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I can sorry I did not think I would cry on this podcast so much Lane Norton scientist record setting bodybuilder and is one of the most respected voices in the health and nutrition space who debunks all the different Fitness and Nutrition myths out there let's go to the technical stuff ooh yeah let's do that calories in calories out so the first point of confusion a lot of people may think they're in a calorie deficit but they're not because one people don't really understand portion sizes if you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food you will be shocked and the other thing is artificial sweetness I've wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not if we look at the randomized control trial they saw 6 kg of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda now when they compare it versus water this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview I'm sure they found that what are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting is it okay if I get deep into the Weeds on this one go ahead in studies people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting it's because what's your thoughts on his impact overall I think it's a net positive and here's why when it comes to weight loss people are Googling how to lose belly fat practically it's kind of irrelevant because and then is sugar addictive this one's going to get me in trouble too so it's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show um and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show we now have five million subscribers on YouTube which is a number that I just can't comprehend and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had we started the DI of just over three years ago now and in my wildest expectations we might have had 100,000 subscribers by now so you can imagine how shocked I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations every week um and spend some time with us so thank you and I made a deal with you I made a deal that if you subscrib to this show that we would continue to raise the bar and
in 2024 we're going to raise the bar like never before I've been working for the last 9 months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to the show and I'm very excited to deliver that for you the production's going to change we're going to go even further with our guests and we're going to tell even more Global stories so as always if you appreciate what we're doing here the simple free favorite ask from you is to hit the Subscribe button let's get on with the [Music] episode Lane who are you and what is the mission you're on I'm trying to make Fitness information more accessible Fitness more accessible to everyone and trying to act as a bridge between academic research and your average person because so much Gets Lost in Translation because social media the news it is a fire hose of information a lot of which is misinformation or you only get part of the story and so I have noticed people are so frustrated because they feel like they understand what it is to eat healthy and then a new documentary comes out a new podcast comes out a new article comes out and says oh NOP you're whatever it is you're doing it's wrong and here's why and I just want to help clear up some of that confusion and help people understand the big stuff that really matters versus not getting lost in the weeds of the stuff that just doesn't matter that much and when you say Fitness how do you define that because you talked about you then talked about diet and food so what is the sort of bucket that you put yourself in what are the categories that you really focus on great question but you know I would say that my wheelhouse is nutrition so I did a PhD in nutritional sciences and I also feel pretty equipped to interpret exercise information as well and what is your so that's your academic sort of background what is your lived experience what experiences have you had as a coach to people as a as a trainer in your own personal life that have added to that academic information that you have great question so I'll try to give The Abridged version of this um I got bullied a lot uh growing up as really skinny kid hyperactive weird you know
and so when you're young what makes you stand out is actually you know not such a good thing and uh I got bullied a lot and I started lifting weights to I thought if I got bigger muscles you know girls would pay attention to me and I'd stop getting bullied it didn't work for either of those two things but I did gain more confidence not because I built bigger muscles but because the process of lifting and getting through plateaus and moving through setbacks and all those sorts of things that's what built confidence and I started lifting when I was 15 and when I got to college I changed my major because I decided I was going to do my first bodybuilding show I did it I won the Teen Division and I was hooked I was like this is the thing I want to do but back in you know this is 2001 I was 19 I'm 42 now the Avenues to make money in Fitness were basically be a personal trainer open a gym start a supplement company try to be Mr Olympia and I I didn't know how feasible any of those were so I started looking at a PhD literally for no other reason I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life but I figured if I delay the real world by four to eight year four to six years maybe I'll have it figured out by then but in that meantime I had started posting on different bodybuilding message boards and so I would get a bunch of emails about my articles and people asking me questions and I was like basically doing full-on diets and nutrition for people for free because I just liked it and then when I got to grad school I was like man I you know this is a lot of my time now maybe if I just like charge people a little something I can do this instead of a teaching assistantship make a little bit of money you know didn't really think much of it and so I took my first online client back in 2005 and within three years I was making a full-time income from it with no advertising just word of mouth and then in my fourth year I think was the first year I ever made like six figures from it I remember thinking what is happening I want to take one step back um because it's clear from what you said there but also clear from a lot of the research that I did on you and your backstory that much of the driving motivation behind why you are
what you are today and why you help people and why you do the work you do and make the content you make was because of this early experience with bullying and I've sat here with so many people who are real anomalies in their lives for a variety of different reasons you know maybe in business or or in science or um in sport and I so often find that the the reason why they're brilliant is also fundamentally Interlink to the reason why they struggle or they struggled shall I say and in your story that seems to be very pertinent I read a quote you said on a video you made seven years ago where you said I had intense and sustained emotional bullying I would be put in a corner by four to five people and be obliterated repeatedly yeah I mean you know when I I'll tell people like the the reason I started lifting weights in bodybuilding it was not the noblest of reasons you know it was very much you say I'm worthless I'm going to prove you wrong you know and uh even I mean I I would love to say that it has no remnants today but I would be that would be a lie right um some of the stuff I still struggle with in terms of I have a hard time trusting myself a lot of the times because I got told for so long or trusting some decisions I make I got told for so long you do it wrong you know you suck you're worthless you know those sorts of things when you went to therapy you were diagnosed with a form of PTSD Bing PTSD they call it yeah my my therapist she diagnosed me and I remember saying I don't have PSD like that's that's for soldiers that's for Bel and she goes first off Lane you don't like it when people correct you as a professional in your field don't correct me and you're right you didn't witness people die nothing like that but trauma is trauma and her explanation of it was it is all relative and it may not have been you know hores from war but for your brain it was traumatic and the way she explained it is trauma is something that causes you to react or act in response to something even after that event has passed right so for me for example I've struggled in personal relationships where either Partners or friends trying to give me feedback and I
immediately get defensive very defensive and if you read about relationships that's not great right it's one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for relationships and I never UND I just thought well I'm just explaining myself I'm just and then now I understand it's oh it's because that was my response to the bullying because feedback or criticism to me feels like bullying even though it's not so you have a defense mechanism because you had to defend yourself back then and it's so interesting the the things that we adopt to survive when we're young become maladaptive when we get older it's difficult to unpick all of that when you're an adult isn't it because it's as you know it's very hard wide they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks but I've we've I've got my own trauma responses that I'm still trying to work through and I'm now aware of them but they still on a bad day on an unslept day they can still come to the surface I tell people I don't know if you can like completely undo your default setting right but I think what you can do is get mindful of it and learn tools to manage it right and I mean it's interesting how this ties into obesity because I used to be somebody who i' I've never been obese never been overweight nothing like that when I got to grad school I was very much more towards the side of if you're obese it's cuz you're lazy it's your fault you know and then the more I just observed I realized that can't be true because look at all these OB there's so many obese people that are successful in other areas of their life where they apply a lot of discipline what is it about this thing right and I remembered I read a study and I I I hopefully I get this correct cuz it was a while back but they looked at obese women and they found that obese women were 50% I believe 50% more likely to have uh sexual assault trauma in their past and you also look at the Obesity literature and people who are obese tend to have a greater reward response from food whereas people who are lean or normal weight it's it's not like that huge reward that they get it's like some people you know they they can they can have a drink they can have a beer they go I like the beer you know and other
people become alcoholics right and so so much of this stuff gets tied up in it gets wired in as a as a kind of coping mechanism if you look at like for example binge eating what's happening during a binge is that person is getting a flood of dopamine right they're they're they're masking they want to mask that feeling of whatever made them feel uncomfortable I always tell people I'm like you don't really find people binge eating after they've had 8 hours of sleep at 10:00 a.m. in the morning when they're low stress right it's at 10 p.m. at night after a long day they've been fighting with their spouse their kids are driving them nuts and they just they want to turn it all off right and I think staying mindful is one of the hardest things we have as humans I mean I know what my addiction is unfortunately based on my um current job I get way too into social media you know I just end up up you know it kind of started as well I'm I'm doing work right and I'm responding to comments and all that and pretty soon I'm looking at my screen time and I'm going oh my gosh right and so that was something for me to numb up and turn my mind off right but for other people it's food for other people it's gambling for other people it's alcohol for other people it's some other drug so what do we do with that then so do we first have to figure out what our relationship is on a psychological level with these addictions with with our food for example if we're just focusing on weight loss to start with when you if you were to be coaching someone would you try and understand their um propensity to binge to to have that sort of you like dopamine craving or or do you focus somewhere else I kind of say all right like walk me through a typical day for you walk me through a typical week where where's where are your struggles really at right and one of the things I we call it the biolane way when we when we kind of teach our coaches is we do coaching with you have to have two things are critically important accountability with empathy because if you're just the accountability coach the drill sergeant who's you know most people if they screw up they've beat themselves up more than anybody else I know I'm that way I'm sure you're that way so you don't need
to beat them up again the empathy portion so so if you're just beating somebody up if you're just holding them accountable without empathy you just become the drill sergeant and what happens is people end up tuning you out or they're not honest with you anymore because they don't want to constantly feel like they're failing right the empathy portion if you just have empathy and you're saying I'm so sorry that happened that's so hard I understand but you're not holding them accountable there's no impetus for change right so it takes it takes both MH and so the way I'd often coach like let's take a somebody had a binge something like that the first thing I'd say I understand why that happened you know that's really hard where what was the antecedent to this like what what started this right okay now let's look at if we had to go back and do it over again what are some things we might be able to do to put some to put some barriers right so I had I had one client he's a a hedge fund manager and when he started with me he was binging pretty much I would say almost every day and I said okay where do you find that this is happening and he said well usually it's after everybody's gone to bed and you know um I just find myself in the kitchen and it just happens so okay so it's not reasonable to lock yourself in your room right but what if we just did a few things to increase your mindfulness right put a Posta on the cabinet where you where you keep that the junk food right not saying anything nasty or anything but I just said write down am I hungry or am I just upset then on your on your door right lock it from the inside it's not you know it doesn't keep you from going out but you have to unlock it right like you're having to turn your brain on right and it the more barriers you can put there the the better it gets the more sort of mindful moments you can have where you make you have to kind of make a decision and you don't you come out of autopilot CU I notice when whenever I have my binge moments which happens once in a while it is like unthinking yeah it's just like a robot has taken over this exactly and with this like this particular client right he'd have a rough day at work hedge fund manager
very stressful job I say okay if you've had a rough day at work first thing to do when you're driving home say man I've had a tough day at work this is usually where I'd have a binge session like say it out loud like name it you know what I mean sometimes just naming it is enough to stop it I mean I not the same thing but I struggle with I'm sure you know as ADHD during convers ation I have something to say I have something to say I want to say it I want to say it I want to say it right and I'll end up cutting people off and making them feel bad and so I still have that inclination but now I'll go if I start I go oh I'm I'm sorry I jumped in please finish right and so just like calling it out to yourself can make a huge difference on changing the behavior that which gets monitored gets changed I really want to focus on this point of the psychology of both exercise and weight loss because in all the research that I do on even your conversations and other conversations clearly the like fundamental that sits underneath doing all the things we're going to talk about is like having the motivation the discipline and mastering one's own like mind because as you kind of said we can have all the diet plans in the world and many or all of them might work but without the psychology of how to lose weight and to motivate ourselves to get to the gym none of it really matters so what else do we need to think about when we're trying to understand how to Master like the Beast Within our mind there's a lot to unpack here good I'll start with this um do you know Ethan sule you familiar with him so Ethan is an actor he was in uh my name aurl he was in American History X and he was in Remember the Titans some of the big movies he's been in uh Wolf of Wall Street as well and he was over 500 lbs like he and like everybody knows him as the the really big guy in those movies and those shows now he's like 220 pounds and looks like he would play a military operator in a show right and he said something that really stuck with me he said um if the house is on fire just get out of the house we can worry about why the fire started later but just get out and there's so much like paralysis by analysis out there that people don't end up actually
