I wanna make it very clear I wasn’t acting in any of that, and probably [he pronounces it “prolly”] the number one thing I noted through that experiment is by the end of it, I was in a fog. My mind wanted to do nothing but lay on the couch, and I couldn’t think straight, I felt terrible, but the irony is there was a small part of me that said, “You know what, it’s okay, because I’ve got that next fast food meal to satisfy me.”
What’s going on – that belly fat that I was building is so toxic to so many systems in your body, including your brain, that over time I was becoming, literally, a train wreck, and that was in one week. But what I’m gonna do here is show you what was happening.
So this is me. No big deal at the start of the project. And you’re thinking, “What’s – what is the big deal, you ate a fast food meal.” So, that fast food enters your belly. Your body, you know what it wants? It wants nutrients. So it’s looking for nutrients in this meal, but instead what it is finding? I’ll tell you what it’s finding: way too much sugar in these fast food meals. This is way too much salt. And then, what would make me feel so, just, number one, at first, satisfied, but then, so terrible later – all of these fat globules. And what’s happening over time as these are digested is one thing. Within 15 minutes, maybe, that sugar’s absorbed into your blood stream, and I wanna talk about what I felt. I felt great! You wanna know why I felt great? Because my brain was, was literally releasing serotonin and dopamine, just like in a heroin addict’s brain! It felt wonderful as that sugar was coming into my system – I felt happy, I was livin’. It was great.
But let’s go back to what sugar also does. What you’re seeing there, that’s insulin attaching itself to sugar. But insulin does a very funny thing in the human body. What does it do? It tells your body that you’re about to hit a famine, because you’ve got so much sugar we need to do something with it. So what’s about to happen here – I want you to focus on this area – that insulin is telling your body to store fat right around your midsection. The more sugar you eat – all these meals tell your body to store it, because there’s a long stretch coming up ahead where we’re not gonna have any food, so we better store it all. But as you continue to look deeper inside my body, this – these are the fat cells. Why is this important? Not only are you building more fat cells after these meals, but the fat cells themselves are getting bigger, basically embedding all those internal organs in toxic goop.
I want to show everyone your heart, because this is really what was working harder in me. So my heart, after I would eat these meals, literally would have to work double time, pumping harder — my blood pressure would go up — and as you see my heart beating, I want to remind you of a study that I did, during this experiment, that... that scared me quite a bit. You may remember, this is a picture of my artery after a meal. My arteries no longer expanded the way they are supposed to, after ONE meal. And so... blood flow decreases after one meal. I don't want that in my life! Instead what I want is for good things to happen... but what happens, aah, lets say, maybe 30 minutes to an hour after my meal... lets not forget about your brain!
Because before,remember how I showed you all those areas lighting up? Well now what you are looking at, that is the hypothalamus signaling your brain to release Cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone. Guess what it does. Not only does it help you store more fat here, but it, believe it or not, it makes you want to eat more. So I was on a Ferris wheel. I was on a vicious cycle, eat more,feel terrible, eat more and that's no good, because I'm gonna tell you the kicker of all this. This is what can happen to a body. Less than one week, I put on eight pounds. You may not care about this but I do. My blood pressure was fabulous, 114 over 76. In less than one week, my diastolic blood pressure, entered the pre-hypertensive zone, meaning I actually was developing high blood pressure during this experiment. That was five days, so imagine for everyone out there who does this each and every meal what you are doing to your bodies. The important lesson is, since this project was finished, I've actually gone back to being healthier than ever. I feel wonderful. Each and every day is a joy. You can take these ending numbers, you can push them back to a good range. But the one thing I have to emphasize is that the choices you make every single day that matter. It's so easy to say yes to all that bad stuff out there. And it definitely scared me to see how easy it was to fall into an unhealthy routine. But in the end, I didn't feel good. My body felt bad, my brain felt bad. I felt sad to some extent. I need you to listen to that voice, it's never too late to make a change.
