I don't know why this is so controversial, but it is. And today, we're going to go there. What's the topic? Weight loss. Weight loss. We're talking about weight loss. And the reason why I want to talk about this is because we've all been there. We've all been at that point in our lives where we're frustrated with how our clothes feel, where we feel like shit, where everything we're trying is not actually working, or the things that we've been doing forever, in my case, this is me, are no longer working and having the same impact. And you start to feel like your weight, your waistline, your attitude, everything's out of control. And I want to talk about it today. And so if you're like me, it probably means that you've spent most of your life trying to either lose weight or trying to stay in shape. And this goes all the way back to when I was a little kid. I can remember my mom on the living room floor and Jane Fonda was on the television. She had those leg warmers on and my mom was doing all the stuff. And then the next thing I remember, the thymaster, that thing that showed up at your house where you're supposed to squeeze it in and out.

And then as I got older, I've tried everything: step class, spin class, jazzercise, which I think we now call Zumba. I've gone to classes in person online. I've done pilates on a mat, on a reformer. I've tried everything. And don't even get me started with the number of diets. Anybody remember the cabbage soup diet? Why on Earth was that a thing? Eat for your blood type? I've done that. Low fat, high fat, no carbs, complex carbs. No wonder we are all yo- yo dieting. I mean, simply listing all of this off makes me start to feel like a human yo- yo. And as I've been thinking about this topic and researching it, it occurred to me, if this is such an enormous problem for almost all of us, maybe we've been thinking about it all wrong. In fact, the expert that you are about to spend an hour with says that you and I are going to stop talking about losing weight right now. No more. It's the wrong approach. You and I need to start leveraging what she calls a muscle centric medical approach to our health. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a medical doctor.

She has completed two research and clinical fellowships in nutritional science and one in the science of aging. She has spent 20 years conducting groundbreaking research and treating private patients in her clinical practice. Her first book, Forever Strong, is filled with evidence-based strategies, and you're going to learn a lot of them here during our conversation today. Doc. G is here to teach you about the largest organ in your body. I know you're thinking, What is that? What is the largest organ in your body? Believe it or not, that's your skeletal muscles. And your skeletal muscles are not only the largest organ in your body, they make up the entire architecture of your body. And they are key to effective weight loss, to boosting your energy, burning fat. And she's going to talk to you today about how you can use a muscular centric medical approach to reverse diabetes and to fight heart disease and cancer. And my job in all of this is to translate all that she's saying into simple actionable takeaways. In fact, I'm going to try to reduce all this research to two changes that you can make starting today to leverage all of the things that she's going to teach us.

So if you want to lose belly fat and live a strong, long, healthy life, there is no more important thing for you to do than to listen to this conversation right now. Get your pens out and get ready to change your life because Dr. G is in the house. All right, please help me welcome Dr. Gabrielle Lion to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be able to sit down and talk with you.

So, Dr. Lion, I'm so excited that you're here. And I just want to start with the basics. What significance does it have that your muscles are an organ?

Yeah, this idea, full. First of all, skeletal muscle makes up 40 % of your body weight, period, which is a huge amount of your tissue. Wow. And I think that this is a really important point, is this idea that when we think about skeletal muscle, we often hear about just exercising the bicep and really just, is it toned or not? Can I see it or not? And that's why this concept of muscle as the organ of longevity is so critical to get out to the public because skeletal muscle is so much more than that.

Well, I'll be honest. I have only ever thought about muscles in a one-dimensional fashion. Can I see them or not? Do I have a six pack? Which I do not. Do I have flabby arms that flap like skin wings? Or do I have nice tight biceps and triceps and all that stuff? I have thought in such a... I don't know. I'm embarrassed about how little I know because I honestly did not even know that muscles were an organ. And there is so much research that you have in your new book, and we're going to dig into it. But I wanted to start at that baseline so that anybody that's intimidated by the gym, anybody that can't see any muscle definition, we're not here talking about a Beachbody Blast workout program. We're talking about using muscle centric medicine as a way to unlock all of these health benefits that I personally, I had no idea that that's the major benefit of doing weight training and why we all need to do it. I've got a little five pound weight here. When you do a bicep curl or you walk up a flight of stairs, what is actually happening as I am curling my muscle here and attempting to strengthen the bicep?