starting and if I put two plates in front of you you know with different food yeah we can cribble but for the most part if I'm sitting something out with the cheeseburger fries and all this kind okay versus lean meats vegetables we know which one is more conducive to to health right people will argue about these little things low carb low fat those sorts of things just get out of the house stop stop eating so so much of this very energy dense hyper palatable food start moving away and Ethan I think it was Ethan he has this he has this thing he says when he um when he uh whenever he posts a picture in the gym he'll say I killed my clone today and I never I never quite understood it and then I read a um a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers now what that means is weight loss we know diets can help you lose weight but they don't tend to work long term because people their adherence wains and they just kind of regain the weight over time and if we look at like out about three years after initial weight loss it's like depending on the statistics you use it's anywhere from 90 95% of people end up regaining almost all the weight they lost and this study was about people who had successfully kept it off for a long period of time so this is the unicorns right the the 5 10% of people who actually had that long-term success and there were things on there that you would expect um you know they they practiced some form of cognitive restraint they uh did cognitive restraint being um counting calories or doing low carb or time restricted eating or some form of restraint but the thing that stood out to me that really grabbed my attention was so many of them specified and pointed out they felt like they had to develop a new identity and I texted Ethan and I was like is this what you mean by I killed my clone he goes that is exactly what I mean and so one of the things I'll tell people now is think of the person that you want to become picture them think about what do you think their habits and behaviors look like on a daily basis now reverse now start to reverse engineer that right and you mentioned motivation and I my thoughts have
changed about motivation a lot of people wait to get motivated or inspired and hey like I think all that stuff's great but in the course of anything and I'm I would bring it back to you in in building a startup I'm guessing there were days where you were not motivated to do what you were doing right yeah most days right right so many days so motivation is great when it come I say that's like nitrous on a car right give you a quick boost and make you go a lot faster but discipline the is the gas tank that is it doesn't I tell people detach your feelings from the process okay I have a very cold calculus when I look at my goals what is my goal what will it take to get there some form of work in time right no matter how you slice it let's let's take um so I won uh the master World Championship in powerlifting in 2022 thank you took me I went to open uh worlds in 2015 set a world squat record there but then went through a lot of different injuries and a lot of pain took me seven years to get back and and win but there were times where I was very unmotivated to go to the gym because I couldn't lift heavy I was you know in a lot of pain but I knew if I want to get back there this is what it's going to take and so it was it doesn't matter if I'm motivated I have to do the things I said I was going to do and I tell people try to detach how you feel from the process it takes to get there and that's really hard for a lot of people to do but here's the thing as you do the process you start to see the results and then the motivation becomes more sustained right the the hard part is when you are down in the ditches and you you aren't seeing that progress so when I'm coaching people on this stuff a lot of it is trying to build their confidence and so many people they'll start a new year's resolution let's say because it's beginning of the year I'm going to go to the gym 5 days a week I'm like stop you haven't been going at all how about this you're going to be active at least an hour for 3 days a week let's start there if you go 5 days fantastic
right but it's different if you said you're going to go 5 days you only go three you feel really bad about yourself you say you're going to go three and you go three feel really good about yourself what's the harm of feeling bad about yourself so there was a year 2017 where I said I may call everyday Steve and I was like I'm going to go to the gym every every day of 2018 I believe it was MH and I'm not going to tell you what happened cuz I think you know but I I want to ask the question what is the harm of setting a huge goal and then failing and feeling bad about yourself you know there's a lot of different versions of like what builds confidence but I think one of those things is keeping the promises you make to yourself right and also just doing the thing you said you were going to do and that's why I tell people like hey for me if I say I'm going to go four or five times a week that's not a problem because for me it takes discipline to keep me out of the gym right like I love that that's fun for me but if you're somebody who hasn't been going just start with something like I'm not saying don't be ambitious overall but you have to build confidence in increments right like so for example I'm going to go back to my own personal experience I in 2015 I set a world squat record 668 lbs at 205 lb body weight class but when I first started lifting I was horrible at squats I've got long legs um I am in fact uh um one of the world powerlifting coaches looked at the video of my Squat and said I I don't know how you did that and squats were very intimidating to me I would get really scared trying to do it my back would hurt you know all these sorts of things you know eventually I ended up squatting 668 pounds but the first time I went in the gym I wasn't able to do it the first five years 10 years I couldn't I couldn't even imagine that right and one of the things I tell people about confidence is I thought when I if I squatted that amount of weight 4 or 500 lbs would feel easy it still feels heavy I just got better at handling it right and I kind of use that euphemism for life that analogy for life because life doesn't get easier but you can get better at handling those things and the confidence that I built to be
able to do that came through the repetition doing it over and over and over again and that's what people need the problem is they don't get the repetition in because they do things like you were talking about which is they start to it'd be like me going in the gym my first time saying I'm going to squat 400 lb I'm gonna get crumpled into a heap right but if I do it if I do what I can do at the time and slowly build that confidence that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for myself I think it was Jordan Peterson that said to me when he deals with some of his clinical patients the starting point for them is so small that it almost makes makes them feel shameful so they don't do it so he says he's dealt with people who literally can't get out of bed because their depression is so severe and telling someone that their goal is just to walk down the hall and walk back feel so small and inconsequential and so full of shame that that they just think no that doesn't matter I'm not going to do that and there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now and they think about where their starting point might be and it might literally be getting out of the house putting their trainers on and going for a 5-minute walk but in their heads they'll go that's not going to do anything that's not going to get me to that Mountaintop that I that I know I need to get to so I'm not going to bother a lot of people like that and I mean you know you can take your cliche that you want you know Journey Of A Thousand Miles begins with a single step how to eat an elephant one bite at a time I mean it's cliche but it's very true right and I think if you're climbing a mountain if you're only looking at the top you're going to feel like you're getting nowhere right so if you want to climb a mountain have in mind the mountain that you want to climb but when you're climbing it look at the next ledge and just do that as the checkpoint right so somebody asked me once if somebody had a lot of weight to lose like over 100 pounds where would you tell them to start I'd say you know I'd look at where they're at right now what are their habits their behaviors what are they doing exercise– wise let's get them to the next ledge right so let's let's just you know we
can go into this too but you know if they're drinking a bunch of soda per day trying to get them to go straight to water that might be very daunting for them right okay well diet soda is better than than regular soda and and people will argue about it but I can cite the studies on this okay they're they're um you know they're eating certain foods can we do something somewhat close to what they're already doing but find a way to cut out some calories from that right let's let's try and I'm going to try and meet them closer to where they are and then slowly pull them back this way when you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change their life so often it seems that there's some kind of adverse event like I'm talking here about the why that sits behind the reason to to change to change to lose the weight to build the muscles do you see that often that there's some kind of catalyst moment you actually see a lot of parallels between like the way adex talk and people who have lost a lot of weight uh in terms of they had to develop a new identity they are often have to get a new set of friends not on purpose but if you think about if you were hanging around a certain type of people and you became and you were very overweight you've probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you and even if you still care about those people as you start to come out of that there's a few things that are happening one if they're not joining you in the things you're doing that creates a gap and uh people can also be very insecure when people they know start improving themselves and they start trying to pull them back in crab crabs in the bucket why why do you got to eat that why can't you enjoy this why can't you you know that's because you're holding up a mirror to them by changing your life right correct correct so you know I I don't think he reminds me talking about this my uh my brother um was an addict and um he he like he went to prison for a period of time um he had a lot of really bad stuff go down in his life and I one day I asked him I'm like was it was going to prison was that like your rock bottom and he goes no he goes honestly I just woke up one day and realize I lose everything I get a job and I lose it I get some money and I lose it I get a
relationship and I lose it I just got sick and tired of losing and not always but you hear a lot of similar stories from people who drastically changed their lives as they just got to the point where they were sick and tired of being that way and they just realize that if I don't make some kind of change this is going to continue and I think one that takes a self-awareness that which is hard and having that mirror brought to you is really hard um I can relate in other areas of life but that why really is at the core of it because at the end of the day if you don't have a really strong why it is hard when you start to lose motivation you know I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack when he was like in his 40s and then he lost 150 lbs and he's like whenever I started whenever I didn't have motivation or I started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits I thought about my kids growing up without a dad and it made it very easy for me and so when you have that really strong why it it it makes it easier to get through it I'm not saying either me or you are going to be able to figure out an answer here but I feel like maybe there's something we can offer to the question about how to cultivate the Y is there anything that you do on those days any disciplines you think you can put in place that will just keep the why um front and center I'm going to throw out one something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background on my phone to um an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be and it just meant that even if it gives me a 1% psychological reinforcement in the direct so that I fall on the correct side of a decision relating to diet or Fitness maybe that would help you know because it's it's there a couple things I think about um I think about the people I care about in my life and wanting to make them proud think about my kids you know um how would I want now I'm going to get emotional how would I how would I want them to remember their dad you know um I can remember um coming back from all these injuries and and I was lifting in the garage one day my daughter she was uh six at the time and she's such a
little spark plug and she would watch me and sometimes she would come in and like do some LTS with me and stuff and uh I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me and I said you know Dad almost was a world champion I got really close and you know I that would be something that I would I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that and she said are you going to try and be a champion again and she said it in the kid way that like but oh my gosh when she said that whenever I felt tired whenever I felt down or whatever I just remember my daughter saying are you going to try to be a champion again made it easy you know and so I had my like it's going to sound goofy but at Worlds in 2022 I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time and uh I had picture of my kids on my phone and I was looking at that and I was almost in tears before I'd go out for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up and and that was that was my why so I'm thinking about my kids and also think about you know my parents and like great people wanting to make them proud and then honestly like my my personal hero is my grandfather so my grandfather is part of the greatest Generation Um he was the funniest person I ever met with the most Integrity of anybody I ever met and so so many times when I think about the person I want to be I I think about my grandfather and um you know still to this day I'll think about them before I if I feel like low motivation or if I've really screwed something up um you know like that sort of thing let's go to the technical stuff yes let's start with so we're talking here about dieting and weight loss if I'm trying to lose weight should I be counting my calories ah so the first point of confusion people assume calories and calories out is the same thing as counting calories that's like saying the law that in order to save money you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget keeping a budget can help you save money but it's not the same thing so let's break down calories in calories out calories inside pretty straightforward it is the food you eat right the calories and the food that you eat now I would add one caveat to that
the metabolizable energy so when we say calories calories is literally a unit of energy and so I'll have some people say well calories aren't a real thing you can't look at calories on a microscope you're right it refers to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that through the process of digestion absorption and Metabolism that energy is captured in one way or another so that's the energy into the system calories out is more complicated so that involves a few different uh energy outputs the first one being your BAS metabolic rate so your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on so if you just laid down didn't move that's how many calories your body would burn and that's actually the Maj for most people the majority of the calories they burn per day it's around 50 to 70% depending on how active they are and it fluctuates person to person so as as a man with fairly big muscles there you yours will be bigger than mine because correct you have more going on over there yeah there there you can tie about at least based on the regressions you can tie about 90% of the variance in BMR to someone's lean mass okay if you look at the studies it's very tightly correlated with lean mass right because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non-lean tissue so bmr's one bucket then you have What's called the thermic effect of food so your TEF um our bodies are kind of like for lack of a poor analogy but analogy that works is cars like internal combustion engine you don't just put petrol or gas in your car and all a sudden it just spontaneously starts up you got to start it the battery puts in energy so you can get energy out of the fuel right your body has to put in energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat and so a lot of the confusion people say well calories in calories out assumes that all calories equal it doesn't because TEF accounts for this because for example protein has a higher thermic effect of food than carbohydrate or fat so if you look at um so protein requires more energy to basically process it correct so if you if you look at um like say fats for example TEF is about 0 to 3% meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it carbohydrates about 5 to
