Exploring the science behind weight loss, the focus is on debunking the misconceptions of the "calories in, calories out" approach and emphasizing the crucial role hormones like insulin, ghrelin, and leptin play in fat loss. It highlights the need for personalized strategies that cater to individual metabolic responses rather than generic dieting trends.

The benefits and risks of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are also unpacked, explaining how they support fat loss by improving insulin sensitivity and metabolic function. While these medications show promise, the importance of balanced protein intake, gradual tapering, and awareness of potential side effects is stressed to ensure they’re used effectively and safely.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 - Introduction to Weight Loss

02:25 - Role of Hormones in Fat Loss

04:54 - Addressing High-Calorie Diet Misconceptions

08:53 - Understanding Ozempic (GLP-1s)

11:04 - Potential Side Effects of GLP-1s

13:56 - GLP-1s for Teens and Young Adults

17:45 - Best Practices for GLP-1 Use

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] Okay, so questions. I've been getting lots of specials this time of year, weight loss, calories. And he was I'll have more questions once I go through a bunch of these in a much longer format. When we go through the how to pick your health care team in the 16 to the 31st, I've got a bunch of people coming on to do some podcast with me on that one. That one should be fun. But anyway, so real quick on the calories, just as a quick overview, the calorie system works really well for me as a morphs. It doesn't work for actor morphs or for a new morphs. It is a silly system that's made up nonsense. There's so many problems with it. The easiest one it can point out, is according to the calorie system, the calories in, calories out system. And this is for anybody. This is the whole easiest way to describe the problem with calorie system. The calorie system says that there is absolutely zero difference between a high carbohydrate, high sugar diet and a high protein diet. As long as the calories are the same.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:01:15] So according to the calories in, calories out, everyone who's done keto is lying. They didn't lose any weight. Know, they didn't lose more weight from protein. They did from sugars. The carnivore people aren't any healthier, all that stuff. So according to the calories in, calories out. What it says is that Krispy Kreme and steak, as long as equal amounts of them, have the exact same effect on fat loss. Which is absurd. The way that the body actually works is it's a chemistry equation. And so each each macro, if you wanted this was the easiest way to do this one. Each macro associated with a hormone. So carbohydrates, specifically sugars, correspond to insulin, insulin, the storage hormone which is moves the sugar into the muscles in the liver and then whatever center is converted to fat. They're not bad. They're just that's just how that works. Protein, as you bring that in response, of course, lots of glucagon, glucagon goes in and creates more sugar for the system to go into your genesis. It actually requires fat to be burned. High protein diets.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:02:25] Your body's actually running on fat, which is why you lose fat in a sugar diet. Your body is running on the sugar, which is why you don't lose fat nearly as quickly because you have to shift over. Every time. And usually you just get tired and sluggish and they don't really shift over, especially if they're they've got high insulin resistance. So that's also how you kind of fix diabetes is you you actually literally change the difference between the body making sugar versus the body eating sugar. So that's how that instant function works. You're hungry because of ghrelin, your fall, because of leptin, your body is run by hormones, not calories. Your body runs on a molecule called ATP or it is triphosphate, not calories. If you get into any of the biochemistry, all of it is based around ATP production and the regulation of IT triphosphate or ATP. So if you're struggling with your diabetes, struggling with fat loss, you struggle with these things and you're basing your diet on calories. That's most likely. Why now should everybody just run, Keita, or should everybody just run Carnivore Now, there isn't a diet that is right for people.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:03:40] There is a diet that is right for a person. I've seen several people who are running really a really, really good carnivore. Like I look at their diet, I'm like, man, this is this is you should teach this. This is the best. This is a phenomenal carnivore diet. And I feel like help. And I'm like, Are you tired a lot? They're like, man, I'm tired all the time. All right, cool. And so we run a CGM or a glucose monitor and all of a sudden we see that they're in the, you know, 60s and 70s as far as blood sugar goes. And so those people need to add in some carbohydrates. Now, the glycemic level of those carbohydrates is again different for that person, but that's kind of what's going on. So just running keto, just running carnivore, you know, might not be the best diet is not the best diet for everybody. And so kind of walking back through that is important. So I would make sure that you you work with somebody who understands that function and understands what's going on now is a blanket statement. And I just said that there isn't a diet for people a lower glycemic diet is going to be best for. 80% of the population.