The Dr. Jules Plant-Based Podcast
Hey, I’m Dr. Jules! I’m a medical doctor, teacher, nutritionist, naturopath, plant-based dad and 3X world championships qualified athlete. On this podcast we’ll discuss the latest in evidence-based and plant-based nutrition, including common nutrition myths, FAQs and tips on how to transition towards a healthier dietary pattern and lifestyle that creates little friction with your busy life!
The Dr. Jules Plant-Based Podcast
From The Heart #3: Beyond the Scale - Understanding Your Body's True Composition
Have you ever wondered why the number on your scale doesn't tell the whole story? This raw, unscripted episode from my new "From the Heart" segment dives deep into the science of body composition and why it matters more than your weight.
Drawing from a real patient case study, I break down how a 68-year-old man with fatty liver and prediabetes discovered through body composition analysis that his health challenges weren't just about being overweight—he was dangerously under-muscled with toxic levels of visceral fat surrounding his organs. This visceral fat, measuring 208 square centimeters (double the threshold for disease risk), perfectly explained his liver inflammation and metabolic dysfunction.
The truth about body composition challenges common misconceptions about weight and health. You can be "normal weight" yet metabolically unhealthy, or "overweight" yet maintain excellent health markers. I share my own example as someone classified as "overweight" by BMI standards despite having optimal metabolic health due to higher muscle mass. We explore practical strategies for reducing visceral fat through calorie management, smart food choices, stress reduction, and—critically—building muscle through resistance training. I debunk the myth that lifting weights leads to excessive muscle growth and explain why protein intake (1.2-1.6g per kg of lean body mass) matters for preserving muscle during weight loss.
Whether you're struggling with weight management, curious about improving your metabolic health, or simply want to understand what's happening beneath the surface of your body, this episode provides actionable insights backed by science and clinical experience. Want to transform your understanding of what true health looks like? This is your blueprint for looking beyond the scale.
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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules
Yo Plant-Based Buddies, welcome to a new segment of the show that I'm going to call From the Heart. Now, these bonus episodes are different no script, no plan, just me speaking openly and honestly about lessons and stories that come from real conversations, with real patience. It's raw and polished and honest, but packed with insights that matter. But packed with insights that matter. Most of the time, I simply open my phone camera, record a video and this is the audio of these conversations. So, if you're ready for something a little bit more spontaneous, this is from the heart, unplanned, unscripted, but straight to the point. Yo Plemys buddies, I'm on my lunch break. I wanted to talk two minutes more like 10, about body composition.
Speaker 1:This morning we scanned one of my patients with our InBody 580, which is a super awesome technology that measures body composition. People often, when they step on a scale, rely on the number, without relying necessarily on what that number is made of and your weight in its different constituents constituents water, muscle or protein, which is muscle and bones, and minerals and fat. And that fat can be essential fat, fat that you need, like the fat in your brain or in your bone marrow, or storage fat, which is like visceral fat or subcutaneous fat. Now, the reason we care about that is because health is not determined by a number on the scale. You can be of normal body weight and still be extremely unhealthy, and you can be of higher body weight and still be metabolically healthy. For example, I'm overweight according to my body mass index to a BMI, but according to my body composition metrics, I'm actually super healthy. I am short and I have a higher muscle mass than most people, my height meaning that my BMI will be higher. Body Mass Index, or BMI, is simply a measure of your weight against your height. So if you are heavier and shorter, you can typically get a higher BMI. Now, bmi does absolutely correlate with health metrics, but it does exclude people like me who are short and thick, short and stubby, who have higher muscle mass.
