ASK DR. ANNA — Weight Loss After 50 Made Simple
Are you struggling to lose weight after 50 — even though you're trying harder than ever? You're not alone, and you're in the right place.
Welcome to ASK DR. ANNA — a podcast that answers your real questions about weight loss after 50. Dr. Anna Pleet, MD tackles tricky topics like changes to your body, why menopause makes weight loss hard, stubborn belly fat, metabolism changes, beating chronic disease, and more. Dr. Anna promotes living the Mediterranean Diet and Lifestyle — something she knows firsthand after spending years living in Italy.
Each episode tackles one specific question from adults 50+ who want straightforward, science-backed answers — without extreme dieting, calorie obsession, or trendy fads. Dr. Anna breaks down complex topics into simple, honest guidance that protects your health and actually works in real life. If you're ready for a doctor-led approach to sustainable weight loss, this podcast was made for you.
This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice from your personal physician.
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ASK DR. ANNA — Weight Loss After 50 Made Simple
30: Why I DON'T Give My Patients A Diet [ASK DR. ANNA]
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If traditional dieting has stopped working for you after 50, you are not doing something wrong. In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna breaks down why the frustrating stall so many adults over 50 experience is almost always biology — not a character flaw — and what to do differently.
Most diet advice was built around younger bodies. After 50, the rules change. Dr. Anna maps out the metabolic spiral that makes standard dieting backfire with age and shares a simple, muscle-first, anti-inflammatory system that makes weight loss feel doable again.
Listen in to learn:
- Where modern diet advice actually comes from — and why it was never designed with bodies over 50 in mind
- The metabolic spiral: hormone shifts, muscle loss, slower resting metabolic rate, visceral fat, and rising inflammation
- Why aggressive calorie cuts trigger metabolic adaptation and set the stage for rebound weight gain
- Why "any weight loss is good" fails when muscle is being lost right along with fat
- The case for protein targets and resistance training as the foundation for protecting metabolism after 50
- How Mediterranean eating reduces chronic inflammation and supports long-term health in a way crash diets never can
- The perfect meal formula built on protein, fiber, healthy fat, and real food flavor
- How to build a sustainable energy gap without extreme restriction or cardio-only plans
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Why We Skip Prescribed Diets
SPEAKER_00I'm a doctor. I trained in internal medicine in Italy, and I have a background in nutrition. And for years now, I've been helping adults over 50 lose weight, both in my clinical practice, sitting across from real patients, and now with thousands more people online who message me every single day with the exact same struggles. Now here's something that surprises almost everyone the first time they hear it. I actually don't give my patients a diet. But wait, Dr. Anna, isn't a diet the obvious thing to do if you want to lose weight? How about eat less, move more, pick a plan and stick to it? You see, that's the advice I'm sure you've heard your entire life from magazines, from friends, from trainers. But here's the problem. If you are in or beyond your 50s, this advice is often wrong because it's built for a body that responds to restriction in a completely different way than yours probably does right now. So in this video, I'm going to walk us through four important things. First, we're going to talk about where this just go on a diet belief actually comes from and why it's stuck around for so long, even though it stops working for so many people. Second, we're going to talk about the specific biological mechanism happening inside your body after about age 50 that most doctors don't fully explain to you. And I call this the metabolic spiral. Now, third, we're going to talk about exactly why traditional dieting does not just fail to fix this mechanism, it actually can make it a lot worse. And fourth, we're going to talk about what I actually give my patients instead and why it works differently for them to lose weight. Now, by the end of this video, you're going to understand your own body much better than you have in years. So let's dive right
Where Diet Culture Came From
SPEAKER_00in. Let's start with a question that I don't think most people ever stop to really ask. And that is, where does this idea of going on a diet even come from? So think about this honestly. You've heard about calorie counting from magazines and weight loss programs built around points or macros or eliminating entire food groups. You've been told about apps that will reduce your entire relationship with food down to a single number that you're supposed to hit every single day. Now, all of this is built around one core idea, which is to eat less than you burn, and then the weight will just melt off, right? Now, that equation is actually not the part that's fundamentally wrong. Energy balance is a real factor for weight loss. But here is what most people don't really explain. That equation and the entire diet industry built around it was developed and tested overwhelmingly on younger people. For people who wanted to lose maybe just a couple of pounds here or there to look better at the beach or fit into their wedding dress. We're talking 20 somethings or 30 somethings. People with stable hormone levels, intact muscle mass, and a metabolism that responds to calorie deficits in a fairly predictable and linear way. Now, nobody built that advice for the body you might have right now. Nobody went back