How to Lose Fat So FAST It Feels Like Cheating For Women

[00:00:00]The average woman in 12 weeks of working with me loses 20 pounds. Most of them thought they were doing everything right before they found me. Eating clean, doing cardio, counting calories, yet nothing was moving. What they were missing wasn't effort. It was [music] this. Because here's what almost no one tells you. The standard advice for losing fat is aimed at the wrong target.

[00:00:21]You can do all of it perfectly and still be stuck. That's because your body's running in fat storage mode. And until you switch that off, it will not let go of the fat no matter how hard you work.

[00:00:32]I'm Dr. Tessa Dam, a physician with Ford board certifications. I've spent over a decade in the intensive care unit, and now I also help women reverse this process without medications and [music] without counting a single calorie.

[00:00:45]Today, I'm going to give you five cheat codes. Five things that make fat loss so fast, it almost [music] feels like you're cheating. It works because you finally stop fighting your own biology and get it working for you instead.

[00:00:57]Let's start with the one that is foundational. Quite literally, everything else is built upon this cheat code number one. Reset the level playing field. What do I mean by this? Resetting your level playing field in this context means restoring your body's normal operating system. Specifically, this means reversing underlying metabolic dysfunction, otherwise known as insulin resistance. This is the thing standard advice ignores, but it's actually the whole game. When insulin resistance is present, your metabolism stays stuck in fast storage mode. Your body cannot use or burn fat for fuel at all. So, a woman can be doing everything right and still not lose fat because the switch is jammed on store mode. This is highlighted in the frustration I hear from women over and over again who tell me, "I'm doing everything that I used to do and that would work and it just doesn't work anymore." By the time your labs look bad enough for your doctor to say the word pre-diabetes, insulin resistance has usually been running under the radar for around 15 years, and it's almost never screened for during a regular checkup. Women commonly blame estrogen, permenopause, or menopause for the change. Don't get me wrong, those matter, but far and away the most common driver is insulin. How common is metabolic dysfunction, you ask? 9 in 10 adults are metabolically unhealthy. More specifically, 88% of adults right now today have metabolic dysfunction. The point here is that this has never been about you not having enough discipline.

[00:02:27]What's more, and worth noting is that the stakes extend well beyond one's waistline. Staying in this state of metabolic dysfunction also sets the stage for the diseases we fear most, including heart attack, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and even many cancers. [music] That is why reversing it has to be priority number one. Here's the great news. Metabolic dysfunction is reversible. And a side effect of doing so for most is weight loss. Imagine a future where you regain control over how your body looks and feels today while also protecting your future health. I now see this reality nearly every day.

[00:03:04]Here's one example. I started working with a woman when she was 46 years old.

[00:03:08]Like many, she blamed permenopause for her weight creep, brain fog, and dropping energy levels. Her fasting glucose and A1C were climbing. Yet, she was getting no plan, just judgment. So, she started avoiding doctors entirely.

[00:03:20]Her clothes also stopped fitting [music] well. She noticed, in fact, she was going up a dress size every year. After a short 12 weeks of working [music] together, she reversed her pre-diabetes and had lost 20 lbs. A year later, she's now more than 40 lbs down. And perhaps the biggest shift of all, that she stopped waiting on the health care system, and instead realized she was in control of her own metabolic health. She just needed the right plan. So before anything else, the first necessary step is to level the playing field by reversing metabolic dysfunction. And the fastest way to start doing this is to learn to speak the language of your metabolism, which happens to be cheat code number two. Learn to speak the language of your metabolism. A fundamental principle here is this.

[00:04:03]Protein and fat are the only two essential macronutrients. Essential means your body cannot run properly without them. Here are the reasons fat is non-negotiable. Fat builds the cell membranes in your brain and central nervous system. It carries the fat soluble vitamins that are A, D, E, and K. It makes and balances hormones, and it is your body's preferred fuel source.

[00:04:25]Your brain itself is roughly 60% fat by dry weight, which is precisely why this matters so much. A 25-year study out of Sweden that included nearly 28,000 people found that those eating highfat cheese and cream daily had about a 13% lower risk of dementia compared to those who chose low-fat alternatives. Well, this is an association, not proof of cause. It fits because fat is what your brain is built from. Moving on to protein. Protein is nonnegotiable. It builds and repairs muscles, skin, hair.

