The Calories Expert: "Health Experts Are Wrong About Calories!" "The Surprising Benefits Of Diet Coke!" & "The Link Between Obesity & Past Abuse!"

25:49And that's what people need. The problem is they don't get the repetition in, because they do things like you were talking about, which is they start to, it'd be like me going in the gym my first time, I'm going to squat 400 pounds. I'm going to get croupled into a heap, right? But if I do it, if I do what I can do at the time, and slowly build that confidence, that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for myself. I think it was Jordan Peterson that said to me when he deals with some of his clinical patients, the starting point for them is so small that it almost makes them feel shameful so they don't do it.

26:27So he says he's dealt with people who literally can't get out of bed because their depression is so severe. And telling someone that their goal is just to walk down the hall and walk back, feel so small and inconsequential, and so full of shame that they just think, no, that doesn't matter, I'm not going to do that. And there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now and they think about where their starting point might be. And it might literally be getting out the house, putting their trainers on and going for a five minute walk. But in their heads, they'll go, that's not going to do anything.

26:55That's not going to get me to that mountain top that I know I need to get to. So I'm not going to bother. A lot of people like that. And I mean, you know, you can take your cliche that you want to, you know, journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. How do you know if it won't buy at a time? I mean, it's cliche, but it's very true, right? And I think if you're climbing a mountain, if you're only looking at the top, you're going to feel like you're getting nowhere, right? So if you want to climb a mountain, have in mind the mountain that you want to climb. But when you're climbing it, look at the next ledge.

27:28And just do that as the checkpoint, right? So somebody asked me once, if somebody had a lot of weight to lose, like over a hundred pounds, where would you tell them to start? I'd say, you know, I'd look at where they're at right now, what are their habits, their behaviors, what are they doing exercise -wise? Let's get them to the next ledge, right? So let's just, you know, we can go into this too. But, you know, if they're drinking a bunch of soda per day, trying to get them to go straight to water, that might be very daunting for them, right? Okay, well, diet soda is better than regular soda.

28:01And people will argue about it, but I can cite the studies on this. Okay, they're, they're, you know, they're eating certain foods. Can we do something somewhat close to what they're already doing, but find a way to cut out some calories from that, right? Let's, let's try and, I'm going to try and meet them closer to where they are, and then slowly pull them back this way. When you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change their life, so often it seems that there's some kind of adverse event, like I'm talking here about the why that sits behind the reason to, to change, to lose the weight, to build the muscles.

28:41Do you see that often that there's some kind of catalyst moment? You actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk and people who have lost a lot of weight. In terms of they had to develop a new identity. They often have to get a new set of friends, not on purpose. But if you think about, if you were hanging around a certain type of people and you became, and you were very overweight, you've probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you. And even if you still care about those people, as you start to come out of that, there's a few things that are happening. One, if they're not joining you in the things you're doing, that creates a gap.

29:18And people can also be very insecure when people they know start improving themselves. And they start trying to pull them back in. Crab the crabs in the bucket. Right, why do you got to eat that? Why can't you enjoy this? Why can't you, you know? That's because you're holding a pomerate to them by changing your life, right? Correct. So, you know, I, I don't think he reminds me talking about this. My brother was an addict. And he, he like, he went to prison for a period of time. He had a lot of really bad stuff going on in his life. And now one day I asked him, I'm like, was it, was going to prison without like your rock bottom?

29:59And he goes, no, he goes, honestly, I just woke up one day and I realized I lose everything. I get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a relationship and I lose it. I just got sick and tired of losing. And not always, but you hear a lot of similar stories from people who drastically changed their lives. As they just got to the point where they were sick and tired of being that way. And they just realized that if I don't make some kind of change, this is going to continue. And I think one that takes a self -awareness, which is hard and having that mirror brought to you is really hard.

30:39I can relate to other areas of life. But that why really is at the core of it. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have a really strong why, it is hard when you start to lose motivation. You know, I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack when he was like in his 40s and then he lost 150 pounds. And he was like, whenever I started, whenever I didn't have motivation or I started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits, I thought about my kids growing up without a dad. And it made it very easy for me. And so when you have that really strong why, it makes it easier to get through it.

31:19I'm not saying either of me or you're going to be able to figure out an answer here. But I feel like maybe there's something we can offer to the question about how to cultivate the why. Is there anything that you do on those days, any disciplines you think you can put in place that will just keep the way front and center. I'm going to throw out one. Something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background on my phone to an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be. And it just meant that even if it gives me a 1 % psychological reinforcement in the direct, so that I fall on the correct side of a decision, relating to dial fitness, maybe that would help.

31:54You know, because it's that. A couple things I think about. I think about the people I care about in my life and wanting to make them proud. Think about my kids, you know, how would I want, not going to get emotional, how would I, how would I want them to remember their dad, you know. I can remember coming back from all these injuries and I was lifting in the garage one day of my daughter. She was six at the time. And she's such a little spark plug. And she would watch me and sometimes she would come in and like do some lists with me and stuff. And I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me.

32:36And I said, you know, dad almost was a world champion. I got really close. And, you know, I, that would be something that I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that. And she said, are you going to try and be a champion again? And she said it in the kid way that like, but oh my gosh, when she said that, whenever I felt tired, whenever I felt down or whatever, I just remember my daughter saying, are you going to try to be a champion again? Made it easy, you know, and so I had my like, it's going to sound goofy, but at Worlds in 2022, I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time.

33:12And I had picture of my kids on my phone and I was looking at that. And I was almost in tears before I'd go out for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up. And that was, that was my why. So I'm thinking about my kids and then I also think about, you know, my parents and like great people want to make them proud. And then honestly, like my personal hero is my grandfather. So my grandfather is part of the greatest generation. He was the funniest person I ever met with the most integrity of anybody I ever met. And so so many times when I think about the person I want to be, I think about my grandfather.

33:51And, you know, still to this day, I'll think about it before I, if I feel like low motivation or if I've really screwed something up, you know, like that sort of thing. Let's go to the technical stuff. Yes. Let's start with, so we're talking here about dieting and weight loss. If I'm trying to lose weight, should I be counting my calories? Ah, so the first point of confusion, people assume calories and calories out is the same thing as counting calories. That's like saying the law that in order to save money, you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget. Keeping a budget can help you save money, but it's not the same thing.

34:33So let's break down calories and calories out. Calories inside, pretty straightforward. It is the food you eat, right? The calories and the food that you eat. Now, I would add one caveat to that, the metabolizable energy. So when we say calories, calories is literally a unit of energy. And so I'll have some people say, well, calories are on a real thing. You can't look at calories on a microscope. You're right. It refers to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that through the process of digestion, absorption, and metabolism, that energy is captured in one way or another.

35:12So that's the energy into the system. Calories out is more complicated. So that involves a few different energy outputs. The first one being your basal metabolic rate. So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on. So if you just lay down, didn't move, that's how many calories your body would burn. And that's actually the most people, the majority of the calories they burn, pretty, it's around 50 to 70%, depending on how active they are. And it fluctuates person to person. So as a man with fairly big muscles there, you will be bigger than mine because you have more going on over there.

35:50Yeah, you can tie about, at least based on the regressions, you can tie about 90 % of the variants in BMR to someone's lean mass. Okay. If you look at the studies, it's very tightly correlated with lean mass, right? Because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non -leant tissue. So BMR's one bucket, then you have what's called the thermo -effective food. So your TEF, our bodies are kind of like, for lack of a poor analogy, but analogy that works is cars, like internal, much engine. You don't just put petrol or gas in your car, it also, and it just spontaneously starts up. You got to start it.

36:29The battery puts in energy so you can get energy out of the fuel. Right? Your body has to put in energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat. And so a lot of the confusion, people say, well, calories in, calories out, assumes that all calories equal. It doesn't because TEF accounts for this. Because, for example, protein has a higher thermo -effective food than carbohydrate or fat. So if you look at... So protein requires more energy to basically process it. Correct. So if you look at, like, say, fats, for example, TEF is about 0 to 3%, meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat, you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it.

37:10Carbohydrates, about 5 to 10%. So if you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate, you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it. A lot of that depends on the fiber content. The more fiber, the lower the metabolizable energy. So fiber actually has a higher thermo -effective food as well. Then protein is about 70 -80%. So if you eat 100 calories from protein, you capture about 70 to 80 calories. So some people out there will say, well, there's negative calories. No, those don't exist. You're always getting more energy out of it than you put in. But some are lower than others, right? And so that TEF is about 5 to 10 % of the energy you expend per day.

37:49So now we've got BMR, TEF, and then you have your physical activity, which we can further break into two different buckets. The first one is obvious, which is exercise, right? You go to the gym, burn some calories, and that's energy out. The second one is less intuitive. It's called non -exercise activity thermogenesis, neat. And that is the small, unconscious movements that you make per day. Give you an example, like what I'm doing it. Like now it's not subconscious because I'm thinking about it. But fidgeting, when you're talking with your hands, pacing, right? In fact, they've actually shown that people who have a more, they call it obese -resistant phenotype, when they eat more, they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it.

38:39And so people who are more obese prone, when they eat more food, they tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active. And people, it's kind of pedantic, but it's important to understand the difference. I'll hurt people, say, well, I'm going to take the steps and get my need up. No, no. You made a decision that's exercise. Okay. The reason being neat really isn't consciously modifiable, right? And so I'll give you an example of, like an extreme example of this. So when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010, the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable. It's hard to describe in words.

39:21Soul crushing would be a way to describe it. And I had gotten done, you know, I trained two hours at the gym that day. I'd done an hour of cardio, got home, and I remember I sat down in the couch, and my ex at my wife at the time, she had like real housewives of whatever county on the TV. I hated those shows. But the remote was about seven feet away. I watched the entire show. I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued. That's an example of neat. And neat is very modifiable. So they've shown that even a 10 % reduction in body weight can reduce neat by up to four or five hundred calories per day.

40:04So you're just a lot of people end up moving less without even realizing it. So here's the rub. This, so you've got your calories in, you've got your calories out, BMR plus T E F plus neat plus exercise. People think of these two things as static. They're not static. And that's what I talk about in the book a lot. We have various adaptations that fight us for weight loss. First of which is on the metabolism side, when you lose body weight, your BMR drops. But part of that is because you're carrying around less weight. So if I 200 pounds and I drop down to 180 pounds, I just have last mass to carry around.

