-E, succinate. And succinate acts on the brown fat to increase brown fat thermogenesis and fat burning overall. It actually increases body heat through this brown fat thermogenesis pathway.

51:18 And it also over time can increase the amount of brown fat by converting beige fat into true brown fat. Now, how much cold exposure and how often? That's the key. But before I give that detail or set of details. Remember if you resist the shiver, you are not going to get the increased metabolic effect, because you are not going to get the succinate release. So if you want to get your body heat, your thermogenic level to go up, you need to shiver. So now we have the NEAT, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So low levels of activity as I described before, which are done away from cold, maybe do them in cold as well. As well as shiver in response to cold.

52:05 And so the shiver itself is valuable for triggering the release of succinate. In fact, succinate is being evolved now by various drug manufacturers as a potential treatment for obesity. Although it hasn't really hit the market in its final form yet. Succinate is powerful for its effects on brown fat. So how many times a week do you need to expose yourself to cold? Will depend on how much fat you're trying to lose, and how much you're trying to increase your metabolism. There are studies that describe positive effects on fat loss of exposing yourself to cold, either through cold shower or through ice bath or other cold water. It doesn't have to actually have ice in it, provided it's cold enough for anytime, anywhere, excuse me, between one and five times per week.

52:52 But it turns out that just one exposure per week can be valuable. The question then is how long to get into that cold environment? And how cold should that environment be? So first let's talk about how long to get into that cold environment? The answer here might be a little bit different than you might imagine. Most of you might think, oh, well if one minute is good, three minutes is better, and if three minutes is better than 10 minutes is best. But remember the goal is to get the shiver induced release of succinate, so that succinate can trigger the brown fat. It turns out that if you want to trigger the shiver, what you want to do is to get into the cold and then get out of the cold and typically not dry off,

53:41 and then get back into the cold and out of the cold, that will definitely stimulate more shivering than just getting into the cold itself. So what I'm not referring to, is getting into the cold environment like an ice bath and waiting until you shiver and staying there shivering. Okay? You also don't want to get hypothermic. And I want to be clear. You want to get approval from your doctor before you do any of this. When you get into cold water, there are two factors that will dictate whether or not you shiver. Probably three, but let's just talk about the main two. One, is how cold it is. So how cold should it be? And look, if you get into water, that's very, very cold. It can actually shock your heart. It can actually give you a heart attack if it's truly, truly ice cold, and you're not adapted to that. So proceed with caution, please. I'm not a physician and I don't want to see anyone get hurt.

54:31 Just cold enough to be uncomfortable is a good place to start. So for some of you that's going to be 60 degrees, for some of you that's going to be 55 degrees, for some of you it's going to be high thirties, right? Depends on how cold adapted you are, and people vary in terms of how well they tolerate the cold. So what you need to do is find a temperature that you can get into one to five, probably one to three times a week. If you really want this to accelerate fat loss. And you want to get in until you just start to shiver, and then you want to get out and not dry off, wait anywhere from one to three minutes and then get back into the cold. Now, you'll notice when you get back into the cold, it'll almost seem soothing, it might actually not induce shiv... It might take away the shiver that you had.

55:19 So here's a potential kind of sets reps protocol that you can play with. Find a temperature then induce a shiver for you. That's going to vary depending on your cold tolerance and how cold adapted you are. One to three, maybe five times a week, get in until you... Or get under the shower or whatever it is, until you start to shiver. Genuinely shiver. Then after about a minute or so, get out, spend one to three minutes out, but don't dry off, get back in for anywhere from one to three minutes, but try and access the shiver point again. And you might do three repetitions of that. So it's three times in and three times out total. Okay? That's a great starting place. And what you don't want to do is build up your tolerance

56:05 to cold so fast, that pretty soon you're able to resist the shiver, because remember the shiver is the source of the succinate release that will trigger brown fat thermogenesis. So if you'd like to see this protocol spelled out, you can access it zero cost at a website which is www.thecoldplunge.com. The Cold Plunge is a company they make cold plunges, and they were kind enough to gift one to the Human Lab Podcast. But I want to emphasize that these protocols are free of cost. The folks at the Cold Plunge are not just interested in marketing their product, but one of their main interests is encouraging people to engage in cold exposure for particular end points and goals like fat loss, resilience, et cetera. Resisting inflammation. But their main focus is providing people protocols

56:53 and encouraging people to use cold exposure of various kinds not just through their products, but through cold rivers and jumps in the ocean and things like cold showers, whatever is most convenient and accessible for various people. And so we needed a place where we could house these protocols in a permanent way, and not just for this episode. But so what they've agreed to do is, to post the protocols there, they should be very easy to find on their website. This particular protocol we're referring to as the fat loss optimization protocol for lack of a better name. And it's really grounded in how cold it can be used to induce shiver. And again, it doesn't really matter how you're accessing that cold, provided you access to the shiver, and you're moving from the cold environment

