← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
How I Lost 100 Pounds By Drinking Butter Coffee : 1371
00:22:36
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Back in 1999, I was a brand new millionaire in Silicon Valley. But I was dying. Literally. I weighed 300 pounds and my doctor told me I was heading straight for a heart attack or stroke and I was only 30 years old. So for the next year and a half I hit the gym six days a week, ate a low calorie diet and even tried going vegan for 18 long and dark months. Nothing worked. The fat wouldn't budge. I could lose half of it and then it would come back with a vengeance. And then I drank a cup of something very, very strange at the top of a mountain on a spiritual pilgrimage. One sip flipped a switch in my brain that turned it on in a way I have never felt before. And when I started doing it regularly, it helped me drop 100 pounds of fat. And I still have abs to this day. Now you're probably wondering what the hell I drank. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I'm at 18,300ft up in the mountains of Tibet, in the middle of a high altitude trekking journey at Mount Kailash, the holiest mountain in the world. And I was sitting in a guest house, frozen to my core and still overweight, when a tiny Tibetan woman hands me this creamy cup of yak butter tea. I'd never seen anything like it. It was thick, golden, kind of oily. I took one sip and about 30 seconds later, my brain started tingling. I felt it in my entire body and my brain had not been working very well, for a long time, and I'm at high altitude. I shouldn't be feeling like I can snap awake, but I did. And the exhaustion that I've been dragging around just broke. And for the first time in years, especially at high altitude, I felt like dancing. I actually felt alive. And the crazy part is, I had never seen this drink before. Nobody in America talks about it. Not one doctor, not one trainer, not even diet books. And when I got home, I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I started experimenting. I swapped the tea for coffee and then mold free coffee and the yak butter with grass fed butter. I tried hundreds of different combinations to figure out did coffee or tea or the butter make the difference. And when I dialed it in, it crushed my cravings and it kept me energized for the entire day. I just didn't want to eat because my brain worked well, my body worked well, and I was burning fat for energy. And then quickly, the weight just dropped off with no pain, no suffering, no willpower. And here's where it gets weird. I stopped living at the gym. I started eating more food, not less. I quit being a vegan and added meat back in and the fat still kept melting off. And then I ended up achieving it. I lost the full hundred pounds I've been working on losing for more than a decade. I knew I had something special, so I decided to call it bulletproof coffee. Because I literally felt bulletproof when I drank it. I started sharing the story with this butter coffee online to anyone who would listen. And in a matter of months, CEOs in Silicon Valley were drinking it. Magazines like Vogue were writing about it. Even celebrities were swearing by it on national tv. Jimmy Fallon and Shailene Woodley were talking about bulletproof coffee. And I didn't know either one of them, and I didn't pay them to do it, because it works. And within a few years, millions of people across more than 60 countries were blending butter into their coffee every morning. There was even a global shortage of grass fed butter so severe that a Norwegian man was arrested for smuggling grass fed butter into Sweden for Christmas cookies. I wrote a book about putting butter in coffee and longevity that hit the New York Times bestseller list. And I launched a podcast that has over half a billion downloads. That cup of yak butter tea in Tibet changed everything for me. But it was only the beginning. It led me down a path that proved that nearly everything people teach about weight loss and living longer, it's just wrong. Because I tried the stuff that was supposed to work and it didn't work. And there are good reasons, and we know those. Thanks to longevity and biohacking. I learned why diets don't work, why I kept losing weight and then gaining it right back. Why more exercise can make you fatter, not thinner. And what controls fat burning at the cellular level. But the breakthrough that led me to lose those hundred pounds, understanding the truth, is about fat itself. Growing up, everyone around me told me the same story. If you eat fat, you'll get fat. Doctors, diet books, even school posters told me, fat makes you fat. And like most people, I believed it. I counted my calories, I avoided butter, and I bought low fat foods because the experts told me they were healthy. But I couldn't lose the weight, and I felt stuck in a body I didn't want. I even exercised six days a week. It didn't make a difference. I just got hungrier and the weight wouldn't budge. But when I started eating more fat, the right kinds of fat, the same kind of fat that was in that yak butter tea, I noticed something shocking. Instead of getting fatter, my body flipped into fat burning mode. And that's when I realized that avoiding fat kept me overweight all those years, because the right kind of fat kept me from being hungry. And this was just the first piece of the puzzle. When I gave my body the right fats, I had energy all day. Without the roller coaster of highs and lows from carbs, I didn't just feel more alert. I felt in control. My energy went way up, my hunger went way down, and the weight finally just started coming off. My brain ran better, my focus lasted longer, and I didn't hit that 3pm crash that used to just ruin my days. Your brain, it's mostly fat, and it burns fat as one of its main fuels when it can. And good fats support your hormones, like your testosterone is made out of saturated fat, and it keeps your