40:50And so your BMR goes down a little bit. Which again, which again is your base metabolic rates. The cost to keep in the lights on, basically. But there's actually what's called metabolic adaptation, which has shown that with a 10 % body weight loss on average, you can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15 % for BMR. So let's take an example here, because people will say, well, calorie deficit didn't work for me. Because, you know, I was eating this many calories. I was exercising this much period of time. And I was, you know, so I, like, what happened? Well, you thought you were in a calorie deficit.

41:34But let's take me, for example, okay, my BMR, I've had it measured, it's about 2000 calories, a little bit lower, about 2000 calories. My total daily energy expenditures are around 3 ,400 calories per day. So that's all this stuff added up, right? But if I lose 10 % of my body weight, for me, 2700 calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit. But if I lose 10 % of my body weight, if I drop my BMR by 15%, 15 % of 2000 calories, days 300 calories, drop my meat by 400 calories. That's 700 calories. All of a sudden, that deficit is no longer a deficit. That's not maintenance, right? Now, this doesn't happen all at once.

42:18This is a progressive thing over time. But there's a reason, like I tell people, unlike if it was a calorie deficit, from the time you did it indefinitely, you would starve to death, right? But all of us, most of us, have had the experience of starting a diet, losing some weight, and eventually, even though you're eating the same way, doing the same exercise, it plateaus, right? And then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit. And the other way, so that's on one side, where that's kind of working against you to try to bring you back to your original body weight, right?

42:53We're talking about weight -weight regain. The other side is your hunger hormones go up as you diet, right? So they've actually, then they have shown obese people who lose weight to become normal weight, when you compare them to normal weight people who were never obese with the same similar lean body mass, the formally obese people have a lower, totally energy expenditure, and they have higher markers of hunger. They have higher appetite. So it's working on both sides of that equation to push you back. So the devil's advocate argument is, well, you know, I ate this amount of calories that should have been a calorie deficit, and I didn't lose weight.

43:38Or it's the, you know, all calories are created equal. I'll tell people, all calories are created equal, because saying a calorie is not a calorie is like saying, second -hand's on the clock are different. No, they're just a unit of measurement. All sources of calories are not equal. So let's take budgeting, right? I used that earlier. Sports car. Okay. So let's say somebody makes million dollars a year, right? If they want to spend a hundred, let's assume no loans, just for sake of ease. If they want to spend a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a sports car, but they're still able to pay their mortgage, they can take care of their responsibilities, and they can put money away for retirement.

44:20Can they buy that sports car? Sure they can, right? And is it a bad investment? I guess you could argue it's a bad investment, because they could put the $150 ,000 in those investments. But maybe that sports car makes them feel good and gives them a little care on the instinct to, you know, keep working and whatnot. But if I take somebody who makes $200 ,000 a year, should they buy the $150 ,000 sports car if it means they can't pay their mortgage, they can't, you know, save for retirement? No, of course not, right? Similar thing with energy, right? So if I'm, you know, somebody who's very active and I burn a lot of calories, is it a big deal if I have a pop tart, say?

45:05If I'm still getting enough protein, I'm hitting my target energy, I'm getting enough fiber in, and my micronutrients, if that gives me that little care on the instinct to keep being consistent, not a big deal. But if we're talking about a smaller woman with less lean mass who needs to eat 1 ,200 calories a day to lose weight, that's not a very good investment, right? It's not a very good use of funds. So what I'll tell people is, you know, people say, well, how do I know what a deficit is? How do I know how many calories to eat, right? Because also just on that point, I heard you talk about food labeling as well, and how inaccurate they can do.

45:47So you can have up to a 20 % error in food labeling, right? So some people will, you, so what that means is it could say 100 calories, it could be 80, it could be 120. Now, I will say if it's coming from a big food company and they have pretty rigorous standards, it's probably not that far off. But they're allowed up to that, right? Because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous. It'd be difficult to like get it exactly on. So you'll have some people say, well, see, calorie counting is useless because you can't know exactly how many calories you're taking in, and are you going to get your BMR measure, are you going to get your neat measure, are you going to get this measured?

46:24It can be much more simple than that. Again, financial analogy. I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless, because you never know what inflation is exactly doing. And if you have investments, you can get differential returns on it and on the output side, you have unexpected expenses. You have fluctuations in expenses. Your power bill is going to be different from month to month, right? Your car breaks down one month. But if you look at the average over time, you can get a pretty good idea of on average what your expenses are like, right? And you can get a pretty good idea over time, unlike entrepreneurs like us, but even like us, you can start to kind of see the trends and get a relatively good idea of what it's going to be.

47:15So when it comes to calories in and calories out, yes, tracking exactly can be very, very difficult. But if you were monitoring your body weight and you're being consistent with how you track, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit. And I think another thing that's crossed the people up, that's actually shown up on that review of the successful weight loss maintainers, they actually talked about one of the things that was a barrier for them or hard for them was the weight fluctuations. Because you know, if you've ever weighed in every day, have you ever done this for your weight every day?

47:49Even first thing in the morning, right? Bows is all over the place, right? So actually, when we were with our coaching and then with our app, we're not just looking at one weight. We encourage people to weigh as long as it doesn't cause them a lot of stress and anxiety, weigh in daily and then it's taking the average of those. Because day to day changes in weight are much more dictated by fluctuations in fluid but week to week and month to month averages reflect loss or gain of mass. So for example, if you're monitoring your body weight, you know, taking averages and looking at that over time, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit because on average you're seeing it go down, right?

48:33Now, I want to make one more point, which is you don't have to track calories to lose weight. Absolutely not. It's just one methodology. Because no matter what you do, you have to have some form of restraint, right? And my friend Peter T .A. actually breaks it down nicely into a couple of different three buckets, right? You can have dietary restraint, which is low carb, plant -based, whole food, you know, whatever it is, you're restricting some sort of food group or type of food, right? Then you have a time restriction. You eat within a certain time frame of a certain window. Then you can have just straight up calorie restriction, where you're tracking and monitoring.

49:13What you choose to do, I think a lot in terms of what is best for an individual boils down to their psychology and what feels easy. So this is where a lot of the diet wars start because somebody will do, say, low carb, right? And they'll get results from that. And they'll say, man, it felt like I wasn't even dieting. And for whatever reason, that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy. And they got progress from that. But then they assumed that everyone else will have the same response. Somebody else does low fat. Somebody else does intermittent fasting, whatever have you. And you have all these stories.

49:53Personally, I was the kind of person, I'm the kind of person that if I tried to restrict certain foods, I end up getting that binge response, right? But if you tell me I can eat whatever I want, as long as I'm tracking it, I become ridiculously consistent. And I mean, I'm still eating mostly, like, whole food, mentally processed foods, you know, those sorts of things, because they're better for satiety. But I don't stress out about having some snacks here and there that are, you know, bad. Consistence. Because I'm being very consistent, right? How important is that consistency? It is the most important thing.

50:27So there is actually a meta -analysis. And for, when I say meta -analysis, think a study of studies. Okay, so it's not a new study. It's what they're trying to do in a meta -analysis is they are trying to take studies that are similar and compile them together to see, is there a consensus here? Is there an overall effect here, right? So there was a meta -analysis of, where they looked at 14 different, like, popular diets. And these ranged from low carb to, you know, high carb low fat, right? And what they found is on the long term, none of them were better than the others for weight loss. But when they stratified them for adherence, from least adherent to most adherent.

51:15What does that mean? So people who were consistent, basically. So when they stratified them for, I think, compliance. Another way to put it. When they stratified them that way, regardless of diet, a linear effect of adherence on weight loss. So what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is the one that they consistent, that can consistently execute. They all function the same way, which is, you know, creating some sort of calorie deficit. Now some people will say, that's not true. I did a low carb diet and I was eating more food. You probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie dense food.

51:54You probably were eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food. But you were eating less calories. Is there any way to lose weight in a calorie surplus? Not. If that's the, so what I'll tell people is, right, you take in food, the carbons that you take in, they have to go somewhere, right? And if you are, if you are not in a surplus, what you are saying is you are creating energy out of nothing. If that's the case, NASA needs to study you because we figured out how to not worry about fuel on long space lights, right? We have a perpetual motion machine. Again, a lot of this, the confusion becomes when you have, you know, for example, metabolic adaptation.

52:44So, you know, people, they may think they are in a calorie deficit, but they are not, or they are overestimating how many calories they burn. And here is the other thing that people don't want to talk about because this gets down to the mirror, right? So there is a classic study. I think it was from 1992. And I think the title, I may butcher it, but it's discrepancy between reported and actual calorie intake, it will be subjects. I want to say is the name of the study. And so what they did was they had people, they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight even though they were eating low calories.

53:20And the average calorie intake that was reported by participants was 1200 calories a day. And so they measured a bunch of different stuff. They measured their lean mass, their fat mass, they measured their BMR, they measured their total daily energy expenditure. They found that their BMR was very average when it was based on their lean mass. And actually, if you look at obese people, they actually have a higher BMR and higher energy expenditure, typically than lean people, but on average it's because they have more lean mass because when you have more mass to carry around, your body has to create more locomotive mass.

53:58And they told the subjects, we are going to monitor you and we will know if you're eating more than you say you are. The average in the study was they under reported their calorie intake by about 50%. And they over reported their physical activity by just under 50%. Now, and some of the participants argued with the researchers about it, right? Here's where people miss the message. The message a lot of people take from that is, I'll see, they're lying. And that's a really hard thing to take to somebody that be like, well, you're probably under reporting your calorie intake, or you're probably eating more than you think you are.

54:40That feels very, you know, aggressive. And I don't think it's lying. I think that one, people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food, you will be shocked, like way out of serving of cereal, or a serving of ice cream, or if you're going to be really depressed, way out of serving of peanut butter, because the tablespoon that you're grabbing, I promise you, is probably two or three servings. And then, you know, like if the first time I weighed out ice cream, when I started weighing my food, I was like, this is a serving. It's like two bites, you know?

55:19And so I don't think people have a really good understanding of serving sizes. And even, I'll remember, I never forget this. It was an Instagram DM, and this lady was saying that she was eating 1600 calories a day, and not losing weight. And we kind of, you know, had a little back and forth, and we were talking. And I said, well, how, she's like, I am measuring my food. I'm like, how are you measuring it? She's like, I'm doing volume measurements. So she was doing cups, table spoons, that sort of thing. I said, do me a favor. Do exactly what you've been doing, but way out each one. A day later, she came back and said, oh my god, I'm eating 2700 calories a day.

55:51And so even dietitians, under report the caloric intake and studies by about 10%. And these are the experts, right? So you have on one side, people are eating more than they think they are. And then on the other side, they think they're being more active than they really are. But again, that's a hard conversation to have with people. And even as such, telling people, hey, you need to move more, eat less. Mechanistically, that's true. But that's like telling somebody, hey, if you want to save more money, just earn more and spend less. We all of this, you know, I was adding up all these discrepancies, right?

