#804 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Losing Fat

25:34We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like you go to the UK, there's some fat people. A lot of people are fat. But you come to the US, especially like Southern Texas, you will regularly see four and 500 pound people. That's an American. Rascal fat. Yes, but on fractions of super fat people, we are inferior to a few of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. Folks from Tonga, folks from American Samoa, Demson Big People is over there. And the two things super well. Eat amazingly tasty food, three things. Be incredibly jolly and super awesome to hang out with and are statistically completely overrepresented of any racial group in American football pro performances.

26:22And rugby, probably as well. Yeah, that's a step down for them. I'm like, this is easy. I usually do this against way bigger people. So, sorry, what was your set point there? Settling point. Settling point. Yeah, yes. So, if I get you over to a cruise ship for two weeks, I mean cruise ship food is so good. And it's kind of 24 hours and it's always there and you leave the main restaurant and they're like fresh baked cookies. And you're like, who the hell am I to say no to this nice young person? And all of a sudden, you're taking in 600 more calories per day just normally. Now, your settling point, if you stayed there for weeks and weeks, would be whatever it was but higher.

27:03You take it the other way where you get into a time machine and you go back to the 1940 late 40s in the United States You're like all right. I'm ready to eat. What are you gonna do? There's a few fast food places, but they're not that good You got a drive pretty far to get them and they're not even open 24 hours. You're just quite a fence. That's why the 40 sucked and You go, okay, how do I get some food you go to the grocery store? It's almost completely bereft of convenience food. You're like, how am I supposed to hook my food? There's some interesting cultural stuff that just it's baffling in retrospect.

27:32You know the idea of a nice Sunday dinner, like a ham dinner or a turkey dinner? That is as far as I'm concerned, archaeology at this point, because any person of basically any income in a modern country can just buy a turkey or a ham every single day for every meal. It's a nominal cost. So if you go back to the 1940s in the US, people say why weren't there so many fat people? You want to be fat? You got to cook your own food. food. And if you're a bad cook, it's not even tasty. So if the average tastiness and convenience of the food in your area goes down, you're settling point 8200 anymore. It's 160 now.

28:05Now it could be 200 if you were on a cruise ship, but it could be 220. So based on those factors, your food environment, your activity level, who you hang around with, etc., your settling point can move up and down. But in any one situation, yes, settling points are a real thing. And there's some physiology to your body being a little annoyed they did having to make a change. It's less annoyed if the environmental factors change, and then it's like, well, I'm just living my best life and I'm just losing weight because I just don't eat tasty food all the time. So there is something to settling points, and there is a genetic factor for sure.

28:37The absolute biggest, by a mile, genetic factor for settling points is hunger levels and food pleasure response. I'm sure you've hung out with a lot of people in your life. Some people, are you a food guy, do you like to eat? Yeah, yeah. But notice the way you said like yeah, some people are like bro are you kidding me? I can inhale food some other people and I've been friends with many people like this in the past They just like food to them is like this thing They have to remember to put in their bodies otherwise they look Right so the biggest factor by long shot and anyone Individual is what are their hunger levels like and what are their enjoyment of food neurochemistry like and that goes a big way How do you get the American obesity, the global obesity epidemic?

29:27You take hyper -palatable ultra -convenient relative to income super cheap food. You make it insanely ubiquitously available. You vary it constantly so no one gets used to it. Like if you want a new type of crisp to eat in the UK and you go once a week to the store, you just never run out because there's always new stuff. And you pair that with a population of people. Some fraction of that population, totally unaffected. They just, eh, eh, eh, crisps. I have a crisp, I sit down, I do nothing. I don't have another one. Some people, you have tasty food, and it's cheap and convenient. That's their hobby now, is eating food, and they love it, and the pounds just smack on and on and on.

30:08So for them, they're settling point in that environment. Sometimes doesn't have a number yet, because they're still working their way up to it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think this has been the most interesting thing England, maybe over the last year, orbiting a number of people talking about why is modern society so fat? There's all of these images from the 1960s of beaches in America and everyone looks lean and athletic. And you see, it's because of the insert, your favorite food demon of choice here. It's the red 40, it's the seed oils, it's the carcinogens in the water, it's the estrogen levels, it's the whatever, whatever.

30:45But the sort of Occam's razor of this is just food is tastier, more calorie dense, cheaper and more available than it's ever been before. Yes. What did you think was going to happen? What would it just, from first principles, just make that. Forget the constitution of it. What's the molecular weight weight? Is it artificial or is it natural? What do you think would happen to those people? Yes. Very predictable. in a certain sense a little bit disappointing, because it would be cool if we could have like one type of food additive or something in the water supply that we discovered was insanely obesiatgenic, and we managed to put in some sensible regulation and take it out of the water supply or reduce it by a factor of a thousand, and everyone just like over the next year had this Renaissance where they leaned up.

31:38That would be awesome. It would be awesome for two reasons. one, it would solve the problem really quick. And two, it would remove any onus of actually the problems worse than you thought. It's like, if you go to couples therapy for a while and you want your partner to change, and after like 12 sessions, you, uh, the psychiatrist or psychologist request you come alone, and she kind of like dances around and she's like, you're the problem, Chris. It's kind of all on you. Nancy's great. She's been great the whole time. It's you. You're like, that's not what I went to couples therapy to hear. And so when someone's like, it's actually all the insanely tasty food you love to eat all the time that's making you super fat, you got a tendency to be like, what are you going to stop eating that stuff?

32:22What was it? It's a microplastic. Can I eat the kind of microplastics tasty? So at some point it's this insanely simple reason that describes probably 90 % more more of the variance and obesity from historical times to now. But it's also a bit like a crap. It's like try to make it on a JV basketball team. And you're like, coach, is it hard? Is it do I have to practice dribbling anymore? And I say, you're just an Ashkenazi Jew, dude. You're never gonna be good at this. That's what I heard from my basketball coach. When I was five foot zero back and just kidding. I'm not five feet yet. One day, Chris, I'll get up there.

32:59It's something you don't wanna hear, but once you process it, you're like, of course it's true. So the good news is, for the first time in history, we can start taking real big bites out of that, no pun intended, with modern pharmacology, which is going to save us all from everything. Begin insane rant about how drugs are great, but Ozempik and all of those drugs, and I do find it, at this point, comical that Ozempik gets all the attention that it gets, because it is a third generation GLP1 agonist, there's already in late stage clinical trials, a fifth generation agonist. Auxempic. To Zapatide.

33:37That's Gen 4. Oh, Auxempics Gen 3. Uh huh. Right. Okay. So I think a lot of people have sort of reset the number because one and two kind of maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like lyragletide and stuff. No one. And what's the, the, the 5th gem, which is the one that's really hard to pronounce? So there's a bunch of them, but I pronounce it retatratide. Right. You can also say it read a true tide if you want to say like three words instead of one. Okay. So like retatretide is not a GLP1 agonist technically. It's a triple agonist. It's a GLP -GIP -Glucogan agonist. Not only does it kibasher appetite from two different separate pathways, but somehow I have no idea how these guys managed to modulate the glucogan pathway to increase your resting metabolic rate.

34:20Retatretide is Gen 5. It was invented years ago and what they're inventing right now in the pharmaceutical industry is going to make retatrotide look like a joke. And retatrotide left ozempic behind completely in clinical trials. It beats a trazepatide no problem. And we're talking about more weight loss for less side effect. The stuff they're developing right now is going to lead to a late 2020s, in my view, in which for almost everyone, if you don't want to be obese anymore, you just take the medication and you won't be. But if you do, you just don't take the medication and you will be. Why is, why can just one pill or one injection do so much?

35:04Because it makes you less hungry fundamentally. And then when you're not really hungry, you stop eating as much food and all these weird other hypotheses about why we're getting fat. Ozenpa kind of crushed all the whole whole. So how does it just do all that? That's so funny. I mean, there's a big, I'm going to be fascinated to observe the way that most people see the GLP1 category of drugs. I've been surprised by the negativity of the pushback. I haven't. You haven't been surprised. No, not at all, my God. Why? People have a reflex of anti -pharmaceutical, anti -capitalist, anti -corporate, anti -drug attitude.

35:41Some kind of schmorgous board of those comes out anytime, all the time with a ton of people. Oh, so this is like the natty or not of fat, or not. Definitely fatty. I meant that in a different way. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. I think some people have an issue with the fact that they feel like it's kind of cheating. I had to get there. I love to tackle that one. Okay. Yeah. I see where people are coming from for the respectful part of my talk, which ends now and begins the disrespectful part of my talk. It's pure nonsense. You use air conditioning. When you break your leg, you go to the hospital when you get antibiotics.

36:22You cheating mother. Aren't you supposed to be eating rocks and bashing your head into a caribou to kill it or something like that? As a matter of fact, the first tool industry, millions of years ago, that proto -humans made, one of them is like the old duvet tool industry. They discover these now where it's like, you know, flint rocks that are shaped in a no longer natural pattern. Whittle down into something like a little club head or a little spike that you can at least like pull an animal, it's got some part easier or even kill something with. They were cheating. That's the first cheating they've ever done.

36:57Artificial and it made them better at stuff. Your ability to lose weight can be a test of your willpower. Or you can take the pill or the injection and with no added willpower lose all the way you want. And then you can test your willpower on tending to your family better, being a kinder person to others, being someone of moral authority to others by how you live your life, coaching little league football and being on time for the kids instead of standing a fucking hardy's line, getting your third cheeseburger for that day. You can start a business. You can save the world, you can clean up the atmosphere, everything.

37:39We're not running out of problems. So if we have body fat as this thing that's going to sharpen our will and we get rid of that, the set of problems remains approximately infinite still, and you can sharpen your will on what's left over. If you think you're tough improving your willpower to yourself by losing fat, you're right. But you're not getting jacked. You're not building a business because you're draining all of your willpower on that one thing. It's a good thing we have pills to help us with as much as possible. So then we can have more bandwidth to do all the other good stuff that we want to do.

38:17Getting back to the fat loss in the diet. Protein carbs fat. How should people be thinking about those? How do they contribute? What should they be eating? Yes? Proteins are essential because they compose all of the organs, all of your enzymes, all the stuff that does work is pretty much protein. It's non -negotiable. And also protein supports your skeletal muscle, which is kind of important because there's two types of getting lean. One is people think you're sick and ask you if you're okay because you lost a bunch of muscle. The other is like people compliment you or saying nice things behind your back because they're jealous and they want to have sex with you but they can't.

38:52I'm used to that sort of thing, the jealousy part, meeting jelly. So protein is a big deal. For most people who are not pursuing exotic, hyper bodybuilding pursuits, as little as just over half a gram per pound of body weight per day protein is going to take care of most of your needs. So if you weigh 200 pounds and you eat something like 120 grams of protein per day, you're probably golden and you can probably lose fat and lose a very little or no muscle at all. The top end is maybe about double fat. Real insurance policy type of stuff. You do in crazy hardcore weight training, crazy amount of cardio and activity.

39:33You're already very, very lean and you're prone to losing muscle and you're a little older than average over 40. Then it's just over one gram per pound. So if you weigh 200 grams, if you weigh 200 pounds, then maybe you have of 200 and coinier 240 grams. For a very serious fitness person, gram per pound is an amazing rule. Just understand that for most people, like if your mom asks you for diet advice, just a little bit over half of that is totally solid. Often, best consumed for most muscle mass retention and building through three to five meals evenly spaced per day. But if you just have like two meals for the average person if they're eating lots of protein, they're gonna get great results.