What's happening in this organ, in my body when I do that?

There's a lot of things that happen, and we're going to break it down very simply. Number one, you get stronger, which is the obvious. Number two, the non-obvious is that when you contract skeletal muscle, it secretes these myokines that then go throughout the body that help with bone health, brain health, and nutrient utilization, which just means the food that you eat, when you contract skeletal muscle, it moves glucose, which is simply the sugar in your bloodstream into the cells, into skeletal muscle. That's incredible, especially with this epidemic of obesity that everybody is talking about, this idea of insulin resistance that everybody is talking about, skeletal muscle is your architectural infrastructure of everything.

You've got so many medical degrees and fellowships. What the hell made you go from psychiatry and a practice that was in general medicine and all of these degrees that you have? What had you make the connection between muscles and people's health?

Thank you so much for that question. This has been a very long journey, which, by the way, I don't recommend anybody doing that. There's a lot of other ways to go about that. When I graduated high school, I graduated high school at 17 pretty early, I moved to Hawaii. I moved to Hawaii, and I moved in with my godmother, who was a functional medicine OG. Oh, cool. And she was and is a PhD in nutritional sciences. I began sitting in on her patients. And I believed that nutrition from a very young age was the key. Fast forward to then going to my undergraduate, which was also in human nutrition vitamin mineral metabolism at the University of Illinois. My life changed because serendipitously, I landed in the lab of Dr. Donald layman. He is one of the grandfathers of protein metabolism. A lot of the things that we take for granite, now, he discovered in his lab 20 some years ago.

And you were standing there? Yes.

As an undergraduate, I was working in his lab, and I was deeply influenced by this idea of protein, dietary protein, and skeletal muscle as it relates to women's health, women and men. But the studies that we primarily did were, at least the ones that I was working on were women, postmenopausal women. Fast forward through medical school, I knew that I wanted to go to medical school. Did two years of psychiatry, realized that that was not my bag. So did family medicine for three years, and then finally did a fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis in nutritional sciences and geriatrics, which looked at aging individuals over the age of 65. And my research at the time, because I was a combined fellow, I was in charge of seeing geriatric patients, but also doing obesity medicine research. And this concept of muscle-centric medicine had been building, but there was a flash of insight. And I would love to share how it came about and what really changed everything for me.

Absolutely. What was the insight?

Well, at the time, I was seeing patients in the hospital and in the nursing homes. I was doing that during the day and then on the weekends. And then in the evenings, I was doing obesity medicine research, where I was running a weight management clinic. And we were also looking at brain imaging. We were looking at the influence of obesity and brain function. And there was just one participant in particular, we'll just call her Betty. Betty was in her mid-50s. She had big brown eyes, dark curly hair. She was a mother of three. She was someone who had struggled with yo- yo dieting her whole life. Had been told to lose the same 10 to 20 pounds that she put on after her first baby. She had been cycling through diet after diet. The information was to lose more weight, exercise more, do this cardiovascular training, and reduce her calories. And by doing that, what ended up happening is we destroyed her muscle. She would go through yo- yo dieting. Overseeing all of these patients cumulatively, I realized that this information and this obesity epidemic that people have been trying to fix for the last 50 years, wasn't obesity at its core the problem.

But the one thing that the patients that I was seeing from the Alzheimer's patients to the cognitive impairment patients to the obesity, the struggling with weight, wasn't being over fat. It was actually about being under-muscled. And it was the unhealthy muscle that was driving everything else.

Wow. I want to be sure everyone gets the benefit of that epiphany. Can you say that again? That from your medical and research background, you had this epiphany that the problem wasn't that people were too fat. Right. It was?

That they had unhealthy skeletal muscle.

Wow. And I gather that what you're going to prove to us today is that developing healthy skeletal muscle turns it around and unlocks all kinds of health benefits.