Speaker 1:This body composition analysis looks like this Let me just hide the Medicare number. It looks like that, right. This patient consented to me sharing this information. This patient is a 68-year-old patient that we know has fatty liver and borderline diabetes and borderline diabetes. So we wanted to see in order to maybe start a ZenPick with that patient where his muscle mass was, because people can lose up to 20% of their body weight when they're in a calorie deficit, like, for example, when using a ZenPick over a year. So if you lose 20% of your body weight, how much of that is fat and how much of that is muscle? That's what's important, not the number on the scale right. Because if you lose 50 pounds but 15 of those is lean body mass meaning you're losing muscle and you're losing bone density, meaning you're losing muscle and you're losing bone density the metabolic implications of that can actually backfire where, as soon as you stop the medication, your loss of muscle mass have dropped or reduced your basal metabolic rate, the amount of calories you burn daily, so that it's much easier to gain the weight back. And obviously the goal is not to have people lose their muscle mass and bone mass so that they have osteoporosis later on. So we wanted a baseline before we do anything Now.
Speaker 1:Baseline tests showed that this patient was not just overweight, he was under-muscled and overweight. A significant proportion of the fat he had was visceral fat. Now visceral fat area is measured in centimeters squared. Optimal is less than 60. Normal is less than 100. Over 160 centimeters squared of visceral fat puts you at higher risk for metabolic disease. This patient was at 208, which was compatible with his liver tests that were showing ALTs in the hundreds, so more than triple, normal inflammation on the liver. We already had an ultrasound that showed that this is a severe fatty liver. So, basically, having a high level of visceral fat fat that is stored inside of your organs and impacts their function negatively is much more serious and dangerous than just having excess subcutaneous fat, aka the fat stored in your skin or in your butt or in your thighs, for example, or your love handles. And even, most importantly, this test showed that he was under-muscled. He was probably a good 10 to 15% of muscle mass underneath what he would need to be normal. Now I don't strive for normal, I strive for optimal, because life will hand curveballs to you and you have to be equipped to handle them right. So for this patient, he had high visceral fat. He had about 94 pounds of pure fat on him, which was about at 400% of what was expected for an average male of his height and age, and he needed to put some muscle mass on.
Speaker 1:So where do we start with a patient like that? Well, first of all, if we're talking about tips to lose visceral fat, which is the fat that's inside of your organs. First tips is getting in a calorie deficit. Easier said than done, but basically that means eating foods that are low in calorie density, high in fiber, high in water. If you look at what that means, it typically means eating more fruits and veggies and legumes and whole grains and switching towards tending trending to increase more unsaturated fat in your diet and less saturated fat, which means typically more nuts, more seeds, more avocados, more soy products, chia seeds, flax seeds and less saturated fat, less meat and dairy and eggs. If you can do that and stick in a calorie deficit, you'll tend to have less visceral fat.
Speaker 1:Now, a lot of other things affect visceral fat. There's a genetic component to it. Postmenopausal women that lose their estrogen will tend to store more visceral fat. People that have chronic stress will have higher cortisol levels. That leads to storage of visceral fat. So people that are sleep deprived, that are stressed, that are lonely, people that have high insulin resistance because they eat a lot of refined carbs and a lot of saturated fat have more visceral fat. And people who are under muscled.
Speaker 1:Um, now, this patient's bmr was calculated as 1775 calories per day. That means he needs700 calories per day for maintenance and he says that's impossible. I eat 1,200 to 1,300 calories per day and I'm still gaining weight. What people need to understand it's very difficult to absorb that information is that calories are simply a measure of the energy contained in the chemical bonds, in the carbon bonds of fat and carbs, right? So laws of thermodynamics apply much in the same way as the law of gravity applies. Now, if I drop my crayon, we all know it's going to fall. Drop my crayon, we all know is going to fall. And much in the same way, if you eat too many calories in comparison to your maintenance calories, your BMR, you'll gain weight, right? So if someone says I'm eating in a calorie deficit but not losing weight, that means you're not in a calorie deficit. It's impossible to lose weight if you're not in a calorie deficit. It's like saying I'm pushing the gas on my car and driving in reverse. Very difficult information for a lot of people to absorb.
