Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

The biggest miss about weight loss that you've ever been told.

First of all, let's remember one of my most famous lines. Weight off fast will never last.

Weight off slow, you're good to go. Now what do I mean by that?

It turns out that over 90% of people who go on a quick weight loss diet regain not only that weight but actually more weight than when they started.

Well over 90%. One of the things that gets talked about repeatedly is the use of a low carb diet to lose weight.

No fat diet to lose weight. An intermittent fasting diet to lose weight.

A keto diet to lose weight. And you'll see a study of remarkable changes in a month, six weeks, huge amount of individual weight loss.

And while all of that is true, when studies have been designed to compare over a period of time these various eating programs,

it's almost like the tortoise and the hare. By that I mean, for instance, the Atkins diet, a low carbohydrate keto high protein diet, if you will, versus a normal carbohydrate or a low fat diet.

In fact, the Atkins like diets, tours actually lost more weight more quickly than the other two diet groups.

But when these diet groups were followed over a six month and then a year period, low and behold what happened was that the people who rapidly lost weight caught up with the slower losing weight.

And by the end of a year there actually was little to any difference in any of the groups. And that's because things that are going to really require you to radically change your behavior are usually not sustainable over a longer period of time.

And one of the things that I've spent my career teaching people in my practice is that I've got to find, they've got to find a lifestyle that they can live with literally and figuratively.

And that lifestyle may be very different depending on the individual, but beware of rapid weight loss schemes. It just is one of the greatest myths out there.

Now, when I first lost all my weight over 25 years ago now, I would join a study coming out of the NIH looking at people who had successful long term weight loss.

And again, that's a very small percentage of people who lose weight. It's only about 5% of people who have sustained weight loss over many years after being obese.

And the remarkable finding was it really didn't matter what their eventual diet became, but the thing that was consistent across all the groups that sustained weight loss was that they had a sustained exercise program.

And interestingly enough, it didn't really matter what that exercise program was, but it was an exercise program that they stuck with.

And I think again, so much of what I teach my patients is in exercise, number one, you've got to find something you enjoy doing.

It's not something that you, oh my gosh, I've got to go do this because that's how I'm going to keep the weight off.

Again, you've got to find something sustainable and something sustainable almost always involves something that you enjoy.

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