40:14Okay, cups. I'll do carbs and fats at the same time if you don't mind. There is a big difference between optimizing for athletic performance and muscularity and just losing some goddamn fat so you can see Mr. Twinkie again. Well there you are buddy, it's been a while. Carbs and fats kind of combine into one index of extra calories after protein has been taken care of. Her really great up for fat loss that you can use is called macrophactor. And they have this turnedile where you can like turn up the carbs and turn down the fats. And it's one comes out of the other because for many people it just doesn't matter as long as you get a minimum of both.

41:01If you're getting some fibrous veggies and maybe a few pieces of fruit per day, but you're down to very low levels of carbs, you eat no grains, no No brads, no rice, none of that. But you eat plenty of healthy fats, your golden, you're going to lose tons of fat and be super healthy. If you have minimal fats like you take an essential fat supplement every day and the rest of your diet has no fat in it whatsoever, you're doing starches, grains, gatorade, the whole nine yards, but your calorie balance is set. You've generated a 250 to 750 daily calorie deficit and your protein is good. you're going to lose fat until the cows come home.

41:39And it's going to go super well. How you feel on each one of those. How you're sport and athletic hobbies are supported. How convenient it is for your life. Those are secondary discussions, but very important ones. So it's kind of two points here. One, as long as you get minimum levels of fats and carbs, which are very, very low and most people won't hit, whichever one you want higher or lower, it doesn't matter. But also consider this. If you're more physically active, more carbohydrate generally works better. If carbs kind of make you just want more carbs, but if you get a big satiating effect from fats and you're like, oh, that's enough, maybe you can consider more fats.

42:17Some people get more energy from carbs and they prefer more carbs. Some people get an even keeled mental clarity from lower carbs and higher fats. And their go -to is to have higher fat. Most people would be served best with an even combination of them, roughly the same calories is coming from fats and carbs. Once your protein is taken care of, because in many cases that afford you the most flexibility in your diet, you show up to a restaurant with your friends. You're on a fat loss diet. And you look up what menu items you can eat. Obviously you're on a fat loss diet. You're not going to eat five of the menu items and be a pig.

42:50But a lot of real food in the real world, it's tough to get zero carbs. It's also real tough to get really low fat. But most of them have a bit of carbs, bit of fats, and if you have that middle combination, It's a really, really awesome way to go to town and still hit your calorie goals. So carbs and fats plus or minus, no big deal, as long as your calories are in check and your protein is in check. The conversation for fats versus carbs is individually based preference and very nuanced. Is the a kind of fat, which is best? Well, our company started making this fat supplement. I'm just trying to shield as many.

43:25I'm shielding products. I don't even have to sell. Get on the mailing list. Super fats. Generally speaking on average, the preponderance of your fat should probably come from poly and mono unsaturated fat sources. There's a conversation that is more poly or more mono, probably more poly than mono, but what kind of foods are we talking about here? A bunch of the oils, most of the plant oils are really, really awesome. Olive oil, canola oil. Yes, I said canola oil. Just do it. I am a high MDB. Do a PubMed search for canola health benefits review, and you'll see that it's super, super healthy. All the different kinds of oils are usually generally very good.

44:06I can't respect a doctor who proposes seed oils as part of his diet. I never asked for your respect. Nameless, faceless, troll person who is in a troll farm in China. But yeah, by the way, the seed oil thing is really funny. I get smacked for that all the time. I needed a video about YC oils on bad fiat health. Yeah, totally. We have that on the RP Strength channel. And like, you know, it's curious about the issue because so many people are talking about Cedar oil being bad. And it just is like one PubMed search. And there was a few review articles that are like, yeah, Cedar oils generally tend to be better than so they've done multiple studies where they take people who eat a lot of saturated fats, which are totally fine, by the way.

44:44But they replace some fraction of those with Cedar oils in an almost every study that people are months later healthier. And so like the idea that Cedar are bad for you is usually concluded by folks that are like really deep into lipidology research and their inferring that Cedawel should be bad for you based on various cooking process modifications. But inference is dope and I use it all the time in decision -making but it never beats actual empirical randomized control trials because that's like what the real world actually is. It's like well I think Stacy likes me go ask her. She's like no you're like okay I was wrong.

45:17Right, inference doesn't beat the real thing. So seed oils are super great for your health. They're totally fine. And then there's all kinds of nuts, all kinds of nut butters, avocados, those types of fats tend to be amazing. Fats from fatty fish, also super awesome. Saturated fats are also just fine for your health and you can have a lot of them, but you generally want something like two thirds of your fats to come from plant fats, poly and mono unsaturated. maybe 130 fats to come from saturated fat sources, like eggs and beef and things like that. Were you want to maybe go easy on fats? Is ultra -possessed sources with trans fats in them?

45:58A trans fats don't just kill you when you're walking one day and you just keel over it. It's trans fats. The police put up a line of trans fats on it. But they're not great in aggregate over the long term. So, you know, like your primary source of fats is like mcdonalds for eye grease. It's not great. Cheesy puffs, it's not great. So if you do mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated fats are totally fine. But if you're having trouble with your lipids and your doctor's like, look, you gotta change something, replacing some of your saturated fats with polyamanoid saturated fats, just from directly to literature seems to work pretty well.

46:32But it's not a crazy thing. Here's nothing. For many people that listen to this who are already eating a pretty healthy diet, they're total fan and take a solo, the composition of those fats barely matters at that point. If you have a very high fat diet, let's say you're trying to do the keto thing or the carnivore thing, yeah, you got to take a look at your fat sources a little more because that's a lot of fats now and it's going to matter for your blood work.

46:57I wonder, is there not something to do with reheating fats and oils? That's bad. That's allegedly. Is it? Is that true? I haven't looked into it in great depth because the preponderance of the people that espouse that are insane people Who's epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average? So like I haven't looked into deep refutations of the flat earth idea, but I'm not gonna anytime soon If anyone has any compelling evidence that the reheating process is insanely deleterious for health and they have randomized clinical trials to support this. I'm super interested in it. I'm out of my depth on that one.

47:39But after about five minutes of talking to chat GPT, I could get back into my death no problem. It's one of these things that where do you get reheating of oils all the time? Literally in fried grease. Stop feeding McDonald's of a day, and you're not gonna have that problem. So so much of this stuff, so many of the demon foods that people have gotten issue with whether it's particular colorants, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's seed oils, come along for the ride with foods, food types, hyper -palatable calorie dance, very processed, probably just not all that great for you to be having very regularly.

48:14So it's not about the components of this individual thing. It's like saying this circuit board is very dangerous. Well, it is when it's attached to a javillon missile. Yes. And you're pointing all of the circuit boards and saying, look at how bad these circuit boards are for everybody. And you go, will get it is because for the most part that circuit board exists inside of that missile. Yeah, I like that you used the javelin missile. It's a very pertinent to the news cycle. Maybe you too will pick it up. In other news this episode is brought to you by Momentus. Two fundamental parts of recovery are proper sleep quality and proper hormone levels, which is why Momentus is sleep packs and that Tonk at Ali, yeah, there it is, have helped me recover.

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49:29You can get a 20 % discount sight -wide by going to link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentus .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Meal timing. How often should people eat if they're trying to do fat loss? How much of a spread between meals do they need? And for weight loss, it just doesn't matter. They've compared eating six or more meals per day regularly to what's called alternate day fasting, or one day you eat, and the next day you're just really pissed at everyone because you don't eat.

50:11For weight loss, it doesn't matter over the long term. And it makes sense because the calorie balance is the same. It's calorie controlled. That day that your eating is real fun on that diet. The day you're not eating is really extra not fun. So weight loss not a concern. How does it become a concern? That loss is muscle growth and muscle retention are processes that prefer multiple meals spread evenly throughout the day. So if you want to lose weight and you just don't care about muscle, let's say it's not a problem for you. You train hard anyway because you love it. But you're like, I have plenty of muscles.

50:49My doctor tells me I need to lose weight. Whatever meal frequency is something that schedule -wise, culture -wise, preference -wise that you like, do it up. One meal a day, no problem. Meal every other day, no problem. Seven meals a day, dope. If you're trying to build and maintain muscle mass as much as possible, and you're really full -sending this, and you're training with weights regularly, which is a big deal. Any number of meals up to you hit four per day, evenly spread, each of them high in protein, marginally increases how much muscle you can grow and maintain. After four meals per day in all of the research, we see that the...

51:34there is no more effect that we can detect. So if you're like, dude, I'm growing crazy muscle on four meals a day. Should I go to five? maybe it'll make some teeny difference, but maybe not. From the theoretical work, probably not. Mostly because if you eat bigger meals, they just take longer to digest. So the pulsatility of nutrients in your blood, it basically just looks like this the whole day. Because you start eating breakfast. By the time you're out of a breakfast, you get lunch, and then dinner, and then you're done. What about the earliest that people should eat, the latest that they should eat?

52:06Is there something to do with the parentheses of your eating window throughout the day. If you eat in a very constrained eating window, the result you can expect starts to look more and more like a very small number of meals per day. Your body doesn't really count meals. Your peripheral cellular structures count how much of a flux of nutrients they get exposed to. So if you say, my eating window is from 8 p .m. to 10 pm at night and I have four meals in my eating me dough every half hour. Your body's like, I hear that, but it's just one big meal. Look, if you still have stomach contents, not in the intestines yet, and you're eating meal number two, like it's still the same meal.

52:48So a very constraint eating window does do that. But as far as spreading it out longer short, again, for weight loss, none of that matters. For fat loss, you want to spread it out not as far as possible, but you probably want to be ingesting food at something like at least a four, 12, maybe 14, maybe even 16 hour situation. Contest bodybuilders who've near mastered the arc of losing fat while maintaining muscle, they'll eat almost as soon as they wake up, and they'll have their last meal an hour or two before bed if not even closer. And the multiple times throughout the day so that their bodies never starving for protein.

53:28Is that excessive for most people? Yeah. What do you think sensible advice is to wake up? Again, if you want muscle mass retention within a few hours of when you wake up, don't be like it's like six hours later and you work in a project that work and your stomach does one of those like angry grouse or oh shit, you exist. Better get a twinkie. Don't do that. And if you take longer than four or five hours before you go to bed after you've eaten, that can work out great for you. But for some people, especially as the diet wears on, especially as they get more hungry, it might interfere with sleep in two ways at least.

54:07One is, if you're already hungry when you're trying to fall asleep, it's a non -starter. You're not falling asleep. You're just counting sheep, and one sheep jumps over at the one, ba, two, three. It's like a sheep, but it's like sectioned into meat parts. It's like lamb, rack of lamb. And you're like, oh, shit, I'm thinking about food again. And then you go into the fridge and you're getting cheeseburger. So the other way is if you've eaten many, many hours before you want to sleep, but not so many that you can fall asleep. You might wake up in the middle of the night or very early morning starving.

54:39Your cortisol goes up. You ain't falling back asleep anymore. Sleep is so unbelievably critical to fat loss and to muscle gain and retention. It is a non -negotiable variable. So, eat in such a way that gives you the best sleep is probably the best advice I can have in a meal timing perspective. So for most people, eat. You can eat as soon as you wake up, no problem. You can eat right before you go to sleep, no problem. Some people, if they eat right before bed or even an hour or two before, you know, there's digestion, the body temperature goes up and they're tossing and turning, they can't sleep.

55:16Don't do that. Then back that meal up a little bit. But if you're one of these people, especially late towards the end of a diet, a higher carbohydrate You've graduated in protein meal before you go to sleep. Noxia, you're the fuck out, and that's perfect. So very individual, generally spread your meals out, play around with what feels best for you. Is there anything to say about prejudicing certain types of foods earlier or later in the day, backloading the carbs until the evening time starting off with more protein first thing in the morning? There's no matter. Third question. The research on that in general has been a giant like meh, not really.

