How to Lose Fat with Science-Based Tools | Episode 21

I think the current recommendation guidelines in the states are that people engage in 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise five days a week... if their goal is to improve or maintain health of the cardiovascular system. 80% of people in the United States fail to do that or anything close to it.

The bottom line is, if you like caffeine and you can use it safely, ingesting somewhere between 100 and 400 milligrams of caffeine prior to exercise, somewhere between 30 to 40 minutes before exercise, can be beneficial if we're talking about fat oxidation, burning more body fat.

One of the best ways to support the thyroid system and metabolism in general is to make sure you're getting enough selenium ... 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.

At a period of about 90 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise... there's a switch over point whereby if you ate before the exercise... you will burn far less fat from the 90-minute point onward than you would if you had gone into the training fasted.

The percentage of fat that you burn after high-intensity exercise is actually greater. In other words, you burn a lot of glycogen during the high-intensity exercise, and then after the exercise, the post-exercise oxygen consumption, as it's sometimes called, goes up ... After you train intensely, that post-exercise oxygen consumption goes up—sometimes for up to 24 hours, and it is during that period of time that you oxidize more fat.

It's been shown that, at least for short periods of training, it doesn't really seem to matter whether or not you eat before training or you don't if your goal is fat oxidation.

The key thing is to get the levels of EPA that you ingest above 1000 milligrams per day.

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 (epinephrine) into fat and the increase in fat oxidation and mobilization.

Those low-level movements, they trigger epinephrine release from these neurons, and they stimulate the mobilization of fat. And then that fat is oxidized at higher rates.

The burn factor, your thermogenic environment, is one of the—if not the—most important factors in this business of fat loss.