Fat Burning Expert: The Real Reason You Can’t Lose Weight! PCOS, Menopause & Stubborn Belly Fat

31:07So there... So I guess it is kind of true in a way that people understand that if you overeat your metabolism as far as they understand what their metabolism is, is increasing and if you under it, then your metabolism is slowing down. Yes, but I have to emphasize, the major component that slows down is your non -exercise activity. You're not moving around as much. Yes. Yes, the other components like adaptive thermal reduction and potential thyroid issues, that is the minor component. The major component is a drop in fidgeting, a slowing of the rate that you walk around and increase in the amount you sit around.

31:46And you can control that. Yes. It's hard to put a finger on it. But as long as you know that stuff goes down, I'll give you an example of physique competitors. They are, as their cutting face progresses, they're literally lying around in between their cardio sessions and their resistance strain sessions and their top -aware meal sessions. They're no longer tapping their heads, tapping their fingers and bobbing their heads and they're no longer have a pep in their step. They're no longer doing non -exercise activities, basically. question four. What diet actually works best for long -term weight loss?

32:29Keto, low fat, Mediterranean, intermittent fasting, and you've got to give me a answer.

32:38I'll say it in one sentence. The diet with enough protein, enough total calories that is comprised predominantly of healthy food choices that fits the individual's personal preferences and tolerances. How do I lose belly fat specifically? Can you target the belly? Targeting belly fat specifically is a matter of targeting total body fat. You can't necessarily spot -reduce the belly fat. Now if we go a layer deeper it is possible for certain diets to be more conducive to preventing visceral fat gain or maybe even accelerating visceral fat loss. Visceral fat is the fat within the abdominal cavity around the organs and so it is possible for certain diets to be more conducive to reductions in visceral fat.

33:45And that would be diets that have a lower proportion of saturated fat. What's an example of saturated fat food? Land fatty, land animal meats. So land animal fats are going to be your saturated fats that are more conducive to visceral fat gain. So if you were to switch out, let's say fatty cuts of meat, just trim that fat out. And if you replaced it with something like avocado nuts, olive oil seeds. On menopause, why is fat loss harder and what actually works? Okay. During the menopausal transition, which begins at a woman's mid -forties on average and then ends in the mid -50s, there are changes physiologically and formally that can challenge a fitness program.

34:35So it can challenge their ability to execute the fitness program and adhere to it. And so things like hot flashes and joint pain, changes in sexual function, and poor sleep. All of those things can converge to lead to a decreased ability to stick to a program and do the necessary physical activity and dietary adherence to reach the sort of the standard rate of progress for body composition change. And so the solution to that would be simply, you don't have to rearrange a whole program because somebody's going through menopause. You don't have to cut out nutrients and do any special things. What has been effective is just lowering the expectation of progress.

35:29So whereas I would typically have somebody gun for a pound a week of fat loss, somebody in the menopausal transition, they have more challenges to that going on simultaneously. So we would go for about half of that. Protein? What do they do in terms of protein? Just keep the protein high. Same range. Yeah. So with protein, I got to say, there's sort of a two -tiered recommendation. So the general public with average goals will do just fine on 1 .2 to 1 .6 grams per kilogram body weight. That's kind of like the general population average goal, folks. Somebody like yourself, somebody like me and folks who are oriented towards maybe pushing the envelope a little bit more than the average, 1 .6 to 2 .2 grams per kilogram of body weight.

36:27And you know there's a little margin over here for people on the French physique competitors who I would have no problem seeing them go higher than that 2 .2 grams per kilogram cutoff. Is there anything else that peri or menopause or women need to understand about gaining muscle and keeping fat off when they're going through menopause? Is there anything else that we've missed? You know, I would just emphasize the understanding that midlife presents maybe the highest point of psychological stress in people's lives. So starting from the late 40s going all the way into people's 50s and 60s, it's like that.

37:12Now, the concentrated period in the menopausal transition, mid 40s to mid 50s, is when and people are dealing with alien parents, the stress of alien parents, the stress of kids going through high school or college, the stress of hitting a high point in their careers, the pressures thereof, the time, the energy that is necessary to allocate for all of those things, all of those things, distract from, oh, I've got a fitness program here. Oh, my coach is making me do this and this and this, and now he's making me diet like this. That's the thing that I would emphasize. There's nothing special or different that needs to be done.

37:53In fact, there's a lot of mythology that's circulating the space right now, where coaches and gurus and even some physicians are telling women that they are just doomed to gain a bunch of belly fat and lose a bunch of muscle during menopause. It just happens. You're doomed. That's just not true. There is a study called the swan study that's the longest and largest study of its kind. And the average amount of fat gain during the entire menopausal transition was 1 .6 kilograms, which is 3 .5 pounds. And the average amount of muscle loss total during the menopausal transition was 0 .2 kilograms. That's about half a pound of muscle loss.

38:40statistically significant? Yes. Insurmountable? No. So, and are there going to be outliers who experience double the muscle loss and double the fat gain of that? Yes. But none of this is insurmountable. What do you think about taking HRT? Does that help? Yeah, well, it helps those who need it. So HRT should be looked at on an individual basis. One of the things that really annoys the absolute crap out of me is when I'm seeing the comment sections on social media with people telling everybody that, hey, you just turned 40 time to go on HRT, that is between you and your doctor. people are trying to universalize major changes like HRT.

39:30Some people definitely benefit from it and just the same there are a lot of people who don't need it. The people that benefit from it, do they find it easier to gain muscle mass and to not gain fat? Is that kind of like what? That is a common... Okay. That is a common result. Yes. But my thing with HRT is this. So, So there has to be a symptomologic reason to get on. So you have to be incurring or experiencing symptoms that are disrupting to your quality of life, regardless of what your blood labs are like for testosterone, for example, if you are out of range for testosterone, all the lower end, let's say, but you have no symptoms.

40:19And you feel fine, you perform great in all aspects, then it's really up to you, whether it bugs you enough that your lower range or lower on the lower end of the range to correct that. It's up to you. And so symptomologically driven. Now, the other thing to look at with HRT is, and a lot of people, they get a single testing point and they judge their need to get on a hormonal replacement therapy based on a single single test. What people need to do is see whether there is some sort of trend going on in one direction or another or not. And if that trend is going in a bad direction over time, and you can do this by just multiple time points over an extended period.

41:08It's debatable like six months, 12 months to see what's going on. Try to correct things through lifestyle diet and often they are correctable. I've come across many cases where a guy will be under -slept, overworked, eating like crap, gets his testosterone levels tested. Oh, you're right at the bottom or you're even below range. Oh, time for HRT. Well, hold on a second. Let's get this guy some sleep. Let's improve his lifestyle, improve body composition, and and then bang testosterone levels double. This is not an uncommon thing. And so I'm very much a proponent of first, are there symptoms driving the justification for HRT?

41:58And then secondly, are we basing things on a single time point, or did we actually see a trend over time? My next question is about PCOS. A lot of women are struggling with PCOS and that's causing them to have irregular menstrual cycles and fertility issues. What would you say to a woman who is struggling with PCOS in terms of dietary prescription? Okay. So PCOS shares a lot of metabolic characteristics with type 2 diabetes. So there is insulin resistance going on. there is impaired glycemic control going on. And so we can pretty much justify being cautious with total amount of carbohydrate intake with PCOS.

