Skip to content
SHOP NOW

131: Breakthrough Fat Science for Dieters & Health Geeks – with Dr. Sylvia Tara

subscribe to the awesome health course on itunes

“You have an extraordinary resume!” – Wade T. Lightheart, after introducing Dr. Tara, listing her incredible achievements. 

Yes, Dr. Sylvia Tara does indeed have an impressive and unique resume. Here’s the thing: our guest on this episode holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UC-San Diego AND an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. 

Why did a chemist want to study business? 

“I like to think big.” That is how Dr. Tara explains her impressive degrees.  

“When I got my Ph.D. and did research on fat, every tiny atom of that fat, focusing on the intricacies of how that fat interacts with the human body – there’s another part of me that likes to think big. What does this mean for people? What does this scientific information mean for the masses? What does it mean from a business sense and economic sense and a health sense? Putting biochemistry and business together helps me think. Thinking big helps me navigate in a big way.” 

Dr. Tara applied her natural curiosity to fat research years ago when she became frustrated with her weight loss struggles. She noticed how eating less and exercising more than her friends was not resulting in the weight loss she wanted. She saw how some friends could eat all day and stay skinny, while other friends had an easier time losing weight. 

Dr. Tara soon discovered that fat loss is a highly individualized thing. No program or diet will work the same for everyone. That became apparent. So she set out to learn all she could about fat – how it works and what people can do to reduce fat from their bodies. 

In this podcast, we cover:

  • How did Dr. Tara end up with both a Ph.D. in biochemistry and an MBA?
  • Why do women seem to gain more weight than men?
  • Did you know there are different types of body fat? Dr. Tara goes over each one and what each type of fat does
  • How body fat has a “voice” and talks to your body organs
  • Some little known facts about fat that are key to weight loss
  • Why Dr. Tara considers fat to be an “organ” like skin or your liver or heart
  • The relationship between your microbiome and fat
  • If you have struggled to lose weight, here is how to shed fat right away

What is “slow fat loss” or “fast fat loss?” What is a reasonable level to expect?

Dr. Tara: “That is so individual. I would love to lose a couple of pounds a week, which feels healthy – nothing terrible. But I personally cannot. So for me, a pound every couple of weeks, if I’m lucky. Other people can lose a few pounds a week. It depends on how much weight you have to lose. 

If you’re 300 pounds overweight, there’s no problem with losing five pounds a week or so. You should be able to do that. It’s all relative and on a scale.

Crash dieting, or fasting, is something many people do now with bone broth diets and things like that. As long as you’re getting nutrients for your brain to keep ticking in your body and you feel okay with it, keep going.

However, you can’t overcompensate by saying, ‘I fasted for a week, and now I’m going to eat everything. You have to be careful on that ramp back up. That’s what you have to watch. The body doesn’t like change. It doesn’t like to stop eating altogether and it doesn’t want to start eating altogether. It wants to get to homeostasis where it knows what to expect from its environment. That makes our body happy. 

That’s why when you start losing weight, lowering your fat, your body’s not happy. You took your body out of homeostatic comfort and threw it into uncertainty. Now, your body tries to maintain whatever it had – like more or less fat.”  

How does someone select the proper diet for them and avoid running in circles with fad diets? 

Dr. Tara: “It has to work for you psychologically, socially, and biologically. If you find a very restrictive diet that requires eating only certain foods, you have to buy special foods, there’s a lot of preparation, and you’re a busy person – you’re not going to stay on that diet. Or if you don’t like a lot of rules, you’re not going to keep on that diet. So, the diet has to work with your lifestyle. 

Look at fasting – some people want to eat dinner with their family. So fasting after lunch or something like that isn’t going to work. It would be best if you found a diet that works in all three dimensions and you have to be able to stay on it at least a year. 

So find something you can pick for the long run. Your lifestyle and psychological preferences matter. Low-carb diets are successful. If you eat meat and high fat and minimal carbs, you will lose weight. But it has such a high recidivism rate. People come off of that diet and gain more weight than before. 

Our bodies are so different individually. Keep a log of everything you’re doing. That is what I’ve done. It’s almost like self-directed dieting. Try a diet for a few weeks, and if you haven’t lost any weight, the diet is not suitable for you.” 

Dr. Tara is a top expert in the subject of fat within the human body. Stop wasting time picking the wrong diet and living in a state of disappointment with your body fat. Once you understand the different types of fat, how fat works, and how fat loss works for good  (not just temporarily), you can start your weight loss journey that will succeed long-term. 

Dive into this episode – these breakthrough fat facts could change your life. 

Episode Resources: 

Dr. Tara’s Book The Secret Life of Fat
Dr. Tara on Facebook
Dr. Tara on Instagram
Dr. Tara on Twitter

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade T. Lightheart: Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening. It's Wade T. Lightheart from BiOptimizers with another edition of the Awesome Health Podcast. And today we are going to talk about fats, all the different types of fat that is in your body, and some of the latest cutting edge research. There's some really surprising things about fat and it relates to what diet you might select. What's right for you. And today's guest Dr. Sylvia Tara, who has written an incredible amount of research on fat science and lifestyle. After she finally got fed up with eating less and exercising more than her slimmer friends throughout her life. We all know that sucks. Her experience has told her that there was more to weight loss than just calories in calories out as a biochemist, she was driven to get to the bottom of fats mysteries, and the reason it vexes us. In her book, the secret life of fat, she reveals the complex biology of fat, how it resists loss and what to do to remove stubborn fat. Dr. Tara holds a PhD in biochemistry from the university of California at San Diego and an MBA from the Wharton school of the university of Pennsylvania. She was consultant with McKinsey and company and has worked at the world's largest biotechnology companies. Dr. Tara has been featured in the wall street journal, New York times, new Yorker, the daily mirror women's health wired, scientific American, the Lancet, and she has been interviewed on various stations and it was recently featured in a Nova documentary. The truth about fat. Welcome to the show.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Hey, thanks. It's great to be here. What an introduction, thank you.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Well, you've got an extraordinary resume. Very interesting biochemistry with a master's degree at Wharton. Those don't necessarily as something that you would think on the list. So you have both a business mind and a chemistry mind before we get into the fat stuff a little bit about your background. How did you end up in both biochemistry and MBAs? Because that's probably one of the least likely education combos that we've had on the podcast.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: I like to think big, right? So, you know, when you get in your PhD and doing research, you're looking at a protein, every tiny Atom of that protein, you know what it is, and you're into the intricacies of details and how that proteins interacting with your body. But there's another part of me that likes to think big. What does this mean for people? Right. So what does that protein mean for the mass public? What does it mean from business sense and economic sense from a health sense? And so putting those two together, the biochemistry and the business helps me think, think big helps me navigate it in a big way.