55:54Every now and again, someone will pull out a single study or two in isolation and he'll see like see, he'll eat more carbs in the morning and then someone else a couple of years later will be like it's the nighttime carbs that are really good. Any average it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. So I would say you can play around with things yourself, but as long as you have an even ish fraction of your protein in every meal, how you do carbs and fats doesn't matter much. At RP, we like to buy us carbohydrates closer to the workout. So let's see, workout in the middle of the day. We're gonna want you to eat slightly lower fats and slightly higher carbs in the meal before you go train.

56:27It's gonna give you lots of energy. Fats are more difficult to digest. Not in a bad way. Just take a little longer to digest. So you might be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpee and you're like, oh, god damn it. This shit hasn't gone through yet. But if you eat low fat, you're like all your rice is in your muscles and you're good to go. After training to set up recovery and an abilism, there's probably a slight advantage in having more carbohydrates, your muscles are more ready to absorb it, your fat isn't. So that's a really good thing. And so we like to push our fats towards away from the workout and push the carbs a little bit closer, but we're really splitting hairs here.

56:59And so it's not some kind of magic formula. If you're a contest bodybuilder, yeah, it's a little bit more magic of a formula by a small shot. But generally speaking, the spread is, I'd say this, almost anyone that's telling you that the circadian rhythm of food and the spread of macros is very important is misunderstanding the state of the evidence. Okay. When it comes to the kinds of foods to avoid a lean into when dieting for fat loss, what are the things that you think people often overlook? What are the things that are unnecessarily demonized? Where should people be putting their attention?

57:37What's the best food groups to make fat loss easy? Yep. But, raspberries are great, blueberries will kill you and they're terrible. Next question. As far as specific foods, short of like eating soap or poison, there are really no individual foods that are bad for you. And there are no individual foods that stall fat loss. There have been foods historically that have been demonized, not as individual foods, all All of them have gone through the ringer at least once, but food groups. Sugars People will say sugars are bad for you. It's just categorically false to say that. Sugars aren't bad for you.

58:26Sugars are no more prone to adding body fat or making body fat loss any more difficult. It's a non -starger, in direct evidence, in theory, the whole game. Nowadays it's fun to poke fun at sugar and at carbs. In the 80s and 90s, if you told someone you were health conscious and then you put butter on something, they were like, listen, you're going through some psychiatric problems, we should probably get you checked into a center. Because you were delusional. Everyone knew that saturated fat, especially just straight up killed you where you stood. And you were never going to get lean eating a diet high in fats.

59:04They were also wrong. Calorie balance is so king that it doesn't discriminate hardly at all among food groups, fats versus carbs none of that. So the myths of fats are too high or carbs are too high or sugars are high, they're just that myths. However a very important thing to consider is the palatability of your food and the fullness factor your food gives you because hunger's a real thing. So you want to choose food when you're dieting for fat loss, creating a caloric deficit that does at least two things for you. One, it's not so damn delicious that you just want to eat more and more of it.

59:46And if you don't, you're just suffering. Like if you were deep into a fat lost diet and I was like, hello, Chris, would you like a cheeto? You'd be like, don't. Why? Because as soon as you want them cheetos, hits your lips, paradise. You know, purple angels flying around better than acid at that point. He just wanted another cheater. So if you're on a fat lost diet Something bodybuilders discovered a long time ago and a gentleman named I'm gonna butcher his name for sure Stefan GnA GnA he says pronounced like DNA. Mm -hmm. I would just say a guy in it. He's American. Woo He I believe coined the term or at least expose the public to it or something called the food palatability reward hypothesis properly couched as a hypothesis.

1:00:31So he's not a really fucking man. And it basically says something baffling when you think about it. It's ultra simple and explains most the variance we were to talk about with obesity. When food is really tasty, people tend to eat more and they get fat. And they just want more. And if you have tasty food but you've relegated yourself willpower style like look a good person to not eating it, you're just going to be more miserable. You ever smell cheeseburgers being made while you're in the single digits body fat? You're like, dude, if there was an entire family of people between me and those cheeseburgers like insert politically.

1:01:08Boom boom boom shoot them. I'm gonna eat my way through them. Right. Yes, sorry. So Things that get taken out of anything. I went I went native a native American that my So basically if you're dieting for fat loss, try to have foods that are not like exotically delicious. Veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, not a ton of sauces, not a crazy ton of flavor, and here's the really fucked up part. It's going to be completely counter -intuitive. What do you want when your body is telling you, listen, you need to put the fat back on. You want exactly the food that you shouldn't be having. So it's kind of like abstaining from jerking it or something where it's like, what do you really want to do?

1:01:52You're like, I want a jacket. What are you not supposed to be doing? Not supposed to jerk it. Right. But if you can eat at home, if you can clear all of your shelves at home of junk and just have that lower palatability food, first of all, if you're hungry enough, that should taste real good. Playing chicken and broccoli tastes amazing if you're actually hungry. Have that stuff? That's really, really awesome to do. And secondly, you want to have food that keeps you fuller for longer. Food with a lot of fluid volume, food with a lot of fiber, food that takes longer to digest. Minimally processed, fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats, and healthy fats are just kind of undefeated in that category.

1:02:32And so for the calories you're allowed to have, it's a lot of food. It's not ultra tasty, so you kind of feel like you're laboring through it. You halfway through You don't even want anymore. You're stuffing yourself and every week you're losing weight. Paradise. You're really doing it. But it's not paradise because you're going through this boring diet. It doesn't taste as nice as it could be. Dr. Mike's telling me that I can't, the exact thing I want to do, which is to make this tiny moussel scrap of food. Please, can I have some more? So you can turn dial it to go, okay, I'm gonna make my food a little tastier at a little less volume and it's a little less filling such that I like my food, I can finish it.

1:03:14I look forward to it. But at the end of the meal, I'm like, okay, this is tough to finish. And it keeps me full long enough until my next meal comes around. Yeah, I can eat instead of like two hours before my next meal. I'm like, okay, where's the food? Where's the food I'm losing it? As you progress through a diet, it's possible to start with pretty normal food and turn dial that food palatability down and that fullness factor up. such that you finish your diet with quite different foods than you started, but the entire time your perception and relation to food is basically the same. You adjust to your preferences.

1:03:48Now, that works really well. Can you give some tactical examples of good switches from food types that people may be cooking with at the moment, maybe using more typically, and you're saying, more voluminous, more full of water, more unsolvable fiber, etc. What are some of the easy switches? Let's get rid of this. Let's put some of these in. A couple examples. Creamy sauces, to non -creamy sauces, to dry rubs, to salt only when you're real miserable. Tons of rice and pasta and bread down to whole grain breads, whole grain pasta, brown rice. It's still, it's funny, you go to a sushi place and it's like option for brown rice sushi.

1:04:34I'm like the Japanese people did not suffer for the subordination. What the hell is that even? So you go from that to reducing your grain intake more, expanding your fruit intake and eventually expanding your veggie intake. If you have 50 grams of carbs to eat and it's all white rice, that's like a little bit more than a couple white rice. At the beginning of a fat loss diet, shit, you're barely finishing that. I'll actually complete the analogy for you. You got some rice and you got some Japanese mayo on that shit. So god damn good. I'm balls deep into a diet so this is incredibly difficult for me to talk about.

1:05:15You go a couple more weeks now with the same white rice but now you have like you sprinkled some kind of like some kind of seasoned salt on it. It's tasty but it's no more Japanese mayo time because you could just like put that IV into your blood at that point. Then, and you have a little bit of veggies on the side next to it. You go to taking that rice and turning it to brown rice, but now it's not that whole scoop of brown rice, it's half a scoop of brown rice, and to weigh more veggies and even a couple slices of fruit. Still weeks later, you don't have any more rice. You have a bunch of veggies and a ton of fresh fruit.

1:05:51And you're like stuffing it in because like holy crap, like if you get a whole thing of strawberries, that's like 30 grams of carbs. like, oh, me fucking strawberries. Do I have to get to this thing? Whereas like one, like you take a swig of sweetened condensed milk and it's like, boom, that's 50 carbs. Like, what? How? So eventually you might get to a point where most of your carbohydrate consumption comes from a combination of fresh fruits and green veggies. And that's going to be insanely difficult to out eat your calorie goals or to put another way. You're going to eat your meals and be like, I don't want any more chicken broccoli and orange I'm good until the next meal and you have it again.

1:06:29And then when you end your diet and you start coming back up to maintenance, you slowly reverse that process back out again. So you are using a restriction in the types of foods that you are allowed to eat in an attempt to pad out the satiety that you have by making it increasingly calorie sparse per gram of food, fewer calories, and to increase suffering to make it dirt more. You're trading off two different kinds of suffering. There's the suffering of having to eat food you're not amazed with, and there's the suffering of actual hunger. They don't compare in magnitude. It's a stupid analogy offhand is the annoyance of having to wear a sticky, gross, sweaty helmet versus taking it off in combat.

1:07:20Yeah, it sucks, but there's bullets flying. The alternative to your helmet is way worth 100%. What about potatoes? You mentioned about vegetables there. A lot of people that sort of starch that is a big satiating thing. I suddenly know that when I've been dieting previously, that's one of the things I miss a lot. There's no amount of ground beef at 97, 3, and whatever else that I can throw on a play with some vegetables that I just want a little bit of starch. How can people get that if they think I really that's my thing. It just makes me, makes my diet easy. Why would you go to for that most starchy stuff?

1:07:55So what you have to do is you can do an experiment on yourself for any given number of grams of carbohydrates, which starch choices for you? Do you find the tastiest, the most difficult to stop eating, the most difficult to understand that okay, now you've run out pasta don't get anymore, and also the longest window after the meal of keeping you full. On average, boiled potatoes do really well in that regard. Mashed potatoes, not as well, they're tasty, you can suck them down faster. A bunch of different types of potatoes, the more, the more minimally processed, the less processed the better, do super well.

1:08:39Typically rice does okay, but you can put away a lot of rice. Pasta generally doesn't do that great. I can make fields of pasta disappear, by just breathing it in. So not everyone's the same. So you want to try and figure out, but generally speaking from memory potatoes on average, rank pretty high in the... Fits the title. Index. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Create Creatine Gummies. You might have heard previous guests like Dr. Ronda Patrick and Dr. Peter Itia, talking about the benefits of taking creatine daily. Thank you very much. Let's face it, taking creatine every day is not fun.

1:09:19Whereas having a tasty gummy, come on, send it. Come on. Ah, okay. And again, let's go. We got this. Ha, no, come on. Ah, yeah, let's go. Just need to show good. So everybody needs to take creatine and it's not fun and now that problem has been fixed by creating creatine gummies. Tastes great, easy to travel with, can throw it in a bag, it is now a treat to have creatine every day as opposed to a chore. Across more than 700 scientific studies creatine has been proven to safely and effectively build lean muscle, improve muscle recovery and improve brain health and longevity. Right now you can get a 30 % discount off your order by going to the link in the show it's below or heading to trycreate .co slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom.

1:10:06Check out that's trycreate .co slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. We've spoken almost exclusively so far about ways to manipulate what goes into the body, but energy balance is what goes in versus what you expend. What do we need to know when it comes to how our body actually uses calories, G -flux theory? Is that a thing? Is it a hypothesis? What's G -flux? I think that the way that was put across was the difference between taking in 3 ,500 and expanding 2 ,500 and taking in 2 ,500 and expanding 1 ,500 results in a very different type of physiology. Uh. Yeah. Definitely hypothesis.