42:53With type 2 diabetes, there's two tiers of importance dietarily. So of first importance with type 2 diabetes, you have to structure the diet so that it allows body fat loss. The success of GLP1 drugs has actually proven that at the heart of type 2 diabetes is overeating, an abundance of body fat. So the way that type 2 diabetes happens is in genetically predisposed individuals, they gain total body fat, and then they gain visceral fat, an undue amount of visceral fat and then this leads to insulin resistance and impairment of glycemic control. So, PCOS is very similar in this regard. There is no standard or consensus -based PCOS diet protocol, but because it shares so many similar characteristics with type 2 diabetes, then we can pretty much employ the same principles of how we would intervene with type 2 diabetes, which would number one, put a priority on total body fat reduction.

44:03And then tier number two would be, all right, do we need to restrict carbohydrates even further? And so that would be very similar with PCOS and at kind of a population level with type two diabetes, roughly 130 -ish grams of carbohydrates a day seems to be sort of the sweet spot below which people have an easier time controlling their blood sugar than above that total amount. But that's just a statistical average. We still have to look at things case by case. My girlfriend has PCOS and she did the ketogenic diet with me. She's on at the moment. We've been doing it for about eight weeks now. We do it intermittently throughout the years.

44:43And she said her menstrual cycle has perfectly corrected itself. I think at this maximum, it was like 60 days, her menstrual cycle. And then because she's restricted her carbohydrates, as you were saying, in this way using keto, So it's like, she said it's perfect. It's like perfectly predictable now. That's awesome. I say that in part because people, I think people don't, with PCOS, you have it, regular menstrual cycles. Don't often consider that carbohydrates, sugar, glucose, whatever could be the perpetrator. Yeah. Yeah, well. Because it's framed as a disease like you were born with it. Maybe it's heritable.

45:18Maybe there's an element of truth to that. but it's crazy that that dietary intervention had such a profound impact on how I'm particularly. It's glad to hear that you found something that works. That's, you know, that's, anytime you present with some sort of clinical condition, I would first tell you, hey, see an endocrinologist or see a doctor who specializes in that particular issue. And in terms of menstrual cycles, generally, if you do have an irregular menstrual cycle, because is there anything you should be thinking about? Number one, see a doctor. Number two, consider whether or not you are overtraining and under -eating.

45:58Yeah. So what happens with female physique competitors? Mentional disruption, menstrual cessation, a few months into prep. You've sometimes even a few weeks in a prep, depending on how aggressive the diet is. And so menstrual disruption is very common in competitive athletes and in recreational athletes who have to maintain a certain level of leanness while maintaining a high volume of exercise output. Is that the body from an evolutionary perspective saying, listen, we don't have the energy to have a baby here. So we're just gonna shut this down. That is right on. Yeah. So you kinda do, you don't wanna be restricting your calorie consumption too much if you have an irregular menstrual cycle and you're trying to correct that.

46:44Yeah. No, no. The so -called female athlete triad begins with overtraining, under -eating, potential eating disorder, nurturing, going on there, and then down the line, the menstrual cycle gets disrupted and stops, and then hormonal changes happen that are negative, and then ultimately results in osteophenia osteoporosis. And so that chain of events is unfortunately really common with women who don't pay attention to a healthy menstrual cycle. People use this term all the time at muscle memory. I thought it was nonsense, but I spoke to someone the other day. They said to me, actually, no, your body does have a muscle memory, which means that if I fall off now and I stop going to the gym, my body is going to be able to get back to my current physique faster because I was here once upon a time.

47:40Is this true? That is true. There's some debate going on amongst the community. What goes on physiologically with when you train, you create new myonuclei. So you increase your so -called myonuclear domains and those stay relatively permanent even during times of detraining. But there's still the so -called proprioceptive or motor component to training that sticks with people. sort of the skill aspect of it that sticks with people to be able to execute the movements and do the things to cause the adaptations. So not only do you have that muscle memory from the myonuclear domain standpoint, but you have the motor learning at the neurological component.

48:27And to a degree, you also have the skeletal component to be able to capacitate those that rebound in loading and muscle gain, muscle regain rather. Is the gut microbiome playing a role in my ability to lose weight? Not a big one. Of course, if I... Why did you make that sound? Well, there's some people in the space who put the microbiome as the master regulator everything, but it's definitely a part of the the axis of organ systems that that Manifest whatever, you know result. We're looking at it's part of it. Yes, But it's not the main puppeteer of everything. Everything works in concert too.

49:12And I'll just give you an example there. So there are certain supplements that are claimed to be able to who encodes fix the gut microbiome and cause greater weight loss. So there have been many studies looking at this sort of phenomenon. And while there is a statistically significant effect in some cases, the absolute amount that they can help for things like body fat loss or body weight loss is usually not practically significant. It's too small to be considered meaningful. And so I wouldn't necessarily rely on changes in the gut microbiome for impacting like global changes in body fat. Here I have 20 eggs.

50:03I heard that you eat 20 eggs per week, which is about, you know, four eggs a day potentially. Why do you eat so many eggs? Well, number one, I'm one of those weirdos who actually loves eggs. I love the taste of them. They're a great source of protein. Decent source of fat, most of the fat in there is oleic acid, by the way, which is a monoun saturate that predominates olive oil. It's a low saturated fat thing. Of course, the knock on eggs is their cholesterol content. But interestingly, it's a dietary saturated fat that has the greater magnitude of impact on blood lipids than dietary cholesterol.

50:45Interestingly enough, I recognize that the major health agencies would want you to stop your egg consumption to like one a day, possibly two a day if you're an elderly person. But I take the health agencies or even the consensus guidelines as a, okay, that's cool. That's a good starting point. I happen to like eggs. I'll eat more than that. Check my blood, check my health. I'm doing just fine. So I'm one of those people who can do forex today just fine. Is this part of your broader testosterone protocol? I like the fact that eggs are conducive to testosterone production. So you're 53 years old, right?

51:30Yes. Do you test your testosterone levels? I have not tested my testosterone levels in forever, but I'm not concerned with it. Because once again, it would be a symptom -driven thing for me to even care. So if I was experiencing the symptoms of low testosterone, then that would give me a reason to check it out and see what's going on. And then I would have to take a step back and look and see what can I modify with lifestyle? What do I have available to change non -drug wise? And you know what, if I ever need to take exogenous testosterone, if that day ever comes, well then so be it, I'm just not there.

52:12What supplements do you take every day? I take a multivitamin. I take two multivitamins, actually. The reason why I take two multivitamins is because really a certain key nutrients in there, they have to be in such small amounts per single pill that it's really just meaningless. And so I take two multivitamins, one of them with iron, one of them without iron. and I also take fish oil. I take magnesium and I take vitamin D3. I take vitamin C. And by the way, I really should preface this with this is the bro science side of my personal habits because I'm taking my vitamins more on placing your bets basis rather than, hey man, this is just the bottom line evidence base.

53:03I think everybody should do this. Okay, so I want to make sure that's clear. I also take magnesium and I also take collagen and I also take creatine. If I told you you could only take three of those supplements, which three would you pick? That's a damn good question, man. Can I have, can I, I'm going to count my two multi -says one. So you're multivitamin? Would that be the first one? Yes. Okay, so multivitamin. And omega -3s, fish oil, vitamin D3. So you've you've stacked off the creating.

53:39You're a genius.