 Wade T. Lightheart: It's very unique because a lot of people, I think people in the business world often poopoo the, the intellectual and a lot of people in the intellectual world poopoo the business world, but yet they work symbiotically together because great discoveries need marketing to get them out to the public because there's so many genius discoveries that happen in various scientific fields, then nobody's ever heard of. In fact Eric Weinstein on his podcast was lamenting about this fact about how many great discoveries have been in there and have been buried primarily because of this conflict between intellectuals in the business community. And of course today you've been gracious enough to help us share some of the things about fat that people don't know. Now, people are gonna say, well, I've read all about fats. I read this book and that fat, but we're talking something different. You're talking about the body fat in your body. What got you into the different, like this might be shocking to people there's different types of body fat in the body.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yep. Then some of it you really need, you really need to stay alive. You need to function and you need it to be healthy. So that that's really an eye-opener. And you know, when I started this research, the reason I started is because I myself have a lot of trouble losing fat. I have a body that loves to put fat on, loves to pack on pounds and only releases it with great difficulty. So if you put me on the same diet as someone else who is about my size, then other person, I almost guarantee you will lose weight faster than me. There's something about me. That's very resistant. I got so tired of this. I got so tired of this experience. I thought, you know, something's amiss here. There's something we don't understand about fat and bodies, and I'm going to research this. And so I did, I driven by my own personal experience.

Dr. Sylvia Tara: You know, for five years I pulled every piece of scientific literature out of the database. As I read everything, I talked to a whole bunch of resources about their fat and what they were finding out. And you know, what I was finding out was surprising. And so one thing I found out was, yes, there's different types of body fat in your body. Some of it is actually burning calories. It's not, it's not primarily storing calories. And also that fat is not just fat. Fat is an endocrine organ. It is releasing hormones to our body that our body desperately needs. And can't get from any other source. Therefore, your body wants to protect its fat. So when you try to lose it, you're in for a fight with your own body. Who's trying to keep it on and different people know we're all very individual different people have varying, you know, abilities to lose back for some bodies. They hold on much tighter. Somebody let it go faster. So you have to understand your body when you go on a diet. And for me, it helped me because I'm not frustrated. Now I've watched people lose weight faster than me all the time, but I get it. I get why, and it helps me be patient. And this helps me stay on a program.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Well, you know, I think you've probably covered a lot of this. And I think people are going to jump in and get your book, the secret life of fat, because one of the things I've noticed in you, you touched on something already right off the bat and that's as hormones in fat. So I have seen my background was in the bodybuilding industry and fitness industry and things like that when I got started and people get into what I would call dysfunctional levels of body fat, and to give people some context when I was competing for the Mr. Universe contest in 2003, I had to wait an extra souls on the bottom of my feet because the fat pads on my feet were depleted. I was so lean and ripped. And for a lot of young women who get caught in the cosmetic fitness industry, you know, they're doing fitness competitions. They're trying to be on the cover model of Instagram, things like that. Oftentimes they're doing irreparable damage to their indoctrine and hormone systems. Because they're doing this when they're in their early nineties, you know, early twenties when they're supposed to have buyer higher body fat levels. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between body fat and hormones? Because I think a lot of people just see fat is this horrible, ugly thing that we need to get rid of. And don't understand this innate relationship with fat in our bodies.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Oh, fat talks in your body. It has a voice. This is a very strange, but you know, it, it has a voice and there's different tissues in your body that have ears to hear this voice. So fat is sending signals, right? That's what I mean by a voice is sending signals to different tissues and different organs in your body. Those organs receive that signal and they behave differently once they get that signal from fat. So one of those organs is bones, right? Bones are actually, they thicken and get hired density when you have more body fat. Part of it is the weight bearing effect. You know, a fat, a part of it is also a signaling they're signaling between bone and fat that helps them build each other. That's very interesting. Wow. Yeah. Brain size is linked to fat, right? People who have anorexia nervosa or the very lean body fat collection reduced brain volume, right.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And sometimes have cognitive issues. So, you know, fat through its hormones, it releases estrogen, right? And that's what you're getting at. When you talking about, you know, women, when they lose too much fat, they lose estrogen. They can't reproduce. And I've talked to some sports medicine, doctors, reproductive doc medicine doctors, and they see women with this issues. They're either athletes or ballerinas or they're leading disorder. And they have to get them back to a nice, healthy, normal, fat level for them to reproduce adequately, knowing their lactate, all of that depends on your body fat. But now what I found out is as fat through its hormones, like leptin, adiponectin estrogen, it's affecting so much in your body. It's affecting your brain size, your bones, it's affecting your ability to heal wound healing, right. Is linked to fat. So was your immune system, your thyroid productivity and your ability to reproduce as well.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: So just vast effect. Think of it. Like you're like a gland, right? Like if you had thyroid hormone, right? Like your thyroid gland releases thyroid hormone, you obviously need thyroid hormone to maintain your body temperature and a whole bunch of things. If you try to lose your thyroid hormone, your body will give you a fat pick-up fight because it does lose that. It's the same for fat because releasing these hormones, your body needs, it's actually going to protect it when you try to lose it. So think of it as that important of an organ.