10% so if you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it a lot of that depends on the fiber content the more fiber the lower the metabolizable energy so fiber has a higher thermic effect of food as well then protein is about 70 80% so if you eat 100 calories from protein you capture about 70 to 80 calories so some people out there will say well there's negative calorie no those don't exist um you're always getting more energy out of it than you put in but some are lower than others right and so that TEF is about 5 to 10% of the energy you expend per day so now we've got BMR TEF and then you have your physical activity which we can further break into two different buckets the first one is obvious which is exercise right you go to the gym burn some calories and that's energy out the second one is less intuitive it's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis neat and that is the small unconscious movements that you make per day give you an example like what I'm doing like now it's not subconscious because I'm thinking about it but fidgeting um when you're talking with your hands uh pacing right in fact they've actually shown that people who have a more they call obese resistant phenotype when they eat more they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it and so people who are more obese prone when they eat more food they tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active oh interesting and people it's kind of pedantic but it's important to understand the difference I'll hear people say well I'm going to take the steps and get my knat up no no you made a decision that's exercise Okay the reason being neat really isn't consciously modifiable right and so I I'll give you an example of like a extreme example of this so when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010 um the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable it's hard to describe in words um Soul crushing would be a way to describe it and um I had gotten done you know I trained two hours at the gym that day i' done an hour of cardio got home and I remember I sat down on the couch and uh my my ex at my wife at the time uh she had like real housewives of
whatever County on the TV I hated those shows but the remote was about 7 feet away I watched the entire show I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued that's an example of neat and neat is very modifiable so they've shown that even a 10% reduction in body weight can reduce neat by up to 4 or 500 calories per day so you're just a lot of people end up moving less without even realizing it so here's the rub this so you got your calories in you got your calories out BMR plus TEF plus neat plus exercise people think of these two things as static they're not static and that's I talk about in the book a lot we have various adaptations that fight us for weight loss first of which is on the metabolism side when you lose body weight your BMR drops but part of that is because you're carrying around less weight right so if if I 200 lb and I drop down to 180 PBS I just have less mess to carry around and so your BMR goes down a little bit which is again which again is your base metabolic great right which is the the cost of keeping the lights on basically but there's actually what's called metabolic adaptation which has shown that with a 10% body weight loss on average you can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15% for BMR so let's take an example here because people will say well calorie deficit didn't work for me because you know I was eating this many calories I was exercising this much period of time and I was um you know so so I like what happened well you thought you were in a calorie deficit but let's take me for example okay my BMR I've had it measured it's about it's about 2,000 calories a little bit lower about 2,000 calories my total daily energy expenditure is around 3,400 calories per day so that's all this stuff added up right but if I lose 10% of my body weight for me 2700 calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit mhm but if I lose 10% of my body weight if I drop my BMR by 15% 15% of 200 2,000 calories day is 300 calories drop my neat by 400 calories that's 700 calories all of a sudden that deficit is no longer a deficit that's now maintenance right now this doesn't happen all at once this is a progressive
thing over time but there's a reason like I tell people I'm like if was a calorie deficit as soon as like from the time you did it indefinitely you would starve to death right but all of us most of us have had the experience of starting a diet losing some weight and eventually even though you're eating the same way doing the same exercise it plateaus right and then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit and the other way so that's on one side where that's kind of working against you to try to bring you back to your original body weight right we talk about weight weight regain the other side is your hunger hormones go up as you diet right so they've actually then they have shown obese people who lose weight to become normal weight when you compare them to normal weight people who were never obese with the same uh similar lean body mass the formerly obese people have a lower total daily energy expenditure and they have higher markers of hunger they have higher appetite so it's working on both sides of that equation to push you back so The Devil's Advocate argument is well you know I ate this amount of calories that should have been a calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight or it's the you know all calories are created equal I'll tell people all calories are created equal because saying a calorie is not a calorie it's like saying uh second hands on the clock are different no they're just a unit of measurement all sorts of calories are not equal so let's take um budgeting right I used that earlier sports car okay so let's say somebody makes million dollars a year right if they want to spend aund let's assume no loans just for sake of ease if they want to spend $150,000 on a sports car but they're still able to pay their mortgage they can take care of their responsibilities and they can put money away for retirement can they buy that sports car sure they can right and is it a bad investment I guess you could argue it's a bad investment because they could put the $150,000 in those Investments but maybe that sports car makes them feel good and gives them a little carrot on the end of the stick to you know keep working and
whatnot but if I take somebody who makes $200,000 a year should they buy the $150,000 sports car if it means they can't pay their mortgage they can't um you know save for retirement no of course not right similar thing with energy right so if I'm you know somebody who's very active and I burn a lot of calories is it a big deal if I have a Pop-Tart say um if I'm still getting enough protein I'm hitting my target energy I'm uh getting enough fiber in and my my my micronutrients if that gives me that little carrot on the end of the stick to keep being consistent not a big deal but if talking about a smaller woman with less lean mass who needs to eat 1,200 calories a day to lose weight that's not a very good investment right it's not a very good use of funds so what I'll tell people is you know people will say well how do I know what a deficit is how how do I know how many calories to eat right because also just on that point I I heard you talk about food labeling as well and how inaccurate that can be so you can you can have up to a 20% error in food labeling right so some people will use so what that means is it could say 100 calories it could be 80 it could be 120 now I will say if it's coming from a big food company and they have pretty rigorous standards it's probably not that far off but they're allowed up to that right because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous it'd be difficult to like get it exactly on so you'll have some people say well see calorie counting is useless because you can't know exactly how many calories you're taking in and are you going to get your BMR measured are you going to get your neat measur meur are you going to get this measured it can be much more simple than that again Financial analogy I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless because you never know what inflation is exactly doing and if you have Investments you can get differential you know Returns on it and on the output side you have unexpected expenses you have fluctuations and expenses your power bill is going to be different from month to month right your car breaks down one month but if you look at the average over time
you can get a pretty good idea of on average what your expenses are like right and you can get a pretty good idea over time un let well entrepreneurs like us but even like us you get you can start to kind of see the trends and get a relatively good good idea of what it's going to be so when it comes to calories in and calories out yes tracking exactly can be very very difficult but if you are mon monitoring your body weight and you're being consistent with how you track you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit and I think another thing that's crosses people up this actually showed up on that um that review of the successful weight loss maintainers they actually talked about one of the things that um was a barrier for them or hard for them was the weight fluctuations because you know if you've ever if you've ever weighed in every day have you ever have you ever done this where you waited every day even first thing in the morning right up down bounces all over the place right so actually when we with our coaching and then with our app we're not just looking at one weight we encourage people to weit as long as it doesn't cause them a lot of stress and anxiety um weigh in Daily and then it's taking the average of those because daytoday changes in weight are much more dictated by fluctuations in fluid but week to week and month-to-month averages reflect loss or gain of mass so for example if you're monitoring your body body weight you know taking averages and looking at that over time you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit because on average you're seeing it go down right now I wanted to make one more point which is you don't have to track calories to lose weight absolutely not it's just one methodology because no matter what you do you have to have some form of restraint right and my friend Peter AA actually breaks it down nicely into a couple different three buckets right you can have dietary restraint which is low car herb plant-based um Whole Food you know whatever it is you're you're restricting some sort of food group or type of food right then you have a time restriction you eat within a certain time frame a certain window then you can have just straight up calorie restriction where you're
tracking and monitoring what you choose to do I think a lot in terms of what is best for an individual boils down to their psychology and what feels easy so this is where a lot of the diet Wars start because somebody will do say low carb right and they'll get results from that and they'll say man it felt like I wasn't even dieting and for whatever reason that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy and they got progress from that but then they assume that everyone else will have the same response somebody else does low fat uh somebody else does intermittent fasting whatever have you and you have all these stories me personally I was the kind of person I'm the kind of person that if I tried to restrict certain foods I end up getting that binge response right but if you tell me I can eat whatever I want as long as I'm tracking it I become ridiculously consistent and I mean I'm still eating mostly like Whole Food minimally processed foods you know those sorts of things because they're better for satiety but I don't stress out about having some snacks here and there that are you know bad consistency because I'm I'm being very consistent right how important is that consistency it is the most important thing so there is actually a um meta analysis and for when I say meta analysis think a study of studies okay so it's not a new study it's what they're trying to do in a metaanalysis is they are trying to take studies that are similar and compile them together to see is there a consensus here is there an overall effect here right so there was a meta analysis of um where they looked at 14 different like popular diets and these ranged from low carb to you know high carb low fat right and what they found is on the long term none of them were better than the others for weight loss but when they stratified them for adherence from least adherent to most adherent what does that mean uh so people who were consistent basically so when they stratified them for I think compliance another way to put it when they gratifi them that way regardless of diet a linear effect of adherence on weight loss so what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is the one that they consistent that can
consistently execute they all function the same way which is you know creating some sort of calorie deficit now some people will say that's not true I did a low carb diet and I was eating more food you probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie dense food you probably were eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food but you were eating less calories is there any way to lose weight in a car calorie Surplus not if that's the so what I'll tell people is all right you take in food it the carbons that you take in they have to go somewhere right and if you are if you are not in a surplus what you are say is you are creating energy out of nothing if that's the case NASA needs to study you because we've figured out how to not worry about fuel on Long space flights right we have a perpetual motion machine um again a a lot of this the confusion becomes when you have you know for example metabolic adaptation yeah so you know people they may think they're in a calorie deficit but they're not or they're overestimating how many calories they burn and here's the other that people don't want to talk about CU this gets down to the mirror right so there's a classic study I think it was from 1992 um and I think the title I may butcher it but it's discrepancy between reported and actual calorie intake in OB subjects I I want to say is is the name of the study and so what they did was they had people they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight even though they were eating low calories and the the average calorie intake that was reported by participants was 1,200 calories a day and so they measured a bunch of different stuff they measured their lean mass their fat Mass they measured their BMR they measured their total daily energy expenditure they found that their BMR was very average when it was when it was for when it was based on their lean mass right and actually if you look at obese people they actually have a higher BMR and higher energy expenditure typically than lean people but on average it's cuz they have more lean mass because when you have more mass to carry around your body has to create more locomotive Mass but when they so they and they told the subjects we will we are going to monitor
you and we will know if you're eating more than you say you are the average in the study was they under reported their calorie intake by about 50% and they over reported their physical activity by just under 50% gez now and some of the participants argued with the researchers about it right here's where people miss the message the message a lot of people take from that is oh see they're lying and that's a really hard thing to take to somebody to be like well you're probably underreporting your calorie intake you're probably eating more than you think you are that feels very you know aggressive and I don't think it's lying I think that one people don't really understand portion sizes if you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food you will be shocked like weigh out a serving of cereal or a serving of ice cream or if you want to be really depressed we out a serving of peanut butter because the tablespoon that you're grabbing I promise you is probably two or three servings and then you know like if the first time I weighed out ice cream when I when I started weighing my food I was like this is a serving it's like two bites you know and so I don't think people have a really good understanding of serving side and even I I'll remember I never forget this it was an Instagram DM and this lady was saying that she was eating 1600 calories a day and not losing weight and we kind of you know had a little back and forth and we were talking and I said well how she's like I am measuring my food I'm like how are you measuring it she's like I'm I'm doing volume measurements so she was doing cups tablespoons that sort of thing I said do me a favor do do exactly what you've been doing but weigh out each one a day later she came back and said oh my God I'm eating 2700 calories a day and so even dietitians under report their caloric intake in Studies by about 10% and these are the experts right so you have on one side people are eating more than they think they are and then on the other side they think they're being more active than they really are but again that's a hard conversation to have with people and even as such telling people hey you need to move more
