If You're Only Focused on Fat Loss, You're Missing This | Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

The Daily Motivation

Lewis Howes

Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

The Daily Motivation Show host Lewis Howes sits down with physician Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who argues that the medical world has been measuring and targeting the wrong thing for decades. She makes the case that skeletal muscle is the body's metabolic foundation, and that diseases like insulin resistance and obesity begin in muscle long before fat becomes visible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.
0:11.6	What if I told you, I don't think we're over fat? In fact, we are undermuscled. And the reality is, as you pointed out, there's been this fixation on fat, adiposity,
0:23.8	the diseases related to obesity,
0:26.0	cardiovascular disease, hypertension,
0:28.6	insulin resistance, all of these that go along with.
0:32.2	With obesity, right?
0:33.0	Exactly.
0:34.2	Well, what if obesity is actually just a symptom, which in fact it is, and what if I told you that these diseases are actually diseases of skeletal muscle first? And that obesity begins in skeletal muscle. Insulin resistance begins in skeletal muscle first. What is skeletal muscle?
0:57.0	Yeah. Well, I mean, just even from a general perspective, it's the things that you, it's muscles
1:02.3	you have voluntary control over. Okay. Right. So it's your biceps or your triceps or your quads.
1:07.8	Anything you can flex. Yeah. Is that. Okay. So the disease starts there? Yeah. Inflict. First there. Well, if you think about what skeletal muscle is, skeletal muscle is your metabolic currency. Okay. It's number one. For most people, it makes up 40% of their body weight. For you, maybe 45, for me, maybe 35, you know,
1:29.3	you're about a foot taller. Exactly. And when we think about skeletal muscle, we must understand
1:34.6	that really, again, as your metabolic sink, what does it do? It is the site for glucose disposal.
1:40.7	80% or more, it is the site of glucose disposal. Your muscle is a site where glucose
1:46.2	can be run through. Yes. So glucose is a really interesting molecule in the fact that it is
1:53.0	toxic, but we need it. And we have to get rid of it. It can't just hang around. And if we don't
1:58.9	get rid of it, it's stored in the fat. Well, if we don't get rid of it, the definition is diabetes. But we have to move glucose
2:06.4	out of the bloodstream and into tissue. The main side of that is skeletal muscle.
2:13.6	One, if you think about skeletal muscle as a suitcase, if it is over packed with glucose and fatty acids, everything spills back out into the bloodstream.
2:23.3	Okay.
2:24.3	Right? And what we must understand is that healthy muscle will act as the body's sink.
2:30.3	You have...
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