and said, wait a minute, does this still apply once we go through menopause, when estrogen drops, and for men when testosterone starts to decline? And does this actually still apply once our muscle mass starts dropping on its own, independent of anything you're doing wrong? Now, does this still apply once chronic low-grade inflammation starts rising in nearly everybody after a certain age? You see, all this weight loss advice that you've heard your whole life has just been passed down generation after generation, diet trend after diet trend, as though the human biology stays exactly the same from when you're 25 to when you're 65. And I can tell you right now, it doesn't. The gap between what the diet industry tells you and what's actually happening inside your body right now when you're 58, 62, 73. Well, that's exactly why so many of you have been stuck for so long. You're doing everything you were told to do, but you're seeing it simply stop working. Now I see this in my clinical practice constantly. It's women who say to me, Dr. Anna, I did this exact diet 10 years ago and I lost 25 pounds really easily. I'm doing the same exact thing now, but this time the scale is not moving and I don't understand what's wrong with me. I hear men tell me all the time, yeah, I've always been able to just drop weight before some big event, like I would cut carbs for a few weeks or I would just go running more often. But now if I do that, I'm not really seeing the same results. Yeah, these people are not imagining this, they're not crazy, they're not losing their discipline. It's that their bodies have fundamentally changed. And the problem is that nobody has explained to them what's going on. So instead, for you watching this video, I'm going to explain what is actually happening in your body after your midlife years, so after your 50s
The Metabolic Spiral Explained
SPEAKER_00on average. I call this the metabolic spiral. And once you see it laid all out, I promise you, things that have been confusing for you for years are gonna click into place. Now, let's start this by laying out two fundamental facts with two things that converge at roughly the same time in your life. The first main thing that happens in your midlife years are hormonal changes. Now, as you move through your adult years for women, you have all of your years of fertility, and then you hit this thing called menopause. And that's where a lot of shifting happens. Mostly your estrogen drops down. But there are other hormone shifts happening for men too, such as testosterone gradually declining with age. It doesn't happen as dramatically as it does in women, but both men and women do have drops in their testosterone levels. Now, one of the direct consequences of these hormonal changes is that your body starts losing muscle mass even faster than it used to. So this isn't just about whether you're working out or not, it's actually now a baseline shift in how your body maintains its important lean tissue. So the second thing that starts to happen in your midlife years is a decline in physical activity. Now, this is actually connected to the first point. As estrogen and testosterone decline and muscle mass starts dropping, your energy levels will drop right along with it. Now, that might mean your physical activity naturally declines too. And for most people, this is the case. On top of it, a lot of people experience that their joints start to ache more and more. It's commonly known that arthritis is a diagnosis that is more common in older folks. Also, people who've had prior injuries, those things can flare up. Your life might get really busy because you're dedicating yourself to so many other endeavors. And it could be that your career is peaking or you're taking care of other people in your life, children, parents. You might have more demanding hours. And then paradoxically, for some people who have entered retirement, their life actually slows down and they lose the structured movement that used to be built into a simple daily routine for them. And so the combination of these hormone changes and less moving around and less physical activity is like a catalyst for each other. And this is where everything comes together. Muscle is the most metabolically active tissue in your entire body. It is the tissue that burns calories, even when you're doing absolutely nothing at all, just to keep you alive. So you're sitting at your desk, you're watching TV on the couch, maybe you're actually sleeping. All of these things are times when your body is still using up energy, and because of that, that means you're burning calories. Now, when you lose muscle mass, your resting metabolic rate drops down. So what this means is you're now burning meaningfully fewer calories every single day just by existing and staying alive. Now, a slower metabolism means it becomes easier for your body to store excess energy as fat. And in this middle stage of your life, the fat, well, it doesn't just go anywhere. It actually goes to a very specific part of your body around your midsection, which is what people mostly are referring to when they talk about their belly fat. Now, there's a special name for this type of fat. It's called visceral fat. It's fat that not only gets deposited in your midsection, but specifically around your central organs, things like your stomach, your liver, your gallbladder, your kidneys, and your pancreas and all of your intestines. And it behaves in a very specific way, completely differently from the fat that for you women out there listening to this was deposited in your thighs and your buttocks throughout all your younger years. And for men, it was just anywhere else in your body. Visceral fat is not passive tissue. It's actually active tissue. What that means is it's not just sitting there, it's actually actively doing chemistry. It's producing