metabolism running. And good fats give you steady energy. But on the other hand, people will tell you carbs are energy. And I did believe that for decades. Eat your oatmeal for breakfast. Grab an energy bar when you're tired. Slam a sports drink full of sugar before your workout. But that energy, it's just a sugar spike and you get a quick burst. And then the crash hits and your brain goes foggy. Your cravings come back even harder, and you get hungry again fast. So you eat more and the cycle traps you. That's what had happened to me. I kept feeding my body sugar and refined carbs because they're low fat and I thought I was fueling myself. In reality, I was running on fumes when I had a full tank sitting right there around my waist. But fat. Fat is different. It is stable. It is clean, long burning fuel when it's the right kind of fat. No spikes, no crashes, just steady energy that lasts. And once I made that switch, my body started burning the fat that I'd been carrying for years. So if you want to try this yourself, start your morning by blending mold free coffee with a tablespoon of grass fed butter and a tablespoon of MCT oil, no sugar. You'll notice a difference in how long your focus lasts and how good you feel. I lost 100 pounds by eating more fat than the government ever recommended. Here's how you can use this in your own life. First, stop fearing all fats. There's a huge difference between good fats and bad fats. Good fats are things like grass fed butter, MCT oil, coconut oil and the natural fats in grass fed meat. Bad fats are things like processed vegetable and seed oils and anything hydrogenated or trans fats. So step one Swap out the bad fats in your kitchen. Replace vegetable oil with butter or ghee or grass fed beef tallow. Step two is you add good fats to your meals. Start small. Blend some butter or MCT oil and your coffee. In the morning, drizzle some extra virgin olive oil on your salad with or cook your eggs in ghee. Do it consistently and you'll train your body to expect good fats that it can actually use to build healthy cells and burn for fuel. And that's when the real fat loss starts. Not from starving yourself, not from low fat foods, but by feeding yourself in the right way. But even after I discovered the power of fat, I was still stuck in one old belief that if I could just eat less calories and I could just work out harder, the fat would melt away. Back then I thought I was doing everything right. I counted every single calorie, I tracked every meal and I spent 90 minutes a day in the gym, six days a week for 18 months straight. I got stronger. But the mirror told a different story. So did my belt. 46 inch waist when I started. 46 inch waist after 18 months of low fat, low calorie overtraining. No matter how hard I worked, the fat wouldn't come off. I felt like I was trapped in a broken system, fighting my own body with no way out and just using my willpower every single day. Just say no to food to just get on the treadmill, to just pick up more weight. It didn't work. And that's when I realized the calories in, calories out rule was just a straight up lie. The formula doesn't explain what's really going on inside your body. That model ignores the bigger players, hormones, metabolism, and inflammation. So it wasn't just about the numbers on a label. Two foods with the same calorie count could act completely differently when I ate them. So I learned it wasn't the quantity of food that controlled fat loss. It was the quality. Nutrient dense foods can send powerful signals to my body and flip my metabolism from storing fat to burning it. And when you eat the right nutrient dense foods, you're giving your body the raw materials to run its engine. And vitamins and minerals and high quality proteins send a we're safe and we have enough energy signal. And when that signal's on, your metabolism doesn't have to cling to every calorie. It can release stored fat for energy. And those same nutrients, they can also calm inflammation. A lot of people think that inflammation is just soreness, but it's a constant chemical alarm that your body sets off when it's under attack from processed oils and sugar spikes and toxins. And that alarm breaks two different critical hormones that can control how you feel and how much you think about food every single day. It's insulin and leptin. When your insulin is always elevated, your fat cells stay locked in. Your body can't access stored energy. And when leptin stops working, your brain never gets a message that you're full. So you stay hungry no matter how much you eat. And when inflammation drops, insulin and leptin start to do their job again. Insulin stops locking fat away. And leptin can finally signal you're full. And that's why when I finally ate the right foods, my hunger just naturally changed. My brain wasn't starving for nutrients anymore. My hormones started working properly again. My appetite just adjusted on its own. And I didn't think about tacos all the time. No more constant willpower battles. My body was finally working with me instead of against me. And feeling lots of energy and being lean just came naturally and effortlessly. And here's how you can make this shift for yourself. Stop obsessing over counting calories and start asking, is this food nutrient dense? Does it have enough protein? Does it have the right kinds of fat? That matters way more than calories. And fill your plate with foods that come from nature. Grass fed meats wild caught low mercury, seafood Organic, low tox and vegetables cut out processed foods that drive inflammation and mess with your hormones. When you eat better quality, you notice you don't need to snack as much. In fact, you won't even think about food for four or five hours after you have a meal. When the meal has enough good fat in it, your metabolism will run hotter, your hunger calms down, and losing weight just starts to feel natural. There's no forcing, there's no effort. It