eat less mechanistically that's true but that's like telling somebody hey if you want to save more money just earn more and spend less with all of this you know I I was adding up all these discrepancies right discrepancies is in like you're weighing it wrong the labels got 20% wrong and I and then my head went back to your budgeting analogy as an entreer as a CEO if my accounting was 20% off I'm dead but if my but but then if it's 95% off in the till like how much money we're getting into the till and then I'm using a cup instead of a scale so that's I don't know 30% off as well no wonder you know the business would go bust right it's complicated I go what the [ __ ] are you going to do yeah it it is complicated but I will tell people you know again if you get back to the the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently which is one of the I have to be careful about this because there are some people where monitoring their body weight consistently ends up being like really anxiety provoking for them disorted eing and stuff yeah that sort of thing so that's you know I try to be sensitive to that but it is a consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly and it's it's a self-correcting thing right like if you're keeping a budget very regularly and you see oh man I spent you know $5,000 more this month what happens you correct right and so I would use that more instead of the accounting variation I would say well sometimes your business has unexpected expenses right or sometimes you have less expenses right and so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate right and so what we're looking for overall is okay let's look back at you know I think a lot of businesses operate in quarters right let's look at this quarter okay on average here's here's our month over month what we're profiting right okay well we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations we'll try to project out a little bit I kind of look at that with people I'm like all right well how much weight did you lose on average like over the past month okay how much were you eating okay you lost six pounds over the last month you're definitely in a calorie deficit right it's working keep
going maybe you're eating 2,000 calories maybe you're eating 2,300 calories who cares it's working right now what happens is eventually once you plateau again maybe reading 2,000 maybe reading 2300 doesn't matter whichever it is if you've plateaued it means you have to reestablish the deficit so you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity or a combination of both you know those sorts of things what about one thing I you talk about at the very start of this conversation was um artificial sweetness specifically oh yeah let's do that specifically in things like Diet Coke I've you know I've wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not okay and there's a lot of you know people talking about this at the moment so what's your answer to that okay this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview I'm sure go um okay so first off let's just talk about weight loss and fat loss okay and and leave out the other stuff um if you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diet soda are heavier in body weight and so some people have said these things cause weight gain but the problem with that is again lifestyle behaviors and so one of the things they've shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners actually tended to be more overweight to start with obese to start with they didn't cause them to become that way they're consuming more of them because they're trying to get to a less obese state right so there's a correlation there but if we look at the randomized control trials right where they say hey you're used to you guys drink soda regular soda you guys drink diet soda there was actually one that just got published a very very really rigorously controlled one-ear study way more weight loss in the diet soda group um and I'm thinking of another randomized control trial I think it was six months where they saw like 6 kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda or it might not have been soda specifically they call them sugar sweetened beverages versus you know
non-nutritive sweetened beverages um so when you replace for for soda it seems to be very effective uh all things being equal and people will say Well it you know it activates the the sweetness in the and and you get hungrier from it well if that's the case then these studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are actually the best frat burners known to man because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms that's amazing they're not it's they're not fat burners they they're replacing that sweet taste and then people will say well it's not better than water you know water people should just drink water shoot the alligator closest to the boat right like okay hey if you can drink water and just drink water cool do that right but if somebody can lose and I have people all the time when I do a post about this somebody say I lost 30 40 50 lbs all I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda literally the only change they made in their life now when they compare it versus water they either see the same results or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results and yeah now it's not because of any kind of fat burning effect what is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar sweetened beverage to water they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else whereas if they're just consuming the artificially sweeten or non-nutritive sweeten but we can't say artificial because um like Stevia is actually you know natural so to say so they call it nonnutritive sweeteners but if they're consuming the the non-nutritive sweeteners they're filling that Gap compensation again compensating right so now again there's nothing magic about them people are just eating less right and if you can do that with water you don't have to consume diet soda you know I would say drink water but if you're somebody where man you know you really have a hard time quitting regular soda heck yeah drinking diet soda is a lot better and people will go well what about insulin they raise insulin that is actually one of the biggest myths out there there are multiple not just iies but now I'm pretty sure there's a meta analysis as well that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise
insulin there is one study um I'm thinking specifically about sucralose there's one study and there everybody always hangs their hats on this and I love to to break it down where sucralose did not increase insulin but they did a they did a sucrose group a carbohydrate only group and a carbohydrate plus sucrose group and the results were the carbohydrate plus sucralose group secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate only group even though they ate the same amount of carbs and so people go well see maybe it's not bad but if you're you know drinking it with carbohydrates it's bad and this is where reading the full text and really going deep on a study is very important so the carbohydrate only group was sucrose which is 50% glucose 50% fructose the carb hydrate plus sucralose group was maltodextrin maltodextrin if you look at are you familiar with glycemic index Loosely yeah so glycemic index basically looks at like um you know how quickly glucose appears in your system and usually you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that multitran has a significantly higher glycemic index and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose because it is a it's actually causes a greater insulin response than even glucose itself because um it's kind of getting into the biochemistry but because it's like this polymer um it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested and absorbed into the circulation so it was actually an inappropriate control group to try to assess that because if you look at the difference in insulin response it's about what you'd expect if you just look at multitran versus sucrose So based on the research there's no evidence it affects glycemia or increases insulin and in fact in these studies where they you know these randomized control trials where they look at you know weight loss um you see improvements in insulin sensitivity hba1c you know because people are losing weight not because of anything magic with these sweeteners is sugar addictive this one's going to get me in trouble too um I want to come back to the artificial sweeteners but I'll answer that um Sugar by itself does not appear to be addtive
Ive there are certain foods that appear to create what's called a food dependence there's subtle differences between that and addiction but I mean kind of the anecdote is nobody's like just grabbing the bag of sucros and just you know eating that and if you think about the foods that really are like very hard to stop eating they're usually not just high in sugar they're usually it's a combination of sugar fat salt and texture okay texture matters as well and mouth feel people will say well Sugar's addictive look at cakes cookies ice cream there's more calories from fat in those than there are sugar in a lot of cases so couldn't you by that logic just argue that fat is also addictive so sugar straight sugar doesn't appear to be addictive per se now it's not very satiating right and it's utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrient so I'm not saying it's a good idea to eat a lot of sugar but um it doesn't appear to have addictive qualities in isolation but there are certain foods cakes cookies these sorts of foods hyper palatable very great mouth fuel potato chips french fries these sorts of foods may have like s sem addictive type properties but just sugar itself doesn't appear to and there's a there's a a study that kind of backs that up basically I think the title was like no evidence for sugar addiction in humans so people will say well you know when I eat that piece of chocolate or that you know sugary thing I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more and more and then the next day I I feel like I need sugar more and I can I've got my own sort of anecdotal experience of I almost call it like a sugar cycle where there might be a weak you know once every four months or six months where I have some sugar and then the next day I want more sugar and then the next day I want more sugar and then the next day and then when I break that Sugar cycle and if I don't eat sugar for like 5 days it kind of it feels like the Cravings gone away M you must hear that from people yeah I mean like right now I have no urge to have sugar for some reason yeah it's so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general right and just like it that could be a self-fulfilling thing where it's like
you know people have been C sugar is addictive or they've heard sugar is addictive and so they eat some feel that mood but also like again the chocolate usually also high in fat right like the mouth feels really good so I'm not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on and and people can have a hard time stopping but it doesn't appear that Sugar like independently is addictive but it can be part of foods that may have addictive like properties artificial sweeters you said you wanted to close off there yeah so now let's talk so we very clearly the research studies show the ones that are controlled well it does help with weight loss um in a lot of these studies what about cancer heart disease uh and the gut microbiome because that's a lot of the questions are out there so with cancer a lot of people think oh there's so many studies showing it causes cancer well first of all again we're talking about epidemiology we're talking about cohort studies so there's a lot of confounding variables but so we were talking about consensus earlier um it's kind of a um I'm on their scientific Advisory Board and it's like PubMed plus chat GPT so you can ask it a question and it will immediately like crawl all the research literature and give you a consensus of what the research says right and so I I did this and you can synthesize it too where it'll show you what percentage of studies say yes no and then possibly right so I I I think I put in do artificial sweeteners cause cancer do you know 80% % of the studies say no but you don't hear about those and why is that because it's much more newsworthy to put out negative news because if you hear a study this thing doesn't cause cancer ho right but what gets shared a lot oh man Aunt Deborah she drinks Diet Coke Deb have you seen this you know it's much more sharable so that negative news tends to get published more right and if you look at the the human studies some of the the more well done ones like I'm think of the neutr Santi cohort in out of France the conclusion was oh it increased the risk of cancer and I I looked in I think it was aspartame spe specifically if something's carcinogenic typically what we see is a
dose response right so if you smoke more you have a higher risk of lung cancer did you know that the yes the so they compared like no or like low amount of aspartame users to like low moderate and then High moderate I want to say it was three different groups so I I could be butchering this a little bit but think low medium high right the medium group had a higher risk of cancer the High group didn't it actually like not uh compared to the the low group it was not statistically different but it dropped from the moderate group so to me and again we're talking about an ratio of like 1.15 meaning a 15% relative risk increase let me put that in perspective 15% sounds scary when it comes to cancer but relative risk means if your absolute risk of developing cancer and say the next 10 years is 10% a relative risk increase of 15% says it goes up to 11.5 yeah it doesn't mean it goes from 10 to 25 right so it's important to to understand the difference but again if it's really carcinogenic we should expect to see kind of a a dose response right we don't see that so to me that's especially with all the studies that don't find an association that's that's more likely to be some kind of data artifact with who knows confounding variables healthy user bias what have you what about the gut then so now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora the comp the composition of it um sucrose appears too aspartame not so much um I think sacran also showed a change to the gut microbiome now here's what's interesting it's hard to know if that is a good bad or neutral change in terms of overall health because um I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose and they were talking about that a couple of species or or genuses of bacteria that increased and one of them that increased was actually associated with people who are leaner have less obesity and better insulin sensitivity and also a species that produce more butyrate and butyrate actually is associated with a whole Host this is a a short chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome mate is associated with a whole host of positive health benefits so I I I will say it's worth monitoring because some of these