 Wade T. Lightheart You know, I was trying to think of one surprising thing that you could think about a fat, but you're already, you've already given us some of them. What are some, what are some surprising things that people don't know about fats beyond what you've just said, this I've never actually heard I'm in this industry for over 30 years. I've never heard of the relationship between fat and bones. The cognitive stuff I knew because I've experienced it when you are staying at is very extremely low body fat level the impairment on cognitive function is very, very real. It's legit. Also I've seen a cascade most often, your hormone levels really go haywire. It is a guy. It was very hard to maintain higher levels of testosterone of when my fat levels got really, really low. It would dry. There's a point where body fat, when it goes up, it starts to diminish. And then there's kind of like a sweet spot. And then if you go below that, then your testosterone drops. What are some other things that we don't know about this organ of fat?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It controls your brain that controls your mind. So fat loses a hormone called leptin, right? And left them circulate in your blood. It goes to your hypothalamus and they actually can control your thinking. So when people start losing fat, they start getting lower levels of leptin in circulation and your brain detects this. And it goes into overdrive because of think so, my goodness, we're losing fat. There's not enough nutrition in the environment we have to do something. Your appetite is sent into absolute overdrive, a looking for food. So, so one thing I learned is all lot of dieters or coaches or dieting programs will say, okay, you'll never feel hungry on this diet, not ever, right. And if you feel hungry or doing something wrong in my diet, what I learned is that's not really true because as you start to lose fat, right, your brain is detecting this, and it's going to make you have a bigger appetite.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: You're more driven to find food. And they do experiments with this. And even people who lose fat through liposuction, right? It's not even diet. They are more prone nto put more on the plate. They're more food seeking. They'll look at food and they do FMR images of people's brains. So they're excited to re centers actually light up really bright when they see food compared to people who've not lost weight. Wow. And so it's almost like fat is controlling itself. Like it sees itself shrinking. It's like no way, right? It goes to your brain saying, do something help me here? And your brain will drive you to go and seek food. So that's one reason that you're hungrier as you start losing weight. So you're not doing anything wrong necessarily. This is your body's response to lowering fat. The other way that that protects itself is that it actually can lower your metabolism by 22%, right?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It shifts to a number of things that affect your thyroid hormone, right? Slows down your metabolism. It actually gets your muscles to switch right to a more efficient way of burning calories. And so people who've, you know, say 10% of their weight, they're at about 22% fewer calories that they need compared to someone who has not lost weight. So picture it like this. If there's someone who's 170 and lost 20 pounds to get to 150, when you compare that person to the person, who's 150 naturally the person who lost 20 pounds has 22% fewer calories. And the person who is at one 50 naturally, there's a caloric penalty for losing some fat. And that can last for years. I think it's been studied up to six years for some people doesn't really go away. So you gotta be on your diet for a long time if you're one of those people. So I always tell people, pick a diet. You really like, because it's not going to be like, yeah, I'm on this for three months and I'm going back to normal. You might be on this for a very long time.

 Wade T. Lightheart: I think that you, you illustrate something. Can you talk about how maybe you said that fat communicates with your body? Well, how does it communicate? How does it tell that story? If you will, or tells your body what to do or downright, like, what is the mechanism? You can go ahead and get a little geeky if you want to. Because some of our more scientifically driven listeners will be interested in that.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah, but there's receptors, right? So your hypothalamus is going to have receptors for lectins. So when leptin comes out of fat, goes into your blood roams around and goes into your brain, it's got, you know, your hypothalamus will have the receptor hears it. So now that it's bonded and made that contact, there's a whole signaling cascade in the cell that leads to a number of things. And one of the changes is behavior. You get more food seeking, right? Same for your skeletal muscles, right. They sense leptin. Even, even for your, like your T cells, right? They have receptors as well for leptin. So there's leptin receptors, right? The ears, if you will, on a number of cells in your body. So when your fat releases leptin and they bind to the receptors, it induces a signal cascade that causes a different kind of behavior, right?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: So there's ears, right? That the ear is the receptor on the tissue. And the voice is the signal right, left and traveling throughout your body. And when you, it declines then, right? Those receptors like, Hey, I'm used to being stimulated. I'm not hearing anything. Right. And then they start to internalize and that also creates an effect on your body. They're not getting this leptin anymore. So again, your skeletal muscles, your thyroid hormone, right? Even your T cells, your brain, all of it will react to that. It does not mean you can't lose weight. It does not mean it's dangerous to lose weight. You can, just know that these are some of the reactions your body is going to go through. It's going to drive you to look for food. It's going to try to lower your metabolism, stay with it. Don't let that throw you off.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And you're not failing on your diet. Your body is responding to having less fat and not liking the idea of having less fat necessarily. And these effects will happen. Whether you lose weight through low carb diets, through fasting through a high carb diet, or even through liposuction, if you just have your fat removed, all of this will happen. So that, that was a big aha moment for me to that for one that was that tricky, right? And that complicated. And also to learn that no matter how you lose your fat, you get some of these effects.

 Wade T. Lightheart: I think that's a, you make a good point. So many people say, yeah, you don't feel hungry on your diet or things like that. And that might be true early on, but a certain point, I remember my coach said, you need to redevelop your relationship with hunger. If you want to be at a success of the high levels of the bodybuilding sport or fitness sport. The other thing was, is I had a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. David Hawkins that talked about when someone's feeling the sensation of hunger, not to call it hunger to redefine that, to kind of start redefining how you called that because this general aptitude of the body to want to eat more when you start losing. And I've certainly experienced that. And it's probably one of the biggest challenges, especially as we get older is like, now I'm kind of like, ah, do I really want to go with the hungry? Now I'll just go eat for the, you know what I mean? It's, it's very easy to check out of that. You call fat an Oregon and I can, you kind of share, like, most people will say, Hey, the largest organ in your body is your skin. How do you say fat as an organ?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It's an Organ in a large way, the same way that skin is. Right? So if you take a piece of what it's square of skin, it's just a piece of skin tissue, right. No big deal, but skin and is fatality are all around your body is acting like an Oregon. Same for your fat, right? If you just take a chunk of fat out. So what, it's a big blob of fat, not a big deal, but in its totality, it is acting like an Oregon. Like I said, it's releasing those hormones, estrogen, right? Lectin adiponectin is another one we can talk about. Those hormones are having vast effects all over your body, right? So, fat is interacting. It's communicating right with other tissues in your body to keep a homeostasis for us. So it's really important. And the reason this is only coming out recently is because fat research has only been funded recently.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It's only since the obesity epidemic that the NIH and other funding bodies that said, we've got to put some money into this and understand what's going on with that. So really like I probably started in 1980s or so is when fat research started to take off. So our knowledge about fat is fairly new and I'm so curious to see what else we're going to find out about fat, because that's, that's, there's more than one kind. It's very clever, right? It's interactive within our bodies. It's not just sitting there like the nurse storage bin, right. It's metabolically active. It's, it's it's interacting with us in a way it's trying to help us. So even when you're getting fatter, your facts, trying to help you, if you didn't have all these extra nutrients floating around, right. And if you don't have fat, where did they go?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: They lodge in your hearts. They lodge in your liver. They go to places where they shouldn't be. And there are people who have defective fat, right? So people live with lipodystrophy, who can't create fat and where do extra nutrients go in bubbles under their skin and blisters right. In liver, in their hearts. So your fat is keeping them healthy. And we really have an obligation, I think, to understand our fats you know, help it help us if you will. Right. So yes, some people will have more fat. You can actually have a little extra fat as long as it's stored and healthy areas, but it's like the subcutaneous layer and you can still, you know, go on. So it's, it's best not to be very overweight, but if you have a little extra fat, it's not the end of the world, either.