53:44That's those are those would be those would be the top three. I would cry. Can I add creatine in there? Could I squeeze it in there? No, no, no, no. Oh, bro, so you picked three and make it three, the vitamin D three. Oh, it might humble me to kick the creatine out. So okay, final. I'll leave us. See, you call creating king creating. Yeah. Why'd you call it that? It's the only non -pharmacological supplement that really has a very strong and deep and broad evidence base for enhancing the effects of resistance training. So strength gains and size gains, more strength than size. the size gains, they come with the initial loading phase where a lot more intramuscular water happens or you know, intracelular, intramiosellular hydration.

54:40That is the big immediate part of creatine that folks feel when they go on it and when they go off of it. So you lose a few pounds of lean mass if you get off of creatine. I call it can creatine because it has possibly close to a, I want to say it's reached over a thousand studies and the majority of those studies show positive effects. Usually with creatine if you were to compare a group taking creatine versus a group not taking creatine. So the creatine group will have like a 20 % increase in their lifting capacity, whereas the non -creatine group will have like 12 -ish percent increase in their lifting capacity.

55:28Over a typical study like 8 -12 -leash -ish. And so that is a significant strength gain advantage. And over the long term, that would definitely augment muscle hypertrophy as well. And once you're loaded with creatine, so being loaded with creatine means that you saturate your muscle creatine stores. And that requires either a loading phase of 20 to 25 grams per day for five to seven days, or a maintenance phase that you engage like three or five grams a day, you'll be loaded at about 30 days. And so during that loading phase, it's pretty common for people to gain roughly 2 % of their body weight as lean mass.

56:15People seem to talk about creativity and like it's this miracle thing that everybody should be taking. That's one of the few supplements that it seems all the experts I speak to about this stuff seem to agree upon. The obviously vitamin D omega 3 comes up all the time and all the vitamins, but creativity seems to have much of an issue with it or be able to point to many side effects of taking with it, both for men and women. Yeah, it's got the musculoskeletal benefit. Believe it or not, there's even benefits for creating on joint health. So not only that, not only the athletic performance in muscle hypertrophy side, but there are things like improved glucose control, improved memory.

57:02So different domains of cognition can be enhanced by creatine. The level of creatine in the brain can increase with supplementation, and then you create a pro -energy environment in the brain, and that's how these positive effects on memory happen with creatine supplementation, especially in people with cognitive decline. So there's almost nothing Creteen can't do. Wow.

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58:06LinkedIn keeps pace. It takes care of the heavy lifting, sending you highly skilled candidates that you wouldn't find anywhere else. So when the time comes to make your next hire, make it count and promote your job on LinkedIn. Head to LinkedIn .com slash DOAC. That's linkedin .com slash D O A C in terms of conditions apply. Don't it breaks? What's a diet break? And why is that, why is that a useful tool? Yes. So one of the big things that dieters and counter are progress plateaus. And so we can define a progress plateau as four to possibly eight weeks of no change in body composition and despite good compliance to the program.

58:49With that definition out of the way, then intervening and overcoming or managing a plateau is really sort of this individualized process that needs to be looked at case by case, where, for example, if somebody feels like they're in the midst of a plateau and they have been on program, then there's really only two reasons the plateau happened. So reason number one is that their compliance was inconsistent. So poor compliance is number one. Or number two, they have reached energy equilibrium. So they've reached a genuine and bonafide new maintenance point. But there's something that is overarching with the plateau concept that people need to understand.

59:39So we automatically look at progress plateaus as something negative. When people need to reorganize or reframe their perception of what a plateau is, and the plateau is just the body doing its job. When we look at the body as an adaptive survival unit, then homeostasis is a big part of that. So if the body achieves homeostasis, then hallelujah, we're going to live. We're going to survive. So if for example somebody has a lot of weight to lose, let's say somewhere to the order of over 20 pounds, 20, 40, 60 pounds to lose, they have to understand that multiple plateaus will be encountered on route to their ultimate goal.

1:00:29And the way that the body changes is always going to be this surge slow stop pattern. And it just continues this way. And with every progressive plateau, the surge part gets shorter. And the slowing part and then the plateau part gets longer. So you can think of it as staircases and landing. So with each success of plateau, the staircase gets shorter, the landing gets longer, but it's supposed to go like that. And the plateaus should be getting longer because the ultimate goal, after all, is a plateau of sorts. And when people come to realize that, then they can look at plateaus as what I call maintenance practice.

1:01:20So if they have that mental shift from seeing plateaus as this negative thing where I need to go sniff out the next great diet or the next great product, they can look at it as, All right, so the plateau is a good thing. The body is doing its job. Now we have an opportunity to practice maintenance. And think about it this way too, Steven. Anybody can get weight off. But weight loss maintenance really is the issue. So the better you get at weight loss maintenance, then the more you can win the game. How do we get good at weight loss maintenance? Alright, so in order to properly maintain, you have to properly get there.

1:02:04So properly getting there means that you have to do your best to maintain your lean body mass while you're losing body fat. So what happens to a lot of people when they die is they lose a lot of lean body mass along with muscle mass, along with their fat mass. And so muscle tissue is something very important to keep on the body while you're losing fat because muscle is we can look at it as our metabolically active every tissue is metabolically active even even body fat but muscle tissue specifically is the center of our dietary fuel usage it is the metabolic engine of the body, if you will. And so if you're losing muscle tissue, you're really losing metabolic leverage while you're losing body fat.

1:03:01So the way that I infer that is that muscle is very greedy. It takes up a lot of calories. So if I lose my muscle, when I drop my weight, it's almost like the greedy guy who sucks up all my calories is no longer there. And so I'm quite likely just to rebound quite quickly. That's a great analogy and it's accurate too. And in fact, there is a phenomenon that in the literature it's called collateral fattening. And that happens when the body senses an energy crisis at the end of a diet where you've lost a bunch of muscle mass. The body senses that, oh my gosh, We just lost a bunch of precious tissue.

1:03:44We have to do whatever we can to get it back. And so your hunger signals ramp up and your body kind of behaviorally and even metabolically does what is necessary for you to feed that back as soon as possible and this does not necessarily happen certainly not to that kind of magnitude if you keep your muscle mass while you're losing body fat. You don't experience this collateral fatening type of phenomenon where people just rebound like crazy because their appetite is out of control at the end of the diet. So the way that you preserve muscle mass during the fat loss process is a couple things. So you have to make sure that your rate of weight loss isn't indicative of something that's too quick.

1:04:34So about half a percent to a full percent of your body weight lost per week is as fast as you really want to go. So roughly a pound a week, some people who start off heavier, okay, two pounds a week is fine at the very beginning. But you generally don't want to lose more than one percent of your total body weight per week because then that increases the chances that you're losing an undue amount of muscle mass along with your fat mass. And so if you can, in essence, control the weight loss rate, then you will keep your lean mass. Now, the other two things that need to be going on at the same time are you need to be resistance training and you need to be consuming enough protein.

1:05:23So straight training and protein. You got resistance training and then you have sort of a top speed limit on how much weight that you lose per week. And 1 % loss a week is a specacular, actually, for most people. Even a pound a week, even half a pound a week, you're looking at like in two years you lost 50 pounds. Most people took like two decades to put on that 50 pounds. So you actually don't want to lose weight too quickly or else you are susceptible to rebound. It is going to come off quickly if you have a lot of weight to lose. It'll come off quickly at the beginning. So for example, somebody who is in a state of obesity, let's say they weigh 250 pounds and let's say they're losing two, two and a half pounds a week at the beginning of the program, that's fine.

