Ultimate Fat Loss Guide - Gabrielle Lyon - Mike Israetel - Layne Norton - Don Saladino

21:40Gabrielle Lyon:If you're like me, you love a good meat stick and are always on the go, but still committed to putting high quality fuel into your body, then you want to check out Paleo Valley, one of the sponsors of the show. Their 100 grass fed and finished beef sticks are clean, nutrient dense, and free from all the garbage found in most convenient snacks. And by the way, this is buffalo chicken, no preservatives, no added sugar, no artificial anything. They are naturally fermented, which means they support your gut, deliver more bioavailable nutrients, and of course, have a long shelf life without the use of harmful additives, which is amazing.

22:17Gabrielle Lyon:Paleo Valley sources from regenerative farms here in the US, the kind of farms that treat animals humanely and prioritize soil health. It's like going to the farmer's market, getting a good quality snack, and it's still bird right to your door. Go to paleovalley.com slash Dr. Lion to get 15 % off. That's paleovalley.com slash Dr. Lion. Supplements. Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah. There are some supplements you may be interested in taking during a weight loss journey as a little bit of an insurance policy. Magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, a multivitamin, multimineral, maybe a greens powder, maybe not, maybe a fruits powder, maybe not, maybe some healthy fat supplements, maybe not.

23:02And those just make sure everything's squared away and working fine. And it probably is anyway, if you're eating a mostly healthy diet, but these are things that are like super, super minor that you can do. It's the very least of multivitamin, multimineral every day. Probably a good thing. As far as supplements that really like have a wallop effect after that, they don't exist. Stimulants are okay, but stimulants are - like a yo himby fedra fedra damn girl we're back in the 90s is that even i don't think so i don't

23:30Gabrielle Lyon:know yeah so guys we're not saying to take it i am purely uh picking dr mike's brain so before you guys get excited please understand so i mean you did say stimulants i mean okay i probably should have went to coffee yeah right stimulants i would say is kind of like a really uh pretty gnarly sword like a powerful sword, but there's no handle. You just grab the sword and bleed right into it. And some people have really calloused hands. They do just fine. Some people, oh, that doesn't work. Tell me what kind of, what stimulant type of thing are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. So some people, uh, stimulants make their brain go really well and they're productive and aware and all the, they feel great.

24:13Some people just get a lot of anxiety from them, like way more than they get anything else. And they're like, I can't live like this. Some people fall asleep fine. I can, I could do, just do a natural experiment. You give my wife an espresso. It's 8 PM. You wait until 8 45. She'll pass out on the couch.

24:27Gabrielle Lyon:See my husband too. Actually you give him espresso at eight and by 805, that guy is done. So if you gave me an espresso at eight at four in the morning, I would be like connecting the dots and conspiracy theories and checking into a psychiatric ward. Well, not that part, but yes. But you talked about caffeine. there are other ones i mean yes uh let's say over the counter stimulants caffeine is the main driver of all of them yep and other stimulants are interesting they have some interesting fat loss and health benefits but teeny tiny and actually caffeine is quite teeny tiny so if you can use caffeine to give you a bit more energy if it doesn't interfere with your sleep much and if you can do it to have it's got a pretty interesting decent hunger suppressive effect what What about nicotine?

25:12Gabrielle Lyon:Nicotine gum, nicotine pouches? Yeah, so nicotine is in that same situation. Nicotine has some health downsides that caffeine does not. So it's just not my first go-to. Nicotine has substantial addiction potential. So it's not something you use on a diet and then quit because you're like, I've been fucking more nicotine right now. Just go straight to Siggy's. Not even the filtered ones. I'm talking about 1956, like your fridge probably has in there right now. Oh yeah, definitely. Just full of cigarettes. and, uh, shrunken heads. Yes. If you open that, you never know what's going to die from smoking cigarettes.

25:46Gabrielle Lyon:It's a lesson, but nicotine, cause you hear, um, with the fasting community, them using nicotine pouches, that works great for fasting, but the nicotine is a pretty hard drug. You know, it's a drug drug, like capital D drugs. So if you want to get addicted to nicotine dope, nicotine also doesn't have like great profiles on your blood pressure. From what I understand, and heart dynamics aren't great. Caffeine is a little bit of that, but they're substantially more muted from my understanding, not an expert area of mine. So if you were to pick one, it might be caffeine. Yeah, for most people, I'd probably start at caffeine and work your way up to cocaine as that happens.

26:21He's kidding, guys. Just joking, yes, don't go taking cocaine, unless you're in the 80s and having a good time. So basically, stimulants are on paper sometimes really cool. and for many people they're a great kind of adjunct to this process of dieting that works pretty well. They have the downsides that interfere with their sleep. When you're not on them you get headaches and literally like physiological drug withdrawal. If you're not on enough of them in your phase after you're done dieting you're really hungry and it drives you insane. If you wake up in the evening or in the middle of the night or in the morning too early to take stimulants yet and you're hungry there's no way out for you because the fuck your anti-hunger thing is also wakefulness thing.