just falls off. But there was another mistake that I was making with my food. I believe the advice that said, eat six small meals a day to keep your metabolism running. Otherwise they go into starvation mode. I thought grazing all day was was the secret. Every few hours I'd grab a snack or a little bit of protein, thinking I was keeping my metabolism all fired up. But instead of getting leaner, I was stuck. My energy dipped. Cravings never went away and I just couldn't burn the fat no matter what I did. So I tried something different. I started skipping breakfast. From the time I went to bed until my first meal the next day, I just wouldn't eat for about 16 hours. It's called intermittent fasting. And at first it felt strange. For years people had said breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But by starting intermittent fasting, I finally gave my body a break. And my system could switch from burning sugar to burning stored fat. That's fat burning mode. And I wrote the first major New York Times bestseller to talk about intermittent fasting because it works so well. And when you give your system a real break like that, something amazing happens in it's called autophagy. This is your body's built in cleaning program. It starts recycling damaged parts of your cells and it makes your metabolism run even better than it did before. And as a result, my hunger calmed down, my energy stopped spiking and crashing, and I lost weight without feeling like I was starving myself. Here's how you can try it. You have that same coffee with butter and some MCT oil blended in in the morning. And that keeps your hunger away. And it keeps your body in fat burning mode. And it won't break an intermittent fast. Because of biochemistry, your insulin doesn't change and some other hormones don't change. So this is a hack for fasting. And then you eat your first real meal at lunch and your second meal at dinner, and that's it. Two meals. No constant grazing, no hunger, no energy crash, no thinking about food. You're just done. It's effortless and it saves you time anyway. When you do this consistently, your body learns to tap into stored fat for energy, your appetite naturally drops, and your weight loss just stops being a fight. So for me, the fat was coming off. My hunger was under control. My energy was steady for the first time in many years. But I still wasn't losing weight as fast as I could have been. Something was blocking it. And I finally found the problem. I was exercising wrong. For years, I thought the answer was simple. Run more or walk more. Sweat more, Burn more fat, lift more. So every day, I would punish myself. Long cardio sessions, 45 minutes on a treadmill at a slope, chasing the idea that every mile on the treadmill would burn fat. But the harder I went, the worse things got.
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The scale. Barely moved. My energy tanked. I felt hungrier, not leaner. And I got more fat around my belly. And I discovered that chronic cardio can absolutely backfire. Because when you push for those long stretches, your body floods with cortisol, which is a stress hormone. You need some of it, but too much of it puts on belly fat. Cortisol hangs onto fat and it breaks down muscle for quick fuel. So the harder I worked, the more I stressed myself with excessive exercise, the more my body hung on to fat. It was a vicious cycle. And you've seen the gym bros like this. They've got muscle and they've got a big belly. It's overtraining. You work harder, you feel worse, you can get fatter. That's when I realized exercise wasn't supposed to be punishment. When I stopped grinding and started training smarter. Everything changed. Instead of more hours in the gym, I just needed the right inputs. Just two or three rehit or high intensity interval training sessions a week were enough to flip that metabolic switch. Short, intense bursts do the opposite of long cardio. So in a few minutes, they upgrade your body's fat burning systems. So you burn fat far better for hours after you stop moving. And of course, I added strength training, but only twice a week, not every single day. More muscle means higher metabolism. You burn more calories even at rest when you have muscle. And that daily gentle movement instead of a long hard cardio session calmed my stress and improved my sleep. So instead of endless cardio that just stressed me out and broke me down, I found a rhythm that made my body want to let go of the fat and want to put on some muscle. And that plus a walk worked way better than 90 minutes a day of pain in the gym. And then I added in recovery tools like cold therapy and saunas. My body responded very, very well. So I thought, I've got it all figured out. Better food, smarter training. My weight did keep dropping, but the progress slowed. And sometimes my hunger would become unpredictable yet again. And that's when I discovered the final piece. A hidden problem that no one was talking about. It's toxins. Every single day, I was adding to my toxic load, and I didn't even realize it. Plastics from water bottles and food containers, pesticides on produce, synthetic fragrances and cleaners and self care products. Mold, toxins in my environment and in my food. All those things add up. And it builds up over time in your body. And toxins don't just float around and disappear. Your body's way too smart for that. It will lock toxins away in your fat cells to protect you. Which means your body won't let you burn fat because it would release poisons. So my body was refusing to burn fat because doing so would have poisoned me from the inside out. And yes, scientific studies do show that if you biopsy the fat in someone's body, it is full of toxins. And that can control how fast you can lose weight and how you feel when you're losing weight. And those toxins also fuel inflammation. That inflammation disrupted the hormones that control appetite and fat storage, like leptin