do appear to change the breakdown of the got microbiota but there's probably You could argue just as much that there's a positive effect as you could a negative effect so what I'll say is again if we look back at the again shoot the alligator closest to the boat and there are no Solutions only trade-offs if somebody switches to diet soda even if it's not the very best thing they could do maybe water is the very best thing they could do but if they lose 20 lbs and their hba1c drops and their insulin s gets better the metabolic Health gets better it's probably a worthwhile tradeoff are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take so I I always say I have like tears of supplements right um my my first tier thousands of research studies very clearly has benefits creatin monohydrate um which we've known about the performance benefits for years we've known about the um the strength benefits the body composition benefits you take it every day yes I do um now it's coming out that there's cognitive benefits and I want to say man I hope I don't I hope I don't get this wrong so I will fact check this and and make sure you ask me for the study I'm pretty sure they did a study that showed that creatin actually decreased depressive symptoms interesting so what I will say is if there was one I would recommend for everybody it would probably be Crea monohydrate because it's cheap effective and um I mean people say wow we don't know what the long-term effects are it's been around for like 40 years we if if there was long-term effects we' we'd have seen it by now and just to Quick aside creatin monohydrate don't waste your money on anything else there's people try to reinvent the wheel with creatin because monohydrate it's you know remember when like big screen flat screen TVs came out uh this I might be a I'm my age here no I remember but I remember it was like $1,000 for a 40in screen TV and now you can get one for a stick of bubblegum you know what I mean and it's because everybody makes them they're so ubiquitous it drove the cost down right everybody sells creatin monohydrate it drives the cost down so companies come up with new forms of creatin and make these claims around them to try to like get you to spend
more money on cre creatin monohydrate saturates the muscle cell 100% you don't need to do anything else what's going on there so a couple things um and we don't don't fully understand all the mechanisms but we know that when creatin gets in the system um and gets into the cell it bonds with a phosphate which uh produces creatin phosphate that is a high energy phosphate donor so when you're exercising um basically you are using what's called adenosine triphosphate which is ATP which is the purest form of energy in your body so this what we call hydrolysis of ATP is used to power a lot of reactions in your body um and so ATP triphosphate three phosphates it to power these reactions it gets cleaved to a DP as anine diphosphate plus uh an inorganic phosphate right creatine can donate its phosphate to ADP reform ATP so what we see is you know um especially during anerobic exercise uh better performance of creatin because it's a high energy phosphate donor can help replenish that um and then it also pulls water into the cell and we think that that's part of the body composition benefits of it because um you know a hydrated muscle cell I mean muscle cells are 70% water they're mostly water and people say well it's just water okay but that's lean tissue and there's actually some I believe there's some evidence that actually uh hydrating the muscle basically actually increases the improves the contractile properties of the muscle so that could explain part of the strength benefits um and of course again it's going to show up as lean mass right now it's not a huge effect we're talking you know couple pounds for most people something like that I'll take it but but for a relatively cheap effective supplement yeah take it right what are the supplements then in is there anything else in the tier one yeah uh I mean like for people who can tolerate whey protein I mean you know it's not um it's not magic but it's a cheap uh usually quite tasty way to get in high quality protein and you know if you get it from Whole Food great but a lot of people struggle to get in you know the amount of protein they'd like to get in from Whole Food and so whey protein again very high quality usually easily digestible the caveat is whey protein concentrate a lot of people can't
tolerate it because there's lactose in there so if you have a lactose uh intolerance a way isolate which is usually micr filtered um gets out the vast majority if not all the lactose and so most people can tolerate that but there are a certain percentage of people who also have a sensitivity to the lactalbumin in way the the proteins in way so in that case there's what's called a way hydrolysate which is pre-digested way and almost all people can tolerate that but if you don't have any digestive issues with it a concentrator and isolate is totally fine what else in that tier one and then I would say uh caffeine interesting CA caffeine is one of the it is the original cognitive enhancer if we look at cognitive test we see consistently people perform better and if you look at uh performance people consistently perform better right before 12 a lot of people talk to me about the halflife of caffeine impacting sleep yeah so that I mean that's the you know there's even some evidence that you know even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning that it may still affect your sleep later so again no Solutions only trade-offs right um I would say overall if you are an athlete um or somebody who you know relies heavily on your brain power to you know do whatever it is you do caffeine probably a useful supplement as you said you know if you're going to take it try to get in you know nine hours before you're going to sleep to cease your caffeine intake because um by that time you know the majority of it is out of your system right what are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting it it seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people to be able to control their their calorie intake um in studies where they don't prescribe calories so they they don't match calories they just tell people either intermittent fast or you know follow a diet people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting it's because it's placing them in a calorie deficit do they see that in the studies that when they when they do like randomized control trials where they're they're actually controlling calories
I'm like one great extreme version of that would be uh there was a study on Alternate day fasting right so people would do um one day fast complete fast the next day um eat 150% of their maintenance calories whereas the group that was just doing continuous was doing 75% of their maintenance calories the entire time both groups lost pretty much the same amount of weight and actually the The Continuous group retained a little bit more lean mass and lost a little bit more fat Mass but you know that's a pretty extreme form of fasting if you look at the like the more traditional like 168 or those sorts of intermittent fasting you see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating programs the the myths that really get tossed around are a lot of them around longevity um and people saying well cuz whenever I talk about this people will say well I don't I don't fast for weight loss I I fast for health I fast for longevity and aagy you probably heard this this term so what I'll tell you is there's actually more evidence that uh calorie restriction increases autophagy than intermittent fasting but intermittent fasting or fasting does increase autophagy so let's talk about what what this is so autophagy is a type of basically Lal protein breakdown so there's a few different ways that the body breaks down like old misfolded proteins or just things that need to be turned over one of them is um through this kind of Lal protein degradation which the lome is a is a organel in the cell that can kind of engulf these old proteins and break them down and then you get the amino acids from those proteins that can then be recycled to make new proteins right calorie restriction increases autophagy exercise increases autophagy fast can increase autophagy too but you'll hear people say well you got to fast for X period of time CU it's when autophagy turns on like 3 days or something 72 hours or something not true so this this is autophagy protein breakdown is always occurring regardless it's the relative rate that changes right but there's no evidence that fasting increases autophagy more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time now let me give you an example
right let's say somebody fasts for 20 hours out of the day and they eat for 4 hours right and and again the the example I'm using is because some people will say well I don't do it for weight loss I do it for you know just health benefits so let's say over that day they're eating their maintenance level of calories you're just eating in a 4-Hour period right whereas let's say ex person just eats three four meals and same amount of calories during the fasting period sure your autophagy is is going to your rate's going to go up but then during that 4 hours when you're eating you're having to eat a lot more food during that 4 hours gu what's going to happen it's going to go way down so while the your rate of autophagy may be lower eating continuously throughout the day compared to the time when people are fasting when those people when the FAS start eating in that window whatever it is since they have to eat more during that time autophagy drop drops whereas the people eating continuously their autophagy is now a higher rate what if you what if you're going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever is there a use for intermittent longer term fasting in that context so say if I was I don't know if I had some inflamation or there was you know something wrong with me is there ever a use case for sort of 702 hour fasts that will hold me I guess in a greater um depth of autophagy this is difficult because there's not really direct research looking at this so I I what I will say will be speculation um and I'm comfortable speculating on it again let's just break it down to equating weekly calories right because if we're comparing Apples to Apples right we we have the we know caloric restriction will increase autophagy so if intermittent fasting places somebody in a calorie deficit overall that's what we call a confounding variable right so if we assume over the course of a week two people assume genetically identical right eating the same amount of calories but somebody is eating them in 4 days whereas the other person's just spreading them across seven but the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days well their rate of autophagy and fat oxidation is going
to be much higher during those three days right but then when they've got to fit all the calories they normally would in mhm over those four days now it's going to be much lower and the people eating continuously are going to have a higher rate of autophagy and fat fat oxidation body's smart it it it strives for homeostasis now I'll have some people say Devil's Advocate argument is well what if you're not compensating for the calories during those four days well then now you're in a calorie deficit and you can't disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit right so in what I'll say is in the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have where they equate calories between uh inter fasting groups versus not fasting groups we don't see differences in weight loss and we don't really see much difference in biomarkers of Health hba1c markers of insulin sensitivity you have some studies where you'll see like a little bit lower fasting blood glucose with intermittent fasting when they test it but I think this is an artifact of the way they test it is it okay if I get kind of like deep into the Weeds on this one go ahead um so one of the problems is if you're going to compare apples to apples if you fast for longer your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower if somebody's eating continuously for example um and then they're fasting for say 12 hours before the test but the person in the fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window their blood glucose tests out maybe a little bit lower right and so you see this in some of the studies not all but some of them but then you look at the longer term markers of insulin sensitivity like a hba1c and you don't typically see differences when they're equating calories and so again again I'm not people will hear what I'm saying and and it's always like the filter right what I'm actually saying and what they hear is Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it's worthless no if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake it is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control their calorie intake and lose weight here's a question for
you and um H me I think I know the answer but it but it turns out a lot of people don't know the answer because I was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with are interested in and I actually did some research into what people are Googling the most and it's interesting that people are Googling the most when it comes to weight loss can you guess what it is ketogenic diet well even more than that is how to lose belly fat oh interesting and it's not so that people are really really obsessed with losing this fat right here and I think there's some exercises out there and some diets that purport to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region what' you say to that the answer is you may be able to spot reduce but I think practically it's kind of irrelevant and I'll explain why so first of all the question is is that visceral or liver fat or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat and that's hard to know unless somebody's done like a you know an MRI and that sort of thing because some people just store their their subcutaneous fat in different areas right like uh some people tend to have it more in their legs like women in particular they if they store it they tend to store more in their legs whereas men tend to store it more here what's the difference between subcutaneous and visceral so visceral is the viscera around the organs okay um visceral fat and liver fat are gram for gram far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat okay so that's that's the point of differentiation but the stuff that causes you to lose subc fat which is the fat Under the Skin um is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat so one of the things I tell people if we're if we're talking about trying to lose body fat or trying to get any big Health outcome let's pick up if we're going to try and make up as much in weight of Boulders as we can you're going to focus on the big rocks first right and then if you got the big rocks you can worry about picking up some Pebbles but don't drop the big rocks to pick up the Pebbles I think a lot of people end up doing that so before you go into some very specific
protocol on trying to lose you know belly fat go back zoom out can I sustain this long term because if you can't sustain it long term it's it's not really going to matter you're better off finding something that you can sustainably do consistently execute long term because if you lose enough overall body fat eventually you will lose the belly fat and I mean you know part of it is just our genetics and how we store it seems really stubborn though it seems like for me it feels like it's the last thing to go I will say they've shown that exercise specifically can help Target liver and visceral fat uh to even without a calorie deficit so even if people maintain their body weight they tend to lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise so let's talk about exercise and weight loss ah so hot topic Hot Topic very hot topic I I would love an answer here on you know one school of thought is that exercise isn't particularly useful for weight loss because if I go out for a run I then come home and I just eat more um and there's a this is kind of a multifaceted issue in the sense that there's a biochemical component to that hypothesis I.E my brain produces more of the hunger hormone so I get more hungry but then there's also a psychological um part to that hypothesis where people say it's actually because I went for a run so I think I deserve more food so then I eat more cake because I feel good about myself so this is where the way the study is conducted really matters so let's take it mechanistically first if we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they're having them you know eat the same amount of calories verus people don't exercise absolutely helps with weight loss absolutely the hunger side is a little more complex so first off there's a compensation of exercise where uh Herman poner did this research basically showing that if you burn 100 calories from activity you don't net 100 calories of loss your body actually compensates by your BMR reducing a little bit or uh you become spontan maybe a little bit less spontaneously active right so there's a a partial compensation but on average
