Cruelly, those that need exercise most like it least. We're all familiar with the smug runner who tells you to just go out, that you’ll enjoy it, feel great, and lose weight. But generally, this advice doesn’t have a good effect. When I get very fit, it becomes addictive... if I miss a couple of days, I get fidgety and need to do something.

It’s hard to go against the laws of physics! However, the idea “let's just eat less and exercise more, and we’ll all lose weight” is simplistic. If it were that easy, then with just a little discipline, we’d all be slim.The key question is what drives you to eat calories if they're not needed and why you don’t naturally burn up more energy when you’ve over-eaten.

A small imbalance of, say, just 100 calories a day might add up to 10lbs over a year! A single extra biscuit a day could add 100lbs over a decade. There are impulses that drive us to overeat or under-burn calories for our natural balance. It is these forces driving our impulses that we need to address, smartly. We need to structure our lives, our diet, and our exercise so that the body pushes us to a healthy weight.

Fun Fact: Even when you’re resting, your body is constantly burning calories to maintain basic functions like breathing, circulating blood, and repairing cells. This is known as your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

We need to learn and implement simple hacks and techniques so that the natural tendency of your body is towards a healthy weight.

If lab mice eat less frequently but consume the same amount of calories and food, they tend to live longer, be fitter, and leaner. Why? You figure it out.

Watch Dr. Louis' video for effective weight loss hacks. Learn how BionicGym targets sugar-hungry muscle fibers to make fat loss easier and more sustainable, helping you keep the weight off for the long term

Some scientists now joke that we are just avatars for our gut biome. Our actions and appetites are partly driven by the needs of these bugs. Say we produce a sugar-loving colony that partly takes over the gut. There is some evidence that they create sugar pangs so we’ll continue to feed them!

If you transfer some feces from a lean mouse to an obese mouse, it loses weight! Even when it can eat the same amount, etc. Disgusting as it sounds, similar experiments have transplanted feces from lean individuals into people with metabolic syndrome (Obesity + Diabetes + ….) and found that their diabetes improved.

You can feed mice the same amount of calories, and only some will gain weight depending on what you feed them.

Fun Fact: The gut biome plays a crucial role in producing serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood. In fact, about 90% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, not the brain!

Fiber is just a carb that is difficult to digest. Intuitively, we all know that eating 500 calories of raw, fibrous vegetables will have a very, very different effect than eating 500 calories of sweets. The fiber stays in the gut until it reaches the large intestine. It keeps you feeling full and feeds “good bacteria” in the large intestine. These partially break it down—burning calories as they do so—and release butyrate. Butyrate is now thought to be this almost magical substance affecting everything from immunity to obesity and diabetes (at least in mice!).

Incorporating high-fiber green vegetables into your meals can help regulate blood sugar levels, promote heart health, and support effective weight management.