 Wade T. Lightheart: You talked about fat, and you kind of sort a referenced a few different types of fat. What is some of the fats, like, can you maybe give us a list of the different types of fats and what those fats particularly do?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah. So I think the one that probably your listeners know about is visceral fat versus subcutaneous fat. So the subcutaneous fat is that fat right underneath your skin layer. Right. and that's, the white fat is the kind of fat we want to lose when we get too much fat. For sure. And that's the endocrine organ also, there's also a visceral fat, right? That fat underneath your stomach wall, that's really packed in tight against your internal organs. That's the really dangerous fat that, you know, gets really inflamed when we get too much of it. And once it's inflamed, it's sending upside the kinds and all kinds of inflammatory signals to your body. It's the kind that leads to diabetes and heart disease, right? And all kinds of things. That's your visceral fat, there's also Brown fat, right. And that is fat. That is it's Brown from a high density of mitochondria.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It burns calories to keep you warm. Right. And so this is interesting. They've tried injecting Brown fat into white fat to see if we know it helps them lose weight and in animals, it does. And then there's also a fourth that that's more newly discovered. That's beige fat, and that's fast that is capable of turning Brown when you exercise. Right. So, you know, as it turns out like fat loss, he gets fat loss. So like when you exercise, not only are you burning calories, but you're also building bone mass and you're building muscle mass, you're building tissues that burn more calories. You're also turning some beige fat Brown, right. And that Brown fat is going to burn more calories too. Right. So then you get like kind of weight loss, it gets weight loss through a number of different avenues and the opposite you're sitting there sedentary. You're not, not building good tissues and you're not converting your base fat to Brown. And you're also, it's easier to gain the more you, right.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Yeah. It's very much like how your muscle fiber types can change from the super fast Twitch to then kind of fast Twitch. But if you continue on, you can kind of flip over into you develop more mitochondria and, you know, you get into the endurance type. So it seems it would stand to reason that fats are also have this kind of a morphism kind of what kind of thing. It's really, really cool. I love this. This is so I can't wait to get deeper into the book. I think the question that everybody's sitting here going is like, okay, I'm one of those people that just can't lose fat. Like, you know, my family's big boned or we're all though, you know, like my family, I say older, big boned, or they're the, those people they're plump family, or they're all sorts of kind of colloquial descriptions, depending on what part of the world that you're from. And you'll even see this with high level athletes. You'll see high level athletes. Great examples of the UFC. You'll see these guys that what completely out of shape, but can have no problem going five rounds of like combat fighting or endurance swimmers and things like that.What's going on there?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: There is genetics associated with that. Right? So, and I about this and because I've had such a hard time with that, I looked at all avenues of how people gain weight. So I didn't just look at fat itself and what the heck is it doing right then? But all the different ways we gained fats that a lot of people don't think about, obviously there's gluttony, that's your biggest, easiest way to gain.

 Wade T. Lightheart: [Inaudible] Folks supporting event comes on and the chips go down my face.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: People who can eat like that, and don't really have a problem. And in fact, they're skinny. They have trouble gaining. It's really individual, but there are, there are genetic types, right? That, that, you know, you could be one of those skinny types. I can eat a lot or you can be this type that, that barely eats, you know, sufficiently, and you can be happy. And I write about this and there's different examples of it. I mean, one is the Pima Indians that have been researched. Right? Yeah. So the ones in Arizona, I started eating the foods of Caucasians when the Caucasians settled nearby. So they used to farm, they use of hunt, they used to be active and you kind of whole foods. And then as more processed foods came into their environment, they became obese. And yet some of the Caucasians who were eating the same foods around them, it did not become obese.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: They were normal looking. And so of course, you know, the questions, well, what went on here and the theory is that, you know, this, this line of Indians had experienced famine in their history. They were nomadic, they lived in deserts, famine would come around every 10 years. Their bodies evolved in the way that they had a very thrifty genotype. So whatever was, was coming into their system, the body was very eager to not waste a thing, right. Just put everything into fat. So in this easy process, food came around, their bodies, put it into fat that they didn't waste it. And that's interesting, and there's, there's also specific genes that have been identified and studied now, right? One is IRS one versus a, and B there's FTO that affects appetite. There's twin studies that are really interesting. Two twins will sometimes gain at the same amount and in the same locations, right.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Compared to other people, even though they, they put them on the same regimen as they do for other twin sets. So there's a, there's a genetic component of things, but there's also just like a microbiome component, right? We have bacteria in our bodies, depending on your distribution, you could be getting more calories out of your food compared to less, you know, age is another factor. We will lose our fat burning hormones with age. Having said all of this, it doesn't, can't lose weight that doesn't want to make that clear. I think it does get harder, especially as you age, if you're from a, you know, disadvantaged genotype safe, right. One that's very thrifty that wants to store everything, gender females, right. Gain weight by far easier. And I have a whole chapter about men versus women in my book as well. You know, older, it's harder to, you just have to be more on it.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: You just have to be more diligent and you have to wait a lot longer for that fat to leave. You it's like for any coaches, if you have a 22 year old male versus a 55 year old female, right. Who's like 50 pounds. Overweight has had a couple of kids that woman's going to lose at a much slower rate on the same diet at that 22 year old male. And I've worked with coaches at times. So they were, they were sure I was cheating on something, you know, on a diet. I'm not, it just takes me honestly, about two weeks to lose pounds and reckless the way my body is. It doesn't mean I give up, I just have to wait longer for the results to come in.