1:06:14But on average, on average, you would want to look at roughly a pound a week is a good benchmark and I still would not frown upon or scoff at a half a pound a week for certain cases. We can talk about some of those stubborn cases like on the topic of plateaus for example. I had a client, I'm sure she doesn't mind being named a great person, Pam Greshock. She's a veteran coach in the space. She's Perry Metaposal, so she's in her 40s. And she wanted to lose what we calculated out to be eight pounds of fat. And she stored the majority of it where she didn't want it was around the midsection. And I had to in mind that, okay, this is somebody who's Perry Metaposal.

1:07:10So there's going to be a lower rate of progress going on. But this is somebody who is highly trained. So she doesn't have a lot more muscle to put on that would give her some extra in quotes metabolic leverage for the whole process of improving body composition. So she's highly trained, paramedicosal wants to lose eight pounds of fat, which would represent the final eight pounds, sort of that pushing the envelope. Knowing those three things, I knew that this is going to be a difficult and slow -going process. So, whereas I would normally have somebody expect roughly, or at least gun for a pound a week loss, for Pam it was more like, are you going to be okay with one to two pounds per month?

1:08:08If we can get rid of one to two pounds of body fat per month, I would be happy with it, and I think you should be happy with it. And so I convinced her of that. And with her wanting to lose eight pounds, I think it helps to give people a visual of what a certain amount of weight loss looks like. So coincidentally, a gallon, a gallon jug, if you fill it with butter, that's eight pounds. And so I had her visualize this eight pound jug and I also had her do a butter visualization too. So a standard stick of butter is four ounces. So four sticks of butter is one pound. And in her case, she wanted to lose, well, she wanted to lose eight pounds.

1:09:00So that's 32 sticks of butter that would be removed from her body at the end of the dieting cycle. It's not what this is here. What is this? Ha ha ha ha ha! That is 10 pounds of butter. This is an amazing freaking visual. And this is because you asked about diet breaks as a tool for people achieving long -term weight loss or just breaking through plateaus or managing plateaus. So, every 5 to 10 pounds that somebody loses in a dieting cycle is high time for a diet break. The way you can define a diet break, put some parameters on it. So it's what I call non -yolo maintenance. So you take off the rules, take off the restrictions, but you're not eating with sheer abandon.

1:09:50You're just relaxing the diet. You take a week off the diet, either every four to eight weeks while you're dieting, or you take a week off of the diet, every five to ten pounds that you lose. And the sound of five to ten pounds seems like, oh, that's nothing. But no, it's a milestone. This is ten pounds. Yes. That's crazy. Ten pounds of butter off the body. So, yeah, every time you lose 10 pounds, it's five to 10 pounds. And in my experience is high time to take a diet break to just alleviate the mental and the physical fatigue of dieting. And that's one of the tactics that you can use for a long term adherence to a plan.

1:10:38Then on the topic of flat toes, when you're dieting, you will hit a point where the plateau periods or the maintenance phases are going to be longer than the dieting phases. I think that's ideal to be able to hit that point for a long -term weight loss goal. And so it's a lot easier or at least a lot less intimidating for somebody to know that they're going to be dieting for four to eight weeks at a time. In between a, let's say, a two to three months maintenance phase. What about fasting? Do you think that fasting is because a lot of people talk about this thing called autophagy where if you fast, you're, I don't know, 48 hours, your body switches into the state of autophagy where it starts to heal and repair itself.

1:11:30Are you a fan of fasting? For weight loss or autophagy or other things? For the control of calories in, fasting is legit. And it's also legit for... It actually works as one of the options for dieting. There just has been a massive accumulation of studies showing that it works great. So the intermittent fasting variants, we have one we talked about earlier, time restricted eating and we've got every other day fasting and then the other third major variant would be twice weekly fasting or the five to type of model. And then you have a consecutive day fasting type of models as well which are less studied because there's more risk involved in them and it's tough to incur that risk in research.

1:12:24When you bring up a tophagy, That's where I kind of have to push back on your mentioning of it specifically, but just in general, people will say, I want to make claims that, yeah, autophagy, and we can explain autophagy as a way that the body gets rid of parts of damaged cells. It's an important process within the body, and it is a catabolic process or a breakdown process. But the thing is, it happens in a chaloric deficit, regardless of whether fasting is involved or not. Really? Yes. You maintain hypochloric conditions, autophagy ramps up. You can have a linear hypochloric model or a non -linear or intermittent hypochloric model.

1:13:24And you'll get similar degrees of autophagy if you match the chaloric deficit by the end of the week. Now the other interesting thing about autophagy is that you can ramp up autophagy through exercise. And not only that, but both major types of exercise will increase atophagy. So resistance training increases atophagy. Endurance, aerobic type training increases atophagy. So if you want to, in quotes, chase atophagy, then doing it through intermittent fasting or just going through prolonged periods of not eating can be a double -edged sword. where as the autophagy increases through exercise, they almost don't have a downside.

1:14:14And so a lot of times with intermittent fasting, it can be a great tool for people who need to lose excess body weight. But what I'm seeing in the community is people thinking that intermittent fasting is something that is necessary to do regardless of your body fat level. That is either necessary or beneficial. And that's not actually true per the research. There's one study in particular that looked at men who are already lean. And I believe this was by Templeton and colleagues where they compared a linear dieting model with an every other day fasting model. What does that mean every other day fasting?

1:14:55So they took 24 hours off? Yes. Yeah. So it was, yep, every other day. And then the same deficit by the end of the week between the two groups. And the intermittent group actually lost more lean body mass than the linear Clark deficit group. They lost more lean body mass. They lost more weight. They lost more muscle. Yeah, and so that gives us a hint that fasting is great until it isn't because you've achieved what you need to do achieve. And so then it just kind of becomes a tool. It's always just a tool to help people control calories in. One of the beautiful things about fasting and whether it's time restricted eating or whether it's some sort of variant of alternate day fasting or twice a week fasting is that it works in research regardless of whether people are meticulously tracking things or not.

1:16:03And so that can be a boon for individuals who don't necessarily like to micromanage their stuff. But for people who are trying to maximize retention of lean mass while they're pushing the envelope of fitness, it can definitely be a double edge sword once you're already lean. But if I do want to maximize the benefits of autophagy, the best way to do that is fasting versus just calorie restriction, I'm assuming. We don't know what the optimal level of autophagy is that would actually confer health benefits. We don't know what that threshold is. And there's different ways that people try to measure autophagy.

1:16:44It's very hard to correlate certain levels of autophagy with certain degrees of disease prevention. We're not there yet. I don't think, I think big picture wise, I think that autophagy is an algorithm running in the background that is more of a bystander type of thing than a driver. Similar to insulin and glucogon. So the insulin and glucogon axis works when you feed versus when you're fasting. So glucogon levels go up. What's glucogon? Glucogon is a hormone that mobilizes fuel stores in the absence of food, in the absence of calories. And autophagy is similar in that regard. And I think that a focus on pushing autophagy is sort of missing the forest for the trees.

1:17:46Because if we were to push autophagy to its end, then we could go all the way to a phenomenon called autosis, which is runaway cell death, which happens in starvation, in some cases. And so I think that we need to focus on other things like how do we maintain a certain body fat percentage while maintaining a certain physical activity level while maintaining a certain dietary pattern. I think that it's those things that are much more productive to target than seeing how How far can we push our topotophagy before potentially going into runaway cell death? I was looking at the benefits of this thing they call itophagy and it says the proven likely benefits are cellular cleaner.