Yes, Mel. And, in fact, it's never too late to start. And that's actually where I got the title of the book, which is Forever Strong. It's never too late to be forever strong. And I know that together we can change the trajectory of aging. We've been trying to combat this, quote, obesity epidemic for the last 50 years, and we haven't gotten anywhere. And in fact, we've gotten worse. And one thing I know for sure is that if you are trying to fix the wrong problem, you'll never get there. If you are working under a paradigm of thinking about a problem, and you are not making any improvements, then perhaps we are looking at it from a perspective that really needs adjustment. So what I would say is that obesity in and of itself, in part, obviously it's very complex, but a huge portion of obesity and the issues that ride alongside with obesity like cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, like Alzheimer's disease, all of these common diseases that we're beginning to see more of, they're not diseases of being overweight. They're diseases ofdiet, and they're trying to think about how to put their weight and muscle first that begin decades before.

I think you're so cool. And I love your passion and your heart. And one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk to you is because I feel like the conversation about muscle and strength has been hijacked by the fitness industry that is very much about surface, at least when it's marketed, and by men. And this is such an imperative aspect of living a healthier life, creating a better life for yourself. There are implications here that go way beyond the diseases and the issues that your patients were talking about, the biggest organ in your body, most of us have ignored. And women, in particular, have, I personally speak for myself, I'm intimidated by the gym. I hear muscle, I think weightlifting, I think a neck a mile wide, I think veins popping out of my arms. I think that I can't do that. That's not for me. And we have been robbed of a very important, actually, your work says, critical front line habit that every single human being needs to put front and center in their lives, which is strengthening your muscles.

Yeah, exactly, and keeping them healthy. There's no such thing as a healthy, sedentary person. And there was some earlier research that looked at 18-year-old, quote, healthy, sedentary college students. The research shows that these individuals were beginning to have signs of unhealthy skeletal muscle with no overt signs of being overweight. If we address this early, if we address the health of skeletal muscle, which by the way, there's really two primary ways to do that, which I know we're going to discuss, is dietary protein, really nutritional planning, and then exercise training.

Wait, Dr. Gabrielle, are you saying that you can strengthen and build muscle simply by changing your diet?

You can simply build muscle if you are protein deficient by increasing the dietary protein of your nutrition plan. The other thing is when you design a nutrition plan that is protein-forward, you will be able to support the health of skeletal muscle. And we're not talking about, again, bodybuilding, slamming protein shakes. None of that is necessary. These are things that are super simple, incredibly simple. So here's my-.

Well, you're going to make it simple. I already love what you said, which is there's two things we need to focus on: the dietary protein, which we will unpack, we'll get into the science, and actually the exercise and focusing on exercise and strength training that will help you build a healthy skeletal muscular system. I also love something that you wrote about in your book that you say, We all need to stop looking at how much fat we need to lose, and we need to start talking about, How much muscle do I need to gain? And how liberating would it be if instead of going, I need to lose 10 pounds. I need to do that, that you actually said, I need to put on about five pounds of muscle. That's what I need to do. I mean, that's such a positive reframe. But how did you arrive at that?

I realized that number one, the strategies that have been put in place have failed people. And when you focus on losing weight, which I don't know one person that hasn't done that, over years and years of yo- yo dieting, you actually destroy skeletal muscle. As we age and become more mature, it becomes much more difficult to put it on and regain the health of skeletal muscle if you've spent years yo- yo dieting. By thinking of always what we have to lose, it becomes very demotivating for people. This really crazy thing that creeps in is sometimes they don't feel worthy of health and wellness in the way that potentially we would want them to feel. So by shifting the conversation as it relates to what people have to gain and understanding that muscle is this currency of health. And in fact, it's the only currency that you can't bargain for. You can't buy it. You can't sell it, but you have to earn it. And by thinking about the skeletal muscle, this currency you earn and put in effort, this crazy thing happens. You begin to cultivate a lot of internal strength. You begin to cultivate this can-do attitude and this way of confidence because you are able to move within a physical domain.

You're not worried about if you're going to fall and break a hip. You're not worried about, I can't eat that. You're not worried about these other things. You have this capacity to shift to a much more positive mind frame. And it's the one thing that you also have direct control over. The last time I checked, you cannot exercise your liver, but you can exercise skeletal muscle.

That's true. If you're frustrated by going up and down and trying this diet and that diet and the other diet and this thing and that thing, and the other thing.

That stops today. Everybody listening to this, they are going to stop yo- yo dieting.