inflammatory signals that are circulating throughout your entire body. Now, here's the part that completely affects this whole cycle. The chronic low-grade inflammation that the fat tissue itself, especially this visceral fat, is producing, actually accelerates the breakdown of your muscle tissue. What that means is this visceral fat is interfering with your body's ability to actually build and maintain new muscle. There are a lot of different components of this. So let me break it down for you. Here's the entire mechanism laid out. We have hormonal changes and reduced physical activity, which can lead to us losing muscle. When we lose muscle, that means we are getting a slower metabolism. A slower metabolism means it's easier for our body to acquire fat and store it. And especially after our middle years, like our 40s and 50s, that fat is getting deposited in our abdomen in what is called visceral fat. That visceral fat produces inflammatory signals, in other words, chronic low-grade inflammation. That inflammation accelerates further muscle loss, which slows down your metabolism even more, which leads to more fat storage, which produces more inflammation. And you are starting to see how this is a cycle that goes around and around. And that is what I call the metabolic spiral. Now, the longer this is running unaddressed in your body, the more entrenched it actually becomes, which is exactly why so many of my patients are always telling me the same stuff. They say, it feels like the longer I wait, the harder it gets to lose weight. That is the case. You're not actually imagining this. That is the metabolic spiral actively turning year after year inside your body. And so we need to be very strategic about how we fix this. And I want to be clear about something here. I think that this is the single most important sentence I'm about to say in this entire video. So listen very carefully. If you are in or over your 50s and you are trying to lose weight with a traditional dieting approach, not only are you fighting a losing battle, but you're also ignoring your biology. So it's not just simply that you can't lose weight because you're failing and you're not disciplined enough. It's actually that you're using strategies that were never designed to address the specific mechanism going on in your body. That means coming up with a way to lose weight, not despite the metabolic spiral, but in light of it. Now, before we're ready to discuss what exactly that is, there is one major issue we need to tackle.
Four Diet Myths That Backfire
SPEAKER_00Now that you understand what the metabolic spiral is, we need to go back and talk about the conventional dieting advice. Because once you start to see it through this new lens, all these myths start to just disintegrate and fall apart on their own. So let's talk about myth number one. This is that cutting your calories aggressively is the fastest, most effective way to lose weight. Here's what's actually happening when you slash your calories overnight dramatically. Your body cannot tell the difference between I'm intentionally dieting to try to improve my fitness and health, and food has now become scarce and I might be facing a famine, and this is a threat to my body. It actually responds to both situations in exactly the same way because it can't tell the difference by protecting itself. Now, at first, yes, you are gonna lose some weight, but the ultimate effect is gonna wear off. Now, what do I mean? Well, once your body starts getting used to the lower or lesser amount of calories that you're taking in, it's going to slow down your metabolism. Now, this might happen if you're cutting your calories too aggressively to lower your metabolic rate beyond what you would expect from the weight you've actually just lost. This is a process called metabolic adaptation. And the research is really clear that this effect is significantly more pronounced in adults over their 50s, maybe age 55 on average, than in younger people. So the harder you cut calories, the harder your body's actually fighting you back. Which means that the most aggressive diets are very often the ones that end up backfiring the hardest, specifically in this age group. And this is where I hear this so commonly. People will tell me with things like carnivore or keto or really lean, low-fat vegan options, they're saying, oh my gosh, I lost 50 pounds and then I regained 100. This is not made-up stuff. It's because you cut too hard and aggressively and your body was fighting you back. Now let's talk about myth number two. And this is that any weight loss is good weight loss as long as the number on the scale goes down. Eh, super wrong. Now, if you're cutting your calories without making sure you're protecting the muscle tissue of your body, which is in charge of protecting your metabolism, you're going to suffer some consequences. If you're not getting enough protein, without doing enough types of training to keep your muscles strong, something called resistance training, a significant portion of the weight that you're losing on a diet is not just fat. We know this is true. All the literature tells us the same thing over and over. It doesn't even matter which style of diet you choose, meaning which foods you're eating. If you're cutting calories too fast and you're not eating enough protein and you're not doing weight training, you're definitely going to lose a significant amount of muscle. Losing the muscle does not just fail to help you in the short term, it actually fails to help you in the long term as well. It's going to feed the metabolic spiral that is working against you. And in all the ways we talked about, all the consequences we addressed before, that chronic low-grade inflammation, setting your body up to regain fat even faster, all of that is going to be exacerbated or sped up when you lose a lot of muscle