again everybody's different but on average uh it's about 28 calories per 100 calories so if you do 100 calories of activity you're still netting 72 it's just not as much as you thought you were going to get right so there's that aspect to it that that exercise doesn't cause the amount of weight loss that you might predict based on how much you do right but it still contributes to energy expenditure the more interesting thing is what you touched on which is intake which is actually counterintuitive to what you think on average in the studies um yes people tend to eat a little bit more but the compensation is not nearly complete okay so PE exercise on the net actually has an anorectic effect now I'm not saying for every person there are some people who whether it's psychological or it actually is physiological they exercise more and they they do feel more hunger right but on average in the studies exercise either has a neutral or positive effect on appetite and there actually is one classic stud study from the 1950s I referenced it in the book where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn't have an intervention but they just looked at sedentary lightly active moderately active very heavily active right so think heavy construction labor workers and from lightly active to heavily active they almost perfectly compensated their energy intake right by eating more by by eating more to match the activity right just intuitively the sedentary people ate more than the lightly active and if I recall correctly about the same maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks being sedentary actually disregulated your appetite when you are active it actually sensitizes you to your body's own satiety signals they work better so I actually think the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn't because you burn so many calories it's one because exercise helps with lean mass retention which we know that the more lean mass you have higher energy expenditure and it also helps prevent weight regain so that's one aspect but the actual amount of calories you expend in exercise I mean if you look at the actual research literature it's not that much I mean you go to the
gym for two hours you might burn 500 calories something like that half my salad right right right like you could you eat a doughnut boom gone right but people tend to have better appetite Reg regulation when they exercise when they're active there there's a there's multiple components to it um like I said better sensitivity satiety signals but then the psychological aspect of goes the other way there are some people who say well I'm exercising I'm going to eat this but other people exercise and they actually all their habits start to get better I'm I'm one of those people as well right I always say if I want to fix my diet I need to go to the gym right I always say that because when I I don't I said it to I think some of my friends in my team the other day if I'm going to go and work out for an hour and I'm going to do go do a hit workout for an hour for example it's so painful that the last thing I want to do is throw it all away with like a [ __ ] Crispy Cream so I I sudden my diet then Falls in place suddenly and that's always when I whenever I go through a moment in my life where I'm like Steve you've lost control of your diet here it's how can I get myself to the gym as as the Catalyst to you know get my diet in order and that's so that's the problem with a lot of not the problem but just the limitation of a lot of studies which is you know especially like epidemiology when I say epidemiology it's like this group does this this group does this and we're looking at what other things happen yeah well people don't do things in isolation right so you you'll hear a study like um I'm I'm thinking of something um oh um people who eat more protein have higher rates of this okay well if we look at where most people get their protein sources in the western world it's highly processed energy-dense foods protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories and so is it the protein or is it all the calories they're taking in right and again people their Lifestyles and habits tend to go together right like you he X group was more prone to heart disease but then they also tend to smoke more drink more alcohol like the these it is very difficult to disconnect those those
habits and those lifestyle habits right they call it um healthy user bias and studies it's one of it's one of the things we have difficulty with and that's why you know again human randomized control trials are kind of our gold standard because I think this is important to touch on the word randomized okay so if we're talking about epidemiology or cohort studies so cohort is a little bit better than your standard epidemiology because they're taking groups of people and they're following them for years so each person is kind of their own control right but still people tend to who are more healthy tend to do more overall healthy things people who are more unhealthy tend to do more it's hard to disconnect those two but when you do a study and you say okay you know one group is going to do a low carb diet one group is going to do a low fat diet and we're going to randomize them right why is that important well what if we let people self- select okay well if they just say go whichever group you want well and I I'm just speculating right but for example low carb diet's very hot right now a lot of people may have a very strong civity to go to that group thinking it's healthier having a more positive view point of it and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life but if we randomize what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups and that is why that's so important and I remember I was I was listening to um a breakdown on a podcast one time and and they were discussing a study that was looking at um they were looking at intermittent fasting versus continuous energy restriction so just normal dieting and and basically the the Crux of the study was they found no real difference in weight loss and the person on there was a very pro- intermittent fasting person they said well how you know they don't know maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever and I'm thinking this person doesn't understand randomization right like you you that would be a very odd thing to just it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to seek out junk food
right so again randomization is not perfect but the reason it's so important is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias and um I think again if people but the downside to randomize control trials is you can only run them for so long because they're controlled is your view on keto the same as you've kind of said about all diets or does keto stand in a buet of its own and I asked this in part because a lot of doctors kind of prescribe keto as a diet for certain people that have um epilepsy and certain types of inflammation and brain related issues okay so epilepsy is a specific case essentially for epilepsy ketogenic diet is actually a very um effective treatment it provides a usable substrate ketones for the brain and they see it um decrease the incidence of epilepsy in fact my friend that I referenced Dom d austino he actually started studying the ketogenic diet as for um deep water Navy SEAL divers because a lot of those divers at depth get seizures and they found that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures now unfortunately people have taken that to say well any brain problem just give them the keto diet there's way less evidence to support it for other brain problems but let's let's talk about there's a lot of claims around the keto diet low carb diets it seems to function for fat loss the same way as other diets through a calorie deficit there was a there have been several really well done randomized control trials as well as a couple of metaanalyses now if they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein but vary the carbohydrate and fat amount anywhere from low fat high carb to low carb high fat no real differences in weight loss or fat loss in fact it actually the metanalysis showed it slightly favored um lowfat diets but it was a really like non-clinically significant amount but how can that be because one of the things people say well when you do a keto diet you burn way more fat so this is I think if there's one sound bite that might you know make it this might be it so yes you do burn more fat on a on a ketogenic diet why well when you do a ketogenic diet you're eating higher fat lower carb so you're eating more fat you have more fat substrate to
burn but also you're keeping insulin low and so you burn uh more fat because insulin reduces your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolysis so people take that and they go well it's better right so here's where we're getting into we were talking earlier about mechanisms versus outcomes right but when we look at these studies so they actually measure the outcome of fat loss they don't see differences between low carb and low fat how if they're burning this much more fat fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same thing fat oxidation is part of fat loss but it's only one side of the coin so fat fat whether you lose or gain fat is fat balance you are always storing and burning fat fat simultaneously okay on a low carb high fat diet you are burning a lot of fat but you're also storing a lot of fat and here's why carbohydrate really isn't stored as body fat your body almost exclusively has to burn it when you take it in there was a trace they did a metabolic Tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates and fats you can label them with a stable isotope and you look at where the label winds up right less than 2% of the fat stored in adapost in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate what's atopos uh fat cells okay over 98% came from dietary fat so here's the rub if you are doing a lowfat high carb diet you're not burning much fat but you're not storing much fat either if you're doing a low carb high fat diet you're burning a lot of fat but you're also storing a lot of fat so what actually matters in terms of fat balance is energy balance are you eating more calories than you're burning that is what will end up dictating that and that's why we just don't see differences in actual loss of body fat between those groups but again so this is where we got into earlier before we started the cameras a lot of people get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms and one of the things I was that way when I was a undergrad in Biochemistry and I think doing that first was great doing biochemistry first was great and then going to nutrition and having a good adviser who zoomed me out and said hey you're you're pretty far in the weeds Zoom back out look at the whole picture okay because mechanisms are great it's good
to ask questions and it when we see an outcome and when I say outcome fat loss would be an outcome actual loss of body fat uh a change in HBA 1 C A biomarker that's an outcome right if there's an outcome there will be a mechanism to support that outcome but just because there's a mechanism doesn't mean there's an outcome and what I mean by that is all these biochemical Pathways these mechanisms this is a symphony and when you do one thing someplace a lot of times it's compensated someplace else okay an outcome is the summation of hundreds if not thousands of different biochemical Pathways coming together and the example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund and getting focused on the individual stocks in it right and saying woo don't invest in that mutual fund look at those two stocks that are down by 40% but why do I care if the overall mutual funds up by 20% I care about the overall that's the outcome and so I'm not against necessarily looking at mechanisms but I'm always going to go to first okay do we actually have human trials that are measuring the thing that we care about not a proxy measure but the actual thing and if I can invoke a former episode on here if that's okay you know somebody said well be careful drinking caffeine because it stimulates cortisol release and that can cause you to store belly fat so that's a mechanism right if you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and um visceral fat or liver fat with caffeine you actually see a neutral positive effect so okay maybe that in small increase in cortisol maybe that's okay that's a negative but if caffeine's also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things like increasing fat oxidation okay maybe there is that negative component to it but it's obviously outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we're looking at right so without being scientists and being able to um understand all of the little instruments in the orchestra yeah right because that's what we try and do sometimes we try and figure out all the little instruments in the orchestra but really you're saying listen to the music listen to the music
and listening to the music in that analogy would be like looking at the scales or would be just looking looking for the outcomes the outcome I mean and also I guess one one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability because like we all have a bias to one big rewards for small investment and that sells right five minute abs that's what we want complete physique overhaul in six weeks add an inch to your arms in 12 weeks what I'm really fascinated by Is What It Takes at a psychology level and we kind of talked about it already because we talked about your why and all these things but you can say that you can say to someone like me in business it's going to take you 10 years to get get there or it's going to take you 10 years to become the world record holder in this uh powerlifting activity but for someone to say yep fine they're going to have to be a little bit their I say twisted they're GNA have to be a little bit it is the ability I think one of the most underrated things is the ability to delay gratification right and not in all areas of my life but in that particular area I'm really good at it and I wonder how much of a choice you had at a deep level you know it's interesting I so I told the story of how squatting was hard for me I the I had been training hard for three years and I had like these chicken legs I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding Forum so bad and I remembered thinking three four years in I'm like man people was like dude your genetics suck like why why are you going to keep doing this and it's kind of the let's find out thing I remember literally having this internal dialogue of you know maybe they never will be big but I'm going to I'm going to commit myself to training hard consistently for 10 years and if I haven't if I don't have a decent set of legs at that time then I'll allow myself to quit if I still feel that way and I always say paralysis by analysis and perfectionism has killed more dreams than failure ever could because one of the the one of the worst things you can do is have no action in action is way worse than failure because if you fail at least you can learn something from it you try stuff you I'm sure as an entrepreneur you've had a lot of stuff fail right but
you learn from that and you go okay well that didn't work well try this and eventually if you're trying enough stuff and you're walking the path it may not have worked out the way you drew it up but you get something better than what you started with right maybe not exactly what you wanted maybe you get something better though and I'll tell people that's why action is so much more important than trying to get everything laid out perfectly just start where you are right now as imperfect as it is start walking the path and if you are walking the path you're going to screw up learn from it and do better the next time and eventually again maybe you don't get exactly what you want but I bet you get something pretty good I got really obsessed with the idea of failure um because of business because I I take stock on the things that move me forward the most the things that were most course correcting and it was never an Accolade or an achievement it was always when life says you were wrong about that and um from that I have this really clear phrase in mind that failure is feedback feedback is knowledge and knowledge is your power and I then went on to study Jeff Bezos Amazon and booking.com and Thomas uh Watson who was the richest man on Earth at one point he was the um founder and CEO IBM and through all of their writing they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their failure rate so much so Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview after one of his employees had failed at something that cost the company I think $400 or $600,000 he said are you going to fire him he goes bu him I've just spent $400,000 training him and then when I looked at amon's shareholder letter it said the same it says we have Jeff Bezos wrote we have to be the best place on Earth to fail he goes on to say in life like it's not about affecting that perfect swing it's how much you swing because in the case of Amazon you'll never know about endless.com which is in the graveyard or the firep phone which is in the graveyard or um a9.com which is in the graveyard but you know AWS which will make them 70 billion a year so he goes on to basically say in he uses a baseball analogy where he goes in baseball you swing you get a great