56:32Discrepancies is in like, you're weighing it wrong. The labels got 20 % wrong. And then I went back to your budgeting analogy. As an entrepreneur and as a CEO, if my dancing was 20 % off, I'm dead. But then if it's 95 % off in the till, like how much money we're getting into the till. And then I'm using a cup instead of a scale. So that's another 30 % off as well. No wonder, you know, the business would go bust. Right. It's complicated. I go, what the fuck are you going to do? Yeah, it is complicated. But I will tell people, you know, again, if you get back to the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently, which is one of the, I have to be careful about this because there are some people where monitoring their body weight consistently ends up being like really anxiety provoking for them.

57:18Just what did he say and stuff? Yeah, that sort of thing. So that's, you know, I try to be sensitive to that. But it is a very consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly. And it's a, it's a self correcting thing, right? Like if you're keeping a budget very regularly and you see, oh man, I spent, you know, $5 ,000 more this month, what happens? You correct, right? And so I would use that more of, instead of the accounting variation, I would say, well, sometimes your business has unexpected expenses, right? Or sometimes you have less expenses, right?

57:50And so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate, right? And so what we're looking for overall is, okay, let's look back at, you know, I think a lot of business operate in quarters, right? Let's look at this quarter. Okay, on average, here's, here's our month over month, what we're profiting, right? Okay, well, we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations. We'll try to project out a little bit. I kind of look at that with people. I'm like, all right, well, how much weight did you lose on average? Like over the past month? Okay, how much were you eating?

58:18Okay, you lost six pounds over the last month? You're definitely in a calorie deficit, right? It's working. Keep going. Maybe you're eating 2 ,000 calories, maybe you're eating 2 ,300 calories. Who cares? It's working, right? Now, what happens is, eventually once you plateau, again, maybe you're eating 2 ,000, maybe you're eating 2 ,300. Doesn't matter, whichever it is, if you plateaued, it means you have to reestablish the deficit. So you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity or a combination of both, you know, those sorts of things. What about one thing I had you talk about at the very start of this conversation was artificial sweetness, specifically.

58:57Oh, yeah, let's do that. Specifically in things like diet coke. I've, you know, I've wondered for a while whether diet coke is healthy or not. Okay, and there's a lot of, you know, people talking about this at the moment. So what's your answer to that? Okay, this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview. I'm sure. Okay, so first off, let's just talk about weight loss and fat loss. Okay, and leave out the other stuff. If you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies, you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diets soda are heavier in body weight.

59:35And so some people have said these things cause weight gain. But the problem with that is, again, lifestyle behaviors. And so one of the things they've shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners actually tended to be more overweight to start with obese to start with. They didn't cause them to become that way. They're consuming more of them because they're trying to get to a less obese state, right? So there's a correlation there. But if we look at the randomized control trials, right, where they say, hey, you're used to you guys drink soda regular soda, you guys drink diet soda.

1:00:12There was actually one that just got published a very, very, really rigorously controlled one year study way more weight loss in the diet soda group. And I'm thinking of another randomized control trial. I think it was six months where they saw like six kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Or it might not have been soda specifically. They call them sugar sweeten beverages versus, you know, non -nutrition of sweeten beverages. So when you replace for soda, it seems to be very effective. All things being equal. And people will say, well, it, you know, it activates the sweetness in the brain and you get hungry or from it.

1:00:55Well, if that's the case, the knee studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are actually the best fat burners known to man because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms, that's amazing. They're not, they're not fat burners. They, they're replacing that sweet taste. And then people will say, well, it's not better than water, you know, water. People should just drink water. Shoot the alligator closest to the boat, right? Like, okay, hey, if you can drink water and just drink water, cool. Do that, right? But if somebody can lose, and I have people all the time when I do a post about this, somebody say, I lost 30, 40, 50 pounds.

1:01:29All I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda. Literally, the only change they made in their life. Now, when they compare it versus water, they either see the same results or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results. And yeah, now it's not because of any kind of fat burning effect. What is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar, sweetened beverage to water, they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else. Whereas if they're just consuming the artificially sweetener, non -nutrient of sweeten, but we can't say artificial because like Stevie is actually, you know, natural, so to say.

1:02:15So they call it non -nutrient of sweeteners. But if they're consuming the non -nutrient of sweeteners, they're filling that gap compensation again, compensating, right? So now again, there's nothing magic about them. People are just edueless, right? And if you can do that with water, you don't have to consume diet soda. I would say drink water. But if you're somebody where, man, you really have a hard time quitting regular soda, heck yeah, drinking diet soda is a lot better. And people will go, well, what about insulin? They raise insulin. That is actually one of the biggest myths out there. There are multiple not just studies, but now I'm pretty sure there's a meta analysis as well that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise insulin.

1:03:00There is one study. I'm thinking specifically about sucralose. There's one study and everybody always hangs their hats on this and I love to break it down where sucralose did not increase insulin. But they did a sucralose group, a carbohydrate only group and a carbohydrate plus sucralose group. And the results were the carbohydrate plus sucralose group secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate only group, even though they ate the same amount of carbs. And so people go, well, see, maybe it's not bad. But if you're, you know, drinking it with carbohydrates, it's bad. And this is where reading the full text and really going deep on a study is very important.

1:03:42So the carbohydrate only group was sucrose, which is 50 % glucose, 50 % fructose. The carbohydrate plus sucralose group was maltodextrin maltodextrin. If you look at, are you familiar with glycemic index? Liesli. Yeah. So glycemic index basically looks at like, you know, how quickly glucose appears in your system. And usually you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that. Maltodextrin has a significantly higher glycemic index and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose. Because it is a, it actually causes a greater insulin response than even glucose itself. Because it's kind of getting into the biochemistry, but because it's like this polymer, it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested and absorbed into the circulation.

1:04:36So it was actually an inappropriate control group to try to assess that. Because if you look at the difference in insulin response, it's about what you'd expect if you just look at maltodextrin versus sucrose. So based on the research, there's no evidence it affects glycemia or increases insulin. And in fact, in these studies where they, you know, these randomized control trials, where they look at, you know, weight loss. You see improvements in insulin sensitivity, HBA1C, you know, because people are losing weight, not because of anything magic with these sweeteners is sugar addictive. This one's going to get in trouble too.

1:05:15I want to come back to the official sweeteners, but I'll answer that sugar by itself does not appear to be addictive. There are certain foods that appear to create what's called a food dependence. There's subtle differences between that and addiction. But I mean, kind of the anecdote is nobody's like just grabbing the bag of sucrose and just, you know, eating that. And if you think about the foods that really are like very hard to stop eating, they're using that just high in sugar. It's a combination of sugar, fat, salt, and texture. Okay, texture matters as well and mouth feel. People will say, well, sugar is addictive.

1:06:01Look at cakes, cookies, ice cream. There's more calories from fat in those than there are sugar in a lot of cases. So couldn't you buy that logic just to argue that fat is also addictive? So sugar, straight sugar, doesn't appear to be addictive per se. Now, it's not very satiating, right? And it's utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrient. So I'm not saying it's a good idea to eat a lot of sugar. But it doesn't appear to have addictive qualities in isolation. But there are certain foods, cakes, cookies, these sorts of foods, hyper -palatable, very great mouth feel, potato chips, French fries.

1:06:49These sorts of foods may have like semi -addictive type properties. But just sugar itself doesn't appear to. And there's a study that kind of backs that up. Basically, I think the title was like no evidence for sugar addiction in humans. So people will say, well, when I eat that piece of chocolate or that sugary thing, I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more and more. And then the next day, I feel like I need sugar more. And I've got my own sort of anecdotal experience of almost called it like a sugar cycle where there might be a week once every four months or six months where I have some sugar.

1:07:25And then the next day, I want more sugar. And then the next day, I want more sugar. And then the next day, and then when I break that sugar cycle, and if I don't eat sugar for like five days, it kind of feels like the cravings gone away. You must hear that from people. Yeah, I mean, like right now, I have no urge to have sugar for some reason. Yeah, it's so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general. And just like that could be a self -fulfilling thing where it's like, you know, people have been told sugar is addictive over they've heard sugar is addictive. And so they eat something to feel that mood.

1:07:57But also like again, the chocolate usually also high in fat, right? Like the mouth feels really good. So I'm not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on. And people can have a hard time stopping. But it doesn't appear that sugar like independently is addictive. But it can be part of foods that may have addictive like properties. Artificial sweetens, you said you wanted to close off there. Yeah, so now let's talk. So we very clearly the research studies show the ones that are controlled well. It does help with weight loss and a lot of these studies. What about cancer, heart disease and the gut microbiome?

1:08:36Because that's a lot of the questions are out there. So with cancer, a lot of people think, oh, there's so many studies showing it causes cancer. Well, first of all, again, we're talking about epidemiology. We're talking about cohort studies. So there's a lot of confounding variables. But actually, so we're talking about consensus earlier. It's kind of a, I'm on their scientific advisory board. And it's like PubMed plus chat GPT. So you can ask it a question. And it will immediately like crawl all the research literature and give you a consensus of what the research says. Right. And so I did this and you can synthesize it too, where it'll show you what percentage of studies say yes, no, and then possibly.

1:09:16So I think I put in do artificial sweeteners cause cancer. You know 80 % of the studies say no, but you don't hear about those and why is that? Because it's much more newsworthy to put out negative news because if you hear a study, this thing doesn't cause cancer, ho hum, right? But what gets shared a lot? Oh, man, and Deborah, she drinks Diet Coke. Deb, have you seen this? You know, it's much more shareable. So that negative news tends to get published more, right? And if you look at the, the human studies, some of the more well done ones, like I'm thinking of the Nutri -Senti cohort in out of France, the conclusion was, I would increase the risk of cancer.

1:10:01And I looked into it. I think it was aspartame specifically. If something's carcinogenic, typically what we see is a dose response, right? So if you smoke more, you have a higher risk of lung cancer. Did you know that the, yes, the, so they compared like no or like low amount of aspartame users to like low moderate and then high moderate. I want to say it was three different groups. So I could be butchering this a little bit but think low medium high, right? The medium group had a higher risk of cancer. The high group did it actually like not compared to the low group. It was not statistically different, but it dropped from the moderate group.