tissue. So you need to really be careful that you're protecting the lean tissue of your body when you're trying to target fat loss. Now let's talk about myth number three. If the dieting worked for you in your 30s, it should work exactly the same way right now for you in your 50s, 60s, and 70s. Eh, also wrong. Now, not exactly. Not in the same way. And this is one of the most common sources of confusion and self-blame that I see amongst my patients. The rules have genuinely changed. Once you hit your middle-age years, your body is functioning slightly differently. We talked about how your hormonal environment is different than it used to be. Your baseline muscle mass is also different than it used to be, very likely. And your inflammatory status is very likely different than it used to be. You need to now take a strategy that is working for a different metabolic environment and apply to the body you have right now. What that means is if you're thinking about calories in, calories out, and that simple equation of burning fat the same way you did when you were 25 and 30, you are going to recognize pretty quickly that you're not going to get the same results. And so we have to approach the thing that is going to work for the age you are now. Now, myth number four losing weight after your 50s really just comes down to motivation and discipline. No, I don't really think so. Now I hear a lot of gurus online say to people, it really is just about calories in, calories out. People are overcomplicating it. Well, I'll be honest with you, it actually is more complicated. The myth that causes people the most pain is this one. And I'm talking about emotional pain. What I see is that people are struggling to lose weight using oversimplified approaches that maybe are not supporting their actual body's functioning and health. And thus they are dealing with things not working out in the long term. And what happens? Well, they're just going to turn inwards and use all of this as evidence against themselves for saying, hey, I failed. I want to say this directly to you if you've been down this road. You cannot will your way around a hormonal shift. You cannot discipline your way out of chronic inflammation. And you cannot just grit your teeth hard enough and push through tough workouts enough to reverse metabolic adaptation. These are all physiological processes. They're not character flaws. So the problem was possibly not that you weren't trying hard enough, but rather that nobody was really giving you the right strategies for the body you have now at the age you are now with all of the other things going on inside of it. Now, let's talk about what I actually give for my patients
The Mediterranean Code Framework
SPEAKER_00instead. So if you are following along with me here, you're going to realize that we have busted up a bunch of myths that people are holding on to when it comes to losing weight when you're in or past your 50s. Now, what I do is I give my patients a completely different system. Because if diet isn't the answer, then what is? Now I give my patients a complete system built specifically to reverse the metabolic spiral. It's not just to create a calorie deficit and hope for the best while crossing our fingers that the muscle loss and the inflammation are just gonna sort themselves out. Well, instead, we're going to target these things specifically. I call this system the Mediterranean Code, and it is built on three things working together at the same time rather than just picking one and crossing our fingers and hoping it's enough. The first thing is protecting and actively rebuilding the muscle tissue itself because that is so key for metabolism. This means making sure our protein intake is sufficient. And yes, it does require a little bit of math to figure that out. A good general target is somewhere between 0.7 to 1 grams of protein per pound of ideal body weight per day. Now, some of you know the equation for kilograms, so you just have to do the conversion to figure out the numbers. Especially if you're not someone who's counting calories or tracking macros, if you want to start with just picking the right foods and then dealing with the math later, what I tell my patients is to design your meal and start selecting your foods by selecting your protein first. Now let me give you some examples. So this could mean that you start with your breakfast thinking through what my protein is gonna be. So let's say I choose eggs, which is you know the egg whites that is the protein component, or Greek yogurt, or some beans, or overnight oats with milk and protein powder mixed in. Maybe for lunch I'm talking about chicken or fish or legumes or lentils. You pick the protein that you want. Dinner is the same game. It could be fowl, it could be fish, it could be beef. It doesn't really matter. If protein is the first thing that you put down, well, the rest of the meal tends to kind of fall in place around it. And at least you know you're giving your body the minimal requirements you need to keep your metabolism revved up. Now, alongside that, we have to do the resistance training because we have to do that thing that's specifically keeping our muscle tissues strong. And this is what most people are not doing at all, especially those of you who are in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. I see you doing none of this. I talk to my patients about it all day long. A lot of people are just walking or doing a dance class, and that does not necessarily target muscle strength whatsoever. So, what are we talking about? We have to hit all major muscle groups. This could begin with just body weight exercises, especially if you're a beginner, or getting resistance bands. You can buy them for like five or ten dollars online. So, really, it's a very easy thing to just buy and keep in your house and to do those exercises at home in your living room. Or you actually use free weights. Maybe you have weights at home, maybe you go to a gym. All you really need is two or three sessions a week to get started to have an effect. We know that there's different types of exercise. And when most people think of exercise, they think about the cardio. But cardio alone does not solve this problem for you. You need to do resistance training specifically to rebuild and protect your muscle mass. And then if you enjoy cardio, walking and cycling, whatever you want to do, dancing, swimming, please do that. There's something for everyone out there. We have to think about what to do for both our muscle training and our cardiovascular types of exercise. They're both kind of two Ps in a pod. They go