Speaker 1:And very often these patients are either not tracking. Well, they're ingesting a lot of liquid calories that are not accounted for condiments, sauces, ketchup, a handful of snacks or a handful of nuts here and there that you're not tracking. Or you're in a calorie deficit all week, but during the weekend that 100 or 200 calories of deficit that you accumulated every day from Monday to Thursday gets totally annihilated by excess calorie consumption during the weekend. So for this patient, the first thing we recommended was putting on more muscle, putting on more muscle. 90% of the muscle protein synthesis stimulus is lifting weights. It's not eating protein, it's lifting weights. And then if you want to optimize muscle protein synthesis, make sure to eat at least 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of lean body weight of protein per day, which for that patient was about 100 to 120 grams. That seems like a lot. You break that down 30 grams per meal plus maybe 10 to 15 per snack if you take two snacks, or 20 to 30 if you take one snack.
Speaker 1:That would be lean sources of protein. Best ones would be and obviously I have a bias towards plant protein, but I mean obviously lean dairy eggs without the yolk, like chicken, would be a lean source of protein. Some lean red meats maybe, if in moderation. But studies show that if you increase your number of calories coming from plant protein by 3%, you reduce the risk of chronic disease by 10%. So that means that legumes, chickpeas, beans, lentils, soy products, trying to include more high-protein, seeds, like hemp seeds, trying to include more high-protein seeds, like hemp seeds, think about edamame, tofu, tempeh, soy milk. So obviously, if you want to increase the amount of plant protein in your diet, that's absolutely possible. And then plant protein also. The package contains high fiber, typically unsaturated fat, more than saturated fat, contains no cholesterol and a wide variety of micronutrients.
Speaker 1:So this patient was like yeah, no, I'm not going to eat plant protein, I don't like beans, chickpeas, lentils or sour products. So we were trying to increase the amount of lean meats in his diet, cottage cheese, I mean. That's where I recommended he see a dietician, because I think that we need to break down how he's eating so that we can tweak what that patient is already doing. That's much more useful than trying to revamp his whole diet, because I eat oatmeal every day but he gagged when I talked about oatmeal. He doesn't eat oatmeal at all. He eats cereal. So for some people, just going towards 2% milk to maybe skim milk or towards soy milk, even better, would be an option.
Speaker 1:Now, the goal is to help people make smart swaps or substitutions and not to change the way people eat if that's not what they want to do. With this patient, the priorities is making more muscle and losing visceral fat. We make more muscles by exercising and by lifting heavy things at a rep range of probably anywhere from 6 to 10, 6 to 12. We make more muscle by making sure that we protect lean body mass by having enough protein in the diet by any means necessary, while staying in a calorie-controlled diet and while making sure that you're protecting visceral fat or you're helping to reduce it by having higher levels of unsaturated fat in your diet instead of saturated fat and making sure that you have low levels of refined carbs in your diet, like fructose, for example. That all promote visceral fat.
Speaker 1:Don't forget that hormones impact visceral fat as well. So insulin, glucagon, cortisol, estrogen all of these hormones do impact where your fat is going to get stored. And if it's going to get stored in your skin, which is less dangerous, it's still pro-inflammatory, but much less than visceral fat, which is fat stored in your organs and leads to organ and metabolic dysfunction, which leads to worsening of insulin resistance, worsening of blood pressure, worsening of lipids, of glucose, of inflammatory markers. It can lead to fatty liver, type 2 diabetes and all sorts of metabolic disturbances.
Speaker 1:Moral of the story people need not just to consider being overweight. A lot of people are under-muscled, so lifting weights is always a part of the equation. And when people say, oh, I don't want to become too muscular, I'm like I've been training for like the last 20 years, almost an hour a day, rarely miss a day trying to get over-muscled and I'm not succeeding. So the chances that you are going to build so much muscle that you're not fitting in your t-shirt anymore are very low. But you'll get much healthier in the process, cool. So lower your visceral fat, put on more muscle and you will absolutely be metabolically more healthy. Cool, all right, peace out. Hey, everyone. Go check out my website, plantbaseddoctorjulescom to find free downloadable resources, and remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr Jules Cormier, and on YouTube at Plant Based Dr Jules.