1:10:56Uh -huh. Maybe even notion. I was in a... Courageal discussion with my friend, Dr. Eric Helms. And I brought up the flux thing. And he was like, Mike, shut up. That was a t -nation article and nothing more. And I was like, fuck, he just clowned me. Christian Tibberdo, what are you doing to me? God, dammit. He usually gets great advice. We all fuck up every now and then. The upright rose. You need the upright rose. The accent alone, I'll believe anything he says. So there is something to that, but let me give you kind of the grand narrative here. There's something called the Ponser Paradox, named after Herman Ponser.

1:11:37It's Discoverer. And this is a gentleman that's actually, I think trained as a maybe like a ethnographer for an anthropologist or something like that? And he went around the world, various colleagues, and studied the physical activity levels of various peoples, peoples of India, of Africa, of China, of indigenous tribes, of modern peoples, and he found that the levels of physical activity are almost the same for everyone. This is crazy, ready? We do not have an inactivity epidemic in the modern world. Hmm, sedentaryness is not the big problem. No, and if you actually live with indigenous tribes, unless they have to, they fucking sit around as long as they can in the d -d -d -d -d -d -d -dick.

1:12:23Because you gotta conserve calories. You go out to get calories when you're hungry, when there's an opportunity. Otherwise, why the fuck are you going out, walking around? There's absolutely variation there. between individuals in any one culture, there are huge variations in physical activity. But on average, physical activity is neither the cause of the obesity epidemic, nor the likely solution to the obesity epidemic. However, if you want your best tools brought to the game of your personal fat loss, what I would say is this, we can have three options for you in physical activity terms. Option one, and this is a little bit to the G -Flux situation.

1:13:07You eat very little, but you're very physically inactive. You're going to generate the same caloric net deficit as all the other two groups of people I'll talk about, two ways of doing things. It'll work. For some people it worked great. I code all day. I don't want to have to fucking exercise for five hours, get out of my face. I don't really hungry person. I can just drink a soyland shake when I'm coding and I'm golden. No problem. The second group are people that have a moderate to high level of physical activity, something typified by 10 ,000 -ish steps per day, for example. Group one would be like two to four thousand steps per day, aka the average amount.

1:13:52And that group of people ends up having a situation where they can eat more food and plenty of food, and that helps them stay more full. But they're so active that they burn lots of fat and lose the same amount of weight and the physical activity is additive to their health outcomes, because physical activity is independently important for health, regardless of how skinny or fat you are. So that's a really good option. For most people, probably better than option number one. Then there's a third option. What I like to nickname the grand illusion. And that is you continue to eat like the giant swine that you are.

1:14:29Taco Bell employees know you by name. They have your order ready for you every three hours. But you tell yourself, I'm just going to out exercise this thing. I'm going to go to Kenya. I'm going to sign up for their marathon team. I'm going to hang out with those homies. And we're going to do the thing. The problem with that is this has been researched by Ponsors Group and Associated Colleges. This has been researched in athletics for a long time. When you ask consistently, and I mean weeks on end, for your body to have a very high throughput of activity, calories, something like North of 15 to 20 ,000 steps per day, every day on average.

1:15:10Your body doesn't like to do that. It makes you very tired. It's making you tired so that you to sit the hell down and stop bothering it as much. And it works. If you got through it, you've just chosen a way that is a way to lose fat that works exactly as well as option number two, which is just a moderately high physical activity of the length, crazy consistent and a decent amount of food. But it's just way harder and you suck up way more of your time exercising where you could be. And eating and punching. and eating. Now eating is fun, right? And who the hell cooks anymore, right? Trying to steal man, the argument here.

1:15:52But there's plural. I don't have one butler. I'm not poor, my god. If you don't want to change your eating habits and you think you're going to out -exercise your diet, we run into two problems. Problem one is what I just said. You're going to be so drained and energy your life's going to and you'll quit 99 % of the time. Problem number two is it is easy to say as what economist and philosopher Tom Sol has coined to term notion. It's beyond, it's a below hypothesis in its intellectual seriousness. Just a high idea you had at a party, not even couched to be tested like a hypothesis would be. And the notion is that, um, I'll just like exercise so much, I'll eat whatever I want, and I'll still lose weight.

1:16:44The thing is though, if you do the math on that and it's frightening math, you can take a mile run, throw back like one twinkie and goodbye calorie balance. Half a donut, nukes like half a mile run or some crazy shit like that. And so it's perfectly fine to say out loud, well I'm just gonna eat whatever. But you can eat with a healthy appetite and if really you mean whatever and you like fast food and junk food and chips and crisps and all that, you can put down four or five K calories a day, no problem. You ever see the average fast food meal? Like if you just go and have the number two or super size it.

1:17:24It's like 2100 calories, but you have that three times a day. You've seen super size me or whatever. It's like, holy shit, how do you out -exercise that? Well, no, it's not just marathon runner pace. It's like two marathon's a day. You're not gonna do that. So because of that situation, option two is the preferred option for some folks option one works. Eating very little, exercising very little, totally cool. Exercise is good for you should probably get more of it, but it works. Option two, moderate high levels of physical activity. Weight train a few times a week, get an average of 10 ,000 ish daily steps or so and eat a little bit less than you normally would.

1:18:02You're a golden option three where you eat a ton of food. You don't change your ways, but you try to exercise a ton all the time. It just doesn't work in the real world for almost anyone. We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90 % of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. AG1 provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one comprehensive, convenient and tasty, daily drink you do not need a handful of pills or potions to support your body and give it nutritional insurance. The average supplement is tested for 10 contaminants.

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1:19:12That's drink AG1 .com slash wisdom. There is a symmetric warfare between what you can put into your mouth and what you can burn in your body. And that's what the example about running half a mile to burn off half of a donut. Running half a mile is not easy, it sucks. And lessen to the donut shop. No way that it'll also sucks. Yeah, I guess you could run there half a mile, run back half a mile, burn it off. Terrible. No one's gonna do that. Yeah, running backward hurt. But yeah, as someone who's tried to find a way to defeat thermodynamics to get lean, just thinking like that, oh god, I hate being hungry, I hate this restrictive diet.

1:19:52I can't have any sauce on anything. You know, it is really, really sucks. I'll just exercise more. And the net outcome has usually been, I can't, I can't keep it up. I'm fatigued already. I'm still not actually eating what I want in any case. If you were to create some sort of pie chart of what contributes to fat loss, what would be the components and what would come from nutrition calorie intake, exercise, whatever of it. If it's just your diet versus your physical activity, I'd say it's 70, 30 or 80, 20 diet versus physical activity, measured as real world explaining the variance of why people are lean.

1:20:37You take a thousand people, some are really lean, some are really fat. And try to see, what is it that the lean people are doing more than fat people, other than obviating genetics aside, it's going to be like, yes, lean people are like a bit more physically active a bit. And other than the morbidly obese, most people are preling plenty physically active. Here's another thing, you weigh 240 pounds and you take 6 ,000 steps a day just because your parking lots always full it when you come to work. You know how much you burn walking when you weigh 240? Probably the same as 10 ,000 from so many ways 180.

1:21:12Oh yeah, or 100%. Maybe even more than that. And so you look at who's really getting leanest and it's mostly those people eat differently. So diet is just, it's a bigger lever. Then it's more direct. A lot of percent. It's like if you were, you know, trying to support a country's military to beat another country. And you're like, you get to pick one weapon system and we'll give you the top of the line, we'll give you logistics, we'll give you support, we'll give you maintenance. Do you want the newest rifle? Or do you want the newest air superiority fighter? You're like, I'll take the jet, please.

1:21:44So the rifle matters, but, um, mood point. Okay. Getting on to energy expenditure, cardio. What do people need to know about cardio for fat loss? It sucks. Next question. So cardio is best seen in most cases outside of a sport context, because then it's cardio for sports totally different. You do what you have to do. Cardio is best seen as I need to burn a certain number of calories to get me to that moderate high level. And I have a couple of considerations. One is preference, one is convenience, one is time cost, and a few others. And so if you think there's something magical to the step mill or to driving to the gym and getting on the cycle or gometer or incline walking or something, you're going to be in for a rude awakening because none of that shit matters.

1:22:34Just your step count can get you as lean as your dietary adherence and genetics are capable of getting it. Cardio is a way to burn calories. Any kind of physical activity is roughly equivalent for it. You just measure the amount of time that you're doing it. To me, the two big factors that stand out, maybe three, sustainability, enjoyment, and time cost competing with other activities through the day. On these three, step tracker and step counting is like a huge deal. I don't want to over sell it, but it kind of wins on all accounts. Why? If you have to get 11 ,000 calories every day as part of your plan, that's what my current amount.

1:23:2211 ,000 calories? It's good guy to 11 ,000. Where's the KFC? 11 ,000 steps a day. What ends up happening is can I get on the treadmill and do 11 ,000 cents? Sure. But also, I can talk to Mr. Nick Chas, CEO of RP, and do a business meeting while I'm hands -free on my phone and walk around my backyard. I can take a walk with my wife. I can walk the dog. I can go to the grocery store. I can pace around. I can do every activity of daily living that actually accomplishes something else. And it's always adding to my step count. Right. So, the advantage of steps walking is that it is not constraining as many other things that you can do as sitting on a assault bike.

1:24:09And do nothing but that. Correct. And it can actually empower those things. Take two scenarios. One is a person is doing only pre -planned cardio. They're on the elliptical for 30 minutes a day to burn whatever number of calories. And they don't track anything else. They do the elliptical. Their husband comes home late from work. And he goes, hey, I got to run to the store. Do you want to come? Wife's tired. You go, honey. It's OK. Husbands alone at the store. He sees a woman that's marginally more attractive. You know the rest. That's it. Divorce post -nav. The elliptical caused my break. That's it.

1:24:43The alternative view is if you're doing step -tracking, you can go to the store and not have to worry about how tired you're going to be from cardio. Because once people checkbox their cardio, the human body, when it's under caloric constraint for long, is really, really finicky and cheap. and it wants to make sure you don't spend anything else. So once you've done your cardio for the day, you just sit on the couch and do this. Not ideal, but if you have a step tracker, everything counts. So if your kids are like, my mommy, mommy, play with us, you're like, well, shit, I'll just go over my steps today.

1:25:15And tomorrow I can take a bigger break. Everything you do, the stuff I'm gonna put on. Is that how you see your steps in the same ways you would see calories across a week? Yes, absolutely. Some days you step a bit more, some days a bit less, some days heat a bit more, some days a bit less. you're aggregating that across. Totally. That's the thing that matters in the end. Now, you don't want to get too crazy where you don't move it all and then you have a day of 40 ,000 stabs. It's unsustainable. It's the same as the alternate day fasting thing in some ways. Yeah. Which some people love apparently, but if you catch me at 8 p .m.

1:25:44of the day I'm fasting, don't catch me. Because what about the different impact that intensity of cardio has on the body? I've heard about the afterburn effect. Yeah. Well, surely you're not getting that. If you're just lolly gagging in zone two as you saunter down the road for 11 ,000 steps, plotting. You walk to a chair from your living room couch, you say, like afterburn. So great question. The afterburn effect or epoch as it's not excess post exercise, oxygen consumption is colloquially one of the most overrated things in exercise science. It's just not that big of a deal. It adds up a little over time, but the way you get crazy epoch is you do like repeat hill sprints or insanely highly damaging whole body lifting workouts.