27:06So I'd say stimulants are, um, also in study after study, caffeine doesn't by itself have a very good raw thermogenic effect. And so if it can control your appetite for you, that's okay. But also your body gets used to it real fast. And so like coffee worked great week one and week eight, you need like eight monsters and five coffees and the shit barely does anything. And it's all side effects at that point. You're like, this is unsustainable. So as far as supplements that work well, I would say caffeine is a cool thing to use. Stimulants are cool in context, but they're not this panacea that everyone should have.

27:36Now, this might be the time to talk about modern anorectic drugs. Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah. So, um, yeah, yeah. So an anorectic is, uh, means something that reduces your drive to eat food drive. And so anorectic drugs are drugs that reduce appetite. And so there are a couple of classes. There are two classes right now of anorectic drugs that work really well. Um, it's, uh, the, so technically the third generation GLP one agonists like Ozempic aka somaglutide. And then there's, uh, the fourth generation, uh, GLP GIP combined agonist, and that's, uh, Zep bound terzepatide. They work amazingly well.

28:21They're the first kinds of drugs really of their kind and mass market, they get out the problem of hunger from a pretty root perspective compared to caffeine, for example. So their suite of side effects is much more minimal. Their suite of side effects that improve health is substantial. They're net health improvers. If you just give them to the random person, they'll just get healthy over time.

28:47Gabrielle Lyon:It's fascinating. That's fascinating. It's a big deal because usually you'll get drugs like that and they're like, yeah, but it's killing you. Like, nope, this is actually, oh yeah, well the stimulant based drugs have to suffer from a lot of the same problems. Here's another really trippy thing. There are now at least a few studies that are multiple years long that show people do not get used to GLP ones. However much hunger it made you lose in the first several weeks is exactly how much hunger it's going to make you lose in week number 92, which is unreal. And how fast, and they, you know, um, they work pretty fast.

29:18Gabrielle Lyon:People will say, oh well it takes i don't know what is it 46 or 48 weeks to reach peak or there's multiple um inflection points that an individual could begin to lose weight but i mean we see it in practice by you know four weeks into i mean they're losing weight whether it's 24 weeks in they've lost a substantial amount of weight i think it's very individual yeah um whether it's 13 % or 22%. So I can speak to that with some detail. Most people will feel an anorectic effect within several hours of administration of the drug, much of its subcutaneous once weekly. So within several hours, you may have an idea that you're going to eat a lot of food.

30:00You put the typical amount of food on your plate halfway through, you're like, fuck am I doing? I don't want this anymore. Yeah. And so it's kind of hits right away, more or less. and then these drugs have very long half lives that are measured in a week or longer. And so you take it once a week, which means if you run the math, a lot of, for example, semaglutide reaches its peak at any given small, like any given dose you start, let's say 0.5 milligrams per week. It reaches its peak effect in your blood five weeks later, even if you don't add anything. It's just like once a week you take 0.5 milligrams and the dose in your blood goes up, up, up, up, up.

30:39So one of the big take home points from this is if you have an amount of some agglotides you're taking and you just started taking it and you're like, I don't really feel a lot of the hunger effects. It would be easy to stay on it for a few weeks. After a few weeks, you're going to be like, holy shit, thank God I did not my dose. Cause that would have caught up to you big time. And then it takes weeks for it to go back down.

30:57Gabrielle Lyon:Be sick and nauseous, throwing up. You could be, um, the side effects definitely if you increase a dose too fast or, uh, not good. And a lot of times like people will get on social media and blame the drug. Like what didn't work for me. It made me throw up. Like how much did you take Betty? And she's, I don't know, like the whole thing. Oh my God. Right. This unreal powerful drug. So for most people are not going to need that much. And then it's really kind of a turn dial for hunger. The more drug you take, the less your hunger is. And then you just like lose as much weight as not you want, but pretty close more or less.

31:29I mean, as long as you can tolerate the side effects and big time, if your diet and lifestyle well, comport well with the drug. One of the things about these drugs is if you give yourself high palatable foods that are also high in fat, then you're able to like outrun the drug at the mouth and brain and eyes level. You're like cookies. And then your stomach's like two middle fingers and up it goes, or you feel really sick or all sorts of both holes situation. And so it's really a big mistake to do that. So the best diet you can have for these drugs is a healthy diet, relatively low in fat, but low in calories and high in healthy food so that you never have to run into this problem of tolerating the drug poorly.

32:13We have a friend that has been taking these drugs and she's completely transformed her body. And she had what we lovingly call the macaroni and cheese incident. She's a few weeks into the drug. She was at like a family gathering and they're like, oh, mac and cheese. And she took the right kind of portion, a little bit of it. And she was like, nope, bathroom. The body's like, no, too much fat. And so if you manage your diet properly and you take these drugs, the primary way in which they work is they use their anorectics. They reduce food drive and they do all kinds of really awesome things for your health, including mental side effects.

32:45They actually make you less prone to every kind of addictive behavior they've studied so far.

32:49Gabrielle Lyon:Yes, we see that all the time in practice. Yeah. Individuals that are interested in alcohol seem to be no longer interested in alcohol. Cigarettes, that whole thing. Anything. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. And so these drugs are not mandatory. You can lose tons of weight and get super healthy without them. But I would say that in the modern context with the evidence that we have, they're definitely like a tool in the toolbox. And if you've really been struggling without them, I would say going to talk to your primary health care provider about them is a real small idea. Absolutely agree.