1:10:49So to me, and again, we're talking about an odds ratio of like 1 .15, meaning a 15 % relative risk increase. Let me put that in perspective. 15 % sounds scary when it comes to cancer, but relative risk means if you're absolute risk of developing cancer in say the next 10 years is 10%. A relative risk increase of 15 % says it goes up to 11 .5. Yeah. It doesn't mean it goes from 10 to 25, right? So it's important to understand the difference. But again, if it's really carcinogenic, we should expect to see kind of a dose response, right? We don't see that. So to me, that's especially with all the studies that don't find an association.

1:11:33That's, that's more likely to be some kind of data artifact with who knows confounding variables, healthy user bias, what have you? What about the gut then? So now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora, the composition of it. So Carlos appears to as per tame, not so much. I think saccharin also showed a change to the gut microbiome. Now, here's what's interesting. It's hard to know if that is a good, bad or neutral change in terms of overall health. Because I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose, and they were talking about the couple of species or genuses of bacteria that increased.

1:12:22And one of them that increased was actually associated with people who are a leaner, have less obesity and better insulin sensitivity. And also a species that produce more butarate. And butarate actually is associated with the whole host. This is a short chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome butarates associated with the whole host of positive health benefits. So I will say it's worth monitoring because some of these do appear to change the breakdown of the gut microbiota. But there's probably you could argue just as much that there's a positive effect as you could a negative effect.

1:12:58So what I'll say is again, if we look back at the again, shoot the alligator closest to the boat and there are no solutions only trade offs. If somebody switches to diet soda, even if it's not the very best thing they could do, maybe water is the very best thing they could do. But if they lose 20 pounds and their HBA1C drops and their insulin sensitivity gets better and the metabolic health gets better, it's probably a worthwhile trade off. Are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take? So I always say I have like tears of supplements, right? My first tier, thousands of research studies very clearly has benefits.

1:13:46Creates an amount of hydrate which we've known about the performance benefits for years. We've known about the strength benefits, the body composition benefits. You take it every day? Yes I do. Now it's coming out that there's cognitive benefits. And I want to say, man, I hope I don't get this wrong. So I will fact check this and make sure you ask me for the study. I'm pretty sure they did a study that showed that creatin actually decreased depressive symptoms. Interesting. So what I will say is if there was one I would recommend for everybody, it would probably be created amount of hydrate because it's cheap, effective.

1:14:28And I mean people say, wow, we don't know what the long term effects are. It's been around for like 40 years. If there was long term effects, we'd have seen it by now. And just to quick aside, create a monohydrate, no issue where money on anything else. There's people try to reinvent the wheel with creatin because monohydrate, it's... You know, remember when like big screen, flat screen TVs came out? I might be showing my age here. No, I remember. But I remember it was like $1 ,000 for a 40 inch screen TV and now you can get one for a stick of bubble gum. You know what I mean? It's because everybody makes it and they're so ubiquitous, it drove the cost down, right?

1:15:04Everybody sells creatin monohydrate, it drives the cost down. So companies come up with new forms of creatin and make these claims around them to try to like get you to spend more money. Create a monohydrate, saturates the muscle cell, 100%, you don't need to do anything else. What's going on there? So a couple of things. We don't fully understand all the mechanisms, but we know that when creatin gets in the system and gets into the cell, it bonds with a phosphate, which produces creatin phosphate. That is a high energy phosphate donor. So when you're exercising, basically you are using what's called a dynazine triphosphate, which is ATP, which is the purest form of energy in your body.

1:15:43So this, what we call hydrolysis of ATP is used to power a lot of reactions in your body. And so ATP triphosphate, three phosphates, it to power these reactions, it gets cleaved to ADP, a dynazine diphosphate, plus an inorganic phosphate, right? Creatin can donate its phosphate to ADP, reform ATP. So what we see is, you know, especially during anaerobic exercise, better performance with creatin because it's a high energy phosphate donor can help replenish that. And then it also pulls water into the cell. And we think that that's part of the body composition benefits of it because, you know, a hydrated muscle cell, I mean, muscle cells are 70 % water.

1:16:33They're mostly water. And people say, well, it's just water. Okay, but that's lean tissue. And there's actually some, I believe there's some evidence that actually hydrating the muscle basically actually increases the improves the contractile properties of the muscle. So that could explain part of the strength benefits. And of course, again, it's going to show up as lean mass, right? Now it's not a huge effect. We're talking, you know, a couple pounds for most people, something like that. I'll take it. But for a relatively cheap effective supplement, yeah, take it, right? What are the supplements then?

1:17:06Is there anything else in the tier one? Yeah, I mean, like for people who can tolerate way protein, I mean, you know, it's not, it's not magic, but it's a cheap, usually quite tasty way to get in high quality protein. And, you know, if you get it from whole food, great, but a lot of people struggle to get in, you know, the amount of protein they'd like to get in from whole food. And so way protein, again, very high quality, usually easily digestible. The caveat is way protein concentrate. A lot of people can't tolerate it because there's lactose in there. So if you have a lactose intolerance, a way isolate, which is usually microfiltered, gets out the vast majority, if not all the lactose.

1:17:49And so most people can tolerate that. But there are a certain percentage of people who also have a sensitivity to the lactile humans in way, the proteins in way. So in that case, there's what's called a way hydrolyze, which is pre -digested way. And almost all people can tolerate that. But if you don't have any digestive issues with it, concentrate on isolates, totally fine. What else in that tier one? And then I would say caffeine. And just caffeine is one of the, it is the original cognitive enhancer. If we look at cognitive tests, we see consistently people perform better. And if you look at performance, people consistently perform better.

1:18:28Right. But before 12, a lot of people talk to me about the half life of caffeine impacting sleep. Yeah. So I mean, that's the, you know, there's even some evidence that, you know, even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning that it may still affect your sleep later. So again, no solutions only trade -offs, right. I would say overall, if you are an athlete or somebody who relies heavily on your brain power to do whatever it is you do, caffeine, probably a useful supplement. As you said, you know, if you're going to take it, try to get in, you know, nine hours before you're going to sleep to see sure caffeine intake.

1:19:13Because by that time, you know, the majority of it is out of your system, right. What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting? It seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people to be able to control their calorie intake. In studies where they don't prescribe calories, so they don't match calories. They just tell people either intermittent fast or, you know, follow a diet. People in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers. But it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because it's placing them in the calorie deficit.

1:19:49Did they see that in the studies? Yeah. So when they do randomized control trials where they're actually controlling calories, I'm like one great extreme version of that would be there was a study on alternate day fasting, right. So people would do one day fast, complete fast. The next day, eat 150 % of their maintenance calories. Whereas the group that was just doing continuous was doing 75 % of their maintenance calories the entire time. Bull groups lost pretty much the same amount of weight. Actually, the continuous group retained a little bit more lean mass and lost a little bit more fat mass.

1:20:27But, you know, that's a pretty extreme form of fasting. If you look at the more traditional 16 .8 or those sorts of intermittent fasting, you see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating programs. The myths that really get tossed around are a lot of them around longevity. And people saying, well, because whenever I talk about this, people will say, well, I don't fast for weight loss. I fast for health, I fast for longevity and autophagy. Autophagy is this term. So what I'll tell you is there's actually more evidence that calorie restriction increases autophagy than intermittent fasting.

1:21:10But intermittent fasting does increase autophagy. So let's talk about what this is. So autophagy is a type of, basically, lysezomal protein breakdown. So there's a few different ways that the body breaks down like old misfolded proteins or just things that need to be turned over. One of them is through this kind of lysezomal protein degradation, which the lysezom is a organelle in the cell that can kind of engulf these old proteins. And break them down. And then you get the amino acids from those proteins that can then be recycled to make new proteins. Cali -restriction increases autophagy. Exercise increases autophagy.

1:21:50Fasting can increase autophagy too. But you'll hear people say, well, you got to fast for exp period of time because it's when autophagy turns on. Like three days or something. Somebody's around with something like that. Not true. So this is autophagy protein breakdown is always occurring regardless. It's the relative rate that changes. But there's no evidence that fasting increases autophagy more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time. Now, let me give you an example. Let's say somebody fasts for 20 hours out of the day and they eat for four hours. And again, the example I'm using is because some people say, why don't do it for weight loss?

1:22:33I do it for health benefits. So let's say over that day, they're eating their maintenance level of calories. You're just eating in a four -hour period, right? Whereas, let's say, ex -person just eats three, four meals and same amount of calories. During the fasting period, sure your autophagy is going to, your rate is going to go up. But then during that four hours, when you're eating, you're having to eat a lot more food during that four hours. That's what's going to happen. It's going to go way down. So while your rate of autophagy may be lower eating continuously throughout the day, compared to the time when people are fasting, when the faster start eating in that window, whatever it is, since they have to eat more during that time, autophagy drops.

1:23:21Whereas the people eating continuously, their autophagy is now higher rate. What if you're going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever? Is there a use for intermittent, longer -term fasting in that context? So say if I was, I don't know, if I had some inflammation or if there was something wrong with me, is there ever a use case for sort of seven, two -hour fasts that will hold me? I guess in a greater depth of autophagy. This is difficult because there's not really direct research looking at this. So what I will say will be speculation, and I'm comfortable speculating on it.

1:23:59Again, let's break down it equating weekly calories, right? Because if we're comparing apples to apples, right, we have the, we know caloric restriction will increase autophagy. So if intermittent fasting places somebody in the calorie deficit overall, that's what we call a confounding variable, right? So if we assume over the course of a week, two people assume genetically identical, right? Eating the same amount of calories, but somebody is eating them in four days, whereas the other person is just spreading them across seven, but the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days.

1:24:35Well, their rate of autophagy and a fat oxidation is going to be much higher during those three days, right? But then when they've got to fit all the calories they normally would in, over those four days, now it's going to be much lower, and the people eating continuously are going to have a higher rate of autophagy and fat oxidation. Body smart. It drives for homeostasis. Now, I'll have some people say devil's avocat argument is, well, what if you're not compensating for the calories during those four days? Well, then now you're in a calorie deficit, and you can't disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit, right?

1:25:08So in what I'll say is in the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have where they equate calories between intermittent fasting groups versus not fasting groups, we don't see differences in weight loss, and we don't really see much difference in biomarkers of health, HBA1C, markers of insulin sensitivity. You have some studies where you'll see like a little bit lower fasting blood glucose with intermittent fasting when they test it, but I think this is an artifact of the way they test it. Is it okay if I get kind of like deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead. So one of the problems is if you're going to compare apples to apples, if you fast for longer, your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower.