hit you might get four run but in life you swing and you get a great hit you can just absolutely change your life so it's really about making sure you're swinging yeah I mean Kobe Bryant said I love this quote and I might butcher it a little bit but he said you know whether you win or lose if you win it's great but you still got to wake up the next day and do the process over again if you lose it sucks you still got to get up and do the same process over again and it's that willingness to somebody said confidence is the willingness to wade into uncertainty and I really like that quote because I mean that's at the foundation of kind of like any big goal that you're going after there is no certainty you can't guarantee anything in life and so we can say it's important to fail it's but when you're actually in that moment you're not like yes this failure is great I love this it's it's very stressful and it sucks like it really really sucks but I can tell you in most cases the best stuff in my life came out of some of the worst stuff in my life you know and if I hadn't been willing to try and Wade back into it repeatedly I might not have gotten some of the great things that have have happened in life and whether you win or lose you're still going to have to wake up and do the process over but if you stop doing the process if you stop stop trying if you stop walking the path that's where you really lose I think a lot of this like getting back to the diet stuff a lot of this the the diet hacks and stuff like that it's it's people trying to shortcut that that painful process but that process is where you are going to learn so much about yourself and where the actual fulfillment is so that kind of brings me on to a zenek okay because obviously that's a big subject at the moment with dieting which is we're talking about you know quote unquote shortcuts here what's your opinion on his imp okay I think I'm going to give a a very balanced view of this okay um overall I think it's a net positive and here's why so go 100 years back 200 years back whatever very rarely did you see an
obese person right it was just we didn't have such crazy access to hyper pable extremely energy-dense Foods right even go back 60 years right if you wanted a cake or a cookie you had to go to the bakery there was barriers to get there now we are surrounded 247 with unlimited access to cheap calorie dense hyper palatable foods and again we know people who tend to become more obese um have a greater reward response to food here's the real tough part and where you can tie it back to addiction right so imagine you were a uh a gambling addict and I said well we don't want you to gamble so much but you got to gamble a couple times a day uh we don't want you to drink so much but you got to drink a couple times a day you know don't do blow so much but you got to do it a couple times a day now I mean again people argue about food addiction is there really food addiction is there not but imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation but knowing you have to eat you can't just not eat right so I think if we look at the actual data on on OIC G what we're talking about just to give the background biochemistry are glp1 mimics glp1 is a hormone that's secreted by your gut in response to feeding and it acts on the GI to tell you you're full and it also acts on your brain to tell you to that you're full to decrease your appetite and these things work very well um we see a on average about a 15 to 20% reduction in body weight in the studies so pretty much the most effective anti-obesity treatment that's ever been created now glp1 itself is its halflife is only a couple minutes but what they've done is they modified the protein uh so that now the halflife is much much longer so it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period of time and again very effective so what are the potential downsides what does that do to the body then so that they've extended the sort of halflife of the protein and then that means that I feel satiated for longer oh yeah so um I don't feel hungry yeah in fact it can be such a powerful effect a lot of people it feels like almost nause ating like um you you hear again every drug has side effects right um some people initially get nausea vomiting that sort
of thing it tends to decrease with time um but on an anecdotal level I've talked to people who've done the drug and they've said that some have said even after they stopped the best way they described it is I don't have the food noise anymore I'm not all always thinking about food or I'm not thinking about food nearly as much it calmed it down for me even after they had stoed for some people even after they stopped okay so perhaps there's some long-term changes to the brain chemistry that happened we're not sure or perhaps they just got more confident because they lost some weight and realized because it's not increasing your metabolism that that's one thing to point out so I've had some people say you know I have a slow metabolism so I've got to take OIC and I'm like well you're going to be disappointed because it's acting on the appetite side of things it so some people will say well the The Devil's Advocate Army is well they could just eat less right but if it was that easy people would just be doing it right so some of the criticisms of the drug are well we see a lot of lean mass loss I don't know if you've heard that some people said MUSC muscle I I I don't think that's as much of a concern as some people do and the reason is most of these studies with uh gp1 mimics the people aren't resistance training and so if you look at studies where people aren't resistance training and they just diet and they're not like their normal protein not high protein you see anywhere from like a like a 30% to 40% of the weight they lose is from lean mass um and OIC is it's right about in that area which makes sense cuz they're eating less and if they're not resistant training or eating high protein again they're feeling very full so hard to eat high protein because protein tends to be quite satiating so I don't see that as being like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss I think what I would say that could be problematic is if people are so full they may not be choosing the healthful most healthful food choices because they feel full if they just end up eating less of the foods they normally eat these calorie dense hyperpalatable foods and they don't
modify their habits when they get off of it they may be prone to regain and so I I look at this as I I am if I have to pick I'm Pro on board with these um just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification right like encouraging people to exercise educating them on healthy food choices then I think it's a great option for a lot of people do you think there's enough data especially when we think about sort of long-term studies on the impact of a zemp because I you know one of the things I've come to believe in life is that there's no such thing as a free lunch and this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now you know so here here here's what I'll say um we don't have I mean long-term 10 20 year data you know some people said well there's a risk of thyroid cancer I mean I think that was from like some kind of rodent study where they were using a much higher dose than normal um I'm always I tell people be very careful less than 50% of animal studies end up translating into like actual human out comes what did we say earlier there's no Solutions there's only tradeoffs yeah yeah so maybe there is some side effect some Downstream effect that may have a negative effect if it helps somebody lose 50 100 pounds I'm still going to bet that it's a net positive right could have it have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone maybe but most of those people weren't going to get there anyway or it's was going to be really really tough for them to get there it's funny CU a lot of Fitness industry people are very very much against this drug and then they tell you what fat burner you can buy with the discount code in their bio and I'm like wait wait uh this math doesn't math to me so your fat burner that probably doesn't work okay this drug that actually works not okay make it make sense what you think of the fitness industry um I have a LoveHate with it the big problem with the fitness industry is a couple things first say there's really no barrier to entry right like if you want to be a medical professional there's some barriers to entry right like you got to do some work anybody can call themselves a fitness coach there's no barrier at all and anybody who has a six-pack will get
a lot of clients because as as I found out um science is way less sexy than just hey look you know and you know it's funny I I for a couple years I went up a weight class in powerlifting I went up to the 105 kilogram class which is 231 now I'm not I'm not fat at 231 but I I put it on here quickly right my face will get pretty in fact there's a reason there's a nice beard here because it's like makeup for men right like it it hides my chubby cheeks and um man the comments on my videos and I actually saw I sold less stuff and then when I dropped back down at powerlifting and I was leaner I sold more stuff and I'm like this is so weird like my knowledge isn't any different it's the same dude and it's not like when I was 231 that was on purpose I I didn't get there by accident wasn't like I forgot how to do nutrition you know but if you were a normal person and you didn't know anything about Fitness and there was two PTs in front of you you you go to the one that looks better you go to the one you want say I want to look like that right and uh that's that's tough it's a it's a very tough thing to Wade through and and what I will say people ask me all the time do you think a personal trainer needs to look the part do you think you know a medical professional needs to look the part I say no but people like to see application and I do think there is value in being able to tell one of the things I was able to tell my clients from competing and bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things I say hey I'll I'll never ask you to do anything I have not done or would not be willing to do myself right and we we said earlier that humans aren't logical they're emotional irrational and all these things and we to conserve mental energy I mean funny enough I read about this rat study um I don't hate rat studies most of my research was in rats but it just it just goes to show how the brain works and they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate at the end of it the first time it goes through the maze the rat's brain is going crazy second time it goes through the same maze its brain is basically there's like almost no activity there it's the activity has dropped and it's turned into autopilot the study goes on to talk about how we're always looking for shortcuts to to
decisions what I would tell people is again you can never turn your brain off right and it's it's just hard it's hard to identify who knows what they're talking about I mean you know I'll be on this podcast and then you know people say what about this guy this guy has a a doctorate he has this and and um you know that's one of the reason I actually started my research review where I review studies or me and my team review studies every month and try to like translate it into plain language because I did see this like kind of Gap right and trying to build this bridge because it's so hard for for the average person to know and one of the things actually I I I missed talking about was if you and I are having a conversation if we're on a certain topic it becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable on the top topic or where they're about the same right like pretty quickly can tell like if we're going into Investments and and uh how to start a company and marketing like you're the man for that right comes to nutrition like you can tell pretty quickly hopefully I know what I'm talking about Lifting me right but what we're really bad at is if two people are disagreeing on a topic both of whom are more knowledgeable than us on said topic we pretty much have no way to sort out who's who's right or wrong wrong okay this is something I've never mentioned before in 2023 I launched my very own private Equity Fund called flight fund and since then we've invested in some of the most promising companies in the world my objective is to make this the best performing Fund in Europe with a focus on high growth companies that I believe will be the next European unicorns the current investors in the fund who have joined me on this journey are some of Europe's most successful and Innovative entrepreneurs and I'm excited to Ann anoun that today as a founder of a company you can pitch your company to us or if you are an investor you can also now apply to invest with us head to flight fund.com to gain an understanding of the fund's mission the remarkable companies we proudly support and to get in touch with me and my team let's talk about Zoe who you may know because
they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company you guys know health is my number one priority Zoe's growth story has been absolutely incredible so far they're doing science at a scale that I've never seen before because of their members and recent breakthroughs and research they can now continue to offer the most scientifically Advanced gut health test on the market previously the test allowed them to analyze 30 bacteria types in your gut but now thanks to new science they've identified a 100 bacteria types this is a huge step forward and there's nothing else that's available even close to it on the market at all so to find out more and to get started on your Zoe Journey visit zoe.com stepen you can use my exclusive code CEO 10 for 10% off don't tell anybody about that okay just for you guys what is the most important thing we haven't spoken about today gosh I think we touched on a lot of stuff but let's talk about resistance training real quick okay um you know a lot of people think resistance training is just you know for for vanity and for Meatheads and we see now resistance training decreases the risk of cancer decreases the risk of heart disease de drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia of Falls of broken bones you know people talk about calcium vitamin D probably the single best thing you can do to improve your bone density is to resistance strain and you know you'll hear people say well I'm 40 or I'm 50 or I'm 60 it doesn't matter you can still put on muscle in in fact um right across the street from where I was doing my PhD they took basically frail elderly people who had trouble like sitting and standing up and put them through like I think it I want to say it was a 16we program and resistance for them started out just squatting to a high chair you know and then slowly they lowered it down lowered it down and some of them started using weights as well they saw significant increases in their muscle mass as you know older people so you can still put on muscle even getting older in fact um who is a uh I think Alan Aragon he's another good uh nutrition person on social media his he was posting a video of his father showing I think his father's like over
80 years old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50 lb kettle bell you know the amount of quality of life Improvement you can get in people from either resistant training throughout the course of their life or just getting them started regardless of age it's a huge Improvement in quality of life do you know what I think though I think I'm going to be honest here right mhm this morning I was I got up right and um my like lower back hurt a little bit and I remember thinking the first thought is oh God I'm getting older that's why that that is and I remember thinking oh I should probably question that thought because that's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way I if you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible your brain you kind of you chalk it off as an inevitability of Aging therefore you do nothing about it therefore it gets worse whereas really this other thought came into my mind which was okay go to the gym and train your lower back to strengthen it one of the most damaging messages that Physicians have given is when people have pain in an area they tell them to stop doing activity as you age you are going to have pain you can be strong and have pain or you can be weak and have pain my uh I love my dad great dude very sedentary right he has really bad sciatica he doesn't lift weights but if you lift weights you it actually has been shown to decrease back pain like on the whole yeah like when you do what I do where you're like you know lifting cars essentially yeah like I'm when you're so it's funny I'll post videos of me lifting like once a week um just cuz most people don't care about me lifting they just want to get information out of me and the comments are always you know isn't that bad for your lower back or you know isn't that going to and I and uh are they'll say you've had so many injuries I said I've been doing this 25 years show me an athlete who's competed at a really high level for two decades who also doesn't have a laundry list of injuries and pain Tiger Wood swings a golf club he had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues right activity is medicine yes if you're doing it at a very high level athletes what's the dosage needed to improve at