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:04:54] You're some of these extreme academics are going to want a much higher glycemic function than the rest of us. But those who are trying to gain weight, which is the other problem with high calorie diet, because everybody is, you know, talking about calories out and they completely omit the people who can't gain weight because we all have that friend, right? Everybody's got that friend who, you know, no matter what they eat or drink, they just don't get any weight. They don't gain weight. Like, you know, I've got buddies of mine. My example usually uses Melody Ritchie from college. That guy would out eat me every single time we go out and he would drink more beer than me and the whole, like, the whole thing. And he never gained an ounce. He's knocked him off. And the problem is, is that for a lot of these guys and I say, Ritchie, a lot of these guys, that's their own personal hell. Like, they're like, man, I work out real hard and I eat 5000 calories and I can't gain any weight. Yup. That sucks.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:05:49] I'm sure it's fine for the women to a degree. I'm sure there's a lot less women who are like me. If only I had gained 10 pounds. Then there are guys who are like. And I'd like to put some muscle on. But yeah, so. And we'll go through this a little bit more as we go through. You know, a lot of times this is this is the biggest thing that we do when we start walking people through for their health. The first thing we always do is we start with the biochemical pillar. And we're like, all right, look, let's let's get your diet and your supplementation squared away, because as soon as the chemistry gets squared away, then we can move on. So it's you know, we work on hormones, we work on diet. And that's a big thing. And that's why I have everybody. Give me your ten favorite foods. Write some of your ten favorite foods, the five foods you never want to eat again. And we'll help build a diet out of it. And you know, it's always funny because we were like, no, but my favorite foods are pizza, nachos and ice cream and cookies. And I'm like, that's fine.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:06:42] Like, there's a way there's a way chemically to get all those things in. I mean, again, if you look at it like, well, the sugar is really the issue, right? You know, if that's really what's going on or Michael, if that's really what's going on, then all we to do is just trim the sugar out. Like, there's a lot of really good keto desserts that you can make. You can buy that you can eat that aren't going to have nearly the effects on your waistline that you know, the sugary ones will. So, I mean. Like, you know, I've had God, I've had so much pecan pie, you know, this year and transitioning and I've had I got to tell you, you know, people are asking me that, like, are you think you're going to win the show you're doing on the seventh? I'm like, Well. Kinda. My goal for the show was to be better than the last time. I have no idea who showing up at these shows, but I know I am. And so I was always like, Well, I want to be better than I was last time. And that's kind of where my goal is, is, you know, and this is one of those things where it's like, well, that's the easy way to go through it.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:07:50] My next show, I've got to be better than the one I'm at this time. And the difference I made between June and now is pretty significant. So I'm real happy with where I'm at. I'm not done. So my goal on that one is going to be I want to see my psoriasis and then I want to maintain that body that leanness for as long as I can. So might not win shows, but that's my goal. So I can start to see the strategies when I hear I'm starting to see kind of the shadows of it. And so we're excited about that. On the U.S. Olympic thing, all the good ones, and I'm kind of there's a lot of things. I'm out on an island all by myself this year. When I started Telluride, the calories thing was nonsense and I had to go look at the metabolic function. The macros was a little bit out of my own. I'm a little out of my own on that in the Olympic one as well. The GOP ones. We can argue back and forth whether or not the actual thing you're injecting into is natural or not. And if you don't want, it feels like it's totally not natural, that's fine. But it does activate a very natural pathway.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:08:53] The glucagon pathway, the electrolytic pathway is 100% natural. It is in each one of you. So the thing is, is that if you're in how long you've eaten the diet you've eaten and how sensitive your body is to glucagon matters tremendously. So insulin will shut off the glucagon pathway. So if you're sitting in a highly insulin resistance state, which is where like 90% of the population is, and virtually every single, I want to say virtually every single diabetic, because I've never seen it not be the case with a diabetic where they weren't highly insulin resistance. I'm sure there's some weird pathology out there were some like to people who are diabetic but don't have insulin resistance, but every else does. And so what insulin resistance means is that you're producing a lot more insulin than you need to. And so what ends up happening is that you have this constant flow of insulin in your body. Well, insulin literally shuts off. It's the gate mechanism is the thing that's just supposed to shut off gluconeogenesis, which is glucagon function.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:09:56] And so if you have insulin resistance, you're going to have a lot less functioning glucagon. So it's going to be much, much harder for your body to lose the fat because you don't go into this system, which is why a lot of times we can use a GLP one to kickstart that system. It can knock the rust off of it and get it going. And we have fantastic success with it because again, in all the dangers that are associated with GMP ones are not dangers of GMP once they're dangers associated with the glucagon function, and it's just metabolic function. So the reason we lose the muscle mass is because your body is breaking down proteins to make its own sugar. You don't give it enough protein. It'll muscle tissue. There you go. So just we just got to maintain muscle protein function in your gut. The reason we gives us liver issues is that, guess what? Your body is actually burning and processing more fat. Guess what? Process is fat bile. Where's that? Made in the liver. And so if your body is used to making, you know, three units of bile and it needs 12 and it tries to kick up production, it doesn't quite get there. We've got a problem.