 Wade T. Lightheart: One of the areas, I think that's fascinating. You just touched on it for a second is the relationship between your microbiome and fat. And so there's been research where they've used different types of probiotics. They've inserted them into people and they gained body fat. And then there's some, they put another probiotics, bacteria, cultures inside the person and they lost body fat. What is this relationship between the microbiome and fat?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah, this is a really interesting one. It's also in our control, I'll say, so we have a distribution of bacteria in our gut. And depending on what that distribution is, what type of bacteria you have in your gut, there are some that really can extract a lot of calories out of our food. They can break down polysaccharides, they can make them very digestible. They can produce sugars. They actually will help you gain fat, right gain weight, and absorb all those calories. There's other kinds of bacteria that, you know, they'll let a lot more pass. They won't absorb it all a lot more. We'll go in as waste. And you know, what they find is that people have a high diversity of fruits and vegetables in their diet, their microbiome tilts towards one that lets a lot more go out as waste, right? It doesn't try to fight with the food to digest all that really hard fiber stuff more will go out as waste.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: So I get fat loss, I gets fat loss. Cause if you eat more fruits and vegetables, right, raw fruits and vegetables in particular, you know, you're getting less calories and you're feeling full. Cause you're getting a lot of fiber at the same time. You're getting your microbiome to turn into one that's tilted towards one that absorbs less calories from your food. So fat loss is to getting fat loss. On the other hand, people have lot of processed food like flour and sugar. Their microbiome tends to tilt towards one. That's very efficient at getting all the calories out and producing more sugars as well. And so weight gain, right? You're eating those kinds of foods to begin with, which isn't great. They help you gain weight. And then you're tilting your microbiome to one that's highly efficient and pulling calories out. And so then that gain to get fat gain. So it's almost like that that bowl of Cheerios, it says a hundred calories per bowl. For some people it's 80 calories, depending on your microbiome for other people, it's 120 calories, right? There's a variation there.

 Wade T. Lightheart: This is the big factor. I think a lot of people in my coaching that you would have to kind of gauge where that person is and then see their diet and then see regulate up and down. And there's, there's very big variances between people's metabolic rates on the same diet. And that's because of you're saying that's because of the bacteria and how it efficiently processes, those particular types of calories, right. Is that, would that be accurate?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: That's one factor. The other factor is going to be genetic straight. The other factor is going to be gender and age. You've got to think of all four of those things.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Let's talk about that for a second. Talk about genetics. I was just funny enough, I was just on the phone yesterday with my genetics and epigenetic experts because I do these kind of full bore health profiles. Every year I go through heavy metals, I go through genetics, we go through hormones, we do blood glucose monitoring. We do all these kinds of cool, fun things in the biohacking community. And we were going through the specific types of genetics, relate it to certain risk factors and how to offset it with food and, you know, elements that I needed to be mindful of. For example, different vitamins. I have to be conscious of because I don't process some vitamins as well. Toxicity, you know, I'm not as good at detoxing, some toxins and some I'm really good at talk about the role of genetics and fat. And how do you tweak that? Or what's some common things that you might know.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so we talked about the genome types, right? Like the Pima Indians and there's other races. Also, if you've come from a history of, of like fasting or famine, you very well could have one of these really thrifty genome types that help you absorb more calories. But then there's a couple others that have been identified and studied. Now. I mean, one is the IRS one gene, depending on which variant you have, people have the, I think it's to be very in the store more fast, right? So there'd be cleaned their blood in a way they're healthier. They don't have a lot of floating triglycerides around because their body's very efficient at taking them out of the blood and putting into fat. So they tend to be a little fatter but healthier. And then there's the FTO gene, right? There's a certain variation of the FTO gene causes a higher appetite in people, right? When you give, when you, they have this very anti, you put them in a buffet, they tend to load up their plate with more energy dense foods like cookies and chips and things like that. So, so, and again, your fat research is kind of new. So there's new, new learnings coming all the time, new genes being new variants genes being discovered. That'll tell you, you know, how your body's going to interact with food and how it might store. One thing that helps though, even with genetics and coming from the twin studies and all the other studies, the exercise seems to mitigate the effects of genes, right? So people with FTO or IRS one, if they even do moderate exercise, like biking for half an hour or some, some vigorous gardening or something like that, the effect of the gene seems to attenuate, right?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: So that's, that's one way to keep it keep that down. So you can still, like I said, even though life might be harder for you, depending on the hand you've been dealt, right? If it's genes or gender you know, age, whatever it might be, there are still ways you can lose weight. And that's what the book is all about really is that, you know, if you're like me and the reason I started writing, because I have that problem, I have very stubborn, fat, right. My body that loves to gain and doesn't want to give it up. And so I looked at all angles, what could be causing that? And it kind of knocks out. And any reason you might've had to not believe you could lose weight because you can, again, it's just, it's just, it's slower and you have to be more persistent and you have to work a little bit more. You have to exercise a little bit more, being incredibly careful about what it is you're eating in order for that week to go. But if you're not, you know, you can't lose weight. Even if you've got a stubborn fat body.