1:18:39So repairs, damaged proteins and organelles, I believe, improving cell efficiency, metabolic health improves insulin sensitivity, neuroprotection, heart and muscle quality maintains mitochondria, helps adapt to training and obstative stress, immune tuning and longevity. There's sort of strong animal evidence, I believe, around the longevity component, but they, the research that I was reading talked about how it can backfire because tumors may use a top of topogy to survive and some treatments for established cancers aim to inhibit it. And if you overdue, fasting. As you said in the study you cited you can lose muscle which is not great and be fatigued, etc.

1:19:23There is a bit of a trend I think with people doing a lot of water fasts and stuff like that, quite periodically. I think it's rising. Even sort of juice fasts and stuff like that. What's your take on those types of fasts? I'm not a big fan, Stephen. I think that the cycle that people go through, at least in the developed world is that they go through the year then November comes around and then the holidays hit. They overdo it from November to through December all the way up to the end of the year and they're like oh boy I have 10 to 20 pounds that I want to lose and then they just use these sort of fasts and these detoxes to crash off the bad decisions of the previous few months.

1:20:14And then the cycle repeats annually. So I think that it's a much healthier approach for people to secure and reinforce the right habits through the entirety of the year. Instead of jumping on the fast to get rid of the holiday benches. This sort of brings me to the key to genetic diet. My dad used the key to genetic diet, and I think actually my brother as well, but also a few of them, my friends and my life used it as a way to drop their fat quite quickly to sort of recompose their body very, very quickly. And the results of seeing someone on the key to genetic diet quite a standing, because my friend the other day sent me the chart of his weighing scales at home and it's to sort of gradually increase upwards and then he did the ketogenic diet where he cut out carbohydrates and sugar.

1:21:05It's basically almost entirely and it's just straight line down in his body, his body weight. What is your perspective on the ketogenic diet? What is it good for? What is it not good for? Is it good at all? It is a very effective way to lose weight and fat and that's for a few big reasons. First of all, if somebody goes from their typical Western dietary pattern to the ketogenic diet, then they're automatically cutting out a lot of highly processed, hyper -palatable, carb -fat, combo junk foods and snacks that are just energy dense, easy to overconsume mindlessly. That's a good thing about the ketogenic diet.

1:21:55In addition to, well, they're finally eating enough protein now. And so along with the increase in protein comes an increase in satiety and a better hunger control. Now, the negatives of the ketogenic diet, the big one is that the majority of people who engage a ketogenic diet, they don't do it permanently. For one reason or another, they're no longer on the keto diet. And this is reflected in research as well, even in vulnerable populations who would stand to benefit from that level of restrictions. So usually what happens in research is you take a group, two groups of subjects and one is on the high carb low fat control diet.

1:22:40And one of them is on a ketogenic diet which can be achieved by a maximum of 50 grams of carbohydrate in the day or less than you're on the keto diet. So what happens at the 12 month point in the diet and sometimes at the 6 month point, the keto group is now consuming about two to three times more carbohydrates than the original 50 gram assignment. So they rebound. They just insidiously creep up the carb intake. There's something about the ketogenic diet that the majority of people who engage it just can't stick to. It's too restrictive for people. They can't stick to it, but what you were saying, they also end up rebounding above what they were before.

1:23:26They end up rebounding like, I'll give you a specific example. There was one study, well, there was the A to Z study where the individuals on the Atkins diet ended up consuming what looked a lot like the zone diet. The zone diet. Yes. The zone diet is a 40 % carbohydrate, 30 % protein, 30 % fat. So it's the key to diet, roughly. The keto diet is more like 60 to 80 % fat, and then 15 to 20 % protein, and then the carbohydrates are the remainder. The minor percentage. So what happens is, like the people who started off at 50 grams of carbohydrate at the beginning of the study, the keto group, at the 12 -month point, they were, they crept that carbohydrate intake up to around 150 grams of carbohydrate, whereas their assignment was 50 grams of carbohydrate.

1:24:29A day, this is a common theme in long -term keto studies. Is this up -creep in carbohydrate intake over time because people can't maintain the 50 grams of carbohydrate max required to stay in ketosis. And I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of people out there who are just living the keto life permanently, they're out there. But they are in minority. I see them in the comments section whenever I talk about keto. I see people say, I've been on the keto diet for five years, for seven years, for 10 years. There's entire, there's huge communities of folks who've been on keto for five, ten years, they're, or longer.

1:25:13And that's great, more power to these folks. But claiming that this is a universal solution ignores the reality that some people, most people, per the research, the majority, can't stick to it. So that's the caveat, one of the caveats of the keto diet. The other one would be for those who can stick to the keto diet for long enough. You really have to look at the quality of the diet in order for it to be cardiovascularly healthy. If you're going to engage in, let's say, an 80 -85 % fat diet for the rest of your life, there's going to be very different effects if that 80 -85 % are from land animal fats versus from nuts, avocados, olive oil.

1:26:02Very different cardiovascular effects going on there. And so that's the other caveat with the keto diet. There's a Mediterranean type of keto diet that is healthy. And that has, you know, it is one of these cardiovascularly protective types of diets that you can engage. whereas if you just do like beef bacon and butter from here on out, then you don't have the best cardiovascular risk trajectory. What about gaining muscle on the ketogenic diet, where I'm restricting carbohydrates? Is it more difficult to gain muscle mass? The short answer is yes, and the nuanced answer is you still can gain muscle on keto.

1:26:50So the body is really resilient and quite genius at manufacturing the carbohydrate and dodgingly or within the body. So your body can make carbohydrate out of lactate and fill at least partially your muscle glycogen stores. And so going on a zero carbohydrate diet doesn't necessarily end up with the type of results that you might imagine for somebody who's completely avoiding carbohydrates. And in the research comparing strength gains from a high carbohydrate low fat diet versus a keto diet, the keto folks, as long as they're equated with protein and total calories, with the control diet, they've got similar strength gains.

1:27:44It's quite an interesting phenomenon. Muscle size gains is a different story, interestingly. Almost always there's some advantage to the high carb low fat control group compared with the ketogenic diet group when it comes to both gains in lean mass as well as retention of lean mass during dieting. And one of those things is more or less obvious. It's like you simply carry more muscle glycogen when you're on a high carbohydrate low fat diet. And muscle glycogen is the stored form of carbohydrate within the muscle and then minor amount in liver. And for every gram of carbohydrate that you store as glycogen, there's three -ish grams of water stuck to it.

1:28:35And so just sitting there, you're carrying more muscle mass, more fullness on a non -ketogenic diet. What about the carnivore diet? A lot of people have talked about that recently, which is just a diet where you just eat meat. What's your point of view on that? Well, okay, it's a little silly and it's a little extreme, but it has some merit to it. So carnivore diet, when you get on it, it's similar to how when people go on a keto diet after they've been doing the standard Western diet since forever. So the standard Western diet has too much of everything. It's got too much total calories, too much refined carbohydrate.

1:29:15It's got too much of this type of fat and too much, it's got a moderate amount of protein, but you're also eating everything under the sun from burgers to fries to cakes to ice creams to cookies. In addition to pasta and everything else. So, when you go from that excess of everything to the carnivore diet, you automatically and spontaneously eat far fewer calories than you used to on your standard Western diet. So the carnivore diet is actually the lesser of the evils when we're comparing it to the standard Western diet. And you can even try to optimize the carnivore diet. like some people engage a carnivore diet that is just extreme, like beef and salt.