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:11:04] If you're low on method B six, you know, again, that's how we make bile. You're going to have more liver stones or gallstones. You're going to have more liver gallbladder issues. So understanding that piece keeps that piece going. You know, and then we talk about, you know, the gut not functioning as well. The, you know, the the gastric emptying issues. Again, you know, that's part of it. And so you just factor that in and you keep things moving through. Water's a big one. And then the only other thing you've got to monitor is and this is a little bit. It's kind of it's a little bit tight end, but it also will block the the GOP won't have the ability to block the government reward system in the brain. This is the conversation about, you know, hey, these GOP ones, I go to them, they can everything these are helping to fight addiction and they can.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:11:56] The biggest one we see is with food. You know, people are like, I just eat last month, but what are you eating less of? And then like everything and you're like, Yeah, but when you really get into it, they're eating less junk. They're eating, you know, because what happens is there's a lot of these chemicals in our food. You know, You ever heard the Lay's commercial, you know, can't just eat one? Yeah, like a lot of this food have these chemical preservatives in them, that activator our dopamine reward system and literally make us addicted to the food, which is why we overeat and why we one of the reasons that we have so much, you know, issues with weight, there's some other biochemical fiction factors they create, but that's one of the things they do. And so is the isn't the kind of blocks that reward system. You eat less, but you also smoke less and drink less and apparently do less heroin. That's what the research is leading us to believe.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:12:48] So the problem with that is that if it dulls the reward system, it can also dull all the great things in life. And so the problem we get into is that if you're using if you're using a GLP one, any of them resemble dieters appetite semaglutide. You need to make sure that you're having regular meetings with your health care provider and they're checking on that. You know, like the way we do it is I'm like, Hey, here were the goals we had for the last two weeks. How many of them did you meet? And I do this and that and like, did you feel good about that? And they're like, Yeah, I actually do. Great. You're going, well, if you're like, now or if like, Hey, your kid won their first baseball game. Like, are you happy about that? And you're like, Not really. What do. Normally been happy about that? Yeah. All right. We need to kind of look into that, cause here's the open loops we need to set up so you can start looking for things, and maybe we start titrating back down and getting off. So the the next step is actually really the GOP ones. I think we need to. Recognize how the chemistry works. Work with people who understand the chemistry and not bash it quite so quickly.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:13:56] And I'll tell you, you know, and again, we are an island on this one. We get a bunch of kiddos who are obese and have are pre-diabetic, let's say 13, 14 year olds, and they're overweight and they're looking diabetes in the face, whether it's five years away, six years away, ten years away. They're looking at in the face, if we can use the GOP ones now to bring the weight down, break this guy, this insulin resistance problem, and we can start reshaping the diet a little bit. You're going to see a lot of health care, a lot of massive positive health care changes because, you know, if we start recognizing where does you know, where where are we in the Chuang? If you're like, hey, you know, we're you know, right now we're in this getting fat insulin resistance pace and soon is going to be in the diabetic piece and then we're not to worry about neurodegeneration like dementia. But if we fix it here you break that chain.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:14:54] This is the long term wellness space. You break that chain and now we don't have to worry about diabetes. We don't worry about dementia because we fixed it earlier on. And there's a lot there's a lot of kids that we've seen that that would be highly beneficial for. And there's a lot of 20 to 25 year olds. So, you know, there is a big piece of this that is, you know, that is actually, you know, if you use properly and you teach people lifestyle functional changes. So it maintains long term. There's a lot of ways you can use these to make people substantially healthier in society. And the other thing about this, the kids thing is. You know, when you look at this from a holistic standpoint, right. Imagine how horrible kids were when we were when like when I was a kid. So let me 30 years ago. Now they have social media. Now they have all sorts of ways of of messing with people from a psychological standpoint, from a self-esteem standpoint.