064: Dr. Zoe Harcombe – Reversing Outdated Dietary Guidelines, Understanding Food Cravings, and What it Takes to Stop Overeating Carbs and Sugar

Episode #064
Reversing Outdated Dietary Guidelines, Understanding Food Cravings, and What it Takes to Stop Overeating Carbs and Sugar

Learn why it’s time to rewrite dietary guidelines to include a high-fat, low-carb approach. Dr. Harcombe shares what the research supports in this podcast episode.

Guest

Dr. Zoe Harcombe

If you can change the dietary guidelines in America, you can change them worldwide. Because they are now embedded in hospital food, school food, and military provisions, you would change the whole public sector and the dietary advice. Share on X

Why do people overeat when their goal is to lose weight?

What’s really behind the obesity epidemic?

What does the research support when it comes to our current nutritional guidelines, especially with regards to dietary fat?

Despite starting out with an economics and math degree, Dr. Zoe Harcombe quickly transitioned into the diet and health sector to uncover the answers to these questions and more.

What she discovered, as you’ll hear about in this podcast episode, is that our current dietary guidelines are outdated and not supported by science.

Instead, the research is proving that just the opposite is true — following a low-carb, high-fat diet is the key to better health.
People realized that they lost weight faster, they felt less hungry, more satiated, and managed to get through to the next meal much easier when they had fat meals. Share on X

Dr. Harcombe discusses why that is and she digs deeper into understanding food cravings, especially those for sweet and carb-heavy foods.

She also shares what it takes to improve public health, how to stop overeating, and why she transitioned from being a vegetarian for 20 years.

You’ll hear more about her thoughts on sustainability and how a plant-based diet negatively impacts soil quality too.

As for Dr. Harcombe, she has a Ph.D. in public health nutrition and has authored six books, including, Why Do You Overeat?, The Obesity Epidemic, and Stop Counting Calories and Start Losing Weight.

Each week, Dr. Harcombe debunks nutritional guidelines and outdated research to her 60k+ social media followers.

And you’ll get to hear a condensed version of her top principles from several decades of research when you tune into this episode.

Here’s a quick overview of everything we chat about today

  • Zoe’s background and how she started out in math and economics and eventually transitioned into researching nutrition, public health, and dietary guidelines
  • What drew her to study obesity, food cravings, addiction, and achieving weight loss
  • Why you crave particular foods
  • A common relationship high-achievers have with food
  • Why do people overeat when the goal is to get slim?
  • Understanding food cravings
  • Zoe’s simple acronym for the foods to include in your diet
  • How long it takes to kick food cravings
  • The mechanisms at play when it comes to cravings
  • The emotional component to cravings
  • Why Zoe believes it’s a “cheat not a treat”
  • What works best for fixing bad eating habits?
  • The nutritional combination you should always avoid and why
  • How is fat viewed in the UK?
  • What it really takes to reverse current dietary trends and guidelines
  • You’ll also hear more about Zoe’s views on sustainability and how a vegetarian diet negatively impacts the planet and what to do instead
  • What happens when you go down a plant-based route
  • Zoe also dives into her views on gut health and the gut microbiome

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