Perfect Meals And A Sustainable Gap
SPEAKER_00together. The second component of targeting the metabolic spiral is to reduce this chronic inflammation that has been kind of feeding the spiral in our body all along. This is where decades of Mediterranean nutrition research becomes so relevant. There is a pattern, and there's more than one pattern, but I'm biased because I lived in Italy for so long. There is a pattern of eating that is built specifically around healthy foods, which fight inflammation that includes lots of healthy fats, lots of plant foods rich in antioxidants, using herbs and spices that fight inflammation, and in general has minimally processed foods, which means you're not having those ingredients that cause more inflammation in the body. Refined sugars, ultra-processed products, anything that's really junk food. And I'm talking, of course, about the Mediterranean diet, which has been studied extensively and consistently shows measurable reductions in inflammatory markers. And even more importantly, it has direct impact on the consequences of long-term inflammation, which means it's protecting us from the big kahunas, the big chronic diseases, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, certain cancers, Alzheimer's, and dementia, and more and more. Now, a practical way to start applying this kind of healthy eating is not only by following me on YouTube, but by following what I call the perfect meal formula. Every meal should have four things on your plate: your protein choice, which we've already talked about before, a source of fiber, a source of healthy fat, and naturally occurring flavor from real ingredients like herbs, spices, citrus, things like ginger, turmeric, any of those really nutty, delicious flavors that we add to our cooking. Now, a plate in this way might look like the following: a piece of grilled fish or chicken as your protein, roasted vegetables for your fiber, a drizzle of olive oil for your healthy fat, a squeeze of lemon or fresh herbs like rosemary, basil, thyme for your flavor. Now, the perfect meal formula does three things at once for us. It's going to balance our meal out, so it's actually going to keep us full. It's going to give your body the essential nutrition it actually needs to function and make you feel full, satisfied, and supported. And it's going to reduce that chronic inflammation, which means it's working directly against the metabolic spiral, helping to reverse it. On top of that, and because you're getting real protein, real fiber, real healthy fats at every meal, it's going to keep you from running into all the hunger and the cravings that come from eating something quick, maybe processed, nutrient. Deficient that leaves you unsatisfied like an hour later. And that is where we make our worst choices when it comes to food. We are reaching for the candy and the ice cream and the chips and the fast energy because we're depleted, we're starving, you name it, we've all been there. Now you don't need to weigh anything out or calculate a single number to get started with this if you don't want to. You just have to check do I have all four components of the perfect meal formula on my plate? And if you do, you know you're going to be supporting your body to start reversing the metabolic spiral for you, which is going to make weight loss so much more effective and even faster. Now, the third thing we have to do here is to create an energy gap. And this is what most people talk about when they talk about hitting your calorie deficit. Yes, having an energy gap is absolutely essential to getting weight loss. But the thing is, the way we do this matters. The best approach is doing a moderate and genuinely sustainable amount of an energy gap each day rather than something aggressive or extreme. This is the part that most people miss in the conversation. They think they just have to slash calories hard and fast to get weight loss going. The energy gap actually doesn't have to come entirely from eating less. You have to understand this is an energy equation. And there's a reason I'm calling it energy in and energy out instead of calories and calories out, the way most people hear about it. What often happens is that if we are talking about all the energy that goes into our body, which is what we're eating, and I argue how much we're sleeping, we also need to address the amount of energy we're expending. And that's what brings to the equation how much we're moving around. So we can target this equation not only by eating less and eating smarter, which we've talked about a lot already, but by moving more and moving smarter. So every bit of additional physical activity, especially resistance training, things that are protecting our metabolism, things that are protecting our muscle, it doesn't just widen the gap. It actually sets up a system for yourself to make this sustainable for you so you can keep going with it. If you cut calories hard, your energy is gonna drop. And I guarantee you, you're not gonna wanna stick with your weight loss plan. This is what happens to so many