1:30:03Okay, so that is very appealing to people who have a tendency to jump on the carnivore diet because it's even more extreme and people with tendencies towards the extremes, they'll, a lot of them are ex -vegans actually carnivores because they can only be on one extreme side or the other. It's tough for them to be in the gray scale here. But the carnivore diet is the lesser of the evils. It can be optimized if that's even possible. If people had more variety within their carnivore model, within their plant -free diet model. Like for example, if somebody went carnivore instead of doing beef and salt, he had a rotation of fatty fish, Paul three, beef, eggs, dairy.

1:30:54And who knows, maybe he might even justify protein powder in there for dessert, who knows, it's still animal -based. Ha, ha, ha. Do you find that vegans and vegetarians struggle more to gain muscle mass, typically? vegans and vegetarians in the general population do because they're not aware of how to structure the diet and the training program to achieve that. So what are we missing? They're just not eating enough total calories and they're not eating enough protein, generally speaking. Now there are some vegans who will drink a bunch of Mountain Dew and you know, have potato chips and things like that and still stay vegan and Oreo cookies are vegan, I believe as well.

1:31:38But vegans can still gain muscle on par with omnivores if they structure it right. And most people that you encounter and have worked with over the years, not getting enough protein, like the average person on the street. Yes. Almost everybody who has been overweight or obese, or just had some degree of an issue with their body fat levels. Almost all of them under consume protein. What about people that are very skinny? Because I've got a lot of friends that would be in the skinny fat category where they kind of, they look very, very, very skinny but they've got, you know, a little bit of a role here.

1:32:28And they often say to me that they just can't gain weight. I've had this a lot from friends. and I just can't get the game weight. I've heard I need to have more protein, but I'm just not gaining any weight. Yeah, that is the, in quotes, hard gainer phenomenon. And people will have different degrees of body fat in that category. But these folks, what they actually have an issue with is a spontaneous increase in what we call non -exercise activity thermogenesis. So basically, it's an increase in spontaneous movement. It's just an increase in fidgeting, tapping, moving around, just being more hyper -canetic in response to increasing their caloric intake.

1:33:18In 24 hours, you and I expend ex -amounted calories. So total daily energy expenditure is composed of various components. So there is a resting energy expenditure component. So are so -called resting metabolic rate or it's also called resting energy expenditure or basal metabolic rate. Those are all interchangeable. That is the amount of calories that your body burns in a 24 -hour period just to stay alive. Okay, so if you were bedridden, the amount of calories you burn just through your vital organs and your systems working, that's your resting energy expenditure. Now the other part of energy expenditure is your active energy expenditure.

1:34:07So active energy expenditure consists of, we can subdivide it into your exercise activity and your non -exercise activity. With hardgainers, it's their non -exercise activity that spontaneously goes up when they try to eat more to gain weight. It's an interesting study done in the late 1990s by Levine and colleagues where he took a group of normal weight subjects. It was a mostly male sample of subjects. And he fed them a thousand calories above and beyond their maintenance requirements. And I believe this was for 10 weeks. What happened during the study and as a result of eating a thousand calories above their maintenance needs, they ended up burning on average, 336 calories, through an increase in non -exercise activity.

1:35:04So that is a very interesting phenomenon. One of the subjects in that study actually ended up burning almost 700 calories as an increase in their non -exercise activity thermogenesis. And so what happens to this archetype, this hardgainer person, is they just start fidgeting more, they just start walking faster, they just start sitting less, they start bobbing their head more. And they can even just subconsciously train harder, train more. And their energy expended your side, just ramps up spontaneously in response to an increase and calories. So if someone is a hard gainer and they're stable to gain weight because of this sort of spontaneous energy usage, what advice would you give them to stop moving?

1:35:58Eat more. Okay, so the principle would be to eat more. The practice would be eat more in a way that you get those calories and easily and conveniently. And so you can structure liquid meals, two in a day, really need three shakes to have between their meals at any point in the day where it's convenient. And then you just literally add nutrition and calories that way. And so that's the solution to literally eat more. I think the thing that sits underneath everything we're talking about is motivation. Whatever that means, which is like having the motivation to stick to something. Discipline, whatever you want to call it.

1:36:48When you look back through the last 30 years of your career, are there any similarities in the thing or the catalyst moment that made somebody finally stick to it? Stick to the diet, stick to the exercise regime, stick to the whatever? Is there any themes of a person going from struggling to disciplined? So the first thing that comes to my mind is they finally arrive at the point where their physical goals become priority number one. Changing the body, so losing body fat, gaining muscle, achieving your ideal body composition. That is a colossally difficult goal. Whenever I work with somebody who's preparing for a contest of some sort, whether it is in the more elite line of physique contest or whether they're just joining a transformation challenge, but they're both very, very serious, and they both are putting their program at the top of their priority list.

1:37:58So when I say top of your priority, I mean, you do what you need to do to stay alive and keep breathing as a top priority. And right there is your physical goals. Okay. So the big problem with people who find that they can't hit their goals or they can't stay consistent or they're just having a struggle losing X amount of body fat or even a struggle gaining X amount of muscle is that they simply have five other things that are are prioritized in their day above and beyond their program. So they have five universes of excuses that can come in the way of sticking to the program. So somebody has to be at the point in their lives where they're gonna make it a top priority because there's nothing metabolically different from these physique competitors and these people who join these challenges versus somebody in the general population and who's just struggling.

1:39:01The people in the physique contests will always hit their goal within 1 % at the end of the prep period, they'll always hit their goal. And so they're not a different species, they're not a different animal, they don't have special metabolisms. They just have different priorities. And so that is the difference. You have to hit a point where your physical goal becomes priority one. And is there anything that one can do in your opinion or that you try and do when you are training it back in the day to make this someone's priority? You can sit somebody down and review with them the what are the reasons why you're doing this.

1:39:47Name me three good things that you think will come out of this or three drivers that you can think about. And then you can just have them write that down. And then they can be reminded that way. But fundamentally, Steven, they have to arrive at that point sort of on a self -initiated way. You can't really make the horse drink. You know, you can pull them towards the freaking pond, but you know, they almost have to get there themselves and you're kind of you can facilitate it only to a certain degree. And after you ask them, okay, what are the reasons? Then you can also have them put in their face, okay, what are the barriers?

1:40:33So to have them right down to your three biggest stumbling blocks. And so then you can give them two sets of things to think about that will keep them on task and motivate it. You're 53 years old. 53. 53 years old. You look very different at 40 years old. Oh yes sir, I did. Yeah, whoa buddy. Yep. Yep. Mm -hmm. I remember that guy. Woo. That's amazing shot. And you look younger now. I do actually thank God. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah. That always gets me, man. That picture always gets me. Why? It was when my first son was seven -ish and my younger baby was about four. And so parents with young children are very stressed out.

1:41:34Bad habits. I used to drink heavily. Yeah, I started drinking heavily at that point. And I drank heavily from when I was 40 till I was about 46. Were you an alcoholic at 40 years old? Oh yes. Oh yes. What did that look like? It was, it got really bad towards the final couple of years. I'm talking a bottle, bottle and a half of wine. a night by myself. Seven days a week. Seven days a week. And the bottle and a half, that's almost a thousand calories of a thousand calories of regret is what it was. Yeah. Do you know what caused that? The various stress vectors in life, you know, being a dad, trying to be the best husband, becoming successful in terms of coming into demand with projects and people approaching me with business partnerships and me thinking, geez, I worked like two decades for this, for this stuff to happen.