1:25:49If somebody's eating continuously, for example, and then they're fasting for say 12 hours before the test, but the person, the fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window. They're blood glucose tests out maybe a little bit lower, right? And so you see this in some of the studies, not all, but some of them. But then you look at the longer term markers of insulin sensitivity like a HBA1C and you don't typically see differences when they're equating calories. And so again, I'm not, people will hear what I'm saying and it's always like the filter, right? What I'm actually saying and what they hear is lane -set intermittent fasting sucks and it's worthless.

1:26:32No, if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake, it is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control the calorie intake and lose weight. Here's a question for you. Hit me. I think kind of the answer, but it turns out a lot of people don't know the answer because I was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with are interested in and I actually did some research into what people are googling the most. And it's interesting that people are googling the most when it comes to weight loss. Can you guess what it is? Can you do the guy?

1:27:04Well, even more than that is how to lose belly fat. Oh, interesting. And it's not so that people are really, really obsessed with losing this fat right here. And I think there's some exercises out there and some diets that report to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region. What'd you say to that? The answer is you may be able to spot reduce, but I think practically it's kind of irrelevant. And I'll explain why. So first of all, the question is, is that visceral or liver fat or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat? And that's hard to know unless somebody's done like an MRI and that sort of thing.

1:27:49Because some people just store their subcutaneous fat in different areas, right? Like some people tend to have it more in their legs, like women in particular, if they store it, they tend to store more in their legs, whereas men tend to store it more here. What's the difference between subcutaneous and visceral? So visceral is the viscera around the organs. Okay. Visceral fat and liver fat are gram for gram far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat. Okay. So that's the point of differentiation. But the stuff that causes you to lose subcutaneous fat, which is the fat under the skin, is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat.

1:28:28So one of the things I tell people if we're talking about trying to lose body fat or trying to get any big health outcome, let's pick up if we're going to try and pick up as much in weight of boulders as we can, you're going to focus on the big rocks first, right? And then if you've got the big rocks, you can worry about picking up some pebbles, but don't drop the big rocks to pick up the pebbles. I think a lot of people end up doing that. So before you go into some very specific protocol on trying to lose belly fat, go back, zoom out. Can I sustain this long term? Because if you can't sustain a long term, it's not really going to matter.

1:29:06You're better off finding something that you can sustainably do consistently execute long term, because if you lose enough overall body fat, eventually you will lose the belly fat. And I mean, you know, part of it is just our genetics and how we store. It seems really stubborn though. It seems like for me, it feels like it's the last thing to go. I will say they've shown that exercise specifically can help target liver and visceral fat to even without a calorie deficit. So even if people maintain their body weight, they tend to lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise. So let's talk about exercise and weight loss.

1:29:46So hot topic, hot topic, very hot topic. I would love an answer here on, you know, one school of thought is that exercise isn't particularly useful for weight loss because if I go out for a run, I then come home and I just eat more. And there's a, this is kind of a multifaceted issue in the sense that there's a biochemical components to that hypothesis. I, my brain produces more of the hunger hormones, so I get more hungry. But then there's also a psychological part to that hypothesis where people say it's actually because I went for a run. So I think I deserve more food. So then I eat more cake because I feel good about myself.

1:30:22So this is where the way the study is conducted really matters. So let's take it mechanistically first. If we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they're having them, you know, eat the same amount of calories, where people don't exercise absolutely helps with weight loss. Absolutely. The hunger size is a little more complex. So first off, there's a compensation of exercise where hermit concert did this research, basically showing that if you burn 100 calories from activity, you don't net 100 calories of loss. Your body actually compensates by your BMR reducing a little bit or you become a spontaneous, maybe a little bit less spontaneously active, right?

1:31:12So there's a partial compensation. But on average, again, everybody's different, but on average, it's about 28 calories per 100 calories. So if you do 100 calories of activity, you're still netting 72. It's just not as much as you thought you were going to get, right? So there's that aspect to it that exercise doesn't cause the amount of weight loss that you might predict based on how much you do, right? But it still contributes to energy expenditure. The more interesting thing is what you touched on, which is intake, which is actually counterintuitive to what you think. On average, in the studies, yes, people tend to eat a little bit more, but the compensation is not nearly complete.

1:31:56Okay? So, peep exercise on the net actually has an anorectic effect. Now, I'm not saying for every person, there are some people who, whether it's psychological or it actually is physiological, they exercise more and they do feel more hunger, right? But on average, in the studies, exercise either has a neutral or positive effect on appetite, and there actually is one classic study from the 1950s, I referenced it in the book, where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn't have an intervention, but they just looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very heavily active, right?

1:32:35So think heavy construction labor workers. And from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated their energy intake, right? By eating more to match the activity, right? Just intuitively. The sedentary people ate more than the lightly active, and if I recall correctly, about the same, maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks. Being sedentary actually dysregulates your appetite. When you are active, it actually sensitizes you to your body's own satiety signals, they work better. So I actually think the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn't because you burn so many calories.

1:33:19It's one because exercise helps with lean mass retention, which we know that the more lean mass you have, higher energy expenditure, and it also helps prevent weight regain. So that's one aspect. But the actual amount of calories you expend in exercise, I mean, if you look at the actual research literature, it's not that much. I mean, you go to the gym for two hours, you might burn 500 calories, something like that. Half my sounded. Right, right. Like you need a donut. Boom, gone, right? But people tend to have better appetite regulation when they exercise, when they're active. There's multiple components to it.

1:33:56Like I said, better sensitivity to satiety signals, but then the psychological aspect of goes the other way. There are some people who say, well, I'm exercising, I'm going to eat this. But other people exercise and they actually all their habits start to get better. I'm one of those people as well. Right. Right. I always say if I want to fix my diet and go to the gym. Right. I always say that because when I, I don't, I said it to think some of my friends and my team of the day, if I'm going to go and work out for an hour, and I'm going to do go to a hit workout for an hour, for example, it's so painful.

1:34:24That the last thing I want to do is throw it all away with like a fucking crispy cream. So I said my diet then falls in place suddenly. And that's always the one I, whenever I go through a moment in my life where I'm like, Steve, you've lost control of your diet here. It's how can I get myself to the gym as the catalyst to get my diet in order? And that's, so that's the problem with a lot of, not the problem, but just the limitation of a lot of studies, which is, you know, especially like epidemiology. When I say epidemiology, it's like, this group does this, this group does this, and we're looking at what other things happen.

1:35:01Yeah. Well, people don't do things in isolation. Right. So you'll hear a study like, I'm thinking of something. Oh, people who eat more protein have higher rates of this. Okay. Well, if we look at where most people get their protein sources in the Western world, it's highly processed, energy dense foods. Protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories. And so is it the protein or is it all the calories that are taking in? Right. And again, people, their lifestyles and habits tend to go together, right? Like, you hear X group was more prone to part disease. But then they also tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol.

1:35:54Like these, it is very difficult to disconnect those, those habits and those lifestyle habits, right? They call it healthy user bias and studies. It's one of the, it's one of the things we have difficulty with. And that's why, you know, again, human randomized control trials are kind of our gold standard because I think this is important to touch on the word randomized. Okay. So if we're talking about epidemiology or cohort studies, so cohort is a little bit better than your standard epidemiology because they're taking groups of people and they're following them for years. So each person is kind of their own control, right?

1:36:29But still people tend to, who are more healthy, tend to do more overall healthy things. People who are more unhealthy tend to do more, it's hard to disconnect those two. But when you do a study and you say, okay, you know, one group is going to do a low -carb diet, one group is going to do a low fat diet, and we're going to randomize them. Right. Why is that important? Well, what if we let people self select? Okay. Well, they just said, go whichever group you want. Well, and I'm just speculating, right? But for example, low -carb diets are very hot right now. A lot of people may have a very strong cliquity to go to that group thinking it's healthier, having a more positive viewpoint of it, and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life.

1:37:11But if we randomize what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups. And that is why that's so important. And I remember I was listening to a breakdown on a podcast one time, and they were discussing a study that was looking at, they were looking at intermittent fasting versus continuous energy restriction. So just normal dieting. And basically the crux of the study was they found no real difference in weight loss. And the person on there was a very pro intermittent fasting person.

1:37:44They said, well, how, you know, they don't know. Well, maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever, and I'm thinking, this person doesn't understand randomization, right? Like you, you, that would be a very odd thing to just put it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to seek out junk food, right? So again, randomization is not perfect, but the reason it's so important is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias. And I think again, if people, but the downside to randomized control trials is you can only run them for so long because they're controlled.

1:38:23Is your view on keto, the same as you've kind of said about all diets, or does keto stand at a bucket of its own? And I asked this in part because a lot of doctors kind of prescribed keto as a diet for certain people that have epilepsy and certain types of inflammation and brain related issues. Okay. So epilepsy is a specific case. Essentially for epilepsy, ketogenic diet is actually a very effective treatment. It provides a usable substrate ketones for the brain, and they see it decrease the incidence of epilepsy. In fact, my friend, I refer to him, Dom D. Castino, he actually started studying the ketogenic diet as for deep water Navy seal divers, because a lot of those divers at depth get seizures.

1:39:06And they found that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures. Now, unfortunately, people have taken that to say, well, any brain problem, just given the keto diet, there's way less evidence to support it for other brain problems. But let's, let's talk about, there's a lot of claims around the keto diet, low carb diets. It seems to function for fat loss, the same ways other diets through a calorie deficit. There was a, there have been several really well done randomized control trials, as well as a couple of meta analyses now. If they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein, but varied the carbohydrate and fat amount anywhere from low fat high carb to low carb high fat, no real differences in weight loss or fat loss.

1:39:55In fact, it actually, the meta analysis showed it slightly favored low fat diets, but it was a really like non clinically significant amount. But how can that be? Because one of the things people say, well, when you do a keto diet, you burn way more fat. So this is, I think if there's one sound bite that might, you know, make it, this might be it. So yes, you do burn more fat on a ketogenic diet. Why? Well, when you do a ketogenic diet, you're eating higher fat or carb. So you're eating more fat, you have more fat substrate to burn, but also you're keeping insulin low. And so you burn more fat because insulin reduces your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolusis.

1:40:39So people take that and they go, well, it's better, right? So here's where we're getting into we're talking early about mechanisms versus outcomes, right? But when we look at these studies where they actually measure the outcome of fat loss, they don't see differences between low carb and low fat. How if they're burning this much more fat? Fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same thing. Fat oxidation is part of fat loss, but it's only one side of the coin. So fat, fat, whether you lose or gain fat is fat balance. You are always storing and burning fat simultaneously, okay? On a low carb high fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat.

