Is This Actually Food for Humans? | Shawn Stevenson EP 533

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11I'm down 25 pounds and you're like, what are you doing? And I said, well, I've just been consistently on my lifting program and consistently on my nutrition program. Really being intentional about the consumption of food. I'm trying to stick around 2 ,000 calories a day, trying to get about 150 to 200 grams of protein a day, trying to get as much vegetables as I can in there and stay under 2 ,000 calories, stay around 2 ,000 calories. And by doing that, I'm down 25 pounds in 13 weeks. But I'm really consistent with the lifting program that I'm on. I'm also consistent with getting my steps in, just moving my body, walking more, about 10 ,000 steps a day.

0:52And I'm really consistent with the nutrition and optimizing that. Do you think counting calories is a powerful thing for optimizing metabolic health and weight loss? Or should we be thinking about counting something else? What you just shared right there and something so powerful that we can miss is the fact that your calories, you've shifted that focus on your protein. Yes. Right? And there's a lot of infighting has been for years with fats and carbohydrates and kind of like protein has been like riding the bench basically, you know? But in reality, why does this matter? Well, proteins are needed to build your tissues.

1:29When we talk about hormones, what are they? They're proteins. When we're talking about enzymes and breaking things down and repairing and things like that, they're made from proteins. We need to provide that fuel. But also, proteins provide the biggest thermogenic boost to the body. Your body utilizes more energy in the digestion of protein than it does the other macronutrients. It uses more energy in the digestion of protein. Right. So what you're netting is going to be less. So it's burning more calories? You're burning more calories. This is something really that we don't think about. You have to use calories to assimilate calories.

2:05Right. You have to use calories to digest, assimilate, and eliminate your food, right? So if you have more protein-based calories, you're burning more of the calories in your body than if you just had carbohydrates or something else. Exactly, yeah. I mean, significantly more, right? But this has been known for a very long time. But it's just kind of been like pushing the back burner because all of the fighting about carbs, and proteins. Now, unfortunately, even as I'm talking about this stuff, there's a part of me that is well aware that we're isolating food into parts. And this is part of the problem because food is food.

2:41All right. We evolved eating food. We didn't evolve eating macronutrient. Right. You get your macros in the day. You know, like Socrates and Hippocrates and all these guys, you know, the Stoics and, you know, they weren't like, you know what, just count your macros, bro. You know, they're prescribing certain foods and also fasting, right? And these, all these different technologies, inner technologies that we know about today, but we've devolved in a sense where we are so focused on something that nature provided or that was created by food scientists. And that's really the big problem. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, back, you know, right around the 1920s, 30s, 40s, right somewhere in that time frame, she published one of the biggest best-selling nutrition books of the time, and it was focused on calories.

3:32It was this newly discovered thing or article to hang our nutrition, our choices on, but that's not that calories hadn't been around. You know, there's Atwater, there's people before this, but calories were used not in nutrition, it was used in physics, but it parlayed its way into nutrition because just like you have a bomb calorimeter where you can actually incinerate a food and find out how much energy is given. That's how you measure the calories. But your body is not an incinerator. Your body is intelligent. It's not a calculator. It's a very highly evolved chemistry lab. And so even that superficial lens of calories, just being able to like, this is how many calories in this thing.

4:13We know today we've got a lot of data on you think this amount of calories isn't a thing it's way off and you think this amount of calories you're burning on the treadmill it's way off because it depends on you right you're unique and so with that said here's where it changed she shifted the conversation from she said you will no longer eat a slice of bread you will eat 100 calories of bread it's changing the languaging we're starting to see food as numbers and not food so it's disorienting us from the fact of like, is this food? Is this a real food? Or are these calorie counting or point system ultra processed things because it's a certain amount of calories, it's okay.

4:51And so it's changing the ingredients that are making us up as humans. It's changing the metabolic fuel that we're using and depressing our system because with the fact that you're eating the way that you're eating, you're also eating a more biased nature, more real whole foods. Of course, prepared in cool ways and all that stuff. That's really where the magic is. So we can use calories as a tool, but we don't want it to become the ultimate warden, the ultimate controller of our perception about nutrition. It's a tool and it's not a very sophisticated tool because here's another inconvenient truth is that that calorie count on your packaging, all they did was just do some math.

5:29They're not using a bomb calorimeter and actually measuring how many calories is in that. There's certain things that are kind of accepted as this is the way it is. And that's what they're putting on the package they're doing is the Atwater system. They're just using some math. And so again, I'm here to like, okay, we can use this as a tool to know that you're in this certain range for what's appropriate for you. But the biggest focus needs to be on the quality of that food that you're eating, that you're building your tissues out of real sustainable materials. And that things that your cells can recognize, that your cells, your genes have evolved having some exposure to this.

6:02versus hot fries, which is very different from the metabolic impact that that's going to have. You can do things in a certain phase, like you were guzzling Dr. Pepper like you're getting paid for it, and you can get by. But at some point, there's a cost with everything. Absolutely, man. There's a cost with everything in our universe. There's causality. And so being able to be empowered and start to see through a different lens, is this real food or not? Is this human food or not?

6:36Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:26Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.