33:17Gabrielle Lyon:You know those people that can fall asleep anywhere, that person that gets on the airplane and before they even take off, they're asleep. I'm not one of those people. I need all the sleep help I can get. and one of the sponsors of our show, AG1, has done it again. They have created AGZ, and this is a nightly drink that helps you wind down. It's melatonin-free with clinically studied herbs and adaptogens and minerals. AGZ is one of the few sleep supplements that contain both Magteen, which is magnesium L3 and 8, and saffron, two high-quality ingredients at amounts supported by research. That's amazing.

33:55Gabrielle Lyon:It has 250 milligrams of highly bioavailable magnesium in every serving, which is providing over half your daily value. AGZ is NSF certified, the gold standard in independent quality and safety certification. It is free of melatonin, gluten, dairy, added sugar, artificial sweeteners. If you're ready to turn down the stress and turn up the relaxation then head to drink ag1.com slash lion to get your free broth or with your first purchase of agc which supplements have the best evidence give me your top three and i also have a a few uh statements that are i need a yes or no answer which can be very difficult for you um try to box me in i am listen okay so my mount rushmore of supplements is not gonna like thrill anybody because it's going to be stuff that everybody's aware of uh number one is creatine monohydrate uh i i give me the dose five grams per day do you know that 12 for brain health they're well so there was so for muscle five grams per day resaturate there was a recent study that showed an acute 30 gram dose actually improved uh cognitive function this guy i can never pull can you imagine i would say that um can you imagine arguing with you you know like just you know i'm so excited i can pull up some x's they can probably give you some i'm very excited um to chat with your your current beautiful lady but i would just not want to argue with you it would just be like well that time uh in 2003 that way at 5 17 and 30 seconds p.m oh you're right okay so this is i already know this wait i am going to call you out nobody knows this about lane he is a freak when it comes to scientific literature and numbers and like ridiculous if i'm like lane um so uh i would love for you to come to houston on september 22nd um we're planning on having dinner with everybody this day in one ear and out the other hey what about that event this guy you give him a date or something else anything with numbers outside of academics education or money forget it yeah um did anyone know that about you probably not uh my girl never knows yes of course because she i think it actually gave her like a hard time for a while because she was kind of like like i would struggle with dates times uh recalling certain things in conversation yes and she'd be like it's called how can you like this it's called man brain yeah man brain yes man so i don't want to deter you but yes we have to close this out because people do not know this about you no so and and i i never actually realized like that i just thought study wise that that's how people were no and layman uh last year we were all at an event and he goes yeah i've never met anybody who could just i just like the bane of my between that and your skin it's a bane of my existence so yeah um i i don't know why i got that way i just had a photographic memory when it came to studies and you know it just kind of worked out creatine so five grams five grams for muscle 30 grams acutely for um is darren kandau's work so i don't actually know that um i forget you got one you got one um now the the question i would have is okay would you get the same benefits if you just like took that five gram maintenance dose and over time you would get there perhaps the 30 gram dose is just a saturating effect early on it makes sense who knows hopefully that that cognitive research is going to expand more but i honestly have a really people like well do i need creatine no you don't need it but i have a hard time making the argument against taking it and do you know that you know how much creatine you would get in a um cooked steak yes one pound a pound a pound you get about half a gram of bioavailable creatine i mean so that would be what two and a half pounds of weight you would have to eat five to get two and a half grams yeah yeah no thanks yeah it's it's a little bit more that i i think i worked out the math because um everybody wants to know there was a claim from the carnivore community that all you need to do is eat red meat and i'm like oh well you need to eat about seven and a half pounds of red meat what does make cooking much easier and menu choices what is your next what is your next supplement let me finish with creatine all right i'm just trying to keep you on track you don't need to load if you have gastrointestinal side effects from it split it into two two and a half gram doses um that will help with the gastrointestinal discomfort also any form of creatine other than monohydrate in my opinion is a waste of money um all the studies looking at different forms of creatine creatine monohydrate performs just as well or better and it's the cheapest version so get that if you want to go a little bit more bougie get the micronized version gets more soluble mixes up better next one caffeine the original nootropic the original cognitive enhancer i'll take it very consistently show caffeine uh will uh it actually increases bmr slightly may improve fat loss just a little bit um cognitive uh like task recall stuff people are better at performance people get a little bit better at um how much what's the kind of dose uh so if you want like strength and power stuff you got to get like three to six milligrams per kilogram so pretty high dose if you're looking at like anti-fatigue cognitive stuff probably around like 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine so basically it's how crazy do you want to feel.

39:44Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. So for me as a super ADHD person, I'm kind of a caffeine junkie. Um, you know, I, I'll have about 500 milligrams of caffeine before I train, but I'm also like, you know, if your ADHD stimulants don't affect you the same way, I just, that doesn't make me like, it just makes me very focused. Um, so I like caffeine. Um, obviously there's the, you know the the impact on sleep again no solutions only trade-offs if you are someone who trains later in the day the half-life of caffeine is six hours you're probably like let's say you're going to train like 5 p.m you're probably better off having your caffeine dose like maybe like three hours earlier and that way you know after six hours at least half of it's out of your system And some people are fast metabolizers and some people are slow.