1:26:41Then you see, you know, couple dozen maybe a hundred or two extra calories burned over a twenty -friar period, but And over 100 extra calories burned, it is already a real big deal very unlikely. And so the intensity of the exercise, as far as aggregate ability to burn fat and lose weight, basically doesn't matter. What's much more of a concern is sustainability. If you think you have to run jog for cardio because it's intense and it's going to burn that fat in a super special way and your knees start to hurt, you stop jogging. There goes your diet plan. But you probably aren't going to injure yourself walking or swimming or doing an elliptical and if you like to do those things, even though they don't occur at 5 ,000 miles an hour not dunking a basketball for reps or some kind of crazy high intensity shit, it's going to burn the same number of calories because the afterburn effect are so small.

1:27:31And if you're lifting weights, you get that anyway. It's not a thing. So, you made kind of a great point earlier where the sort of diet versus activity, one of those is really much more responsible. How many calories your physical activity burns is so much grander scheme of a thing than how much afterburned causes Then I just wouldn't really worry about the afterburn much I would worry about like is this kind of physical activity schedule something I can do today tomorrow next week next month If that's the case that's your shit and to that end I would encourage some people who get bored of just walking to do a couple different things You can do brisley and jujitsu.

1:28:08You can do Thai boxing you can do regular boxing you do Zoom a class at your gym, you can do swimming, you can do cycling, you can do running, you can do the elliptical, you can walk some days, as long as you're getting the calories going some way, it can be as monotonous as you like. Some people, they do a podcast, they walk around the block 18 times, they love it, they want nothing else. That's me. Other people, they meet some different stuff, different as great, which you don't want to do is do the same thing over and over that you hate, especially if it's high impact and high intensity. Like every time your feet hit the concrete, your knees are like, I hate you.

1:28:39what the, are you doing to me? And you're like, wow, my knees are gone, but I'm leaner, not sustainable, not good. But if running twice a week is fine as long as you swim and bike, and maybe walk the other days and your total aggregate calories are the same, then you're really in a winning forego. It's going to be slightly difficult for some people to work out. Okay, I did 10 ,000 steps. Dr. Mike said, do 10 ,000 steps. You can do 10 ,000 steps. But I just did pickleball for an hour. What's that? Am I counting my steps? Impeccable? I ran. Presumably running 10 ,000 steps burns more calories than walking 10 ,000 steps.

1:29:14Do I count my steps there? How do you think about factoring in cardio output to compare it or comparatively to your 11 ,000 steps? Yeah. There's two ways to do it. I think you're good. I'm sure there are others. One is you go into the one of five trillion free online counters that adjust for all these things and you can just get the calories and adjust for almost everything. There are hilarious pictures of back in the 70s and 80s. They did a lot of measurement of calorie expenditure and real world activities. So you got this guy with a full on gas mass with tubes into an oxygen pack and carbon collection pack and he's golfing.

1:29:49How many calories do you burn golfing? Holy shit, you golfing in space. So they've done all that work so you can get all those formulas. No, but you don't need the formula. It was just type it into an online calculator. I've golfed for four hours. How many calories did I but they'll tell you, body weight, blah, blah, blah, you're good to go. That gets annoying a little bit. So a better alternative probably is to give yourself average daily step goal. And if you know you're a person that also likes to do pickleball, I don't know what the that is. What is it? I actually don't know what it is. It's like tennis for old people, or paddle for poor people.

1:30:30Right. My Wimbledon ranked tennis instructor tells me I don't need to worry about things like that. He only works for me. He stopped playing. He also had the massage guy. Does that? Chris, we were on a professional organization here. I was going to say a bunch of jokes that were all going to get us canceled. In any case, let's say you're pretty physically active. You do some pick up this. You do some pick up that. You walk more. You do this and now maybe set your goal at 8 ,000 steps every day on average. You get 8 ,000 steps. I give an example with my wife. My wife trains multiple times a week in Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu.

1:31:13Hardcore, she's an addict now. It's scary because she's going to kill me sooner or later. If I ever turn up dead, she's suspect number one. I want this official in public. And some days she'll just do her 10 ,000 steps. Other days she'll do 8 ,000 steps, which is like maybe a minimum for her. And then she'll do Jiu Jitsu for an hour, live rolling with psychotic and sane people. That burns way more calories than just the steps alone, but because she always hits 10 ,000 a week on average, any extra Jiu Jitsu is extra. And she loses weight a little faster. If she's tired, she'll ease up on the Jiu Jitsu and do more technique stuff and not as much live, right?

1:31:52So if you're a person that knows you're pretty physically active outside of walking, I'd still do walking and do a tracker and just peg it at 8K or 7K, that's my average and I know I work on top of that. But if you are a person who does nothing else, yeah, peg your steps at 10 or 11K a day and like there's no pickle ball anywhere because that's not a real sport, I swear to God, make that up. I'm getting to guess as well that having a more consistent number of steps that you take every single day means that you don't need to reset that habit. How many did I do? I did that thing to carry the three sort of cross this over.

1:32:25I certainly found that with any diets that were inconsistent, any training plans that were inconsistent, even any productivity days, like sometimes on a Monday coming back after a weekend feels really great because I've taken a little bit of time. Then sometimes I've got to restart the beast a little bit after I had a couple of days where I was chilling out. So I think maintaining consistency in the things that Don't fatigue you or ideally rejuvenate you at least a little bit. That seems to make sense to me Makes a hundred percent sense Consistency is an enormous superpower in a fat lost diet Because consistency means honoring the plan you chose and when you lose weight for long enough and get lean enough Every fiber of your being starts to tell you do anything but this Train less, eat more, reconsider, maybe you can stop your diet today, you can pick it up next week, no big deal.

1:33:19If the consistency is there and you do more or less similar things every day, every week, just do the thing and the results will happen. What about the role of resistance training during a fat loss protocol? Super. Resistance training doesn't really help you lose weight. It does in the sense that it burns calories, but it doesn't burn a crazy amount of calories It's a good amount, but nothing to insane. Resistance training builds and preserves your muscle tissue. So if I have someone lose 15 pounds over the course of 12 weeks, reasonable for a larger size person, they don't resistance train at all.

1:34:01Many of those epic studies showed something like this. They'll lose like half of that will be muscle, maybe 5 pounds will be muscle, 10 pounds will be fat if you're lucky. You're healthier, you look better, your blood work is better, you feel better. It's not amazing. If you resistance train and you've been resistance training consistently already, almost all of that weight loss will be fat, maybe like 13 pounds of it, and only two pounds of lost muscle, and because you keep resistance training after you regain that two pounds back like three weeks later. And then so measured at three weeks after you finish that 12 -week diet, you lost.

1:34:47Well, 13 -ish pounds of fat and no muscle. Visually, health -wise, feeling -wise, night and day. Here's a real kicker. If it's your first time losing fat and you don't train with weights, starting to train with weights while you start to kind of clean up your diet and lose little fat, you can gain pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat. I thought it was impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. Yeah, a lot of people misinterpret more difficult than average to mean impossible. It's like saying flight is impossible and then a helicopter goes by like, bullshit. Fuck you guys. So a really good example of this recently in the media was UFC the UFC president Dana White.

1:35:33Dana White had an unreal transformation as health markers just through the roof. And I think he lost something like a total of maybe 35 pounds on the scale. But because he started taking weight training very seriously during that time, he must have gained anywhere from 5 to 15 pounds of muscle. I mean, 15 is a bit extreme, but I'm willing to go 5 to 10 for sure, just guessing. And that means he actually lost maybe 45 pounds of fat while gaining muscle. So he didn't go from with all total respect. Looking like Jesus, Dana gonna be okay. I'm not really. Jesus Dana is really enjoying his wealth kind of look.

1:36:22Yeah. Who's an opulent weight? My man. That Caesar type of shit. Other people feed me. The biggest concern is gout. Exactly. Oh, again. Is this something wine can cure? Yes. He went, he could have gone from that with no resistance training to like, oh, he Dana White lost weight. And that's nice to hear. But he went from that to like, yo, what the fuck? Dana is Superman. When the hell is he getting on the octagon? You feel me? That's a big deal. It's a big deal at deep health markers. It's a big deal at how you feel. Some people feel weaker after a diet because they are. They lost a bunch of muscle.

1:37:06You gain muscle or maintain it through a diet. You feel stronger after a diet. And the look, and since I'm on the modern wisdom podcast, I can say this and it's fit for purpose, how attractive you are to yourself. Fuck everybody else. matters. And if you lose exclusively or mostly fat, should even gain some muscle during that time, you transform your attractiveness. In most cases, up a bunch of notches. It's a positive feedback cycle for yourself as well, as opposed to going from, God, I was overweight to, well, I'm not overweight anymore, but I'm not. That looks sick. Yeah, I'm aciated. And look, most people prefer bodies that are smaller and That's just a statistical fact.

1:37:53But even more people prefer fit bodies for themselves. And definitely for other people. So if you resistance train when you're losing weight, and yes, this is a message to almost all modern women that are in their 40s and 50s, get in the weight room, lift weights hard, get good personal trainer. Don, well, the RPI perter free app, link and bio. What? Did I just say something? And while you clean up your diet while you lose fat, what you can do is see a completely transformative effect. And no, you will not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident overnight. I mean, I used to be biologically female.

1:38:35And then, 120 pounds body weight yesterday and it took one day for me to do this. Dude, that's the, my favorite sign up is the one that women give to themselves, which is if I lift weights, I will become too jacked. Meanwhile, those of us that have desperately been lifting weights for approaching two decades now in the hopes that one day I might look remotely like I do. So one will be able to tell I work out at the store. I'm like, the chance that you're going to wake up one day and become Arnie, given how hard me and all of my friends have worked at doing that and he's still not achieved it is zero.

1:39:14You don't need to worry. It's real close to zero. It's one of these things where they're doing it at like two orders of magnitude less serum testosterone as well. All women are high -bogo natal. If you're a female and you show up, the doctor, and you're like, hey, my testicles don't produce testosterone. He's going to do blood work. He's going to go, oh my god, you're right. You have almost no testosterone. You're not the candidate for rabid muscle growth. What's going to happen is you're going to Diet down and you're going to look less like you're sick at the end and more like you look healthy and vital and like a little young bebopper like you know when younger women almost don't walk the kinds of bounce around that like shit they have you can have that.

1:39:55It's called muscle mass. It changes the shape of your body. It does this to your ass. It makes your legs look awesome. It does everything wonderful and it does not turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger overnight. It's a huge deal. Are there any specifics when it comes to training during a fat loss phase resistance -wise? We did a great breakdown that everyone can go and watch on how to train for muscle growth. Are there any adjustments when you're in a deficit? For most people, no. If you are at the very end of a insane fat loss phase, if you're a competition bodybuilder, you might want to try to reduce the amount of load you're lifting by a little and increase the repetitions, just because it's the same hypertrophic drive on average, but you're marginally reducing the risk of injury by a tiny little bit.

1:40:42It's also through some biochemical mechanisms easier to maintain your muscular endurance and improve it as you're dieting down than it is to maintain or increase your strength. And so that is a very exotic concern. For almost everyone is just kind of the same resistance training as we talked about in our earlier video all the time. Should people be trying to increase the weight and the reps that they're doing as they go through fat loss? Should they have it in the back of their mind? Am I get a bit tired? I'm four weeks in, I'm eight weeks in, I'm 12 weeks in. What about dealing with the mental pain of maybe not being the progress of strength, not going in quite the direction?