 Wade T. Lightheart: We'll keep going. The book for the listeners who just might've joined us as a secret life of fat we're getting into it. I'm going to ask the big question here, of course, that we get all the time that it's, why do women seem to gain more fat than men?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: That's a whole chapter. And of course I had to look that up because I'm married to a skinny guy who eats whatever he wants and always has, and has never changed the size of his jeans ever. He has those college size jeans on still, but it's unfair. And it's frustrated girl babies gain more fats, right after birth. I mean, it's noticeable at birth. They've studied like 5,000 babies, right. Then they do body that measures. And even at birth girls have more fat than boys. And probably even before birth, they have more fat than boys. So women partition nutrients differently, right? So like when we eat, there's some amount of nutrients that just get partitioned in various tissues. It's almost like a 401k, right? Like your, your paycheck and do a 401k, some certain amount you're putting into savings no matter what happens, right?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: There's some certain amount that's going into this 401k and bodies do the same thing a little bit. They partition nutrients and women tend to partition on more nutrients into fat than men. In fact, they store fat at two to three times the rate at that men do it keeps them healthier to be honest. So they'll be chubbier but healthier. So again, that that's not floating around their blood, it's not lodging in their liver. It's stowing in the fat tissue where it belongs. Right. And, and it happens fairly quickly. So that's one reason. Another reason is that you know, women's bodies depend on estrogen. They depend on fat for estrogen to say after menopause, right? So once your ovaries stop producing as much estrogen, your fat produces it, that's one theory about why middle-aged women in particular seem to have a hard time losing fat.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Again, your body is dependent on it and protective of it. And then women's bodies respond differently, right to fat. So they interact differently with fat. So when we exercise say when we're fasting overnight or we're exercising hard or depleting, our energy source women's bodies will reach for fat more, right? They'll they'll burn fat. When you're done exercising, when you eat something they'll, they'll store fat back at a rate of two to three times as fast as men will, whereas men's bodies will reach for glycogen more than fat, right? So men don't have such an open door relationship with her, that things don't go in as much and they don't come out as much. So women's bodies are quite different. And when women do exercise a lot as well, they release more grelin from their stomach's like relevant as a hormone in your stomach that causes hunger and women, after a tough bout of exercise will release about 33% more grelin than men.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And so if you let them go to buffet, let them eat afterward. They of course have a higher tendency to overcompensate because they're really, really hungry. And so, you know, as a woman, you just have to know, you will have a higher fat level. It's actually not normal and natural for you to do that. And women's health is dependent on fat, especially in the teenage years, right? That bone growth is dependent on the healthy fat level, brain size brain volumes. And the ability to reproduce, right, as a pendant on a healthy fat level nature has made fat more important in women compared to men. Right? And even when you look at the fasting things like the answer keys research, right? I mean, men have to go to a much, much lower fat level nor to have health ill health effects compared to women. They'll start having it faster. Right. on that thing, on that effect. So anyway, I thought that was very interesting. There's our body's nature is designed it, that we just store more fat. We gain it easier. We don't let it go as much. And when there's a signal that fat might be going like exercise, there's these signals that come out of our bodies that say, please eat something more right now. And so this just design

 Wade T. Lightheart: As a fat researcher, I think. And I mean, I've been in a health and wellness industry, my whole life, like 30 years professionally, what are some of the myths around weight loss? Because you hear so much conflicting information. And a lot of it is I would say, not nuanced. In other words, you know, like you said, you know, a dietary practice for a 22 year old male is very much different than maybe a post-menopause female in her mid fifties. What are some of those myths that you blow up in this book?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: The biggest one is that one diet can fit. All right. Well, somebody into the dieting industry, the way you sell a lot of books or a lot of programs is that you, you put it out there and you say, this is going to cure all your ills, right? If you do this diet, you won't be hungry. You'll lose 20 pounds in 20 days. You'll feel great. And you know, if it's, if you're not having all these effects, you're doing something wrong. You're not following diet the right way. And it is so incorrect based on all my research, right? When you start to look at really how individual people are, right. And there's research that show, they study you know, blood sugar levels. After people eat, some people can eat a muffin, nothing happens. There's no change in their blood sugar at all. Other people have like, you know, a bite of a muffin and their blood sugars going right through the roof.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: We're very individual. And how we respond to food, how our bodies respond to how much fat we store. We have different propensities for storing fat. So one diet it's not going to work for everybody. Right. And I actually just put out a course now to go along with the book, that's a little bit more kind of how to implement some of all these findings, because I know that's the hardest part, but if you have stubborn fat, like I do, you have to ratchet up. And so I've been on diets where I've actually gained weight, but for awhile, there was a dieting fat that you're supposed to graze all day. You exercise a lot and raise all day. I think they do this, the biggest things as well. I gained weight on those things. And of course, you know, the coach thinks I'm doing it wrong.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And you know, I must be cheating all the time. How else could this possibly happen? And none of those things were true because I have really stubborn body fat. What I've opted for, what I've noticed works really is intermittent fasting, right? That's one of my, the most sure-fire ways. And when you extend that overnight fast, right? There's some hormonally, right? You start to make use of your hormones to help you bust through your fat. So growth hormone, which peaks at night as a great fat Buster, we have lower levels as we age. And if you eat like close to bedtime, you actually mitigate the levels of growth hormone, and they're not as effective. So if you can stay hungry before you go to bed a little bit after bed, you have more of in circulation. You bust through that fat making use of testosterone, right?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: There's certain like exercises. If you, if you can do squats, you know, things that are kind of weight lifting, right? Some [Inaudible] you'll get a little bit more testosterone too. So, so try to make, you have to be a little more clever. If you're, you know, a bit older with very stubborn fat, you have to pull a couple levers that people who are younger, I didn't know your diet as much I don't have to do. And so that's what the book is about in the course, more so about just how to adjust, how to make a diet, right work for you. If it's not, if you're not losing weight on it, what are the things you can do to up the anti such as intermittent fasting, right? To get it, to finally start losing some pounds.