40:40Gabrielle Lyon:There's some genetic variants. I think it's COMT. It's just a SNP. But again, that's one SNP. So some people, you know, caffeine affects them. Other people, they're able to metabolize it very fast. Yeah. And again, look, again, when we do studies, we report averages. If you know that you're somebody who gets really jittery with caffeine intake, you know, take in the amount of caffeine that you feel like you can tolerate. And then whey protein. So whey protein just. Why whey as opposed to something else? Well, one, it tastes good. Even like unflavored whey actually has like a little bit of sweetness to it.

41:15It's easy to flavor. It mixes up well. The consistency is good. It's not super expensive. And it's very high in leucine. Oh, what's that? So leucine is the amino acid responsible for triggering muscle protein synthesis. now i would consider whey protein of the popular proteins out there the highest quality protein very bioavailable great pd cause pd cause is an amino acid score corrected for digestibility um that kind of assesses like does it supply all the essential amino acids and whey does and it's very high in the branch chains very high in leucine what about the

41:52Gabrielle Lyon:alpha lactalbumin and lactoferrin are those immunoglobulins i mean i know that they're highly available and present in the concentrate the whole way what about the the whey isolate does that also have um alpha lactalbumin lactoferrin which are again immunoglobulins that are good for gastrointestinal health and immunity so potentially good for immunity and gastrointestinal yes what i'll tell people is whey concentrate has those and it's less expensive usually a little bit higher in carbohydrate higher in lactose uh higher in fat is a weight concentrate but you're getting some of those other things that we're talking about that are maybe beneficial for like gut health immunity those sorts of things weight isolate less of those but also virtually devoid of lactose um very low in carbohydrate very low in fat so it really just depends a lot of people have difficulty tolerating a straight whey concentrate oh yeah um a lot of the most a lot of people can tolerate like a blend so like kind of an isolate concentrate blend and do you like that over a rice pea blend for exactly those reasons i mean i am biased i do like whey isolate over that because rice pea blend i mean yeah there are probably other bioactive compounds that we just don't know but i think whey we have a pretty good understanding of what's in it i i like way isolate and that's what my company outwork nutrition sells as a protein because i wanted something that most people could take in so a isolate it's very low carb very low fat it still tastes good i wouldn't know because you haven't sent me any i mean look he's looking over his shoulder all you gotta do asking you shall receive asking you shall receive um so i i like away isolate just because i know most people are gonna be able to tolerate there are some people who do have are really sensitive to the lactob humans in a way that still don't tolerate away isolate very small percentage of the population for them you can do away hydrolyzate uh now they they're increasing in levels of cost like concentrate is the cheapest whey isolate a little more expensive whey hydrolyzate is more expensive hydrolyzate is enzymatically digested so those those polypeptide chains get chopped up with enzymes so that will almost i can't imagine somebody not being able to tolerate a whey hydrolyzate the downside is it's more expensive and it doesn't taste as good but if you want a good high quality whey and you're somebody who you know you get a lot of gastrointestinal discomfort with whey isolate or whey concentrate, whey hydrolysated would be an option.

44:40Gabrielle Lyon:Oh, oh, sorry. It's time to record an ad for the show. Thank you to one of the sponsors of the show, Timeline. And listen, my kids still sleep with me. And after 470 nighttime snack requests, bathroom breaks, my husband's snoring, my cell is there like, yo, gee, we're tapped out. Enter MitoPure. Timeline nutrition is one of the most thoroughly researched products I have come across in over a decade. look, it's carried in my purse. They have peer reviewed published science, and this is where it gets really interesting. So for those of you who are following the muscle centric lifestyle, when you increase bioenergetics, you improve muscle function and health.

45:21Gabrielle Lyon:In adults, 40 plus, timeline has been shown to increase muscle strength and endurance and no change in activity. So whether you've been active resistance training your whole life, or you're just getting started, or you're not getting a lot of sleep and you've got a million requests, your muscles and your mitochondria need help. And they have just launched their low sugar, vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free gummies, which by the way, I am eating by the handfuls, which I shouldn't, but they taste delicious. Timeline is offering our community 20 % off your first order. Go to timelinenutrition.com slash dr lion and use the code dr lion to get 20 off i recommend trying their starter pack with all three different formats and of course their gummies which are incredible can someone just lose body fat or do you think um there must be some lean mass lost is there a way to do it under some conditions you can actually gain lean mass while you lose fat but the condition has to be you're pretty new to training, um, or you're not new to training, but you're new to significant quantities of anabolic steroids.

46:30Um, there are a few other conditions, but generally speaking, when already lean people lose weight, they use some combination of fat and muscle. When people who aren't exercised, they haven't really trained and they haven't lifted weights much. And their diet is like just whatever they feel like When they start getting a healthy diet, higher in protein, and they start lifting weights, which we covered on my last appearance here on the show, then they can actually gain muscle and lose fat at the same time for months and months and months and months and months, if not years. But for people that are already pretty lean or people who already lift weights, yeah, there's going to be some combination of muscle and fat.

