Nutrition Videos

Hi! I'm Stelios Pantazis. I'm a doctor and I specialize in medical nutrition and metabolic disorders. Today, I'd like to talk to you about the difficulty losing weight during autumn. After I explain why this happens, I'll tell you a secret to protect yourselves from it. In my job, I've dealt with diet for better health and weight loss for almost 20 years, and in the two medical centers that I manage, all these years, I've undertaken over 70,000 cases. From early on, I observed in my job that the weight loss of people that started a diet in the autumn was less impressive than the weight loss of those that started a diet in the spring. This phenomenon intrigued me, so I paid more attention to it and I studied it. In the beginning, I humorously attributed it to what I called beach pressure, making a wordplay with peer pressure, which refers to the pressure the members of a group undergo to adjust to the group's norms. But I replaced the word "peer" with the word "beach", implying that the pressure to prepare their body, in order to go to the beach, motivates people, so that they can better follow what I recommended. The experts I discussed it with in medical conferences on diet abroad seemed to agree, with a bit of a smile, although medical research on metabolism has added another, maybe more important reason. The answer came from chronobiology, namely the study of the natural body cycles, which are related to the changes in nature, such as the changes of day and night and the change of season. It seems that as the days become shorter and we go from the hot summer days to the cold autumn days, increased hunger appears, which leads to increased food intake. Namely, in the autumn, we are hungrier and we eat more, and this has been registered in our DNA. This ancient mechanism prepares our body to coordinate with the natural decrease of the available amount of food in the winter, so that we can survive, because, until the spring, food will be scarce. Every animal, while preparing for the winter, increases its fat reserves, taking advantage of the abundance of food in the autumn, in order to deal with the lack of food that will come in the winter. In fact, some animals that hibernate may even double their fat reserves, in order to have enough energy during hibernation, in order to survive and stay warm. Researchers have isolated the genes responsible for these procedures and they have detected them in humans too. These genes may help us explain why we exhibit some of the same dietary habits. The effect of these genes that are activated in the autumn is not small at all. There is research that estimates a difference of 222 calories in food intake compared to the spring. We seem to be genetically programmed to prepare for the lack of food in the winter. But this doesn't happen anymore. Some researchers believe that fructose plays a very significant role in this procedure. Fructose is one half of sugar. There's research that shows that these procedures in animals are activated with the overconsumption of fructose that can be found in ripe fruit and honey. Fructose activates the genes that enable the fat to double for the preparation for hibernation. They also believe that fructose is largely responsible for the uncontrollable obesity pandemic these days. I can't say I totally agree with this conclusion, but I agree that we have to cut down on sugar in the autumn, as well as all year round. It's worth noting that nowadays that we can control how much light we want all through the day and how much heat we want, our body still exhibits these dietary habits. The question is what we can do to protect ourselves from this phenomenon. The solution is information. If we know that our body will function this way and that this mechanism is powerful and primitive, we should make a more conscious effort to avoid foods with low nutritional value that make us fatter. In a previous video, I've talked about the foods protecting from weight gain, and it's worth watching. You should definitely cut down on sugar and sweet foods and processed foods that are rich in processed fats and carbohydrates. Moreover, if you start a diet in the autumn, you should change your expectations and adjust them to chronobiology. You should be really careful during the Christmas holidays and you should know that after this dietary obstacle, you have eight months until the summer to achieve the weight that is ideal for your health. In the long-term, this will benefit you, because you'll control yourselves during the holidays and the road to summer will be easy. If you thought this was interesting, please give us a thumbs up. Share it with people who you think might find it interesting and subscribe to our channel in order to get notified when we upload a video. You can also suggest subjects in the comment section. Thank you very much!