 Wade T. Lightheart: What are some of the things that you have found that helps people select the right diet for them? And I have a topic it's actually coming up in our next book, which I called the bell curve, the BS of the bell curve. And what happens is every time you jump on a dietary site, you'll see all of what I would call the people at the far extreme level of the bell curve, which would this, the diet that helped them overcome some serious medical condition. And they lost body fat and their IQ jumped 10 points, and they're doing cartwheels. And then conversely, if you go to the comment section on their social media, you see these people, I got sick, I developed this and, you know, and I would say they were on the other end of the bell curve. And then you have this, you know, this distribution of people in the middle, but we always see the extremes. And then the people in the low end, end up going to another diet and said, I tried that diet. I had tried that diet and this diet to fix it, you know? And you see this cycle hoping you're, you know, it goes on these cycles every four or five years, the rise and fall of dietary fads. How do you avoid going on the circus ride of diets and select the right one for you the person.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah. I mean, it has to work for you psychologically, socially and biologically, right? So if there's a diet, you don't like, right. It's very restrictive. You know, you have to eat certain foods, you have to buy special foods. There's a lot of prep and, and you're a really busy person. You're not going to stay on that diet. Right. Or if you don't like a lot of rules, right. You're not going to stay on that diet. So it has to work for you and your lifestyle. But so my whole thing of in fasting, it doesn't work for everyone because some people really want to eat dinner with their families. Right. So they're not going to do what I do, but it's okay. You got to find one that works in all three dimensions and you have to be able to stay on it for over a year, at least.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Right. So, so find something you can pick for the long run. So your lifestyle matters, your psychological preferences matter. And so doesn't matter if you're losing weight on the scale or not. Right. So I think that's one of the big problems. I mean, Atkins diet is successful, right? If you eat all meats and high fat and very little cardiac you'll lose weight, it has such a high recidivism rate. People can stay on it and they come off and they gain more than before, because psychologically that's really hard to stay on. Right. And socially too. So, so find one that, you know, you can manage for a really long time. But the other thing is because bodies are so different, we respond and interact with food differently, keep a log of everything you're doing. This is what I've done. I've learned to do. And it's almost like a, you know, self-directed dieting, but you know, try a diet and do it for a couple of weeks or three weeks if you've lost nothing.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: I don't know that that diet is working for you. Right. You probably need a couple levers to up the ante and the levers you can use. Right. One is that overnight fasting window, just start widening it. Right? Like if you're eating at eight o'clock all right, fine. Stop eating at six. Now, like just, just experiment, keep a log of everything you're doing and experiment. The other thing is I think, processed food. So a lot of foods that are supposed to be healthy, right. That come in a package, you warm it up or whatever, and they're called healthy. I don't know what's in food anymore. Like there's so much filler, right? That there's so much like gelatin and carbs and preservatives that you don't necessarily know what you're eating. So you might think you're eating a chicken breasts, but it's not, it's something else completely.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And so the more you can really control what it is, you eat cook. It's not that hard to cook. Just take a piece of chicken, microwave it, if you have to, but know what's in your food, because you might feel like you're following a plan, but you're not, you know, who knows what you just say, really? You know, that's, that's another lever. You know, high intensity interval training, I think is another lever. That's a very interesting one where you really shock your body right. Into some exercise. And I've seen that also busts through fat at times. So experiment, right. And the first thing is to look at, or your eating window or your fasting window, careful of the carbs that you have coming in, really monitor meal to meal, what you're eating, and then you might see some hidden carbs. Once you have a log, cut those out, you might be surprised at what you're eating, just unconsciously. And then also try and try the exercising on hungry, if you can, right? Like either when you wake up if you can stand, it makes me hungry all day. So I don't do it in the morning. Sometimes I do it at night when I'm a little bit fasted and I just go to bed. And so I don't have to feel hungry afterwards, but, but use those levers. Right. And if you're clever about it and you can keep a log and you're diligent, you can make a diet work for you.

 Wade T. Lightheart: What are some of the kind of pieces of advice that you would suggest to someone that, you know, maybe has been struggling for a long time with different diets and stuff, but they're like, you know what? I really want to get this right. I'm want to lose weight right now. I don't know what to do. What are some of the standby things that you need to put into place?

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: I think for one is there's two things. It's be patient and just forgive yourself, right? This is not an easy thing to do. And dieting and bodies are very complex. And just because you tried a whole bunch of diets, they didn't work. Doesn't mean that that one can't work. And if you go in with a positive attitude, you're going, gonna do better at it. So there's something called dichotomous thinking. And I read about the psychology of losing fat as well, because it's really important. I mean, we need a couple of mental strength to go on a diet. When people make decisions all day or they're worn out, they have less mental strength, restraint, right. They tend to cave. And that's why a lot of people cave at dinner because you've had a hard day. Right? And so it's a muscle in a way, a little power.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: So the time in your life has to be right. You have to totally believe you can do this. And you have to be able to, to feel what it's like, which we know we're going to be hungrier because we have less leptin. We know our metabolisms down now because we have less left. And again, you're going to go through this. If you're going through a divorce, if you're going through a job, change, it don't start dieting right now. Right. Just wait, wait, wait until you're mentally. You have the bandwidth, right? The strength to take this on. No, it's going to take a really long time and don't beat yourself up. If someone's losing weight faster than you are, you haven't lost a pound for two weeks. It's going to take a long time for that wall to crack, just stay with it. Right. Find a diet that works for you, that you can stay on forever.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And it's a lifestyle now. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that. And just, and there's something called dichotomous thinking where people like fail or they go off a diet, they feel like a failure. They feel like they've lost. There's no point in staying on. You'd be surprised at how many that ruins. Right. And so some of the people try to come off it's because all they came off cause they couldn't stand it. But then they came off a second day, the third day. Now they gained the weight back and now they just feel like a failure. And I failed on my diet, but you didn't really, I mean, you made a conscious decision to go off and you had ice cream or whatever. So, so you did, if you can forgive yourself faster for that reach and get right back on, it's not a big deal.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Everyone comes off their diets sometime. And in a way, because our willpower needs a little bit of a break here and there it's not so bad to come off once in a while an adult, the key is to get right back on and not lose your confidence with it. And so I think that, you know what I'd say to people, we'll try it again. And again is I have a chapter called mind over fat, take a look at it. Right. But there's ways to psych yourself up to get on something and stay on it. Right. Even if it's slow and even if you've come off, like there's ways to just stay very tenacious on your diet and naturally the key, I think for long-term weight loss.

 Wade T. Lightheart: I like that term. You bring up slow and fast. So what would you say is slow fat loss. And what would you say as fast fat loss? They would say that three times for both women and for men over that, that sustainable, I should say. Cause sometimes, you know, we'll see people go on these like extreme starvation diets and lose a bunch of weight and then they triggers a big gain afterwards. So what do you feel has been, is a reasonable level to work towards