1:42:55How can I turn anything down? So I said, yes, I'll do that, yes, I'll do that, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then pretty soon your yes is just stack up and your workpost stacks up like this. All of those things, they kind of converge into this mix of stress and anxiety. and alcohol is a very convenient and very available and very acceptable means to engage in a substance that acts as an anxiety bandaid. My alcohol addiction was a very real thing and I'm really glad I I overcame it. Through this period from 40 to 46, 47, who were you and what is it that you did that made you realize something had to change?

1:43:58So during that time period, I was just very reactive to my environment. I was just going with the flow. I honestly was not as ambitious as I should have been and focused on my goals. I was comfortable. I was comfortable. And the unfortunate thing about the drink and the fortunate thing to do is it hit a rock bottom point where I knew that it wasn't a matter of, all right, I got to pull back or how am I going to moderate in this in that? It was more like, I just need to stop. I just need to stop. And I need to redirect this tendency towards routine. It's tendency, the sort of obsessive, compulsive thing of needing to do the same thing daily.

1:44:56Just redirect it. How did you need it to stop? Oh, I knew that I needed to stop because my professional and personal life I've basically imploded all because of my own actions. Now for you, was it just a case of, right, I'm going to stop doing this? Or did you have to, did you go somewhere, did you get support, did you seek some counseling, or anything like that? So I have been able to just make the hardcore commitment to stop and keep that commitment. And I've been able to redirect my ritualistic tendencies towards training and good nutrition. And I get a lot of questions, like every year I do a post on Instagram about how, okay, it's year six now, not a single drink, here's what I've learned during that time.

1:45:47And then next month, actually on the 25th of August, that's gonna be year seven, so I'm gonna do the same thing. And so the question I always get is, So, how do you stay abstinent? Like, what do you do to not slip up? And what I do is if I get kind of a craving or a nagging or a feeling like, oh my god, I got to have some alcohol, then I just sit back and I think through the scenario in my mind of me drinking to my degree of satisfaction, degree of, you know, esfacedness. And then I kind of picture that. And then I picture how it might last for an hour or two. And then after that hour or two, I may have made some really bad impressions on one or more people.

1:46:44After that hour or two, I may have plowed through the hot wings at two, three a .m. and then after that, feel like hell the next morning, definitely can't work out that day. And then where did that get me? And so I just go through that scenario in my mind, and then when I'm done going through that scenario, it takes like a minute and I'm right back at where I need to be mind -frame wise. I think the same could also apply that sort of visualization, that pre -mortem where you kind of play out the scenario and see what the consequence would be, can also be applied to many things we're talking about today around, diet and workouts and stuff like that, like playing it forward to see how you'll feel about it in the future and sort of visualizing those consequences.

1:47:33It's thank you for showing that. I think it's somewhat dovetailed into how what we're talking about, about changing your life and motivation discipline, like how does change occurring people? And as you said, it's when it becomes a priority. And quite clearly in your life, it became a priority for a number of reasons. Quick one, I want to talk about something we all need to take seriously, which is cybersecurity. Whether you're a first -time founder facing your very first audit or a seasoned professional who's been through it all, staying compliant is getting more critical than ever and more complicated I have to say.

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1:48:45That's v -a -n -t -a .com slash Stephen for one thousand dollars off. Electrolights are absolutely exploding at the moment and it's for good reason. People are getting more and more into their health and fitness and one of the things that I think we've recently discovered as a society is the profound impact that electrolytes have on hydration but also the impact that hydration has on how you feel, how you perform, how you think. So with all that in mind and because I became quite obsessed with electrolytes I decided that I was going to launch my own electrolyte company as you do. And as I was doing that, I spoke to my friend George Heaton and I said, George, I'm launching this electrolyte business.

1:49:17Can you take a look at it? He said, Steven, me and my friend Ross have already developed one and would love to show it to you. And then they put me in this WhatsApp group and said, we're building a brand called Cadence. We haven't launched yet, but take a look. I took a look. I tried the cans. I tried the sachets and I fell in love. So I shut down my own electrolyte company and took a stake in this one called Cadence, which has been by far in a way the best product in terms of taste, but also in terms of performance. 500 milligrams of sodium, 190 milligrams of potassium, 30 milligrams of magnesium, no sugar.

1:49:53Delicious taste. Give it a shot. Go to usecadence .com and join what I believe to be is the fastest growing electrolytes company on planet earth. Cheers. How do you feel about artificial sweetness? Are there any watchouts that we should be aware of? Generally speaking, they're a nothing burger and there's a lot of scaremongering around artificial sweeteners. But there is one artificial sweetener that has a kind of a and also weight gain, and that's saccharin. So saccharin is the one artificial sweetener that's kind of bombed out at the mom shelter there. As far as the literature is concerned. But the good news about saccharin, by the way, it's the little pink packet things.

1:50:51It's not really commercially pervasive. So it's not that popular anyway. No, it's almost commercially extinct. So the other sweeteners like sucralose, aspartame, stevia or some people call stevia, they're all fair game. They're all in the same boat, all pretty dang innocuous. And you'd have to consume impossible amounts of those things to incur negative health effects in a lifetime, really. Because some people have thought that they're potentially carcogenic. These sort of artificial sweeteners that you find in certain diet beverages. Yeah, now that's definitely a leap. That's definitely a leap based on animal data and completely unrealistic doses and conditions that are irrelevant to human physiology.

1:51:41It's more dangerous stepping out and breathing in the city air, basically. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about, Alan, for the people that are set at home listening to this? It's a really damn good question. Okay, so if we look at the things people care about that don't freaking matter in terms of diet, they fixate on weird buzzwords. Like they fixate on, not even, they don't even have to be weird words, but like sugar, for example. There has been such scare mongering around sugar to the point that people don't delineate between added sugars to the diet versus sugar that is intrinsic or naturally occurring in foods.

1:52:27For fruits. Things like fruit, fresh fruit. Even milk has naturally occurring sugar in it, lactose. Can be problematic for some of the population, but we'll look at fresh fruit. I've actually heard people vilify fruit because it has sugar. And it's one thing to take an idea and put out a plausible claim. Okay, so yeah, it's got sugar. And then, you know, we all know that you've added a ton of sugar to the diet, you lower the quality of the diet, and then you can push your bets towards negative health consequences down the line. Okay, that's fine. That's reasonable. But even though fruit has sugar, it also has a ton of other beneficial components to it.

1:53:19And it's in this low -calorie, high water, high micronutrient density package that is satiating and displaces stomach space for otherwise junky foods that you may, a lot of people would have consumed instead of that fruit. But beyond all that, forget about all the reasoning and stuff. Let's look at the literature. Does fruit cause negative health consequences? Does it cause things like impaired blood glucose control? Does it cause obesity? Does it cause weight gain? It does the opposite of all those things. Fresh fruit actually has been shown to improve glycemic control, improve body weight, improve body composition and improve the protection against a range of cardiometabolic diseases and cancer.

1:54:10So, it doesn't really matter what anybody says. We just have to face the evidence. There's something called the glycemic index that was big in the 80s and 90s and people were, it's kind of come back around again. Glycemic index. I avoid the high glycemic index foods and things like that. And there's a couple of fruits that actually have a high glycemic index that would be pine apples in it. And watermelons. Watermelons. Yeah. High on the GI scale. But the way that glycemic index is determined is you get 50 grams of carbohydrate from a given food. Regardless of the amount that you have to eat, 50 grams of it.