people. So instead of surviving on the smallest possible amount of food, you actually are building a body that genuinely needs and burns more energy. This means a modest, sustainable target is a deficit that you would barely notice day to day. So it's something that you can stick with. And it's not really the kind that's just gonna leave you exhausted and counting down the minutes until you can go to bed and get to your next meal. Now, I have to say a word of caution. One of the classic errors that I see people make when they're trying to increase their exercise is by saying, okay, I'm gonna start jogging and riding my bike and I'm gonna sign up for Orange Theory and swim classes at the Y, and I'm going to play with my grandkids outside and do pickleball and tennis and go dancing. And then all they did was add on more cardio, which will unfortunately make them feel hungrier. If you've done this, you might have experienced this before. The more cardio you do, the more your hunger hormones kick into high gear. Now, this is ultimately going to drive you to eat more. So, what do you think happens if this is the case? You might think, well, I'm burning more, so I can eat more. The problem is you don't really burn as much as you think with exercise. You would be surprised. And so while it turns out, yes, you have a little bit more of a gap. Now, if you've eaten more because you've burned more, you've actually lessened your gap or maybe maybe even made it go away entirely. And the problem is the whole reason we were trying to exercise more is to increase our energy gap. Why? So we can burn more energy than we're taking in so we can actually burn fat. And so the thing I see so many people doing is they're telling me exercise doesn't work. Well, what happens is you exercise, you ate more, you ended up blaming it on the exercise when really the problem is you ate more. This is a classic mistake of people who are trying to just go at it without a strategic approach to losing weight. Now, when you address all three of the factors we talked about previously at the same time, targeting muscle, keeping it strong, keeping it healthy in our body. We talk about inflammation, how to drive it down with good food choices and good activity levels, and creating a sustainable energy gap that is through a combination of eating the right foods and moving the right amount, well, then you're no longer going to be fighting against your own biology. Instead, you're working with it and the spiral that has been turning against you will slowly start to unwind.
Calories Still Matter Plus Next Steps
SPEAKER_00And if you want more guidance and putting all of this into practice, the specific protein targets for your body, the right way to start resistance training, even if you've never lifted any weights before in your life or ever done any kind of strength training before, the meal structures that work, all of these things together is exactly what I teach inside my private community online, the Healthy After 50 Academy. I have a link below this video if you're interested, you can check it out. Now I want to be careful here because I don't want this to be misunderstood. And I see this misunderstanding happen often. There is nuance to this conversation. I am not telling you that calories don't matter. They absolutely do. Energy balance is real. Creating an energy gap is necessary to lose weight. So I'm not just throwing that principle out the window. And I'm also not telling you that you can just eat whatever you want at any amount as long as the calories are correct. That's also wrong. Because as we've talked about, there are specific nutritional things that you want to get correct: enough protein, anti-inflammatory foods. Both of these things have to be taken into account. What I am telling you is that a traditional diet, in the way most people use that word, they think about restriction, cutting out foods or food groups. It's usually extreme and you have to go on it and then you eventually go off of it. That is the wrong tool for the body you probably have right now at your age, whether you're in your 40s or 50s, 60s, or beyond. If you do it in that way, you are not going to create a sustainable system for yourself. And that is where people really lose out on their weight loss process. If you instead target the things that are supporting healthy weight loss, it's going to address your calorie balance, but it will also target the things that are going to support your body in losing weight naturally on its own, supporting the metabolism, keeping that up, supporting your body, fighting against inflammation, which is a thing that it has to do in order for your body to really be able to lose massive amounts of weight. Now, if you've tried diet after diet, after you've turned, let's say age 45, 50, 55, and you've ended up exactly where you started, or even worse off, meaning maybe you've regained more weight than you've ever lost, I really want you to hear something. You didn't fail. The tool you were using at the time was wrong for the job in front of you. Once you understand this metabolic spiral, all the muscle loss, the slowed metabolism, the visceral fat accumulation around your belly, the inflammation, all of that feeding into each other, once you have a system that's built to address all those factors together, you're going to lose weight so much better and it's going to be much easier. It's not because you've suddenly discovered more discipline or you learned how to be more motivated to do the things you need to do. It's just because you're doing the things correctly, finally. And to me, that is the entire difference between a diet that fails you in six weeks and an approach that gives you your life back finally. And if you really want to understand how to do that as best as possible, you want to jump into my other video right up here.