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Again, that's so individual, right? I mean, for me, I'd love to be able to lose a couple pounds a week, which feels healthy. Feels like nothing bad, but I can't, it won't happen. So for me, it's like, you know, a pound every couple of weeks. And that's, if I'm lucky there are other people that can lose a few pounds a week and then it depends on how much weight you have to lose as well. If you're 300 pounds overweight, there's no problem with losing five pounds a week or so. Right. You should be able to do that. It's all relative. And it's all on a scale. No, I think crash dieting like fasting, you know, things like that. I mean, fasting is something a lot of people do now with the bone broth diets and things like that. If you're getting the nutrients you need for your brain to keep ticking in your body and keep going and you feel okay with it.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It's great. But you can't overcompensate later and say, yeah, I fast for a week now I'm going to eat everything. I can, you have to be careful on that ramp back. And that's what you have to watch. The body doesn't like change, right? It doesn't want to, you know, stop eating altogether and it doesn't want to start eating altogether. It wants to get to homeostasis where it knows what to expect from its environment. And that's when it's happy. That's why when you start losing weight, right? And you start like lowering your fat, your body's not happy. Cause if you've taken it out of its homeostatic environment for everything, it was controllable and you were to expect. And when you throw it into uncertainty like that, it tries to maintain whatever it had, whether it was more fat or less fat, right? Like after I've lost weight, I was able to, like, I remember at Christmas time I was able to eat more at Christmas and sheep. I didn't gain weight either. My body didn't want to change on direction either. Almost want it to stay the same. So I think if he could be gentle, right, if you're going to go lose weight, I wouldn't necessarily do night and day. You know, like eating 5,000 calories one day fasting [Inaudible] , I would go into it slowly. Let your body adjust with you on the diet.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Yeah. And one of my old coaches who was one of the first guys to distinguish about metabolism and the consequences of extreme dieting and how it can, he was one of the first guys that coined metabolic damage many, many, many years ago, particularly in the fitness industry specifically. And one of the interesting experience you talk about him. He's been very lean for a very long period of time and he cites an event. He took a two week vacation to a Rubio. Now Aruba. Now he's been in a, what I would say, an optimized metabolism for at least 30 years. At least he went on this trip and on, on a mission to gain as much weight as he could. And he ate like a maniac during, for two weeks, didn't exercise, whatever comes back and he's less weight than he was when he went and proving this point about metabolism. It's not calories, it's not calories in calories out. It's about kind of mastering that communication between the fat in your body, your lifestyle, and then how you're going to go about losing or eliminate getting the excess fat or getting into an optimized state. Is there any other things that we haven't touched on today that you feel that would be great for people to learn about fat? And maybe I want you to shamelessly plug this book because it's so cool, this topic.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Let me think. I think we talked about a lot. We talked about the microbiome. We talked about genetics. You know, viruses can also cause fat, you can actually catch fat. It can be contagious.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Virus contagious.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: It can be.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Talk about this. Good. Can we have to do another lockdown. There's a fat virus coming around.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: There are viruses that cause it's been not about an animals from a long time, right? The rat sarcoma virus was known to cause fatness in mice. No sorry that was chickens. Actually the canine distemper virus causes fatness in mice. And so like they've known for a while that some viruses cause obesity, they can cause a high level of badness. And they have found one for for humans too. It's called 8036. And people who have been affected tend to be about 30% happier than people who have not been infected. A way the virus, you know, it's an adeno virus. So it stays resident and yourselves even after infection. And it works like insulin, right? It helps your body absorb more glucose from your blood. It creates more fat molecules and then ultimately creates more fat cells.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And they're actually it now as a way to, to help with diabetes because it will internalize glucose pretty quickly and you know, create more fat out of it, but it'll keep the glucose out of your blood. So it's very interesting. And so people have had it and they're not even sure how contagious it is, how people get it. Exactly. But it can cause badness. So I've read about somebody who had the virus, this, this man named Randy and the book is written through stories, stories of researchers, stories to patients. So it's not like a textbook. It's a very readable book, you know, told through stories of people. But there's a man named Randy who had struggled with his weight for his whole life. And he finally did see that obesity landed in the hospital and doctor said, you know, there's this research program over at university of Wisconsin.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: You should go there. They might be able to help you. And so he goes there and he meets this man [Inaudible] Andrew, who's been researching 8036, you know, for much of his career researching viruses and fat. And they test him and it turns out he had been positive for 8036. And they explained to him how it causes fatness, how this might be leading to his, his troubles. And it was like a night and day kind of awakening for this man named Randy, what is he.. All of a sudden understood why he had so much trouble managing his fat, his whole life, why he gained so easily while he's diets for constantly failing him? It's because he had a different body type of type that really stored fat, very readily, more than most bodies. And if you have that kind of body, there's things you have to do above and beyond what other people have to do.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: And so Randy now is like in super shape. I mean, he, he lost a lot of weight. He's like six foot something. He weighs like 135 pounds. He's very careful about what he eats. You know, he calls the world, the eating world and the non eating world. Like there are people who can eat and nothing happens to them. And those people like him, right. Who have to be so careful. So when he's at a picnic and his family's, you know, having pizza, he'll bring his boiled eggs and salad and he'll just stay on his diet. But that's, I'd be like, like knowledge is power. So some people found my book to be a bit depressing because it was saying all these different ways we lose weight, how hard it can be to lose weight. But I took it to be very empowering and like in the same way that Randy took knowledge to be very empowering once, you know, right.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Why diets have been failing you, you know, why you have stubborn fat, you can now work with it, right? And you're not fooled by siren songs of this. Diet's going to make you lose weight quick. Like you kind of know what you're working with and what the challenges, and you can adjust your life to handle that challenge. And so think of it positively. Just think of it as you know, knowledge is power. You now know your body. You now know what to do. You have to up the ante. And yet it's not fair compared to people can eat all the time, but this one it is, but you at least now know what it is you have to do.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Where can people get the book? We're going to put this in the show notes as well as follow you, social media, all that sort of stuff.

 Dr. Sylvia Tara: Yeah. So you can get the book on amazon.com. I think it's still on some Barnes and Nobles as well. It's in paperback. Hardback is much nicer than the paper bag. So I can get it. You know, I'm on Facebook at Sylvia Tara PhD on Twitter as well. And then you can email me, go to the website. It's called www.thesecretlifeoffat.com. And that's where the course is like, that's where my email is. And I do correspond with people, especially those ones that have had stubborn, fat to be the ones who reach out to me, but give it a try, right? Just really take your time. Read the book, go through the course slowly. There's so much material at least five years. What the research condensed into a couple of hundred pages it's overwhelming, but you'll start to see things that work for you, right? There'll be like kind of working out sheets, you know, things that you can do, levers you can pull, right. To make a diet more effective for you. So give it a try. Don't get down. Don't get down about any of it. It's hard, but you can do it.

 Wade T. Lightheart: Dr. Sylvia Tara, this has been an exciting and interesting interview. I know my listeners are going to love it. I appreciate you taking the time to share your story about www.thesecretlifeoffat.com. And I don't think this is depressing at all. I think this is really cool, really exciting. We will put the links for how you can order this in the show notes and certainly something that you might want to share with your friends, with your family members, who might've struggled, so that you can know that there is help and there are reasons for the way you are and there's ways to get to where you want to go. You just got to know exactly what to do. Thank you so much, everyone for joining us today on the Awesome Health Podcasts. I'm Wade T. Lightheart from BiOptimizers. I want you to have an awesome day take care and learn the secrets, the secret life of that with Dr. Sylvia Tara, thanks so much for joining us today. Take care.
Posted in

Leave a Comment