Forget crash diets: How to maintain a healthy weight | Alan Aragon & Prof. Sarah Berry

**Jonathan** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science & Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
It's time to examine the science behind weight loss and obesity. Did you know that around 80% of people who attempt long-term weight loss fail? So forget the fads. This isn't about willpower or crash diets. In this episode, we'll uncover an approach that's worked for many people. Today, we're joined by Alan Aragon, who over more than three decades of research and fitness coaching, has pioneered an approach that's called flexible dieting, a strategy to help you lose weight and keep it off. Alan has published more than 20 papers and peer-reviewed journals, and helped transform the fitness industry, replacing outdated dogma with science-backed principles that have become standard practice in fitness and nutrition coaching. We're also joined by ZOE's chief scientist Sarah Berry, a professor in nutrition at King's College London, who's run large-scale human nutrition studies on how foods impact on metabolism and how we store fat. Alan, thank you for joining me today.

**Alan Aragon** (1:18)
Thank you so much, Jonathan. Really, really happy to be here.

**Jonathan** (1:21)
And Sarah, thanks for being here too.

**Sarah Berry** (1:22)
Excited as always.

**Jonathan** (1:24)
Well, Alan, we always like to kick off our show here at ZOE with a rapid-fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. Are you up for that?

**Alan Aragon** (1:32)
I think I was born for that. That's what I tell myself.

**Jonathan** (1:35)
So we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no or if you have to a one-sentence answer.

**Alan Aragon** (1:43)
Let's go.

**Jonathan** (1:44)
Alan, is there one approach to weight loss that will work for everyone?

**Alan Aragon** (1:48)
No.

**Jonathan** (1:50)
Sarah, does eating fat always make you fat?

**Sarah Berry** (1:54)
No.

**Jonathan** (1:55)
Alan, is exercise more important than diet for weight loss?

**Alan Aragon** (2:00)
No, they're both equally important.

**Jonathan** (2:03)
Sarah, if you have a slow metabolism, is it impossible to lose weight?

**Sarah Berry** (2:08)
I don't really even understand what that term means.

**Alan Aragon** (2:13)
Spoken like a true scientist.

**Jonathan** (2:15)
Alan, what's the biggest mistake that people make when trying to lose weight?

**Alan Aragon** (2:21)
Listening to everything they hear on social media and just getting confused and just going with who's the most charismatic.

**Jonathan** (2:29)
Weight loss is a really complex and a really important topic. So Alan, I'm really glad that you could join us today to try and help make sense of it. And listeners often get in touch with us asking for help. They want to move towards a healthier lifestyle. They want to move towards a healthier weight. But they're bewildered by exactly what you just mentioned in the quickfire questions, right? All this conflicting and confusing advice that they find online, you know, where within 10 minutes, you can be told two things that are diametrically opposed to each other. There's obviously an enormous amount of misinformation around, you know, influencers pushing their latest weight loss supplement, dangerous health hacks. There's also this transformation of the field with these new weight loss drugs, right? Azempik and Wigovia and everything. Let's start at the beginning. Alan, why are we becoming more overweight?

**Alan Aragon** (3:16)
It's a combination of several things. So, the way that I see it, it is a gradual shift towards sedentary living, and this has been facilitated by labor-saving devices, and even electronic and digital means to not even have to get up off the couch to prepare food. You just make a call and then wait for it to show up at the door, and that's it. In addition to that, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to maintain healthy body weight. And people simply don't know or are unaware that fundamentally, in order to lose weight, you have to impose a net caloric deficit over a period of time. And so when people are not aware of that, then they easily believe that there are magic foods that, for example, burn belly fat, or magic foods that burn fat, and then other foods that you should completely vilify or avoid. And that's where a lot of the confusion comes in. And in addition to that, I would say that in the present time, people have a greater tendency to use food to, I guess, medicate or entertain themselves. Just from general work, stress, interpersonal stress, anxiety. And so food ends up being kind of used as that sort of tool. I think that the combination of those things is at least some of the factors underlying the obesity phenomenon that has basically started in the early-ish 80s and continued on to today.