and insulin. And my cravings were chaotic and I couldn't figure out why. But only on some days. When I stopped adding toxins to my food, accidentally, I started removing the ones my body already had stored away. The fat finally released because it was safe to do so because my toxic burden wasn't so high. So this is how you do it. You clean your food, sourcing first, grass fed meat, organic veggies, and absolutely no seed oils and none of the synthetic coloring and fragrances and flavoring and all that kind of stuff. You filter your air, filter your water at home, and then sweat out the toxins in the sauna. Do some high intensity interval training workouts. Even a hot bath can help. Add Omega 3s from wild caught low mercury fish. Add polyphenol rich foods like blueberries and mold free coffee. Those can directly reduce inflammation. And by the way, in case you're wondering, the mold free coffee I'm talking about is called Danger Coffee. You go to dangercoffee.com, it's got a therapeutic dose of trace minerals in it that make your mitochondria really happy. And finally, you detox your lifestyle. Ditch plastics, fake fragrances, toxic cleaners, little air fresheners. You don't need those. And when your toxic load lightens, your body just no longer resists fat burning. But even after I was fixing all this, there was still one fundamental thing that I was ignoring. Everything I was doing was helping me burn fat and feel stronger. And my brain felt better than it ever had in my entire life. And this last thing is what helped me cross the finish line and lose the full hundred pounds. The real breakthrough came when I understood that fat loss, energy, even aging, all come down to one single thing. It's mitochondria. These tiny little organelles are the engines inside every cell. They take the food you eat, combine it with air and make it into energy. When they're working, you burn fat, you stay sharp, and you feel unstoppable. You even sleep better when they're broken. You get fatigue, cravings, anxiety, and stubborn fat that just refuses to budge. So stress, toxins, overtraining, poor nutrition, they were all hammering my mitochondria into submission. They just couldn't work, even though they wanted to. And I didn't realize that until I saw the research. Mitochondrial damage is directly linked to obesity. In other words, it was never about calories in, calories out. That's a silly model. It was about whether my engines were firing or failing. Every solution I've shared with you until this point. Fasting, rehit healthy fats. They all fix mitochondria in one way or the other. So figuring out that my mitochondria or what I needed to fix gave me that full clarity. I wish my doctors had just told me when I was 19 years old that my mitochondria were failing instead of telling me to eat less and work out more. And when you fix your mitochondria, you keep the weight off. You don't get it back because you fixed the root. Cause when I actually did this myself, my body started burning fat instead of resisting it, and fat became the main fuel. You can start with nutrients that feed your mitochondria. Coenzyme Q10, carnitine PQQ, magnesium. There's a lot of cool supplements you can take. And mitochondria thrive on clean fat, not sugar. That's why MCT oil became a cornerstone of what I put in my coffee every morning. MCTs bypass normal digestion, go straight to your liver, and they turn into ketones. And that is pure rocket fuel for your brain and your body. And it teaches your cells to count on burning fat instead of burning carbs all the time. Grass fed butter contains butyrate and fat soluble vitamins that stabilize your cell membranes and your mitochondrial membranes. And you add in some omega 3s from wild fish that makes your mitochondria flexible and resistant to damage. And remember that fasting we talked about earlier? It turns out it does something even more powerful for your mitochondria. When you go without food for a stretch, your body doesn't just switch to burning fat. It also triggers mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the process of making new, more efficient mitochondria. It's like new engine upgrades for your cells. You're literally building better energy. And that's why fasting doesn't just help you lose weight. It makes your metabolism stronger over the long term. And then there's hormesis, which is when you use controlled stress to get stronger things like cold plunges. They can push your mitochondria briefly into survival mode. So they know they might need to be able to burn more fuel to generate heat. And they become more effective and more efficient. Saunas do the opposite. They force your mitochondria to activate heat shock proteins that prevent those cellular engines from breaking down under stress. And none of this works unless you get deep restorative sleep. Sleep is when your mitochondria go into repair mode. Your body recycles old mitochondria and makes new healthy ones. So if you say skimped on sleep, you're running yesterday's engines on today's workload. Eventually they're going to break down. They need maintenance. Once I restored my mitochondria, that full hundred pounds came off and stayed off. But more importantly, it just got easier. No willpower, no cravings, no effort. Just knowing what to do. All because one frozen afternoon halfway across the world on the top of a mountain, a stranger handed me a cup of yak butter tea and shattered everything I thought I knew about health. Today, my mold free coffee has an upgrade. It is called Danger Coffee and it's called Danger Coffee because who knows what you might do when you feel this good. Danger Coffee has that therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in it and it's certified mold free. It's what I drink every single morning. Go to dangercoffee.com to check it out.
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A Human Upgrade Formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.