1:54:46And then you measure its effect on your blood sugar levels for two hours after ingestion. It's going to say because watermelons seem as keto friendly, which is but it burns. Watermelons have what's called a low glycemic load. So they have a very low amount of carbohydrate per serving. Yeah, per serving. Even though the carbohydrate itself, if you were to gather 50 grams of it, would have a more pronounced effect on blood sugar elevations. And so even though those fruits have a high GI and certain foods have a high GI, they have a low glycemic load. And ultimately, people need to stop and think about things.

1:55:26Like the longest living populations on the planet do not avoid fruit. The fruit is a regular part of their intake. What about the white stuff? The white sort of added sugar? Is it called refined sugar? We can call it added sugar. What about the added sugar? Added sugar is problematic in two different ways at least. So the first way is it's diluting the nutrient density of the diet. It's a phenomenon called micronutrient dilution when you have just a bunch of junk, micronutrient free calories in the diet. The other way that it poses a problem is because it is usually packaged with highly processed and engineered refined carbohydrate and fat combination foods.

1:56:14So, your classic desserts, pastries, cookies, cakes, things like that. And so the sugar itself, if you were to, if I were to just put a jar of sugar in front of you and say, Hey, I challenge you to not just spoon that in. You'll go, Oh, no problem. You know, it's people paint sugar out to be this inherently evil thing. But the way that it gets into trouble is when it is a part of these hyperpalatable, highly processed, highly engineered dessert and snack foods. And so that is the main issue with added sugar. And the various health organizations, I mentioned the Institute of Medicine, or now the National Academy of Medicine, saying, hey, we need to cut off our added sugars at 25 % of the diet.

1:57:05There's the World Health Organization who presents the sort of the absolutely terrified version of that where they want people to max out their added sugar to 5 % of the calories in the diet. But that's usually not realistic. And it gets a little bit extreme to the point of being pathological. So what would you say? 10 % of total calories max with added sugar. And that would fall kind of right into this discretionary caloric allotment of 10 to 20 % of calories. Kind of from whatever you want. And I would want to qualify that 10 to 20 % margin by saying that if you're hypercaloric, in other words, if you're consuming more calories than you're taking in, you're trying to gain weight or something like that, you probably want to keep your your discretionary calorie allotment to 10 % or your indulgence food to 10 % rather than 20%.

1:58:04How many days a week do you go to the gym? Four to five. I'm just going to confront this question Mark, in my head about, if you go to the gym, seven days a week, for example, is that not giving your body enough time to rest? But I guess it depends what you're doing there and how hard you're working. Yeah, and a great example of that is total sets per week. Okay. You know, like you can cram, let's admit it for a given muscle group, you do like nine sets a week or ten sets a week. You could probably get those in in a single session, but it's more productive to probably spread it out over at least two days.

1:58:43How long does it take for me to start to lose muscle? Oh, man. Okay. That is a good question and a tough one. So muscle loss happens very rapidly in bedridden individuals. So lean mass, especially critically ill folks. Oh, man. It goes really fast. Contrast that with you taking a week off or even two weeks off. But it's more of like an active rest, where you're not just merely sitting around. You could probably go a couple weeks before you start noticing material drops in strength and fitness. Three weeks, yeah, you'll definitely, I think you'll definitely feel that. And do I need to work out till failure in terms of resistance training and like, you know, bicep curls, whatever, in order to get gains.

1:59:39Do I need to be going all the way until I can't curl it anymore? It depends on the goal. You mentioned that your goal was to gain muscle. So in reality, and this question is surprisingly more complex than you might hope it's gonna be. But okay, when people try to train to failure, and this has been tested out in the research literature. They usually automatically leave one to two reps in the tank, even three reps in the tank, and even trained resistance trained subjects when you tell them to train a failure or leave one rep in reserve, they'll routinely leave actually two to three reps in reserve.

2:00:29So people underestimate their abilities to push. They usually, as almost an automatic margin there, that the body sort of regulates and governs and sort of automatically prevents you from going. So with that said, I think that most people can train to failure without worrying about whether they're violating the golden guidelines seen in the literature. It's very common for the consensus in the exercise science community, even in the hypertrophy folks to say, yeah, I'll leave one to two reps and reserve. I think that depends on the exercise. So you'd be kind of a fool to be doing viral raises to think that you can't do partials for lateral raises and still get some benefit out of it.

2:01:24And you'd be kind of a fool to think, I'm going to do concentration curls here. I don't leave one to two reps in the reserve. No, that's different. On the other hand, dead lifting, benching, squatting, these sort of free weight barbell, multi -joint types of movements. Oh, they're more conducive to leaving one to two reps in the tank. But for single joint isolation exercises and even machine exercises and lighter loads, where it's safe, take it to failure, man. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the Lascaz leaves a question for the next. I'm not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is, how does nature impact on your life?

2:02:07It has quite a big impact. Yeah, it has an impact and obviously the environment is important. I'm wondering who the lens of what you do in terms of mindset and health and psych, these kinds of things, if you think much about being outside versus being inside. I've even read some interesting studies around people that run outside versus on a treadmill have more sort of have cognitive benefits because the brain is stimulated more. I think that there's a good amount of literature on the psychological benefits of just being in nature, or even getting some sun. And I think that there's epidemiological population -based data showing that marine communities tend to be the longevity champs.

2:03:08Marine, what's that mean? Communities that live by the ocean are close to the ocean.

2:03:16And... Yup, and that factors in as well, for sure. But just the, almost the metaphysical effect of going to the beach, you know? That's gotta play it. And so, yeah, I think it definitely has an effect, and I think that there are data that we can point to this as it does. Alan, where should people go right now if they wanna learn more from you? Where is the best place to follow you for more information as you continue to investigate and educate on the science of all of the things we've talked about today. My website is alanaragon .com. That's the hub of everything. And maybe my most active social media platform is Instagram.

2:03:59So that is at the alanaragon. And this book I have in front of me, when did you run this book? I wrote that thing from, well, it includes the 30 years of experience that I was talking about earlier. So I've just crammed the 30 years into there, but the actual writing of that took from about 2020 all the way to 2022. Yeah. Took about two years. So first published in 2022 and it's really like a Bible. That's kind of the way I describe it. It has everything in it from what I love about it is you have all these pitches as well. I'm glad you like it. Well, I mean it's like it's it's dare I say it's it's quite like a Like a like a nice accessible textbook.

2:04:47Well, there's been a couple of professors who've adopted it and made it up a part of their curriculum Yeah, doesn't it's Roseman? A hunter -walled man is one of them. Yeah Thank you so much, Ellen. Thank you for doing what you do and people love your message because it's so demystifying in a world that is increasingly mystified by lots of information from lots of different people. So please do continue to do what you're doing. And I am rooting for you in this new season of life where you're going to get even closer to patients once again and clients once again and be even more hands on with your community.

2:05:19So I highly recommend everybody goes and follows you on Instagram to keep track of how they can join your community and be one of those people that you directly impact with your work. And yeah, I'm going to subscribe to your review. so that I can stay ahead of all of the scientific literature as and when it comes out, because for me it is quite demystifying, but you're one of the great voices in this space of simplification and understanding, so I applaud you for that. I think it's all learnable, it's all teachable, but thank you so much for the opportunity to be on this show. This is huge and thank you all for tuning in.

2:05:53Thank you. We're done.

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