the highest level of exercise is always going to be right up against what will get you injured because you get to the point where you simply can't recover from it enough and that's why actually if you look at like what actually prevents injuries it's not stretching it's not Mobility work it's not warmup it's sleep psychological stress reduction those are two of the main movers and and just load management appropriate load management we could get into a whole thing on pain science but one of the really damaging messages is well took an MRI your lower back and you know got a bulge disc so just can't lift out anymore if you my ride my lower back right now I promise you bulge and herniated this I'm sure I do but I don't have pain and we there was a study done where they I think they MRI like people over 40 who were asymptomatic had no back pain like I think almost half of them had bulged or herniated this so we've got this like model where it's oh if you have pain you must have damage and if you have damage you must have pain and it doesn't really work that way I mean look at um people who lose limbs they have pain not just at the stump but where the limb used to be they sense pain pain is just as much a psychological experience as it is an actual tissue damage experience and when you get things that are um that are painful for years your tissues heal in 6 to 12 months for most things but if you're still having pain that's because you've developed a sense ensity to that particular area and and so one of the worst things for pain is becoming inactive but the reason Physicians do this and Orthopedics do this is it's straight up a liability coverage because if they if somebody says you know you have pain but you could probably go back and you know you back off your load a little bit on your lifts and you know progressively work it back up you probably be fine well if they go in and then they injure themselves guess who's going to complain about the doctor give them a one star review and say they caused me to blow out my back right but if you look at this stuff I mean on the whole resistance training decreases pain I want to build my
muscles Lane like your muscles I want muscles like yours um question on the way that I'm working out just sort of practical advice do I have to work out to sort of overload till I fail to to to build my muscles so that they're like yours great question so uh if I had to say how to build muscles like me BS three hours a day you know um can we use AI to shrink them Stephen just having the biggest arms in the podcast um what matters for building muscle we think um we we have a the amount of hypertrophy research in the last 10 years has absolutely exploded compared to what it was before and hypertrophy is muscle growth is what we're talking about what seems to be the cause of it is what's called mechanical tension so just creating a lot of tension on the muscle because now we're actually having studies coming out we're doing like hard stretching they actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained hard stretching there was a a study done um with the calf muscles so they put them in this contraption where basically they're like stretching their calves and holding it there I think I can't remember what the duration was but it was it was a long time right and they were comparing that to traditional resistance training and it was I mean it was a pretty painful stretch I think they said it was like a seven or eight or nine out of 10 in terms of pain level for the stretch but they built as much muscle as people who were doing calves three times a week resistance training I think they were doing these stretches every day so it was it was pretty intense but that's really interesting right because even if you don't have weight you can still create that tension through stretching right um now the stretching again not your traditional like you know it it's pretty intense and pretty painful I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology to getting it and more fun but in terms of mechanical tension it does to maximize muscle growth so we always have to be careful about like a lot of things can cause muscle growth but we're talking about absolutely maxing muscle growth you do have to get close to volutional failure
which is basically like if I'm doing say a bicep curl right or maybe a bench press better example I'm doing reps reps like and it start that's failure right the research suggests you don't have to go to failure but you have to get pretty darn close within a couple reps you know and if you've never trained a failure it's actually really hard to know what that feels like um and so like and actually in in research studies where they take people who are beginner intermediate and they ask them like they have them do a set and they ask them hey how many more reps could have you gotten they underestimate by like five yeah um especially difficult when you're training alone as something like bench press if if I fail the thing back it [ __ ] so I'm like I've put in a buffer of maybe three reps there just so that I don't embarrass myself in front of you know exactly um mechanical tension appears to be cumulative and what I mean by that is if it was just about creating as much tension as possible just load the bar up and just do one rep right so it's it's cumulative throughout a set now the way I like to describe it is intensity is the medicine and the number of hard sets which number of sets close to failure is the dosage now when you first start um you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing it'll grow off anything as you progress I remember when you first started lifting You' add 5 10 pounds every week right like clockwork well eventually you can't add that anymore right but you can still a lot of times you can increase the Reps right with the same weight well eventually you can't do that anymore so how do you continue to progress well you can add more hard sets and what you mean by hard sets uh volume so for example if I'm let's just take bench press again right like let's say I'm doing three sets close to failure and eventually stop progressing I can add another set and that is still another form of progressive overload right because again mechanical tension is cumulative and I mean there is there's some debate about this in the the resistance training field but for the most part I would say it's generally agreed upon by
most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth relative to lower volumes meaning more hard sets and it doesn't really seem to matter about machines versus free weights either uh seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth so when it comes to building muscle the cool thing is you got a lot of options and if you have pain doing one thing you know joint pain whatever lower back pain try something else fantastic news for me Lane we have a closing tradition on this podcast okay where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that's been left for you oh I like this I know what my question will be your one's a really difficult one okay so I don't get to see it until I open this book but Jack has a has a little peek before I ask the guest but no it actually wasn't Andy cuz there was one person between them and they're the person that left this question for you very difficult question I think have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you and why yeah um because of a lot of reasons one being uh perception from other people I felt like I had to make it work um the other being because of some of the remnants of bullying um I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships to I could be easily talked into me being the problem for everything and I'm not saying that I was never the problem cuz I definitely was I've made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships and I've I have my own toxic behaviors that I know I do um but yes I have definitely stayed in a relationship too long and I think one of the hardest things for me and for a lot of people is knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through and I don't think we have I don't think anybody has a clear parameter but for me staying in was not trusting myself not trusting my gut and feeling like I had to make it work because of the kids or because of this or because of whatever because of a a whole host of of many things and again you know I I think I'm not a relationship expert but you
know i' I've I've gone to therapy for eight years now um one of my good friends John delone is an expert on this and and very rarely does a relationship break down because of just one person it it's usually a dynamic and but I think that is one of the hardest things to figure out when when is it time because we talked about like not quitting you know these sorts of things but there's also like sometimes it's not quitting it's just moving on to possibly something better right and learning from what happened and yeah that is a really tough question and um I've definitely stayed in things too long and not just not just like romantic relationships but also like um business Partnerships friendships you know where it became highly toxic and again um I think the next hardest thing to do after that is looking back and going what did I contribute to that Lan in my life I've lost people I've lost a lot of you know people along the way from you know grandparents um friends lady who used to was sort of my proxy mother when I was Jer died in a motorcycle accident um and it's only in those moments that you you kind of have the regrets of all the things that you could have said you know you you wish you could go back and often for people somewhat similar to me somewhat maybe similar to you who have had struggles with expressing their emotions um we probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe tell these people when we had the chance so my closing question for you which is a question of my own MH is if right now you could send a message to your kids mhm and I'm going to let you send one as well to your granddad and your dad and it was the last thing you were going to say what would you say uh okay my kids I would say of course I love you more than anything um you God dang it you um you fulfilled a whole in my life I didn't know I had um and I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently but I love you more
than anything and I don't care what you do with your life find something that you love and it is a positive contributor to the world and go do that and try to make somebody else's life better along the way and to my dad I would say thank you like for not following in your dad's footsteps and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying not on my watch sorry um you know my dad's not perfect but both my mom and dad are really great people and um you know um they've they've um struggled with some health issues um and um you know if I had to say one thing it would be you know thanks for always believing in me always having my back accepting me for who I was in some ways I feel like they're the only people who always accepted me for who I was and they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life when I told them I wanted to get into bodybuilding they were like oh this seems weird but okay when my first bodybuilding show they were the loudest people up there supporting me you know they're um you know when I won worlds in 2022 I was going through a very hard personal time in my life um basically the front end of a divorce and it had just kind of come to a head um like just the Whirlwind kind of chaos stuff and my mom called me they were they were watching online um with my kids and my mom was like son how the hell did you just do that with everything going on your life how did you do that and um you know they've just always been such big supporters of me even when they didn't understand you know my mom didn't understand like you know every what are you studying again what are you study again but you know came to my PhD exit seminar you know Mom was in every baseball game growing up uh dad was on the road a lot but you know couldn't um but came to everything he could you know they they they showed up for me a lot and I knew you know I knew I was loved and so if I had to say anything to them it would just be thank you for everything that you did and when I had kids I was like six weeks in I called my
mom I'm like oh my God you did did all this stuff for me and I gave you all that grief I'm so sorry you know um so yeah they're amazing and if I had to say something to my grandfather it would just be God um you know I would give somebody asked me this the other day I was I would give anything to have five more minutes of my granddad and ask him so many questions about life that I just didn't know enough about to even ask the question you know cuz the man just oozed wisdom you know but if I had to say anything I'm like I would just say thanks for what you did for your family um you know my grandfather when he passed I mean this is a man who had like he had his first heart attack in his 50s and this back in the 19 like late SE like 1970s when like open heart surgery was like carpentry you know his expect his like life expectation I think was five years at the time he was in the Battle of the Bulge the deadliest battle in World War II um One More Story um he um I forget what country he was in but he was supposed to go on leave the next day and a convoy was coming through and it was going to the place where he was going to go on leave right behind the lines and uh his commanding officer said hey why don't you just take it like just go today that night uh a German soldier dropped a grenade down and killed his entire unit and sorry dang I didn't think you'd give me to cry in this podcast man um so much uh and he said you know after that day I just everything was I was living on borrowed time in my opinion he's like I should have been down there and uh he said I get up every day I look at the obituary and if I'm not in it I figure I'm good for another day and uh he had I think three heart attacks three open heart surgeries two strokes he had a boat fall on him long story um so this guy we always joked he had nine lives and um whenever um he was on his deathbed I mean we kind of it was we knew like six weeks in advance he had kind of multi-stem just basically old age and um it never occurred to me I was 20 years old it never sorry 22 it never occurred to me the idea of how you die as being so important and he went exactly how you
would draw it up um you know he was in the hospice so he was at his home his whole family was around him and again he was the funniest man I ever knew and I walked in and all the seats are taken and he's still Lucid talking and um I said uh he had his little like portable toilet you know but he hadn't been using it whatever the seat was down and I said do you mind if I sit here cuz I was going to sit next to him and he said yeah you can't clog that one up cuz I was known in my family for clogging toilets right so he's still cracking jokes on his deathbed and even like the doctor asked him when he was basically the doctor telling him hey you've got like six weeks left doctor said hey we you know you're an organ donor but we can't really use anything uh you know it's all bad basically would you be interested in donating your body as a caver for Med students he goes I always wanted to go to med school I figured it's the only way I'm getting there now so just like had this great outlook on life you know and um just when he passed um I remember sorry my mom looking at him and saying it's okay Dad it's okay we're going to be okay and uh I wasn't even sad because I'm like that guy he got every bit out of it he he milked life for everything he had had a great family and so many people who loved him and if I could just have that kind of impact even half that impact on my family oh man that'd be worth so much to me so I would just tell him thank you for being an inspiration Lane you have been you've been exactly that you've had an impact on millions of people's of lives and I think back to that young kid five six seven years old and I think back to what you said about fighting your way out of it you fought your way out of all of that to now Inspire and impact millions and millions of people's of lives that you'll never get to meet in such a positive way in the same way and with the same integrity and fight that your granddad so clearly had it's funny CU when you went through all of those people I saw an element of you in every single one of them and I think that's a credit to all to them but it's also a credit to you and I know that if your
granddad was I'm sure he's watching us now cracking jokes about you not my toilet habits yeah but I'm sure he'd be so incredibly proud of you because of the work you've done but continue to do so thank you so much for your time today thank you especially for your um honesty and openness because you have no idea how many people that side of you the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself as you are within your work will have on millions and millions of people's of lives I feel richer for having this conversation so thank you Lane thank you I I I've never cried a podcast like that but you know I actually uh it was kind of cathartic you know I was thinking of a lot of different things while I was going on so thank you for having me [Music] on