47:12Gabrielle Lyon:Now, how would you define pretty lean? So let's say someone was, um, a overweight female who is now attracted calories for two weeks. She has determined what her maintenance calorie is. Let's say it's 1800 and she decides to decrease her calories by 350, 500. So she's eating. What is that? Um, 1300 calories. Okay. Okay. Um, do you account for activity or that's the number? The activity question is a little bit of a different question. Okay. Well then I shouldn't go there yet. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. We can, we can definitely handle it whenever you like. Um, so how do we determine who's fat or not fat?

47:58Who's lean? I'd say the easiest test in the real world is like someone's wearing clothes and you just come up to someone else. You're like, is she fat or not? It's really straightforward. forward. If you at least look like an up and down shape, you're good. If there's stuff coming off the sides and the front and the back and the whole thing, you're fat. Now it's ruthlessly unscientific and quite discourteous to say to someone, you would never tell someone something like that. But it's one of those things you look at documentaries in the 1950s. How many people were fat?

48:25Gabrielle Lyon:None. How do you know? I mean, they're just in close, right? But that's what I mean by generally lean. Like no one would, no one would look at you and be like, that's definitely a fat person, right? So if we like take a little walk, no offense, Houston, Texas, the fatometer is going to be at the grocery store, like fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. I mean, are you sure you don't think that 600 pound ladies mostly lean body mass? No, yes, I would, I would not say that. So people who are generally like a close enough within 15 pounds of their insurance table, adjusted body weight, you can consider them fairly lean and without some rigorous weight training and very perfectionist diet, they're going to typically experience significant amount of muscle loss.

49:03People who are significantly more over fat may lose less muscle, but also a lot of that is because they start being more physically active as they lose the weight. So that's a big deal as well. If both groups of people start weight training, when they start losing weight, then they just build muscle and lose fat at the same time. And that's a really, really big deal. As a matter of fact, on that note of weight loss, if you don't lift weights and you start losing weight, you do lose significant amounts of muscle.

49:29Gabrielle Lyon:And it doesn't actually matter where your protein is. We think, I mean, yes, protein has a protein sparing effect, but without activity, without, without muscular specific training to get more jacked, it's actually protein doesn't have a terribly protein sparing effect. That's right. You can't like eat 300 grams of protein up to like getting jacked. If you don't lift weights, it actually just gets burned and excreted and all that whole thing. So you're totally correct about that. So it, the lifting weights thing does matter, but a little while back, um, one of the new anorecter drugs was Mpik got a little bit of hot water.

50:05Cause people were like, Oh, like it's causing people lots of muscle mass loss. And it was true, but it was no more muscle mass loss than you would expect with people who lost like 50 pounds in a year. That's just going to be a lot of muscle loss. It's not especially a thing that GLP ones even do. And there's actually a new review that came out. There was like exactly what we would expect if you just lost a lot of weight. I think is those people never lost that much muscle because they never lost that much weight because the, and I've got all great sorts of great things to say about the anorectic drugs, whenever they do have a big role to play in all.

50:32Gabrielle Lyon:So I want to, um, finish covering the macronutrients, how you would dose dietary protein, how you would think about dosing carbohydrates and how you would dose fat. And if there is a particular distribution that you would use, I am coming to you, Dr. Mike, and I want to lose weight. from where in any case let's pretend you're just enormous like not just overweight but like offensively enormous are you pretending um right now oh yeah well i was looking at crystal stop checking out my wife i mean she's the best by the way um she is going to be a another podcast guest here thank you andrew coates i now put two and two together yes so there are two ways to go about it for macros.

51:22One way is to use the expanded fitness approach, which includes macros that are not ultra specific because the people who are using this, they want a diet that they can easily do. It does not require a huge departure from normal eating habits. For those people, I would say take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by like 0.6, 60%. So if you weigh 200 pounds, anything at close to at or over 120 grams of protein per day is more than enough to provide a great amount of protein for almost every need that you have.

52:07Gabrielle Lyon:So wait, so say that again. So it's 60 % of your body weight. So instead of a gram per pound, it's 0.6 grams per pound. For someone who's wanting to lose weight. Correct. And that is more than enough protein to meet all of your needs. If you begin to resistance train, it's more than enough protein for most people's goals. It'll largely prevent muscle mass loss and actually get some accretion going. So that's really good stuff. And is that roughly 1.6 grams per kg? Is that how that? Oh, fuck. I don't know. Okay. Got it. I'm in America. Damn. We are? Okay. Well, we're in Texas, so I don't know. You never know.

52:40Gabrielle Lyon:That belongs to America. No mess of Texas, man. So, um, 0.6, 60 % of your body weight. Yeah. In pounds, right. Which is not a lot. And so, but that is the scientifically honest answer to how much protein we probably really need need with a capital N, especially people that aren't like trying to optimize hardcore. That's an important point. if you're not necessarily fully trying to optimize. You just want to dip your toe in and get some great results. That's totally cool because a lot of people get that gram per pound thing, which is what I use. If the number I'm going to say next, that's the optimization number.

53:20So if you weigh 200 pounds, it's roughly 200 grams of protein a day. But even if they're trying to lose, if they're trying to lose weight from 200,

53:27Gabrielle Lyon:you would still say meet the 200 or would you say meet their goal body weight?