1:41:29And here's why. Carbohydrate really isn't stored as body fat. Your body almost exclusively has to burn it when you take it in. There was a trace, they did a metabolic tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates and fats. You can label them with a stabilized tope and you look at where the label lines up, right? Less than 2 % of the fat stored in adipose in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate. Fat cells. Over 98 % came from dietary fat. So here's the rub. If you are doing a low fat high carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're not storing much fat either. If you're doing a low carb high fat diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat.

1:42:25So what actually matters in terms of fat balance is energy balance. Are you eating more calories than you're burning? That is what will end up dictating that. And that's why we just don't see differences in actual loss of body fat between those groups. So this is where we got into earlier before we started the cameras. A lot of people get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms. And one of the things I was that way when I was an undergrad in biochemistry. And I think doing that first was great. Doing biochemistry first was great. And then going to nutrition and having a good advisor who zoomed me out and said, hey, you're pretty far in the weeds.

1:43:03Zoom back out. Look at the whole picture.

1:43:08Because mechanisms are great. It's good to ask questions. And when we see an outcome, and when I say outcome, fat loss would be an outcome. Actual loss of body fat. A change in HBA1C, a biomarker. That's an outcome. If there's an outcome, there will be a mechanism to support that outcome. But just because there's a mechanism doesn't mean there's an outcome. And what I mean by that is all these biochemical pathways, these mechanisms, this is a symphony. And when you do one thing someplace, a lot of times it's compensated someplace else. Okay. An outcome is the summation of hundreds, if not thousands of different biochemical pathways coming together.

1:43:51And the example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund. And getting focused on the individual stocks in it. Right. And saying, woo, don't invest in that mutual fund. Look at those two stocks that are down by 40%. But why do I care if the overall mutual funds up by 20%. I care about the overall. That's the outcome. And so I'm not against necessarily looking at mechanisms. But I'm always going to go to first, okay, do we actually have human trials that are measuring the thing that we care about. Not a proxy measure, but the actual thing. And if I can invoke a former episode on here, if that's okay, somebody said, well, be careful drinking caffeine because it stimulates cortisol release.

1:44:38And that can cause you to store belly fat. So that's a mechanism, right? If you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and this or all fat or liver fat with caffeine, you actually see a neutral positive effect. So, okay, maybe that in small increase in cortisol, maybe that's, okay, that's a negative. But if caffeine is also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things, I can increasing fat oxidation. Okay, maybe there is that negative component to it, but it's obviously outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we're looking at, right?

1:45:20So without being scientists and being able to understand all of the little instruments in the orchestra. Yeah. Right? Because that's what we try and do sometimes. We try and figure out all the little instruments in the orchestra, but really you're saying listen to the music. Listen to the music. And listening to the music in that analogy would be like looking at the scales or would be just looking for the outcomes. The outcome. I mean, and also I guess one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability because like we all have a bias to one big rewards for small investment.

1:45:58And that sells right five minute abs. That's what we want. Complete physique overhaul in six weeks and nincheter arms and 12 weeks. What I'm really fascinated by is what it takes at a psychology level and we kind of talked about it already because we talked about your why and all these things. But you can say that you can say to someone like me and business it's going to take you 10 years to get to get there or it's going to take your 10 years to become the world record holder in this powerlifting activity. But for someone to say, yep, fine. They're going to have to be a little bit there. I say twisted.

1:46:32They can have to be a little bit. It is the ability. I think one of the most underrated things of the ability to delay gratification, right? And not dollars in my life, but in that particular area, I'm really good at it. And I wonder how much of a choice you had at a deep level. You know, it's interesting. So I told the story of how squatting was hard for me. I had been training hard for three years and I had like these chicken legs. I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding forum so bad. And I remember thinking three, four years in, I'm like, man, people was like, dude, you're genetics suck.

1:47:11Like why are you going to keep doing this? And it's kind of let's find out thing. I remember literally having this internal dialogue of, you know, maybe they never will be big. But I'm going to, I'm going to commit myself to training hard consistently for 10 years. And if I haven't, if I don't have a decent set of legs at that time, then I'll allow myself to quit if I still feel that way. And I always say paralysis by analysis and perfectionism has killed more dreams than failure ever could. Because one of the, one of the worst thing you can do is have no action. Inaction is way worse than failure.

1:47:56Because if you fail, at least you can learn something from it. You try stuff. I'm sure as an entrepreneur, you've had a lot of stuff fail, right? But you learn from that and you, okay, what? And work will try this. And eventually if you're trying enough stuff and you're walking the path, it may not have worked out the way you drew it up. But you get something better than what you started with, right? Maybe not exactly what you wanted. Maybe you get something better though. And I'll tell people, that's why action is so much more important than trying to get everything laid out perfectly. Just start where you are right now as imperfect as it is.

1:48:39Start walking the path. And if you are walking the path, you're going to screw up. Learn from it and do better the next time. And eventually, again, maybe you don't get exactly what you want, but I bet you get something pretty good. I got really obsessed with the idea of failure because of business, because I take stock on the things that move me forward the most, the things that were most course correcting. And it was never an accolade or an achievement. It was always when life says you were wrong about that. And from that, I have this really clear phrase in mind, that failure as feedback, feedback as knowledge and knowledge is your power.

1:49:15And I then went on to study Jeff Bezos, Amazon and booking .com and Thomas Watson, who was the richest man on Earth at one point. He was the founder and CEO of IBM. And through all of their writing, they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their failure rate. So much so Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview after one of his employees had failed at something that cost the company, I think, $400 or $600 ,000. He said, are you going to fire him? He goes, fire him. I've just spent $400 ,000 training him. And then when I looked at Amazon's shareholder letter, it said the same thing. It says, we have Jeff Bezos wrote, we have to be the best place on Earth to fail.

1:49:53And he goes on to say in life, like, it's not about affecting that perfect swing. It's how much you swing, because in the case of Amazon, you'll never know about endless .com, which is in the graveyard or the fire phone, which is in the graveyard or A9 .com, which is in the graveyard. But you know, AWS, which will make them 70 billion a year. So he goes on to basically say in, he uses a baseball analogy where he goes in baseball, you swing, you get a great hit, you might get four runs, but in life, you swing, you get a great hit, you can just absolutely change your life. So it's really about making sure you're swinging.

1:50:26Yeah, I mean, Kobe Bryant said, I love this quote, and I might butcher it a little bit, but he said, you know, whether you winner or lose, if you win, it's great, but you're still going to wake up the next day and do the process over again. If you lose, it sucks, you still got to get up and do the same process over again. And it's that willingness to somebody said confidence is the willingness to wait into uncertainty. And I really like that quote, because I mean, that's at the foundation of kind of like any big goal that you're going after, there is no certainty. You can't guarantee anything in life.

1:51:04And so we can say it's important to fail. It's, but when you're actually in that moment, you're not like, yes, this failure is great. I love this. It's very stressful and it sucks. Like it really, really sucks. But I can tell you in most cases, the best stuff in my life came out of some of the worst stuff in my life, you know, and if I hadn't been willing to try and wait back into it repeatedly, I might not have gotten some of the great things that have happened in life. And whether you win or lose, you're still going to have to wake up and do the process over. But if you stop doing the process, if you stop trying, stop walking the path, that's where you really lose.

1:51:53I think a lot of this, like getting back to the diet stuff, a lot of this, the diet hacks and stuff like that. It's people trying to shortcut that painful process. But that process is where you are going to learn so much about yourself and where their actual fulfillment is. So that kind of brings me on to Zempek. Because obviously that's a big subject at the moment with dieting, which is, we're talking about, you know, quote unquote shortcuts here. What's your opinion on his impact? I think I'm going to give a very balanced view of this. Overall, I think it's in that positive. And here's why. So go 100 years back, 200 years back, whatever.

1:52:42Very rarely, did you see no beast person, right? It was just we didn't have such crazy access to hyper palatable, extremely energy dense foods, right? Even go back 60 years, right? If you wanted a cake or cookie, you had to go to the bakery. There was barriers to get there. Now we are surrounded 24, 7 with unlimited access to cheap calorie dense hyper palatable foods. And again, we know people who tend to become more obese have a greater reward response to food. Here's the real tough part in where you can tie it back to addiction, right? So imagine you were a gambling addict. And I said, well, we don't want you to gamble so much, but you got to gamble a couple of times a day.

1:53:44We don't want you to drink so much, but you got to drink a couple of times a day. You know, don't do blow so much, but you got to do it a couple of times a day. Now, I mean, again, people argue about food addiction. Is there really food addiction? Is there not? But imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation, but knowing you have to eat, you can't just not eat, right? So I think if we look at the actual data on, on ozemic, what we're talking about just to give the background by a chemistry are GLP1 mimetics. GLP1 is a hormone that's secreted by your gut in response to feeding and it acts on the GI to tell your full and also acts on your brain to tell you to that you're full to decrease your appetite.

1:54:30And these things work very well. We see on average about a 15 to 20 % reduction in body weight in the studies. So pretty much the most effective anti obesity treatment that's ever been created. Now GLP1 itself is all its half life is only a couple minutes, but what they've done is they modify the protein so that now the half life is much, much longer. So it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period of time. And again, very effective. So what are the potential downsides? What does that do to the body then? So that they've extended this sort of half life of the protein and then that means that I feel satiated for longer?

1:55:11Oh, yeah. So I don't feel hungry. Yeah, in fact, it can be such a powerful effect. A lot of people, it feels like almost nauseating like you hear again every drug has side effects. Right? Some people initially get nausea, vomiting, that sort of thing. It tends to decrease with time. But on an anecdotal level, I've talked to people who've done the drug and they've said that some have said even after they stopped. The best way they described it is I don't have the food noise anymore. I'm not always thinking about food or I'm not thinking about food nearly as much. It calmed it down for me. Even after they had stopped.

1:55:56For some people, even after they stopped. So perhaps there's some long term changes to the brain chemistry that happened. We're not sure. Or perhaps they just got more confident because they lost some weight and realized because it's not increasing your metabolism. That's one thing to point out. So I've had some people say, you know, I have a slow metabolism. So I've got to take ozimic and I'm like, well, you're going to be disappointed because it's acting on the appetite side of things. So some people will say, well, the devil's advocate carbias, well, they could just eat less. Right. But if it was that easy, people would just be doing it.

1:56:31Right? So some of the criticisms of the drug are, well, we see a lot of lean mass loss. I don't know if you've heard that. Yeah. I don't think that's as much of a concern as some people do. And the reason is most of these studies with a GOP one mimetics, the people aren't resistance training. And so if you look at studies where people aren't resistant training and they just diet and they're not like the normal protein at high protein, you see anywhere from like a, like a 30 % to 40 % of the weight they lose is from lean mass. And ozimic is, it's right about that area, which makes sense because they're eating less.