1:41:21Re -wreston. The Arpeggio Protrophy app does that for you. Mike seriously shot the hell up about your stupid app. You should anticipate that the rate of progression is going to decline. Maybe you've been really gunning it for a while and adding five pounds to the bar and everything every week. And when you're not adding weight, you might be able to add two reps to the exercise, especially at the tail end of a fat loss phase. Try to aim for adding two and a half pounds to the bar every week and maybe adding a rep every week. or if you're pretty advanced and things really slow down, every other week go up by two and a half pounds or a rep and every other week just maintain.

1:42:02And so instead of trying to gain at a fast rate, you're trying to either gain at a very slow rate. And in the end, you win some, you lose some and you end up maintaining. But you still got to try to push it, which you don't want to do is start trying less hard to really take it to the teeth when you're in a fat loss phase. because the total catabolic muscle destroying muscle burning stimulus is high as fuck now. You've got to fight against it by keeping your training volume up, of course, with the ability to recover, which is going to decline. You still have to test your limits a little bit, because if you train easy and you diet really hard for fat loss, you might lose some muscle still.

1:42:43If you train as hard as you're capable of, you might lose no muscle and maybe gain a little. If you train or try to train as hard as you were when you were massing, you'll just overreach and have to deal Over every third week and that might not be a fun experience Apps how do people get abs? I mean something you download at the Google Play Store. Oh, abs I wouldn't know anything about that. No personal experience. Next question Abs are one of those 80 -20 things but in this case it's like 95 -5 Every single human has abdominal muscles, except for people that are involved in tragic accidents or something like that.

1:43:26And almost always and almost ever, the reason you can't see yours is because you're a layer of fat on top of them is too much. And there's this term from bodybuilding that's really great. It's abs are made in the kitchen, not the weight room and not on the cardio machine and it's fucking true. If you just impose a caloric deficit through moderate activity, good resistance training, you can train your abs or you can not. It doesn't really matter. And your body fat, when it goes down to a small amount, you're going to have whatever kind of abs you have shaped down there. Many people have six packs.

1:43:57Some even have eight packs. I have like a two and a half pack or some shit like that. No, god. But it's almost all that calorie deficit, just straight up getting lean. I would love to dispel a mega myth. People who have a high level of body fat, who want to find out how to do some exercise, or eat some food that's going to give them abs. Aim them for you. It doesn't exist. It's just the layer of fat that's keeping us from seeing your abs. Now, if you do get lean enough and find that instead of those like, you know, like hunk, romance novel abs with a woman's like grating her face on the guy's abs and he has like a unicorn or whatever I don't read to many romance novels you've been featured on a few covers haven't you yeah Against your will still in a copyright dispute nasty legal battle You may find that instead of having those ravioli abs You have just kind of like semblance of abs, but they're real flat The cool thing about that is you have a really small waist which is sweet aesthetically universally considered attract near universally.

1:45:04There's a community of gay folks that are in the Harry bear culture that if you have a gut with abs, you're the fun. Now we're talking about the y 'all market. Yes, yes. Bow to your leader, folks. When I grow my hair out, I can't go around the gay club because I just pulled in. In any case, it's cool. It's a cool look to have just kind of like no crazy, crazy hops. But some people like damn it. I wanted abs abs for those folks. Training abs works exactly the same way as any other hypertrophy training. We covered that in last video. Two to four times a week training, multiple sets, close to failure, full range of motion, big stretch, increasing loads and reps over time.

1:45:46The same. The planks, the superman, all that bullshit, the twists, it does stuff. But if you want big abs, you just go about it like you would get big calves, big forearms, big shoulders, big anything, consistent resistance training. That's the way to get it. And then don't just train abs during your fat loss plan. If in a year from now you want thick abs, start training them now. The last 12 weeks of that year, you're going to die to weigh the fat, then your abs will be eaten good. They'll get real thick. And then they're going to reveal themselves as meaty. But if you just train abs during the fat loss phase, they'll grow a little bit because they're new to the but it's not going to be super impressive.

1:46:26Does training abs make them more visible at higher body fat percentages? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That seems good. That seems like a reason to train them. If you're interested in being at a high body fat percentage, well, higher body fat percentage. Getting a big, totally. But it also gives you like more of a pooch kind of look, which you may or may not be into. It's a concern for folks that are in no offense meant on kind of the smaller side of things for them. Maybe that's a cool thing. For folks that train with weights at your level below your level quite a bit through your level and above, the compound exercises kind of stuff makes your abs so goddamn big to begin with.

1:47:12It's like a drop in the puddle for extra app training. Like right now, I have ravioli abs. I have abs right now if I'm relaxed and I have like, I just genetically have like a gut. My gut has fucking abs. I have a six pack when I'm relaxed now with a veins in it. And so people are like, what do you do for abs? I'm like, I don't train abs. You don't? No, absolutely not. When I transition away from bodybuilding in a few years to try and become really, really good at Jiu -Jitsu, we're good for my purposes. is not anyone else's, I suck in general. I'm going to start training abs not for the purpose of having abs, but for the purpose of developing a much stronger anterior chain, the ability to do this because of your due to that's a big deal.

1:47:53Then I'm going to be training abs, but for now, abs are just a waste of time for me because they're absolutely big enough for contest bodybuilding, which is my current pursuit. And I would just be wasting literal time and recovery on training abs. I suppose just trying to sort of speak to the lay person. and you are, you've got what, four shows this year, four or five shows. The plan has to do about four shows. Okay, so you have four individual days this year, with which you're going to be very, very lean and your abs will be displayed unbelievably well given the low level of body fat. I'm going to guess that most people like the idea, I know that for most of my 20s, what I wanted was to have abs.

1:48:34I didn't care about being lean, I don't hold that much weight in my face, I look sort relatively lean in my arms in any case, so it didn't really matter. So I wanted abs. So if training abs allows me to have abs, visible abs at a slightly higher body fat percentage, I achieve my leanness goal, which was visible abs without having to diet myself down quite so hard. Brilliant. I'm going to say right now, first of all, that works and I encourage people to do it. Second of all, they should do it, conventional resistance training approaches. exercises that work, full -rage your motion, length and exercises.

1:49:07For example, one of the best ab exercises, and there's tons of them, is the ab wheel, the roll out, fucking brutal, and it really tenses your abs at long lengths, which grows them like crazy. Isometric work for the abs generally isn't that great. So I would say if you want that, train abs, train them two to four times a week, essentially train them right. Don't train them as a special group. Because people say, well, how do I get my vice, if I was going to, how do I get my abs bigger like same shit with a fucker. But lastly, what I would say is the effect on how visible your abs are versus your body fat is very small.

1:49:38So you're not going to see your abs at 22 % body found. You should how big they are realistically. You just don't get that big. One, two, maybe three percent body fat difference. Could there be a visual difference there? Yeah, potentially, but you need years of training your abs to get to that kind of look understood. To the first time that I've trained as consistently as I have, over the last, so far this year, like five months, and not done any direct ab work. And also not to be honest, being tracking calories all that much, I'll open on like a hardcore fucking fadmaps, see, see both things, so that's kind of just been built in.

1:50:14Auto diet. Yeah, precisely, just boring diet. But the, I always presumed that lower ab vascularity, like waistband vascularity was something that came about due to the dieting that I was doing and the ab work that I was doing. It's like, I'm adamant that that's the case. Right now, I've got a shit ton of lower ab vascularity and I'm like, I'm not dieting that hard. My weight dropped a little bit, but it's not dropped that much. Where the fuck is this coming from? I was like, oh, I've been training legs, like very aggressively, with quite a long eccentric pause on everything for five months. And I think that that kind of shows at least as an end of one.

1:50:56Sure. What you was saying. You're bearing down deep, the interdomble pressure. That's a lot of aburquerick there. And it adds up. Any one squad or set of squads is not that much aburk. It's a nice and metric. It's like a Superman hole. It's kind of a fucking waste of time. But if you do that bracing for almost every exercise, five times the ego to the gym, you're training your abs for like five hours every week. Add ads up. Are there any supplements that offer an edge for fat loss? The modern anorectics like ozemic enters appetite, absolutely. And, you know, for some people, various stimulants, caffeine, a couple of other ones, you have hymnbeen, etc., they have a marginal effect on reducing appetite, improving mental clarity and focus.

1:51:41If they don't interfere with your sleep, you can take them. The problem with stimulants is that you develop a tolerance to them quite quickly. When you're ending the diet, which I'd love to talk about as far as how to transition out, because that's super important. When you're ending a diet and you have to manage your stimulants again and you maybe come off of them, you get radical rebound hunger. And just the stimulants are just the... Oh, because it's suppressing your appetite, artificially. And so you don't want five monsters every day anymore. You're like, pull out the monsters and you're like, do brownies instead.

1:52:13It's tough. Caffeine is like, you know, you have like a circuit board with a little nail and you're like, giant hammer. And I was like, oh, hit all the other stuff. So as far as real supplements that just straight up work for fat loss, they kind of don't exist. If you have the olympines and the other things, they can add a little bit to the thing. It's like a stimulant derivative sort of thing. And it has some cool health effects. It burns a little bit of body fat. But this is something that you just don't write home about. It's this teeny little thing. It's a bodybuilder Take it. They'll take a fadra.

1:52:47They'll take other stuff and it all works It just works a bit and has quite a few side effects and the stuff that doesn't have a ton of side effects Generally, it doesn't tend to work that much

1:52:59Big farmer won this one the ultimate supplement quote unquote to a fat lost diet Are the modern what they're called really as anorectics? I like to take people away from, trimming them GLP, agonists or GLP ones, because it's already not true for Terzeprtheid, and it's GLP one plus GIP, and for Retatrotitis, Luca as well. And so, anorectic is the general term for drugs that make you less hungry, and that's how they were. Anorectic. Correct. And so, modern anorectics, because they used to be some back in the day that were also stimulant -based, like... Fan, fan. Fan, fan. Subutrophug, that fucked up.

1:53:37A lot of people, subutermine was quite healthy, but the regulatory agencies didn't think it was quite as safe as they wanted. It probably was, but they got weird not about it. It's also a stimulant derivative, so it's got some side effects, dry mouth, etc. The trade name for the drug is meridia. It's a cool drug, not approved for use in the United States. I don't believe it's approved for use in Europe. Of course, you cavalier Europeans, like, well, we'll take anything. But the modern -day aniractics, currently the GLP and etc., group of drugs, they're just fucking good. No, do they have side effects?

1:54:08Yes. Can they be managed with with how you do your diet? Almost almost completely. Are they not for some people? Totally. Do they have really tiny downside risks in some cases? Yeah, they do. Every drug has that. But are they just as a general rule insanely effective and make dieting 50 trillion times easier? Yeah. So defat burn is not work? Okay. Fabburners work, but they burn, deease, a bunch of fat, and they just make you super anxious and awake at night. Most fatburners are stimulant -based, non -stimulate fatburners are kind of a joke at the current time. And so, yeah, it's just like how much caffeine can you cram in an energy drink as most of the question with fatburners.

1:54:53A pill you can take that doesn't wig you out that burns fat enough with a margin that you can tell in a realistic diet is just not around. Okay, given this relatively easy to follow, format that you've explained about how much food you're putting in your face, but why you should portion this prioritizing protein, looking at how much exercise that you're doing, tracking steps, trying to keep you consistent, why do so many people fail at diets? Yeah, it's a good question. Cheese. I think as we've seen with the anerotic drug trials, somagletide, chersepatide, retatrotide, other drugs, when you take away or better put reduce substantially hunger drive, almost everyone loses a bunch of weight.

1:55:50It's also precisely the reason that we've seen obesity. Trenned up is because there's tons of super palatable, super tasty food over historical time. If you reverse that, like people in the 1950s probably didn't have any more average willpower than people today. We like to romanticize and think they did, probably didn't. And so most people fail diets because evolution designed most of us to fail diets. It's a similar question to if you take a bunch of 22 -year -old dudes and you put them into a controlled facility, I don't want to say prison, but a scientific research facility. And you tell them no wanking, that's what you guys call it on the UK.