53:35There's a few ways to go about that. one is a protein has a decent anti-hunger effect. And so if you actually eat 200, even though you don't need it, it can be pretty decent. Um, the goal body weight is totally fine. You can scale it to lean body mass, which also works just fine. Yeah. So you're saying that there are multiple

53:56Gabrielle Lyon:ways to do something right. For sure. But any answer between taking your body weight and multiplying it by pretty close to half point six, all the way up to a gram per pound per day is a lot of really good answers in there. Yeah. And it's nothing is if someone was sitting next to me on that airplane, first of all, it'd be highly inconvenienced because my arms, I mean, you just, I feel bad for that person. You're just kind of on their seat. I tried, I tried to get the seatbelt going and I put my hands in it. I really tried to stay out of people's ways. I did not pay for that side of the seat. but um if they told me listen you know like i weigh 200 pounds and i'm really trying to get fit i have like 160 grams of protein a day is that like too little absolutely not you're doing great now if you want to step on stage mr olympia you might have a different goal if you want to your optimized super physique you're already lean and jacked you might need more protein if you're significantly older etc etc etc you might need more but for most people especially like the our hypothetical female audience, uh, for this podcast, 0.6 all the way to a gram is totally fine.

54:57So that's for protein.

54:58Gabrielle Lyon:Do you care the kind of protein? If you go to get your protein in a really wacky way, yes. If you eat mostly lean, uh, meats, animal products and lean vegan products that are complete protein sources are complimentary, no big deal. But if you're counting mostly protein from bread and just peas by themselves, you're going to run into some problems. Yeah. So protein quality is a thing. That's actually in a later part of the discussion of like where the food comes from. Yeah. So macros first, but that was a great question for carbs and fats. There is a very distinct story for athletic performance and optimization of hypertrophy and all this stuff.

55:34And that story is kind of like meet your needs for fats. And then the rest should probably come more from carbohydrates than fat. What is the need?

55:42Gabrielle Lyon:What is the needs for fat? So from, for males, probably on females as well, you just generally have two class of need. One is the essential fatty acids of which you need like a total of two rams per day. That's what you need, need to like stay alive and well. And then there is a need that comes from hormone optimization, testosterone, et cetera. And that number is significantly higher. That number is measured more in the 20 to 30 to 40 % of your calories per day. Um, many people can do a broad range of that. Some people really prefer one or the other. Another consideration for how many fats you eat is, and this is kind of the main point of the carbs versus fats is if you're just trying to lose some goddamn weight and get a little leaner and get a little healthier, maybe a lot leaner and healthier, how much carbohydrate versus fat you have, as long as you're meeting that technically speaking two grams of EPA and DHA fats per day.

56:38The rest is down to very, very nuanced specifics, and it just doesn't matter that much. So if someone says, you know, I have 20 grams total of fat per day, but I do have a central fat supplement. I feel great. Best time of my life, all the veggies and rice I can eat. I love it. I'm losing weight. You won't hear me say a damn thing. But if someone says, look, I'm trying to low, low fat, high carb, Mr. Twinkie. That's what I call him as a reference to my genitals, by the way.

57:07Gabrielle Lyon:Oh, I had no idea. He doesn't work anymore. I have like totally lost interest to live. I'm depressed all the time. Like, okay, you're eating too few fats, your testosterone is in the gutter. You need to eat more fats. But a big one is preference and what works in your daily diet. So if you're the kind of person that likes salmon and steak, um, whole eggs, which are great, healthy foods, you should probably a little bit fewer carbohydrates and more fats, same calories. Protein is already squared away, but more fats, fewer carbs. If you're the kind of protein, the kind of protein, the kind of person that is super cool with higher carb, you're not really into fats, nothing in your diet, really.

57:50You don't crave fats. You can dunk the fats pretty low and keep that carbs much higher, but for carbs the low end is considered something like oh i don't know 10 to 30 grams of carbs per day predominantly from green vegetables because they have a lot of fiber and nutrients in them very low that's low i wouldn't recommend that as a first principles thing but there are a lot of keto people and carnivore people eating that and a little less and at least in the medium term they get lean. They're very healthy. They love their lifestyle and all as well. So there's a big, broad range of carbs and fats.

58:28As long as the calories are held constant, you got your protein squared away plus or minus carbs and fats is mostly, um, try it. See how you feel that some people fats give them a lot of fullness through the day.

58:42Gabrielle Lyon:Are you a higher fat or higher carb person? I haven't, I haven't eaten to preference in a generation. Interesting. What is your, just out of curiosity. I'm currently on about 25 grams of fat per day. Okay. So you're a lower fat person. I mean, I'm not because I hate it, but I have to do it for bodybuilding, but I'm not the demographic for this talk. Holy shit. But it's interesting. You you're right. You might not be the demographic for this talk, but I'm telling you that I've been doing this for a long time. and the knowledge that your demographic has for body composition is second to none. Yeah, no, like the bodybuilders kind of figured out how this all works.

59:26Gabrielle Lyon:Hydration isn't just about drinking Coke Zero or other sugar-free sweetened beverages like Red Bull. Now I'm saying this for a friend. Or it's not even about drinking more water. It's about keeping the right balance of electrolytes and fluids. During life's most demanding season, like I don't know parenting maybe pregnancy or postpartum your body is going through massive changes blood volume increases hormones shift breastfeeding demands you know all those things all of these life transitions you probably need more and better hydration and you need electrolytes like sodium magnesium and potassium element is formulated to replenish what you actually lose without sugar fillers and junk that you don't need it's a clean effective way to stay hydrated.