1:57:16And if they're not resistant training or eating high protein, again, they're feeling very full. So hard to eat high protein because protein tends to be quite satiating. So I don't see that as being like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss. I think what I would say that could be problematic is if people are so full, they may not be choosing the healthful, most helpful food choices because they feel full. If they just end up eating less of the foods they'd normally eat, these calorie dense, hyper palatable foods, and they don't modify their habits when they get off of it, they may be prone to regain.

1:57:52And so I look at this as I am, if I have to pick, I'm pro on board with these. Just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification, right? Like encouraging people to exercise, educating them on healthy food choices. Then I think it's a great option for a lot of people. Do you think there's enough data, especially when we think about sort of long term studies on the impact of a Zempet? Because I, you know, one of the things I've come to believe in life is that there's no such things a free lunch. And this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now, you know?

1:58:27So here's what I'll say. We don't have, I mean, long term, 10, 20 year data, you know, some people said, well, there's a risk of thyroid cancer. I mean, I think that was from like some kind of rodent study where they were using a much higher dose than normal. I'm always, I tell people, be very careful less than 50 % of animal studies and up translating into like actual human outcomes. When we say earlier, there's no solutions. There's only trade -offs. So maybe there is some side effect, some downstream effect that may have a negative effect. If it helps somebody lose 50, 100 pounds, I'm still going to bet that it's a net positive, right?

1:59:06Could have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone, maybe, but most of those people weren't going to get there anyway. Or it's going to be really, really tough for them to get there. It's funny because a lot of fitness industry people are very, very much against this drug. And then they tell you what fat burner that you can buy with the discount code in their bio. And I'm like, wait, wait, this math doesn't math to me. So your fat burner that probably doesn't work, okay, this drug that actually works, not okay. Make it make sense. What do you think of the fitness industry?

1:59:43I have a love hate with it. The big problem with the fitness industry is a couple of things. First is there's really no barrier to entry, right? Like if you want to be a medical professional, there's some barriers to entry, right? Like you got to do some work. Anybody can call themselves a fitness coach. There's no barrier at all. And anybody who has a six pack will get a lot of clients because as I found out, science is way less sexy than just, hey, look, you know. And you know, it's funny. I for a couple of years, I went up a weight class in powerlifting. I went up to the 105 kilogram class, which is 231.

2:00:24I'm not, I'm not fat at 231. But I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty, in fact, there's a reason there's a nice beard here because it's like make up for men, right? Like it hides my chubby cheeks. And man, the comments on my videos and I actually saw, I sold less stuff. And then when I dropped back down to powerlifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff. And I'm like, this is so weird. Like my knowledge isn't any different. It's the same dude. And it's not like when I was 231. That was on purpose. I didn't get there by accident. I forgot how to do nutrition. But if you were a normal person and you didn't know anything about fitness and there was two PT's in front of you, you go to the one that looks better.

2:01:11You go to the one you want. See how I want to look like that. And that's tough. It's a very tough thing to wade through. And what I will say, people will ask me all the time, do you think a personal trainer needs to look the part? Do you think, you know, a medical professional needs to look the part? I say, no, but people like to see application. And I do think there is value in being able to tell one of the things I was able to tell my clients from competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things. I say, hey, I'll never ask you to do anything. I have not done or would not be willing to do myself.

2:01:48We sell earlier that humans aren't logical. They're emotional, irrational and all these things. And we, to conserve mental energy, I mean, I'm funnily enough, I read about this brat study. I only read about research was in rats. It just goes to show how the brain works and they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate at the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze, the rats brain is going crazy. Second time it goes through the same maze, its brain is basically, there's almost no activity there. The activity is dropped and it's turned into autopilot. The study goes on to talk about how we're always looking for shortcuts to decisions.

2:02:24What I would tell people is, again, you can never turn your brain off.

2:02:32And it's just hard to identify who knows what they're talking about. I mean, I'll be on this podcast and then people say, what about this guy? This guy has a doctorate and he has this.

2:02:47And that's one of the reasons I actually started my research review where I review studies, I mean my team review studies every month and try to translate it into plain language because I did see this gap and trying to build this bridge. Because it's so hard for the average person to know. And one of the things actually I miss talking about was, if you would have a conversation, if we're on a certain topic, it becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly, whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable on the topic or whether about the same. Like pretty quickly can tell, like if we're going into investments and how to start a company and marketing, like you're demand for that, right?

2:03:29Comes to nutrition, like you can tell pretty quickly, hopefully I know what I'm talking about. All lifting me. Right. But what we're really bad at is if two people are disagreeing on a topic, both of whom are more knowledgeable than us on said topic, we pretty much have no way to sort out whose right or wrong. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite.

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2:04:42That's netSuite .com slash Bartlett. What is the most important thing we haven't spoken about today? Gosh, I think we touched on a lot of stuff. But let's talk about resistance training real quick. A lot of people think resistance training is just for vanity and for meatheads. And we see now resistance training decreases the risk of cancer, decreases the risk of heart disease, drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia, of falls, of broken bones. People talk about calcium, vitamin D. Probably the single best thing you can do to improve your bone density is to resistance train. And you know, you'll hear people say, well, I'm 40 or I'm 50 or I'm 60.

2:05:27It doesn't matter. You can still put on muscle. In fact, right across the street where I was doing my PhD, they took basically frail elderly people who had trouble like sitting and standing up and put them through like, I think I want to say it was a 16 -week program. And resistance for them started out just squatting to a high chair, you know. And then slowly they lowered it down, lowered it down. Some of them started using weights as well. They saw significant increases in their muscle mass as, you know, older people. So you can still put on muscle even getting older. In fact, who is that? I think Alan Argonne.

2:06:10He's another good nutrition person on social media. His, he was posting a video of his father showing, I think his father was like over 80 years old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50 pound kettlebell, you know. The amount of quality of life improvement you can get in people from either resistant training throughout the course of life or just getting them started regardless of age. It's a huge improvement in quality of life. Do you know what I think though? I think I'll give you guys here, right? This morning I was, I got up, right? And, um, I like lower back her a little bit. And I remember thinking the first thought is, oh god, I'm getting older.

2:06:51That's why that, that is. And I remember thinking, ooh, I should probably question that thought because that's a self -fulfilling prophecy in a way. If you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible, you're bright, you kind of, you chalk it off as an inevitability of aging. Therefore you do nothing about it, therefore it gets worse. Whereas really this other thought came into my mind, which was, okay, go to the gym and train your lower back to strengthen it. One of the most damaging messages that physicians have given is when people have pain in an area, they tell them to stop doing activity.

2:07:29As you age, you are going to have pain. You can be strong in half pain or you can be weak in half pain. My, I love my dad, great dude, very sedentary, right? He has really bad sciatica. He doesn't lift weights. But if you lift weights, it actually has been shown to decrease back pain, like on the whole. Yeah, like when you do what I do where you're like, you know, lifting cars essentially. Yeah, like, I am, when you're, so it's funny, I'll post videos and be lifting like once a week. Just because most people don't care about me lifting, they just want to get information out of me. And the comments are always, you know, isn't that bad for your lower back or, you know, isn't that going to, and I, and I, I'll, they'll say, well, you've had so many injuries.

2:08:19I said, I've been doing this 25 years. Show me an athlete who's competed at a really high level for two decades, who also doesn't have a laundry list of injuries and pain. Tiger Woods swings a golf club. He had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues, right? Activity is medicine. Yes, if you're doing it at a very high level athletes, what's the dosage needed to improve at the highest level of exercise is always going to be right up against what will get you injured. Because you get to the point where you simply can't recover from it enough. And that's why, actually, if you look at, like what actually prevents injuries, it's not stretching, it's not mobility work, it's not warm up, it's sleep, psychological stress reduction.

2:09:10Those are two of the main movers and just load management, appropriate load management. We can get into a whole thing on pain science. But one of the really damaging messages is, well, took an MRI or your lower back and, you know, got a bulge disc, so just can't lift out anymore. If you get my right, my lower back right now, I promise you I have bulged and herniated this. I'm sure I do, but I don't have pain. And we, there was a study done where they, I think they MRI'd like people over 40 who were asymptomatic had no back pain. Like, I think almost half of them had bulged or herniated this. So we've got this like model where it's, oh, if you have pain, you must have damage.

2:09:57And if you have damage, you must have pain. And it doesn't really work that way. I mean, look at them. People who lose limbs, they have pain, not just at the stump, but where the limb used to be, they sense pain. Pain is just as much a psychological experience as it is an actual tissue damage experience. And when you get things that are, um, that are painful for years, your tissues heal in six to 12 months for most things. But if you're still having pain, that's because you've developed a sensitivity to that particular area. And so one of the worst things for pain is becoming inactive. But the reason physicians do this, in orthopedics do this, is it straight up a liability coverage.

2:10:47Because if they, if somebody says, you know, you have pain, but you could probably go back and, you know, you back off your little, a little bit on your lips and, you know, progressively work it back up, you probably be fine. Well, if they go in and they injure themselves, guess who's going to complain about the doctor, give them one star review and say they caused me to blow up my back, right? But if you look at this stuff, I mean, on the whole, resistance training decreases pain. I want to build my muscles, Lane. Like you, muscles, I want muscles like yours. Um, question on the way that I'm working out, just sort of practical advice.

2:11:23Do I have to work out to sort of overload till I fail to build my muscles so that they're like yours? Great question. So, if I, I'm saying, I'm not muscle -like. What's each of you buying steps? Three hours. Three hours a day. You know, um, we use AI to shrink them. Stephen just had in the biggest times in the podcast. Um, what matters for building muscle, we think, we have a, um, the amount of hypertrophy research in the last 10 years is absolutely exploded compared to what it was before. And hypertrophy is muscle growth is what we're talking about. What seems to be the cause of it is what's called mechanical tension.

2:12:05So just creating a lot of tension on the muscle. Because now we're actually having studies coming out, we're doing like hard stretching. They actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained, hard stretching. There was a study done, um, with the calf muscles. So they put them in this contraption where basically they're like stretching their calves and holding it there. I think, I can't remember what the duration was, but it was a long time, right? And they were comparing that to traditional resistance training. And it was, I mean, it was a pretty painful stretch. I think they said it was like a seven or eight or nine out of 10 in terms of pain level for this stretch.

