Science Has Just Revealed the Secret to Massive Weight Loss

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

It’s a common, frustrating situation.

A person is overweight or obese — in other words, in the same unhappy situation as two-thirds of Americans. So he or she decides to “work it off.”

And while an exercise program improves muscle tone, boosts mood, and even drops the risk of several chronic diseases — the fat clings stubbornly.

One study, for example, found that when 97 men and women (half of them diabetic) undertook a 26-week supervised exercise program, they improved on many health measures, including oxygen uptake… but they lost a mere 2 percent of body weight on average.¹

So… does this mean exercise can’t burn fat?

Not at all.

The Secret

A groundbreaking study has just revealed that elite endurance athletes who eat diets very low in carbohydrate and high in fat (much like my high-fat, real-food diet) burn more than twice as much body fat as high-carb athletes when exercising.²

In fact, the low-carb athletes’ fat-burning rate was the highest ever recorded in human beings during exercise.

The study involved 20 ultra-endurance athletes who specialized in races of 31 miles or more.

Ten of them ate an exceptionally low-carb, high-fat diet. It consisted of 10 percent of calories from carbohydrates, roughly 20 percent from protein, and 70 percent from fat.

The other 10 athletes got 59 percent of their calories from carbs, 14 percent from protein, and 25 percent from fat — a ratio strikingly similar to that of the average American.

All ran on a treadmill for three hours at 64 percent of their “flat-out” oxygen capacity.

The result was shocking. By monitoring the runners’ exhaled gasses, the researchers determined that the low-carb, high-fat group burned 2.3 times more fat than the high-carb, low-fat group.

As Jeff Volek, the lead researcher put it, “These low-carb athletes were spectacular fat burners.”

It Takes Time…

Here’s why.

Eating fewer carbs and more fat essentially “teaches” the body to convert fat into ketones. These are molecules that the whole body and brain can use for fuel instead of glucose, which comes from carbohydrates.

But it can take up to four weeks for the body to adjust fully to what’s known as a “ketogenic” diet. That’s why the athletes in this study were eligible only if they had restricted their carb consumption for at least six months.

It’s fascinating to consider that this study was the first of its kind. Athletes — like the rest of us — have been brainwashed since the 1960s to “carb load” for maximum performance, so there simply had never before been enough of them limiting carbs before now to constitute a valid study.

But fortunately, a sufficient number have finally gone against the grain, so to speak, so a test like this could be done.

(By the way, “going keto” has in no way harmed their performance. For example, in 2012, low-carber Tim Olson won the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run in a record time of 14 hours, 46 minutes — a full 21 minutes faster than the previous course best.)

There is no reason I can imagine — nor did the researchers cite one — why this same fat-burning advantage during exercise would not apply to those of us who are not elite ultra-endurance athletes.

No matter how much one exercises, eating much more fat and much less carbohydrate than the modern norm activates an ancient system, hard-wired into our genes, for burning fat.

I’ve experienced this myself. After my first few weeks of eating a high-fat, low-carb diet, I became keto-adapted (in a future issue, I’ll show you how to use “keto strips” to determine if you are in nutritional ketosis).

I found that for the first time, exercise seemed to burn fat rapidly. If I upped my time in the gym from a half hour to an hour daily, for example, I immediately become noticeably leaner.

Bottom line: Even if you are unwilling to change your diet and become keto-adapted, exercise is still vitally important for overall physical and mental health.

But if — as is true for many of us — one of your goals as you log the miles or strain at the weights is to lose body fat, there is just one path to shift your progress from marginal to miraculous — eating a high-fat, low carb diet.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

^[1] Dobrosielski DA, Barone gibbs B, Chaudhari S, Ouyang P, Silber HA, Stewart KJ. Effect of exercise on abdominal fat loss in men and women with and without type 2 diabetes. BMJ Open. 2013

^[2] Jeff S. Volek, Daniel J. Freidenreich, Catherine Saenz, Laura J. Kunces, Brent C. Creighton, Jenna M. Bartley, Patrick M. Davitt, Colleen X. Munoz, Jeffrey M. Anderson, Carl M. Maresh, Elaine C. Lee, Mark D. Schuenke, Giselle Aerni, William J. Kraemer, Stephen D. Phinney. Metabolic characteristics of keto-adapted ultra-endurance runners. Metabolism, 2015