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1:00:51Gabrielle Lyon:That's drinklmnt.com slash drlion. Stay hydrated, stay strong, and as Goggins would say, stay hard. In terms of weight loss, there are two things that are required for re-comping body. And I'm not talking about additional anabolic agents, and I'm not talking about additional GLP-1 or GIP medications. It is resistance training. And this is the work that Don did, you know, some of the early studies, again, thinking ahead, resistance training and maintaining and or increasing dietary protein from the RDA of 0.8 grams per kg to 1.6 grams per kg. So doubling the RDA. Yeah. That seems to be within the literature, just the way to make it happen.

1:01:36Gabrielle Lyon:If I were to ask you, how do you suggest someone think about structuring a diet who is a post-menopausal woman? She is, I don't know, 55, hitting the gym. You know, we should, I want to make sure we talk about exercise. You know, what does her exercise plan look like? And how is she designing a diet? again, I do think that you should talk about carbon, um, because you, there is a way to make it extremely easy. So what are the macronutrients and how would you think about it? And then what are the practical things? Should they use an app? Should they use something like Lumen? Should they use, I just want to throw that in there.

1:02:14Gabrielle Lyon:Should they use, um, I don't know, X, Y, and Z. How do you think about it? So first off, there are many paths to Rome. There's obviously people who have, and i always tell people if you need to debunk any of this you just look around people like for example well you can't lose weight if you're eating uh refined carbohydrates or a high carb diet okay what about professor mark haub who lost 27 pounds doing a twinkie diet like he was eating 1800 calories a day but he mostly ate stuff from 7-eleven and protein powder like that's what he ate right so so again we just have so many examples of different people's you know on the plant-based side you'll have people say well you know if you're eating a lot of fat it gets stored as fat you can't lose fat well how many examples of low carb diets do we have like it works are many passed around what works is finding something that you can adhere to now when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of structuring a diet the number one most important thing is to get your energy intake correct meaning if you want to lose fat you have to consume less energy than you expend Now, let me just do a couple of quick caveats on that because I know there are people who say, well, I know I was in a calorie deficit.

1:03:27I didn't lose weight. No. If you ate the—so everything we eat is a carbon backbone structure, right? You ate those carbons, they have to go somewhere, okay? And if you gained body fat, your body did not create carbons out of nowhere. They came from somewhere. Okay. So we're very well at accounting for those. So we have to get the energy intake right. Now, what is that? Now there, there are variances and whatnot, but essentially like you're trying to find somebody's daily energy expenditure. This is, you brought up carbon. This is kind of what the app does when it's originally like asking you questions and whatnot.

1:04:15and it's usually an equation out there to kind of determine your BMR and then we're using a questionnaire to determine your physical activity and then it's kind of taking the stab at it you know now you may get it wrong it may be wrong right like you might overestimate underestimate for I would say 60 to 70 percent of people it's going to be pretty accurate that's how you know bell curves work right Alright. But then you adjust based on how you respond. Okay. Let me back up.

1:04:45Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah, we want nuts and bolts. I want to know how many, how are we doing? Are we thinking about protein in a percentage? And this is exactly how the app works on the back end and the algorithm. And the reason I'm bringing up carbon is number one. I think it's amazing. And I may or may not have just recently accepted a position as a director of women's health. Very excited about that. Shout out to Mike. who's in hawaii right now but also how do we make things easy for people and also but before we talk about carbon i need you to tell me how many grams of how are we thinking about protein as a percentage which no we are probably thinking about it in terms of grams i know where you come from i know the school of thought are we thinking about a baseline number so if the current rda is 130 grams of carbohydrates does everybody get that off the bat or um do they have to earn that increase in carbon you know i think about shane my husband who's running chicago marathon right if we you know we have to account for that and then the fat where do you how someone listening at home who doesn't have carbon yet what are they gonna do so again depending on your goal if your goal's fat loss yeah we'll just call it fat loss fat loss while muscle muscle maintenance so you get your you get your let's just say you get your calories right okay so you have to get the right amount of energy to lose fat and energy deficit the next step when i construct a diet and this is how the app works as well in the back end is okay we have the amount of calories that we think is going to be reasonable for somebody to lose fat then we set what is the deficit do you think um is it a 10 deficit how do you begin to think about it depends on like again it just depends on how quickly somebody wants to try and lose weight or fat um this is somewhat of an experiment it's interesting because you are um an evidence-based scientist and even in evidence-based practices we still have to adjust and and kind of go with i mean there is individuality no matter how you look at it and the randomized controlled trials are um you know broadly speaking hopefully through populations yeah i mean i think people um again i think everybody should have to take a basic statistics course because i think people have a a hard time understanding like the concept of variance and whatnot so if we have calories set the next thing we're going to set is protein because it's the most important macronutrient for the reason we talked about thermic effect to food satiety um body composition and so i said that as a gram per kilo or gram per pound of lean mass see you and i are different here yeah i don't know my lean mass well so again this is matt producer what's your lean mass why are you trying to get your something out of your man bag so the reason i the reason i say lean mass is because if you have somebody who's very obese it's really going to overestimate protein if you're giving it based on their their actual body mass but again a lot of people don't know their lean mass like you said which is why when in carbon when they're signing up there's questions um if you don't have like an actual body fat measurement then there's some questions about waist circumforts and whatnot we we make a we make an estimation of what your your body fat is and from your body fat your total weight we can determine your approximate lean mass people get so hung up on this it's it's not a big deal if we're slightly off right so we're saying maybe like ideal body weight ideal body weight somebody could do as well.

