You should be more concerned with your visceral and liver fat levels than your weight. Your shape often suggests more about your health.  

High levels of visceral and liver fat are closely correlated with many long-term diseases. Your shape gives more indication of risk, through your hip-to-waist ratio, than Body Mass Index (BMI) does. 

But being thin doesn’t mean you don’t have increased liver fat. 

It is possible to be slim but metabolically unhealthy. Thin on the outside, fat on the inside (TOFI) is the term used in the medical community. 

Getting metabolically healthy will enable you to minimise your chance of many long-term diseases. And you’re more likely to retain a sensible body size over time. 

You should be focusing on living better and, therefore, longer.

You can strongly influence your health via your choices and environment.

You can significantly influence the likelihood of avoiding many long-term conditions like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and dementia via what you eat and do. Partially via the microbes* and other organisms that reside on and in us. 

It’s already been proven that effects from your microbes and environment affect your epigenetics; gene activity is controlled without changing the DNA sequence itself. 

Think of it as the switchable effects of the genetics you have. Your overall environment affects what’s being switched on and off, and how much. 

Your microbial environment and hormones can be reinforcing. Your microbial environment influences your mood, which can further influence what you eat and then your future microbial environment. There’s far too much on the importance of microbes to cover in any detail here, but you’ll understand more if you decide to use our support. 

*Your microbes are the many bacteria, viruses, parasites, etc, that live on and in you (collectively your ‘microbiome’), substantially in your gut. There are trillions of them inside you, more than there are cells in your body.

We all respond differently to food. For example, studies show that only a few people respond as expected to the food's glycemic index (your expected blood sugar response). What works for one person may promote metabolic dysfunction and weight gain for another.

Even many supplements (including probiotics) don’t have the effect we think they might due to individual responses. 

What works for you as an individual differs for each person. You're better off learning principles and tools to apply and forming your own plan based on your responses, rather than blindly following a diet that promises something like ‘weight loss or ‘anti-inflammatory’. Getting metabolically healthy will help prevent inflammation and help promote a healthier body shape.

Also, losing weight and getting healthy isn’t the same thing. 

Generic diets don’t work because they rely on rapid, radical change that isn’t sustainable, or they encourage the wrong choices or behaviours for you individually.  The science these diets are based on, most notably calorie counting, is often outdated. They also don’t reflect how people change. You don’t need to feel hungry all the time whilst getting healthy, and it doesn’t have to feel like you’re losing out.

We were brought up being taught that we needed enough fibre to avoid constipation, and that was it.

Fibre is so much more important than that. 

Two key components of metabolic health are a healthy gut and healthy liver. Fibre is important in helping both. 

Most people (in westernised nations) intake significantly lower than what is needed for good metabolic health. There’s far too much information on the importance of fibre to cover it adequately here, but you’ll understand more if you decide to use our support. 

What’s been added or taken away from food, or done to it, is often more important than the original ingredients. 

The system we’ve built of nutrition is built from the idea that we understood it correctly in the first place. Original nutritional science we learned overly focused on fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. And the villain was fat. 

You should concern yourself more with what’s been done to the food itself. Frequently fibre is removed, and other questionable products are added. You should always ask yourself: Is it still real food?

Food labels aren’t a good absolute measure to assess how healthy the food will be for you. Low fat and healthy labels don’t mean the food will guarantee good health.

From developments in the last ten to thirty years, it’s clear that whilst the scientific community think we know how things work, we can later discover that we were wrong or only had part of the picture. 

For this reason, we must be open-minded and not stick to old dogma. 

One example is the move from the theory of specific genetic causes for chronic diseases to a different theory in the 1990s. Scientists today believe they only know about 10% of what will be known about the microbiome and its influence on health. 

Science is best used to help form a toolbox of guiding principles.

Whilst many believe that people become overweight because they don’t move enough, this isn’t true. 

Many studies, including studies of studies (meta-analyses), have concluded that exercising doesn’t cause weight loss.

Exercise is still very important for your health and can play into enabling you to lose weight, but it doesn’t cause weight loss on its own.