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:15:57] You know, this would be really beneficial to, you know, break some of these issues and kind of push guys back and some of these girls back in the right direction, especially because many, you know, and I hate to put too much pressure on parents because I get it. I'm a parent. But some of this lays at your feet, too. You know, what did you let your kids eat? You know, what did you feed your kids? How much do you feed your kids? Even when I will tell you that I've seen this over and over and over and over again, you will get kids in and the parents will bring them in and like watch their diet and they give you their diet. And I think that's really good. And like, how long have you guys been around this? Like two years. Three years. Ooh. All right. And they're just not losing. They're not the fat not coming off and not not losing it properly.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:16:45] So, you know, there are some things that we can use these things for. I don't think that we should be, you know, shaming them or I don't think we should be looking at them in a really negative light. It's a drug that's always synthetic and forcing you to do things your body wouldn't normally do, which is the definition of a drug. It's just activating a normal physiological system that we're just not hitting very often now. And so, again, you want to monitor this through. I like doing it a little bit differently. I don't like getting giant boluses. I don't like just like, you know, so I don't like a once a week thing. I also don't like when you when you're done, they're just like, all right, you're done. Like, a lot of people are just like, okay, you're done. Go ahead, buy. You got to taper back off. Because again, if you're right, as used to 5000 glucagon hit and you're right, only produces like 100. You want to start tapering back down so your body count gets used to where it is. But that's you know, how you use it is a totally different story.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:17:45] But it is it is very effective and it's very, very handy, again, if you use it properly. The issue that we get into is that, you know, I keep seeing people come in who who are talking about doing it with their doctor and their doctor is basing all their all their whole died on calories, which shows an unbelievably low understanding of metabolic function. And it's not going to work long term because until you start teaching people, these are the foods that have these issues with the insulin or the glucagon or whatever. And this is the problem you're having. You're not going to get where you need to go. So, for instance, the the people we have these issues, we who are on Carnivore in Quito who have issues, it's not a calorie issue at all. Like at night, not even remotely. So it's not a quantity of foods they're eating. They can eat three times as much meat. They're just not going to get there because their body converts the glucose over so slowly it could conclude, converts the protein into glucose slowly. And so they need to alter their macro function.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:18:45] You know, there's giant amounts of people who are fat and it's not the amount they're eating, it's what they're eating. And they need to alter the chemistry of what they're eating. They need to back down on, you know, the glycemic function. You know, there's there's a giant difference, in fact, between instant oatmeal and steel cut oatmeal. The glycemic index difference on that can be twice like some of the instant meals are 90 and some of the steel cuts are 50. That's a massive, unbelievable difference in glycemic function, you know, so things like that that you have to kind of factor into what's actually going on inside the body. So, you know, those are some of the things we're going to like I said, we're going to go into a lot of this in more detail. And the deal we do between December 16th and 31st, I've got some trainers coming on, some professional athlete trainers coming on to kind of talk about, you know, how they do it and how they what they recommend for training athletes.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:19:41] I've got some pediatric stuff coming on to talk about vaccines, and that was sort of RFK as we chatted about we've got some guys coming on who are going to have some my staff come on and talk about what they do with hormones and ones, that sort of thing. So there's some Kairos on Talk about Chiropractic with me so you guys can get a better idea of, you know, if you're wanting to get healthy and you're trying to figure out how to do it. I'll tell you, it takes a team of people even like the stuff I'm doing. Like, you know, it's like, he knows everything. I've got a team of people I work with and I ask questions to you. Yeah, I've got two pediatric people asked all the time. They're like, How do you know so much about pediatrics? I don't like? Well, for the past ten years I've been asking lots of questions and I just remember the questions I asked. But when people bring me questions, I don't know. I asked my pediatricians, I'm like, Hey, how much of this and what do you think about? This versus that, and then I can get the answers back to people because I have a team of people, you know.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:20:43] So if you're trying to get actually healthy, you're turning your family healthy. You're going to need a team of people. And some a lot of you guys don't even know how to build your team. So what can I go through that I've got I've got a dance coming on. I'm excited about that one. We're going to talk about. Job by TMJ function, the health of the mouth and how it all works. And so there's lots of really cool stuff we're going to do between the 16th and 31st. So tell your friends, make sure you share that one and what kind of everything go in, but keep sending you guys your questions at questions at Chalmers. One a second and we'll get you guys going. So thanks for your time. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

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