[00:04:59]It makes enzymes and hormones. And back to building and repairing muscle. The more lean muscle you carry, the better your metabolism runs because a majority of your insulin receptors are stored within skeletal muscle. Here in lies the urgency for our age group. Past 30, you lose lean muscle at a real clip, as much as 8% per decade, and it speeds up further after age 60. The only way to rebuild it is to eat enough of the essential amino acids, which only come from protein. The nuance most people miss is this. Not all protein is created equal. Your body absorbs and uses animal protein more completely than most plant protein on average. That matters a lot if you eat mostly plants because you can eat what looks to be enough and still come up short. Here's an example. A patient I started working with in her mid70s was largely debilitated and severely limited by autoimmune [snorts] arthritis. This included requiring an average of three hospital stays per [music] year. She was living on a plant-heavy diet as she'd been told this would help. But her own real-time biometric data after we started working together revealed two shortcomings of this strategy for her. One, that diet was loading her up with processed and ultrarocessed food that fed the inflammation. And two, she could not get near enough protein, so she was hungry constantly while also becoming more frail. Together, we individualized a nutritional strategy around her real-time data. And within a short 2 weeks, the swelling in her hands dropped enough that she could see her knuckle wrinkles for the first time in a decade.

[00:06:34]By 12 weeks, her inflammatory markers had normalized. She was coming off of prescription medications and she was 20 lbs down. Now, nearly 2 years later, she has kept off 50 lbs of weight loss and has not been hospitalized once for her arthritis. She now travels, gardens, plays piano, and regularly strength trains. Her starting point included reversing insulin resistance. And as a part of that, she learned to speak the language of her metabolism and was able to make her metabolism work for her.

[00:07:06]Once you're feeding your metabolism what it actually needs, the thing everyone tells you to obsess over turns out to be almost useless. And that is cheat code number three. Stop counting calories. A calorie is a lab measurement that humans invented. It is not a unit your biology actually uses. and counting it misses most of what matters. The clearest reason lies in complexity. I'm referring to protein's thermic effect. Protein has the highest thermic effect of any macronutrient. That means your body burns 20 to 30% of the calories in protein just by digesting and processing it. Calorie counting treats a protein calorie and a soda calorie as the same thing to your body. And they're not even close. Nowhere is this complexity more pronounced than in the ICU. In the intensive care unit, there's a tool called metabolic cart, a precise clinical version of calorie counting. To get a real number out of it, you have to control multiple things. A patient's ventilator settings, keep a closed respiratory circuit to isolate oxygen in and CO2 out, make sure the patient has not been moved recently, account for their body temperature, whether they're shivering, what drugs they're on, and that's just the beginning. In fact, it is so hard to control all of these variables that the metabolic cart is actually very rarely used. So, the point here that has stuck with me for years is this. If it's this hard to measure caloric demand in bedbound patients with nearly every variable controlled by the ICU team, how precise exactly is a calorie count in a dynamic moving human in the real world with far more variables that are not accounted for? I therefore discourage calorie counting altogether. If you feel so inclined that you must count something, make it grams of protein to asssure you are hitting the minimum quantity you need daily.

[00:08:51]That is a number that actually moves the needle. What is your specific daily protein target? The honest answer is that it's far more complicated than one sizefits-all. In general, however, the RDA of 0.8 g per kilogram per day is widely considered too low. Most adults over 30 do better, closer to 1.2 two grams per kilogram of bioavailable protein per day. Two additional caveats matter here, though. The amount goes higher if you're performing regular resistance or strength training, trying to build muscle. Furthermore, if you're currently overweight or obese, it's generally safer to target your adjusted body weight rather than your actual body weight, and always do so under professional guidance. Everything I'm giving you here is the what. reverse the insulin resistance, feed your metabolism, stop counting calories, and in a second, stop stressing your body the wrong way. The deeper how is where it all comes together, the order to do it in, how to build it using your individualized biometric data, and ultimately how to actually get your body out of storage mode so it starts letting the fat go. This is what I walk women through inside my free masterclass, and you can get it at metabolic transformations.com/register.

[00:10:01]It's for women who hear this and think, "Wow, that's me and I want to see what it looks like to reverse this once and for all using their own data paired with expert guidance." If you want the whole system instead of the pieces, start there and then stay with me because the next cheat code is the one women fight me on the most. Cheat code number four, stop adding unnecessary stress to your body. I'm speaking directly to you members of the runner and chronic cardio crowds. If your goal is fat loss and metabolic health, steadystate aerobic exercise should not be your main event.

[00:10:33]Chronic cardio is a stress on the body and the body answers stress with cortisol, which is a fattorring hormone.

[00:10:40]So for a woman already stuck in storage mode from insulin resistance, piling on imprecise heart rate zone cardio is like pouring fuel on the fire, increasing cortisol, and contributing to more fat storage. The second stressor nobody flags is skipped breakfast. Regularly skipping breakfast, whether you call it timerestricted eating or intermittent fasting or nothing at all, when performed regularly is another stressor.

[00:11:05]Here is the rhythm that matters.

[00:11:07]Cortisol naturally spikes in humans in the morning. That is normal and healthy.