1:56:37And you stretch it out for 60 days. You're going to ask a real weird question. How come everyone started wanking after a while? They failed! Because evolution designed you, but at some level, sex drive is just going to turn you fucking wild and you're going to do the thing. Same idea for diets. I don't think there's a necessary, extra level of causal inference we have to make. Think most of the reason people screw up on diets is because food taste really goddamn good and they get fucking Andre and they're like fuck this. Now, you can architect your preparation for a diet to try to minimize that.

1:57:12Being around people in your family and friends group that are at least neutral and hopefully supportive of your diet versus actively trying to be like, come on, have a french fry, that's terrible. Getting rid of the junk food in your home and eat out less or have places you eat out where you know exactly what to order and it works part of your diet. A big one is not having the polyonic goals. goals. If I say to myself, in one month I'm going to lose 30 pounds of fat. I'm almost certainly going to fail. And it wasn't any crazy explanation on the fact that like, I should have made it 15 pounds and made the goal three months.

1:57:46The magnitude of depravity and hunger per any day is not like six times less. And then like every day is sustainable, I'm not trying to crash and burn. So a ton of people crash and burn. Another reason, and it all threads into eventually they just eat junk food and stop, so it's all the core reason still the tasty food. Another reason is a lot of people simply a lot of people actually do well with diets. The vast majority of people will lose weight on diets. The vast majority of those people will regain it back. Why? Because most people don't have a habitual reference intake pattern, a diet they do, that allows them to stay healthy and lean and isn't radically different from what they do normally.

1:58:32For example, a lot of the folks that have used RP diet coach out, it is you eat three to six meals a day and it portions it out at a protein's and healthy carbs and healthy fats. People will eat it and be like, this is the item losing to lose fat. Like I'm just gonna do it. I don't give a shit how hard it is. But after they're done with it and this happens even more in our private coaching, they're like, wait, if I just add a bit of junk food to this every now and again. This is a maintenance plan. I know how to eat now. I know how to put together meals of protein and carbs and healthy fats. I know what I'm doing at the grocery store.

1:59:07I can even eat out and I know how to make core good meals. I have a lot of people who fail diets. Their idea of a diet is cabbage soup and protein shakes and then when the diet ends they go back to what? What are their habits? The same ship they used to do. What gets you the same results to have. Same shit you used to do. They go back into the world, they start doing Taco Bell again, they blow up, do the diet, diet works, stop the diet, diet reverts. If you can from the diet, take some healthy habits that aren't just psychotic things you only do on a diet, knowing how to build a meal of a core of protein, healthy protein, veggies, knowing how to time it, getting into the habit of eating every four or six hours, knowing how to shop at the store, knowing what to order to restaurant, practicing saying, you know what I don't want 18 trillion pounds of french fries.

1:59:52If you do that on a diet, all you need to do is layer in a bit of bullshit and junk food every now and again and now that's your maintenance. You constricted a little bit if you're getting weight again, you loosened it up if you lose weight again and then you confer years and definitely maintain that new healthy lean you. But many people who do diets, they never build the habits to begin with, which is one of the reasons why fat dieting is so terrible. This new weird stuff you're never gonna sustain. Here's the thing, keto carnivore. Great ways to diet. And for many people like Joe Rogan, a lifestyle.

2:00:24Awesome. But for many people they're like, I'm doing keto to lose weight. Okay, so you just never gonna eat a lot of breads any because if you told Joe Rogan, for example, like, hey, man, so you're really good with just like having an occasional bread and pasta every few months when you're on business trips with people. And otherwise you just like stick to your alka whatever is a gap. I love it. Frank down the street is going to be like, well, no, I do the keto diet. Then I lose weight. When he went after that Frank, Elk all the time, he's like, oh, fuck that. I'm going to Olive Garden. I'm like, guess who's going to come back then?

2:00:53Old fat Frank again. It's the lack of those core abilities to have that habit of good eating and the fat diets do not help at all. If appetite and hunger are primarily to blame, is there anything that you can do to mitigate or help reduce hunger. Yes, anorectic drugs. Apart from those. There's a bunch of stuff. Eating a diet higher in protein tends to work well. Not going a very long time without food until you're psychotically hungry. You show up to whole foods to buy your groceries for that day or few days. And you're like you eat two hours ago. You'll buy all the stuff you need to. You go to whole foods after six hours not eating.

2:01:36you're going right to the vegan junk food section and put whatever the fucking hair cart. So meal schedule is a really good thing. Having a diet high in fiber vegetables and really filling foods, tons of veggies, tons of fruits, reducing the overall palatability that I don't mean eating total shit like space gruel that you go to space jail to give you the gruel and the slug always wants more but you're like, fuck take my nose off. Hopefully it's not your roommate, you know, but you're J .L. Selly, right? And so sometimes just not trying to make your food taste the best it's ever gonna taste, because some people do this.

2:02:09And this is really common. They're gonna come on a diet. I know my macros, I know my calories, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take these minimal macros, I have this meal, I'm gonna try to make it taste as good as possible. I can't use mayo, but I'm gonna sprinkle all this fucking shit on it. That meal just leaves you really hungry afterwards. You look forward to eating it so much, it screws up your day entirely. So it's kind of counter -insuitive. Very counter -insuitive. Chris is not kind of counter -tutor. It's completely cut. Completely counter -tutor's intuition is literally designed for an ancestral evolutionary environment where like, tasty shit is a good thing to eat because you're gonna die.

2:02:40Nothing in this world that the ancestral peoples from whom we evolved had ever fucks with a double cheeseburger from McDonald's. Paradise. It doesn't taste like anything they've ever seen because it engineered to be the best tasting thing anyone's ever tried. It's an unstoppable thing. Real. You ever see those like survival wilderness shows where they kill an animal and they like throwing on the grill and they're like, yep, tastes pretty good. No, it doesn't. You don't have salt on it. You're out of your mind. You can only be grilled meat for so long until like, oh, it's or anything else. So ultra super tasty food back away from it a little bit.

2:03:15Another one is make sure you're nice and hydrated. Have a little bit of fluid before you start a meal and it fills up your stomach a bit. It's a huge hack. It can help some people a little bit. Another one is if you tell yourself, look, I'm at a party and I'm going to be eating normal people food. Try to fill up on proteins and veggies first and then maybe have a cookie or two. But if you go fucking right for the cookies and you know, I mean, yeah, sure. Well, if it depends on what game you're playing. If you're gold coins or calories, shit, you just broke all the level records, right? So stuff like that, these kinds of pieces of advice, they're not revolutionary, but when you're hungry and you're dieting, all of them can help to a considerable degree.

2:03:55I like the sort of strategic tactical stuff because those are the things I think that people keep in the back of their mind and also their small behaviors that you anchor your sense of your new sense of identity too. Don't forget, I've got to have the, I must drink my 300 milliliters of water before I sit down to have this meal. Why am I doing this? It's the same reason I have a book of poems, Tim Burton's The Malancholy Death of Oyster Boy. It sits on the desk next to where I record my podcast. Okay. And just by having that there, it's given to me by my speech coach. And I read a couple of poems before I'd start the episode because it's whimsical and it's good for vocal diction and precision and stuff like that.

2:04:35But the main reason is that that is a physical representation of eye care about precision in speech. And by having it there, every time that I go into the room, I go, you must remember to be precise when I speak. Yes. When you're at a business dinner and everyone's ordering lobster, bisque, dipped, and french fries are some sh**. You're like, hey, like what does your filet look like? Can I get some grilled veggies to the table? Because you give a sh** and you have that plan and eventually, you combine giving a sh** with having a plan for at least a few weeks. You have habits. You just had another few weeks.

2:05:06You have the beginning of not identity with a capital I, but a lower case I. I'm a person who gives a sh** about my health. I care about what goes into my body. And here's the thing. One of the funny pieces of feedback I get every now again, from business people and stuff is like, well, you know, I do a lot of client dinners. And I'm like, yes, like, well, you know, like I'm drinking alcohol, I'm eating all this stuff. I'm like, if you tell the CEO of Nvidia, who's, you're, we're sitting across from a business dinner, he's like, are you going to have any of the crazy fries or whatever? You're like, actually, I'm trying to clean up my weight and stuff like that.

2:05:41I'm just going to order a steak and have some veggies. There's no way, Jensen Wong is going to be like pathetic guys. Clean this up. We're not doing a deal with this guy. Unreal. take your data center and shove it and he walks off. He's gonna be like, amazing, good for you. You don't mind that. Sort of man that I want to be in business with. At the very least, it's neutral. If it's a negative, you don't want to be in business with that. Yeah, that's not the sort of person you usually do. But it's usually like a cool positive. No, usually I like to say, but please order anything you want. Temptation's not a factor.

2:06:09Because most people be like, oh God, I was gonna get the pizza, but I don't want to make you, and they'll do that because they're super nice. His diet is not my diet, somehow. Exactly. They start feeling guilty. You don't want that kind of energy. So be okay, like you guys order whatever you want. I'm just going to do me. I promise I'm having fun and you say it in a way that hopefully can look like you're having fun. That's great. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about from a strategic hack tactical style of perspective where you think, you know, if I actually rely on that quite a lot, I like that idea of if you're having dinner with somebody else and say, I'm on a diet at the moment working quite hard at this.

2:06:45I'm going to get myself some meat and veggies, but you're free to get whatever you'd like. I'm temptation, it may show on my face, but don't worry, you're not going to break me type thing. That's a charming way to go about delivering a diet. The water beforehand, I think is great. Actually, diving back the tastiness of your meals and continuing to push that. Is there anything else from the toolkit that we haven't touched on? tons of other stuff, but one thing that I would bring attention to that's really helpful and this happens with time is have an arsenal of ideas about what to eat. You don't want to go to the grocery store, balls deep into a diet or a business dinner, balls deep into a diet and look at either the groceries in front of you, the aisles and aisles or the menu as like a child looks at something for the first time because you just can end up ordering chicken nuggets or just buying pounds of cheese sauce and drinking it in the back to cry my last Tuesday.

2:07:40My coach Jared knows about this. There's a rough conversation. You want to have go to when I go to the store, I know where the veggies are, I know where the lean meats are, I know where the grains are, I know what I'm buying. My wife and I, when we go to the store, we go with a shopping list mostly because we're the kind of anal people that don't do anything without a list. But also on a hardcore diet, we know we're getting online shopping for this would be the ultimate hack. Amazon just sends you all the shit you need and nothing more than the shit that you don't. The grocery store stuff because man, they look so good.

2:08:16Our croger in our city in which we live has precisely three full, separate American, mega size aisles just of chips. Mano Henselman's was visiting me because of our friends and I was like, you gotta see this. He's like, man, he sees, he's like, holy shit. So like if I go there without a plan and I'm starving, it's over. You go to a restaurant, it's over one of our RP coaches, Dr. Jen case. She has a whole list of how to read restaurant foods. And if it's like breaded glazed, well, she's like, stay away from this. Stay, you know, broiled baked, et cetera. If you go to a restaurant, you can even go so far as to look at their menu before.

2:09:00I had to be like, what would what would I choose if you go to Japanese food? So, shimi is good, teriyaki is good, maybe the ponzu mayo, super roll isn't the best. If you show up in a normal state of you're just living your best life to a restaurant, it's a beautiful life thing to just look at a menu and be like, what do we have? You're on a mission when you're on a diet. Don't forget that. You show up, you're looking for specific things. and that's a big tip, because if you show up and go, I wonder what I should eat. Oh, man, you might order some good stuff. You might not. Yeah, I've been surprised by how many restaurants will let you kind of just go off -paste from it.