57:39 to a slightly warmer environment. So getting out of the cold shower or getting out of the ice bath, et cetera, or out of the cold plunge, and then back in. Because it turns out that the cooling and rewarming process of the body is where shiver kicks in. And so that's distinctly different than just trying to get into the cold and stay in the cold for as long as possible. And if you zoom out a little bit and think about some examples in life, you'll understand why that must be the case. For instance, people who do a lot of cold water swims, you have these polar bear clubs, I think they call themselves. They do these cold water swims. I would sometimes see these people swimming back and forth to Alcatraz and stuff like that, which it seems risky. and they tell me it's very stimulating

58:24 for the mind and body. Great. Sometimes those people are very lean, oftentimes they're not, and they're getting a lot of cold exposure. And one of the things that happens is, if you expose yourself to cold over and over, you adapt, you become cold adapted. And when you do that, you no longer get the epinephrine, the adrenaline release from the cold and therefore you don't get the succinate release and the shivering and the brown fat thermogenic effect quite as intensely. So if you want to use cold for other reasons, and certainly cold water swims can be fun. And there's, you know, long as you can do them safely, they're great. I've gotten into cold water swimming for some period of time. You can use cold for resilience, et cetera. But if you want to use cold to increase fat loss, then getting this shiver process going the cooling

59:11 and rewarming which accelerates the amount of, or increases the amount of shiver. That's going to be the way to go. One note about cold and some of the factors that it releases. A few years back there was a lot of excitement about this hormone called irisin, I-R-I-S-I-N, which was associated with cold. And there was a lot of excitement about its potential role in increasing metabolism so much so that people were starting to explore this as a potential fat loss drug. To my knowledge that went nowhere. The science eventually shifted over to succinate as the main factor in cold induced thermogenesis through this brown fat pathway. But if anyone out there is aware of any positive effects of iricin or of any signs of irisin that I'm overlooking here,

59:57 or that I'm speaking about incorrectly, please let me know. I'd be very curious to learn. Now, I want to just talk about brown fat a little bit more, and talk about a period in your life in which you were rich with brown fat, you had a ton of brown fat, and that's when you were a baby. Babies can't shiver. These neurons that release epinephrin into fat are not wired up and really aren't present at sufficient levels or in sufficient numbers when you are a baby. And therefore you can't shiver as a baby, and you can't warm yourself up in cold environments very well. To compensate for that, mother nature installed in all of us

1:00:44 an excess of brown fat early in life that exists again in the upper back, and the middle of the back and the back of the neck. Over time if we don't expose ourselves to cold environments or do other things that make a shiver, we lose a lot of that brown fat, but what's interesting about brown fat is that there's some evidence that brown fat just like white fat can both increase in size, but that you can also add new cells. Now, there's a little bit controversial. People always say you can't change the number of fat cells, you can just shrink them or increase their size. Well, it turns out that epinephrin released from these little nerve endings in brown fat and succinate circulating in the body may

1:01:30 and I want to underscore may have the effect of increasing the amount of brown fat cells probably by converting these beige fat cells into brown fat. So that allows us to become much as we were early in life, where we metabolized like crazy and we'd heat ourselves up without shivering. Some people have taken the cold thing to the extreme, putting ice packs on the back of their neck throughout the day. Did a episode all about testosterone and estrogen, and there's this, let's just call it a very niche, I have to imagine very, very niche culture of people who are wearing literally, I'm not joking. They are these cool pack ice pack underpants. They go by a name that I'm not going to repeat on here, but you can find them on Amazon. Those are people that are using cold packs on the body

1:02:17 and on the groin to try and increase things like testosterone. But as well to try and increase thermogenesis and trying to increase their metabolism. Just remember if you become cold adapted, you're not going to get the fat burning effects to the same degree. So cold is a powerful tool for fat loss, but you don't want to adapt. This is reminiscent of a rule that you hear about in endurance exercise and in strength exercise as well, which is, that you want to use the minimal effective stimulus to promote growth or progress. So growth of a muscle or improvements in endurance. If you go 10% further on a run or 10% faster, you will likely see an improvement in performance provided your recovery the next time you come back and do that same round of exercise.

1:03:05 You'll be able to do more work or complete the work more easily, et cetera. You've adapted. If you do 20% more distance or 20% more weight, you won't necessarily see the same commiserate level of gain or improvement. And so likewise with cold, if you're quickly moving from 30 seconds of exposure to 10 minutes of exposure, you're overlooking the opportunity to get the most fat loss and increase in metabolism by stepping it up in smaller increments. Okay? And this also speaks to the rationale for using cold exposure to accelerate fat loss for certain periods, but then maybe not doing it year round. If fat loss is your goal, maybe use it for two, three months at a time and then stop for two, three months at a time,

1:03:51 because it is such a potent stimulus provided you engage in the shiver. Next I'd like to move to exercise and how particular timing and types of exercise can vastly improve fat loss. Before I do that, I just want to mention a really important reference for those of you that are interested in learning more about how neurons connect to fat? This is certainly a paper that you'd want to look at, if you're interested in diving deep into the literature and reading all the various studies. It's a review. And the title of the review is neural innervation of white adipose tissue and the control of lipolysis. That's neural innervation of white adipose tissue and the control of lipolysis. It was published in Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology. You can find that free online.

1:04:37 They have the full text available. The first author is Bartness, B-A-R-T-N-E-S-S. It's a great review.

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