[00:11:11]The thing that turns that spike back down is eating breakfast, breaking your overnight fast. Do it within nutrient-dense real food breakfast, ideally timed 30 to 60 minutes of waking, and you signal your body to bring cortisol down and step out of fat storage mode. This one change over and over with the women I work with opens up a new level of body composition, energy, and [music] fat loss. I was recently working with a woman in her mid-60s. She was extremely reluctant to eat breakfast early. In fact, a delayed and small breakfast had been part of the routine she had maintained for decades. a routine that also included strict adherence to a heart-healthy diet and chronic daily cardio. She had convinced herself all of these were the right things despite the fact that her results were to have landed her overweight and pre-diabetic. Through working together, she was able to lose over 20 lbs and reverse insulin resistance fairly easily. But her progress also stalled short of her ultimate goals. It wasn't until I convinced her to perform a trial of regularly eating a nutrient-dense real food breakfast within 30 to 60 minutes of waking that her body understood the signaling and freed up another 10 lbs of weight loss, which finally got her to her body composition goals, including less visceral fat and a healthy waist to hip ratio. So, now we've added to the list, stop stressing the body the wrong way. The last cheat code is the one that honestly moved the needle the most for me personally. Cheat code number five. Ruthlessly cut ultrarocessed food. Convenience is real, but look at these items for what they actually are. Foodlike products built through heavy industrial processing to be hyper palatable and last on a shelf.

[00:12:49]They're made mostly from refined ingredients. Cutting ultrarocessed food is what takes you right back to cheat code number one. Resetting the playing field and reversing underlying metabolic dysfunction. Remember, this is the single most important lever to pull before anything else can really work.

[00:13:04]Over half the calories of the average American diet now come from ultrarocessed food. And about 70% of the entire US food supply fits criteria as ultrarocessed. That is a big part of why we are in a metabolic health crisis and it's what keeps most people stuck. I was always active growing up. This extended into medical school when I started competing in triathlons and running half marathons. Then internship and residency hit, which required 80-hour work weeks and overnight shifts, and my exercise stopped to almost nothing. Around then, my boyfriend, now husband, moved in and took over the cooking and meal prep.

[00:13:39]This meant I relied far less heavily on convenience and instead ate primarily nutrient-dense real food meals prepared in advance so that I could take food with me to the hospital. That single change during a stretch when I was barely exercising at all resulted in me dropping 15 lbs in just 2 to 3 months. I had more energy and looked more fit than I ever had during my hardest athletic training. As a newly minted physician, I thought I knew exactly what unintentional weight loss meant.

[00:14:06]Undiagnosed cancer. Fortunately for me, it wasn't. But I wasn't the only Dr. Duke. My own PCP who was quite seasoned accused me of being a closet runner rather than accepting that small dietary changes alone could result in such significant improvements in my BMI and lab values. That was the first moment I appreciated how real all of this is and how underappreciated the power of food as medicine is in our society, including within medicine itself. And now after spending over a decade in the ICU, where I regularly witness the end result of unadressed metabolic dysfunction, this still fuels my passion for this work.

[00:14:44]Understand this, it was never willpower.

[00:14:47]The fat that will not move is not about willpower or effort. Your body is stuck in storage [music] mode and no amount of discipline flips that switch. Food and the right daily habits do. This should come as a relief. Good news. It means you are not broken nor are you failing.

[00:15:03]You simply have been aiming at the wrong target and using the wrong tool. Fix the five things we just covered and the body does the rest. It wants to let the fat go. I frequently am asked how fast will I notice change. Trust me when I say this is not slow. When the signals change in a consistent manner, the body responds fast, which is exactly why it can feel like cheating. Remember the real world examples I shared of women just like you? It took a mere 2 weeks for one patients hands to change. Women who work with me inside of metabolic transformations average 20 lbs of weight loss in 12 weeks. These are mere examples. And of course, everyone is an individual. But I can tell you that none of the women who have transformed their weight, life, and health with me thought it was possible for them when they started. They truly had to prove it to themselves to believe it. This takes us back to where we started. Women doing everything [music] right and getting nowhere because they're fighting their own biology instead of working with it.

[00:15:56]Reverse the insulin resistance. Feed your metabolism. Stop counting calories.

[00:16:01]Stop exposing yourself to the wrong kind of stress. Ruthlessly cut ultrarocessed foods. And fat loss stops being a battle. That's it. That's the whole thing. Now, every one of these cheat codes comes back to one hormone, insulin. It's the thing that decides whether your body stores fat or burns it. And if you only take one idea from this video, let it be that one. I made a full video on exactly how insulin runs your fat loss, why cutting calories fails while insulin is high, and what actually switches it off. If today connected for you, that one takes it all the way down. It's on the screen right now. Go watch it next.