2:09:41I don't actually see this on here, but is it possible to get that without the other thing on that and can we sub such and such for such and such? There are two things to say about that. One is oftentimes the better of the restaurant, the more likely they are to accommodate. As some people are like, well, I'm going to Michelin Star place. Those people will do whatever the fuck you tell them. They'll be like, oh yeah, that guy owns Nvidia. Don't modify the caviar. Like, give him whatever the hell he wants. The other thing is, real chefs. Look at contest bodybuilding food or diet food and they laugh at how easy it is to make.

2:10:17This is not - You've just made his job, half as far. Oh my god, he's not like, he's not interested in making that Super Alfredo Carbonara for the 50th time that day. Sure, he likes it. We're like, hey, like no sauce, just noodles, some grilled chicken. He's like, did I get this right? You're like, oh, he's like, he's like, no problem. So you often try to get in convenience in people. Another thing is choosing restaurants to go to that are conducive to selection, subway, burrito places like Chipotle. You can make a bowl or a sandwich with mostly just meats and veggies and a little bit of rice and beans and you're fucking golden.

2:10:51They ask you, do you want the cheese sauce? You don't have to say yes, versus if you go to like McDonald's, yeah, there's a grilled chicken sandwich, but like there's just not a lot of mix and match and make your own good stuff. So even the places you go out to eat, another one is like a lot of people in California, half those like, it's a call like fast casual Asian dining, like the broiler with flame broiler, Panda Express. A lot of those have like just grilled meats and rice and veggies. Yeah, they got other taste of your ship, but if you know they have that, you know what you want, you got a plan, you show up, you get it done, you eat it in the corner, you cry yourself back to your car and then you're mean.

2:11:30What about people who have a sweet tooth? They're deep into a diet and they use to finishing off a meal with something that's a little bit of a treat. What would you say to those people? What are some of the hacks that people who have a sweet tooth can use to keep satiated during a fat loss. Yes. One of your recent guests, menohenselmans, just shared an excellent study. Artificial sweetened beverages beat water in a weight loss trial. So, that means if you have a diet sprite or five, sweet tooth problem solved. All of your food comes from a regular food. You have a couple of sprites with the meal or after.

2:12:10Your golden mission accomplished. So artificial sweeteners are as they're technically called not in nutrition of sweeteners because some of them are natural like stevia stevia stevia just like a guy named steve at the office you kind of we want to know but not know know you know um and there's monk fruit and other stuff that's totally fine very low calorie or no calorie so not in nutrition of sweeteners those are totally great they're safe they're effective they're awesome no on aggregate they don't fuck up your gut microbiome the people who don't like artificial sweeteners at this point is just the argument from nature fallacy or aka the naturalistic fallacy just writ large.

2:12:44Like you are an example. There's a picture of your face in the dictionary by that shit at this point. It's just a done deal. So you totally find to have those in very high amounts. The testing limits are just absurd. Like you can feed rats half their bodily naspertame and they're like, I still got it, baby. So they talk though. That's kind of weird. What is there anything else? Yes. Yes. There are many ways to make tasty things that are sweet that aren't insanely high in calories you plan to your diet. One of them is fresh fruit. I mean, fresh fruit, peaches, apples, pears, berries. You can have a bunch of them, and realize like, oh my god, I actually need double this to get my carbs for the day, or just a handful of berries after meal if you put it on the food scale.

2:13:24It takes care of the sweet tooth and it's awesome. Now look, I'm all about like giving people real talk science shit, trying to motivate a little bit, but I'm not ever going to bullshit anyone or at least try are the fucking handful of berries going to taste like fudge brownie. Fuck no, they're not. Man, nothing beats real ice cream. I will say though, two companies come to mind. Enlightened ice cream and Halo Top. Enlightened was actually started by a friend of Mr. Nick Shaw and I's. He's great. Halo Top, I know no human at that place, but I eat Halo Top ice cream whole the damn time because it's like a third of the typical calories of a cabinanjerry's pint and when you're deep into a fat lost animal that shit tastes good and it used to taste not so great they're getting real good.

2:14:08We tried legendary foods we tried that um they do sort of a protein pastries cinnamon rolls their pastries are great and it's one of those like here's my big thing if you're expecting diet foods to taste like real foods Stop. They're not gonna. But if you expect them to taste like some kind of chemical, artificial, the aliens and the simulation are like, this is real food and you're like, well, shit, I can taste the difference if you expect it to taste like that. It's actually quite good nowadays. And here's another thing. If it tastes too icky, you don't really have a sweet tooth mother. Just skip it and eat your normal food.

2:14:43If you're hungry enough, that's still taste amazing. Give that a try. Yeah. I think anything that's got 20 grams of protein in and resembles a cinnamon and roll and taste pretty nice and you can put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. So fucking game change, I've been really, really impressed with what they've done. They've absolutely wizardry of some kind that they've done to make 20 grams of protein and four net grams of carbs. Go fuck yourself. I don't know what's in it and I don't want to know. I know it's going in my mouth. Yes. Like everything. Most things, male things, huh? I have a wife.

2:15:16Diet transitions and diet breaks. Can we cover that? Yes. or am I skipping ahead? No, no, no, no. That's good enough. Dieting is dope. Constricting your caloric intake to generated deficit is the critical way in which you transform your body. But as I said earlier, the fast fraction of people that do diets regain the weight, because there's no diet afterwards, after you're done dieting, you have to prepare for the fact that as soon as the diet is over, the next day your body is still screaming at you that you're starving to death. It's not like finishing a marathon and you get your gold medal and you're like, we're done.

2:16:01And the next day you just go to work. Your body has a memory and it hates you.

2:16:11That's right. He'll remember even when he's older. So what you have to do is understand that the diet doesn't end when the diet ends. The diet ends when you have finished the weight loss phase and slowly reintegrated back into maintenance. A few weeks later, maybe a few months later, if the diet was hardcore enough, you'll feel normal again. So what does that mean practically? after your diet is over. You already have a rough idea of what your main incentive is. Go back up that next week to your main incentive, but do it exclusively in the same kinds of foods that you had on the diet. You're eating brown rice and broccoli and chicken.

2:17:00That's an example meal you were eating. The day after the diet is not brownies with honey glaze on top. It's more chicken and rice and broccoli or whatever. You're going to gain a little bit of body water. Don't freak out, it'll come back down in a few days. Stay on that same diet. Can you have a cheat meal or two? Sure. Some people think it's great. Some people, their eyes get really big and they just want to keep cheating. So I would say save your cheat meal, your pizza with friends for two to three weeks after. So what you have is you finish the diet. And then for two to three weeks, you eat at your new maintenance, which is way more food than you're reading in the diet, but it's still clean food.

2:17:42Quarantko, it's that healthy food. It's that low palatability food. After a few weeks, you are going to physically have a hard time eating that food. You're going to look at your fifth meal and you're going to fuck this. Can someone eat this for me? Now, you're not freaking out anymore. Your diet fatigue is way lower. And now, hey, shit, you can go with your friends to have pizza. You'll have four slices. It'll be baller. You don't want anymore. You leave the next day healthy food again blah blah blah. And they are back to having a few junky items a week. Everything in balance, your golden. Keep weight training, keep your activity nice and high.

2:18:16Keep most of your food nice and healthy. And if you get a little too heavy, bow back the junk. If you get a little too light, dial up the junk or eat more of that healthy food. Don't just fall off the face of the earth at the end of the diet and just go back to whatever. That's a big problem. And if you want to diet again to lose more fat. Let's see your way 200 pounds, you get down to 185. But your real goal weight is like, you want to weigh 165. That's where you're going to look your best. For any given length of time you die, it saves 12 weeks at RP based on our examination of the evidence and are working with hundreds and thousands of clients at this point.

2:18:51We've determined that something like two -thirds to one times the length of the previous diet is how long your maintenance phase or slow bulk should be after. If you want to get a little thicker, if not, just maintenance phase. So what does that mean? You die different 12 weeks. your next eight weeks should be a diligent attempt at maintenance. Being aware of the fact that you could regain, eating tons of that healthy, not so great, palatability food and slowly threading in a bit more high palatability food. This is where desserts that are way outside what you would eat on a diet, but still way below what you would normally come in really handy, for example.

2:19:24Hey, let's have a great, legendary foods, this great. Another one is frozen yogurt. You ought to do ice cream ice cream, bro. That fat level is It's just going to blow you out. But frozen yogurt, it's actually not a ton. If it's plenty of calories, but it's not ton. It feels you up a lot. Froyo is super dope in that after two or three weeks of healthy food, get some frozen. That's a treat. Amazing. Tons of veggies, sorry, tons of veggies. Tons of fresh fruit mixed with regular yogurt, stuff like that goes a long way. Eight weeks later, if you feel good, and you can honestly tell yourself, I can do another several months of dieting, I want to do it.

2:20:04Try that thought on for size. It fits. Do it. You could try that thought on for size and be like pizza. Like if your brains are GPT, you're like, hey, do I want a diet? It just returns pizza. You're like, shit. Then just maintain for longer until the diet fatigue drops. A huge problem people run into is two things. One, they'll finish the diet and they'll just jump off a cliff and eat pizza on the way down and then they get fat and the other one is they'll maintain diligently. I didn't mean the scare quotes for a few weeks and they'd be like, I feel pretty good. Time for another hardcore diet.

2:20:35They do three weeks of that. They try to eat their own hand. They fall off the wagon and reek in all the way. So dieting is a phasic process. It is by definition unsustainable. You diet down for eight to 12 weeks, even six to 12 weeks, and there's no bonus points for 12. If you're getting kind of crazy at nine weeks, stop the diet. Maintain for at at least six weeks. Then diet for seven or eight weeks, maintain for six to eight weeks. You got some trips coming up. Keep maintaining for three months, four months, five months, who cares? You already won. And then later you can take another stab at it.

2:21:09The idea that you have to try to lose all of your weight at once is a nonsense and it's gonna set you up for failure. Dr. Mike Gidsertel, ladies and gentlemen, Mike, I appreciate you. It's very, very nice to have this evidence -based community coming to the forefront yourself, Mano Lane, the big guys. It's good. I really, really like it. And I think that you're doing great work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you need to chill. They should continue to watch your podcast because it's fucking amazing, man. Thank you so much for having me on. If you guys want to learn more about stuff than RP Strength YouTube channel, we blab about this incessantly.

2:21:41There's tons of other great creators in the space, the 3D MJ folks, Stronger by Science, Mano Hanselmanz, Dr. Pack, Dr. Milo. These are awesome people. or like left out of town, Jeff Nipper, of course, the king of the evidence -based community. Just get on the internet type in evidence -based fitness, evidence -based dieting, and you're gonna get much more good stuff than bad stuff. And if you wanna buy stuff, a lot of funnels at the RPU too, should do their job. But we have the RP Diet Coach app, you can download it, you can use it, it's super great. The RPI Pertrophy app to get jacked. And I come to Instagram and be my friend, and on there, and you'll notice that I have a giant ugly head, I appreciate you, man.

2:22:20Thank you so much. Popsicles, sprinklers, equilibraries, talk about refreshing. You know what else is refreshing this summer? I'll bring a new phone with Verizon. Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trader in my plan and lock down a low price for three years on any plan with my plan. This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer. Swing by Verizon for our best phone deals. Three -year price guarantee applies to then -current -based monthly rate only, additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.