Dr. George Best: Hello, I am Dr. George Best of Best Health and Wellness in San Antonio, Texas. This is part 4 of my video series on why can't I loose weight. In today's video, I am going to be starting my discussion of the various inner feeling factors that can prevent you from loosing weight. And dealing with the individual organs and glands that are involved in weight losing and why there are problems with those organs and you may have problems loosing weight.
The first one I am going to do discuss, even though it is not the most important or in terms of most people's weight gain problems, it is involved in most people's weight gains problems and that is liver. The reason why the liver is involved in so many problems with weight is because it is involved in either the production or the activation of all of the fat burning problems in the body. I am not going to go into detail on that right now. So basically saying that, if the liver is not working quite at a 100%, then the various hormones that are involved in fat burning are either not going to be produced or it not going to be activated properly and so that's going to slow down your ability to burn fat.
So, what causes issues with the deliver? A lot of people are familiar with things like alcohol is a problem to the liver, certain drugs cause problem with the liver and that's definitely true and that is definitely a problem for a lot of people. So if you are trying to loose weight, one of things you want to do is, cut on your alcohol consumption, not only from the standpoint of does it contain calories, you know, a lot of might drink white beer. The alcohol actually causes some problems with the liver, it makes the liver work harder. So it actually will slow down you ability to loose weight if you're drinking a lot of alcohol beverages.
Medications; if you are on medications that are nonessential, in other words, things that you take that you don't really need to take but you take them just because, I know a lot of people, they take pain killers on a preventive basis which ultimately doesn't work but that's another story, and they take this stuff on preventive basis so and after a while, what have you done, you like it too much. That's especially true, we see the Metacin, basic products like, very hard on liver, especially when it's taken on a regular basis like everyday for a long period of time, very, very hard for the liver processor. So if you can avoid taking certain medications, you are definitely better off to do so.
Now the third aspect of videos is that, I mentioned on earlier video that I am now a big fan of the Atkins Diet, because even though the Atkins Diet does make most people lose weight initially, most people will hit a wall with it, especially if they stay on the induction phase or that initial phase where you don't need anything but basically meat, and meat and fatty food. The reason why this is a problem is that the liver can only handle so much protein and fat.
Fat, they are one of the bigger issues. And because the liver can only handle so much protein and fat, something like Atkins Diet or anybody who is just eating mostly meat, doesn't ever getting vegetables in, use a lot of fatty foods, lot of fried foods, that kind of thing, after a while, it starts to really slow down the liver. The liver has a hard time processing all of that and especially if you're just eating it ever single meal, after a while liver just can't keep up and it's going to slow down all the processes including its processing of the fat burning hormones, which then in turn slows down your ability to lose weight.
So you want to take it easy on your liver. How do you do that? As we talked about cutting back on the alcohol and the drugs, but you also want to keep your consumption of high protein, and particularly high fat foods to a minimum. The main thing here is really your fatty greasy type stuff. High quality protein is okay as long as you're not yet going overboard with it, now much overboard. Here is the thing where lot of people, especially those live in United States, eat a lot of meat and we take half a pound of meat, you know that's about right full of meal, right? Really in terms of how much protein your body is designed to handle, truly about half that meat, and may about quarter pound eating at a time, if you are eating meat.
Now you can eat few eggs at time protein there. They are very some of the protein sources, they are in most types of things. Usually we're eating a lot more than we really need to and particularly for those people who are trying to lose weight, they are eating way more than they really need. So what I recommend is as far as protein intake is, if you are eating meats, fish, beef, chicken, anything like that, what you want to do is, keep the portion size down to a quarter of a pound, that's four ounces. If you are really a big person, if you are a big muscular person or you're trying to build muscle like a bodybuilder or something like that, then you can definitely go higher than that to assist in those. But if you're trying to lose weight and you want your liver as much as possible, you want to keep that down to about four ounces, may be a little lower than that.
So that's the liver. Again fatty foods are a big problem. The other thing I recommend is if you're trying to lose weight, cut off fried foods altogether, that is a big problem for the liver to process. Also it's probably better to stay away from things like bacon, anything that's got a lot of grease in it, those types of things you want to stay away from too. Take it easy on your liver. Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, eat some mycelian protein fish, it's particularly good and stay away from the high fat stuff, keep your alcohol intake to a minimum and keep away from the medications that you don't absolutely need to take.
Basically the liver will start to recover. When that happens, most people will have quick weight losses, the liver starts to recover. The reason why is, when the liver is unhappy, it tends to hold a lot of water in the abdominal area and so what happens is that you can get start loosing a lot of water weight and people get really excited by this. So anything about 8, 10, 12 pounds sometimes in a day or two and there you go, wow, I really lose weight and then they get really disappointed when those scenario stops.
When you run out that excess water, then your weight loss is going to slow down to very just burning fat and fat burning goes up at slower rate, typically in about 1-2 pounds every week or so. If you are losing two pounds a week, you're really doing pretty good, that's a lot so right than you lose 8 or 10 pounds in a couple of days, but that was water weight.
Any program out there that says, hey, you are going to lose 8-10 pounds a week, what you're losing is water. And yeah, you're losing 10 pounds a week and that may take place for 2, 3, 4, sometimes maybe 6 or 8 weeks just depending upon on how that delivery is give an individual, but ultimately all you are loosing is water and you will get that point where you run out of water to lose and then your burning fat if things are going well. If things are going in desirable level, then you go slow way down on your weight loss. As long as you're loosing a pound or two a week, that's what you want, things are going the way it should be.
So realize that when you are burning fat and you're only loosing, always loosing 1-2 pounds a week, that's exactly what you want to happen and we'll be discussing a little bit more on some of the future videos in the series. But that covers the liver part of weight loss for now. I will be speaking to you soon on the next part of the series, thank you for watching.
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