2:12:43But they built as much muscle as people who were doing calves three times a week resistance training. I think they were doing these stretches every day. So it was, it was pretty intense. But that's really interesting, right? Because even if you don't have weight, you can still create that tension through stretching, right? Now the stretching, again, not your traditional like, you know, it's pretty intense and pretty painful. I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology to getting it and more fun. But in terms of mechanical tension, it does to maximize muscle growth.

2:13:19So we always have to be careful about like a lot of things could cause muscle growth. But if we're talking about absolutely maxing muscle growth, you do have to get close to volitional failure, which is basically like if I'm doing a, say a bicep curl, right? Or maybe a bench press, for example, I'm doing reps reps. Like, yeah, start that's failure, right? The research suggests you don't have to go to failure, but you have to get pretty darn close within a couple reps, you know? And if you've never trained a failure, it's actually really hard to know what that feels like. And so like, and actually in research studies where they take people who are beginner intermediate, and they ask them like they have them do a set and they ask them, hey, how many more reps could you have gotten?

2:14:09They underestimate by like five. Especially difficult when you're training alone, something like bench press. If I fail, the thing that it fucks. So I'm like, I've put in a buffer of maybe three reps there just so that I don't embarrass myself in front of, you know? Exactly. Mechanical tension appears to be cumulative. And what I mean by that is if it was just about creating as much tension as possible, just load the bar up and just do one rep, right? So it's cumulative throughout a set. Now, the way I like to describe it is intensity is the medicine. And the number of hard sets, which number of sets close to failure is the dosage.

2:14:52Now, when you first start, you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing. It'll grow off anything. As you progress, I mean, remember when you first start lifting, you had five, 10 pounds every week, right? Like clockwork. Well, eventually you can't add that anymore, right? But you can still a lot of times you can increase the reps, right? With the same weight. I'll eventually you can't do that anymore. So how do you continue to progress? Well, you can add more hard sets and... What do you mean by hard sets? Volume. So, for example, if I'm... Let's just take bench press again, right?

2:15:24Let's say I'm doing three sets close to failure and I eventually stop progressing. I can add another set. And that is still another form of progressive overload, right? Because again, mechanical tension is cumulative. And I mean, there is some debate about this in the resistance training field. But for the most part, I would say it's generally agreed upon by most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth relative to lower volumes, meaning more hard sets. And it doesn't really seem to matter about machines versus free weight either. Seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth. So when it comes to building muscle, the cool thing is you got a lot of options.

2:16:05And if you have pain doing one thing, you know, joint pain, whatever, lower back pain, try something else. Fantastic news for me. Lane, we have a closing tradition on this podcast. Okay. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that's been left for you. Ooh, I like this. I know what my question will be. You're one's a really difficult one. Okay. So I don't get to sit until I open this book, but Jack has a little peek before I ask the guest. Was it any...? No, it actually wasn't Andy. Because there was one person between them and they're the person that left this question for you.

2:16:40That's a very difficult question. I think. Have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you and why? Yeah.

2:16:59Because of a lot of reasons, one being a perception from other people, I felt like I had to make it work. The other being because of some of the remnants of bullying, I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships to... I could be easily talked into me being the problem for everything. And I'm not saying that I was never the problem because I definitely was. I've made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships and I've had my own toxic behaviors that I know I do. But yes, I have definitely stayed in a relationship too long. And I think one of the hardest things for me and for a lot of people is knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through?

2:18:05And I don't think we have... I don't think anybody has a clear parameter. But for me, staying in was not trusting myself, not trusting my gut and feeling like I had to make it work. Because of the kids or because of this or because of whatever. Because of a whole host of many things. And again, I think I'm not a relationship expert, but I've gone to therapy for eight years now. One of my good friends, John Deloney, is an expert on this. And very rarely does a relationship break down because of just one person. It's usually a dynamic. And but I think that is one of the hardest things to figure out.

2:18:57When is it time? Because we talked about not quitting these sorts of things. But there's also sometimes it's not quitting. It's just moving on to possibly something better. And learning from what happened. And yeah, that is a really tough question. And I've definitely stayed in things too long. And not just like romantic relationships, but also like business partnerships, friendships, you know, where it became highly toxic. And again, I think the next hardest thing to do after that is looking at what I'm doing. Looking back and going, what did I contribute to that? Lane, in my life, I've lost people.

2:19:52I've lost a lot of people along the way from grandparents, friends, a lady who was sort of my proxy mother when I was younger, died in a motorcycle accident. And it's only in those moments that you kind of have the regrets of all the things that you could have said. You know, you wish you could go back. And often for people somewhat similar to me, somewhat maybe similar to you who have had struggles with expressing their emotions, we probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe tell these people we had the chance. So my closing question for you, which is a question of my own, is if right now you could send a message to your kids.

2:20:38And I'm going to let you send one as well to your granddad and your dad. And it was the last thing you were going to say. What would you say?

2:20:50Okay, my kids, I would say, of course, I love you more than anything. You, God dang it. You fulfilled a whole my life. I didn't know I had.

2:21:10And I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently, but I love you more than anything.

2:21:21And I don't care what you do with your life. Find something that you love and it is a positive contributor to the world and go to that. And try to make somebody else's life better along the way. And to my dad, I would say, thank you. Like for not following in your dad's footsteps and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying, not on my watch. Sorry. You know, my dad's not perfect, but both my mom and dad are really great people. And, you know, they've struggled with some health issues.

2:22:21And, you know, if I had to say one thing, it would be, you know, thanks for always believing in me. Always having my back, accepting me for who I was. In some ways, I feel like that the only people who always accepted me for who I was. And they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life when I told them I wanted to get in the bodybuilding. They were like, oh, this seems weird. But okay, when my first bodybuilding show, they were the loudest people up there supporting me, you know, they're, you know, what I won Worlds in 2022. I was going through a very hard personal time in my life.

2:22:57It's basically the front end of a divorce. And it had just kind of come to a head, like just the whirlwind kind of chaos stuff. And my mom called me. They were watching online with my kids. And my mom was like, son, how the hell did you just do that with everything going on in your life? How did you do that? And, you know, they've just always been such big supporters of me, even when they didn't understand, you know, my mom didn't understand like, you know, what are you studying again? What are you studying again? But, you know, came to my PhD exit seminar. You know, mom was in every baseball game growing up.

2:23:39Dad was on the road a lot, but, you know, couldn't, but came to everything he could. You know, they showed up for me a lot. And I knew, you know, I knew I was loved. And so if I had to say anything to them, it would just be thank you for everything that you did. And when I had kids, I was like six weeks in. I called my mom. I'm like, oh my god, you did all this stuff for me. And I gave you all that grief. I'm so sorry, you know. So yeah, they're amazing. And if I had to say something to my grandfather, it would just be, God, you know, I would give, somebody asked me this other day. I said, I would give anything to have five more minutes of my granddad and ask him so many questions about life that I just didn't know enough about to even ask the question, you know, because the man just oozed wisdom.

2:24:28You know, but I had to say anything. I'm like, I would just say, thanks for what you did for your family. You know, my grandfather, when he passed, I mean, this is a man who had like, he had his first heart attack and his fifties and this back in the nineteen late seventies when, like open heart surgery was like, carpentry, you know, his expat, his life expectation. I think it was five years at the time. He was in the Battle of the Bulls, the deadliest battle in World War two. One more story. He, I forget what country was in, but he was supposed to go on leave the next day. And a convoy was coming through and it was going to the place where he was going to go on leave, right behind the lines.

2:25:15And his commanding officer said, hey, why don't you just take it, like just go today. That night, a German soldier dropped a grenade down and killed his entire unit. And sorry. I didn't think you could get me to try on this podcast, man. So much. And he said, you know, after that day, I just. Everything was, I was living on borrowed time, in my opinion. He's like, I should have been down there. And he said, I get up every day, I look at the obituary. And if I'm not in it, I figure I'm good for another day. And he had, I think three heart attacks, three open heart surgeries, two strokes. He had a boat fall on him, long story.

2:26:02So this guy, we always joke, he had nine lives. And whenever he was on his deathbed, I mean, we kind of, we knew like six weeks in advance, he had kind of multi system, just basically old age. And I never occurred to me. I was 20 years old. It never, sorry, 22. It never occurred to me, the idea of how you die as being so important. And he went exactly how you would draw it up. You know, he was in the hospice, so he was at his home. His whole family was around him. And again, he was the funniest man I ever knew. And I walked in and all the seats are taken. And he's still lucid talking. And I said, he had his little like portable toilet, you know, but he had been using it, whatever the seat was down.

2:26:56And I said, do you mind if I sit here because I was going to sit next to him? And he said, yeah, you can't clog that one up because I was known in my family for clogging toilets, right? So he's still cracking jokes on his deathbed. And even like the doctor asked him when he was basically the doctor telling him, hey, you've got like six weeks left. Doctors said, hey, you know, you're an organ donor, but we can't really use anything. You know, it's all bad, basically. Would you be interested in donating your body as a cadaver for med students? He goes, I always wanted to go to med school. I figured it's the only way I'm getting there now.

2:27:30So just like had this great outlook on life, you know, and just when he passed, I can move up.

2:27:46Sorry. My mom looking at him and saying, it's okay, Dad. It's okay. We're going to be okay. And I wasn't even sad because I'm like, that guy, he got every bit out of it. He, he mocks life for everything he had, had a great family and so many people who love them. And if I could just have that kind of impact, even half that impact on my family, oh, man, that'd be worth so much to me. So I would just tell him, thank you for being an inspiration. Lane, you have been, you've been exactly that. You've had an impact on millions of people's of lives. And I think back to that young kid, five, six, seven years old.

2:28:29And I think back to what you said about fighting your way out of it, you fought your way out of all of that to now inspire and impact millions and millions of people's of lives. That you'll never get to meet in such a positive way. In the same way and with the same integrity and fight that your granddad so clearly had. It's funny because when you went through all of those people, I saw an element of you in every single one of them. And I think that's a credit to them, but it's also a credit to you. And I know that if you, your granddad was, I'm sure he's watching us now cracking jokes about you.

2:28:59Probably, but my toilet habit too. But I'm sure you'd be so incredibly proud of you because of the work you've done, but continue to do. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, especially for your honesty and openness because you have no idea how many people that side of you, the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself, as you are within your work, will have on millions of millions of people's of lives. I feel rich of having this conversation. So thank you, Lane. Thank you. I've never cried in a podcast like that, but I actually, it was kind of cathartic. I was thinking of a lot of different things while I was going on.

2:29:33So thank you for having me on.

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