1:08:19So we're looking at like around two grams per kilo of lean mass up to three grams per kilo of lean mass is what the app will end up recommending. And that's typically what I recommend as well. Now, three grams per kilo lean mass might sound like a lot, but when you consider if you're not doing total body mass, it winds up around probably 2.2 to 2.4 grams per kilogram of total body mass for somebody with an average body fat, you know, on average. So that's on the upper end. But again, I like protein. But again, in the app, you can adjust within a certain range if you want to. So once you've got calories set, once you've got protein set, again, I like around two grams per kilogram of lean mass.

1:09:05Gabrielle Lyon:Of lean mass, which is interesting. I'm trying to think about what that would be. so if someone was so if someone was 52 kilograms and that's their total body weight you think is this someone's name gabrielle lion no i'm smaller than that yeah kind of but i'm i think i'm actually smaller than 52 kilograms you know how much so if i'm 100 and i don't know maybe buck 10 if i'm lucky how much how many grams of protein would that be right around 100 to 110 you know okay so i'd If you're 110 and you're pretty darn lean, my guess is your body fat is somewhere around 12, 13 % body fat. Not that high, but it should be.

1:09:46Okay, 10%. Just kidding. You're looking at about 100 pounds of lean mass. That's about 45 kilos. You double that, 99, about 100 grams of protein, right? Yep. So our app would put you anywhere from like 100 to 150 grams of protein, depending on your personal preference, right? and so once you've got the protein number set we have to deduct those calories out of your total calorie goal and then you have carbs and fat left and so what i did as a coach and what the app does is kind of say what do you what kind of dietary preference do you have do you prefer a little more fat do you prefer a little more carb do you like a balanced diet are you plant-based are you ketogenic and you can pick any of those things and it will put you and will you know distribute the carbohydrates and fats appropriately is there a minimum amount of carbohydrates that you seem to like for an athletic person i mean it depends on the athletic event if we're talking about somebody doing like actual anaerobic stuff for a lifter

1:10:52Gabrielle Lyon:let's say for someone who is lifting doing resistance training um for hypertrophy three days a week but they're just doing it to maintain skeletal muscle mass what are you thinking do you care i'll give you the straight down the line scientific answer then i'll give you the i'm trying to pin him here guys true serum i like i guess yes yes so the straight down the line scientific answer is it doesn't seem to matter that much um carbohydrate to fat there are some individual studies that showed less lean mass accrual on a ketogenic diet versus a non-ketogenic diet equated to protein but there was also a recent meta-analysis showing that there really wasn't a difference between high carb low carb with protein equated i think if you inject me with true serum i think a little bit of carbohydrate is probably better just because even though carbohydrate insulin is not anabolic in the physiological range it is anti-catabolic it does inhibit protein degradation and there was actually a study from tipton showing that post exercise when they gave carbohydrate with protein, or it might have been with amino acids, that the net protein balance was more positive when they gave it with carbohydrate.

1:12:02Gabrielle Lyon:You can still make body composition improvements by just being consistent. And again, you can change it for if someone is moderately trained or more advanced, you would increase the either volume or intensity, which would you think is more important for body composition changes, specifically fat loss? Yeah, you know what? I would have to look at training age first. So if someone is new to training, if I'm coming in with an intensity approach, in my opinion, most people are not gonna be able to stabilize and maintain. I mean, if I had my wish out of it, I mean, I would balance out between some volume work and dropping down volume and raising intensity.

1:12:42I think it's been my approach my entire career. I will set my training up into different blocks, blocks of like two months, right? Where -

1:12:51Gabrielle Lyon:And is that how everyone should do it? No, this is just how I do it. So I'll set up like January and February will be the same program, but I'll have progressions every two weeks and the exercises will change in February. And then March will come - When you have hockey? Yeah, I mean, listen, I gotta pay attention. Like during, I'm a hack hockey player, let me be clear, but if you're playing three, four days a week, you wanna be careful about how you load the spine. You wanna be careful about specific movements that you're doing, like your body could potentially, you know, it could take a toll on your body.

1:13:24So I think exercise selection is important. And I think intensity is important when you're playing that much. And then when you scale off, I think it's a time to put your foot on the gas in certain areas and maybe start focusing on a little more strength and power. And you can get a little bit more aggressive with certain things. But all throughout the year, for me, it's like those workouts start with that practice portion. And that's what allows me to feel very...

1:13:46Gabrielle Lyon:Lost. Lost. I like that term. I don't like, it's just, it's a fun term to use. And it's not a scientific term. Let's be very clear here. But it just feel more, feel more flossed and feel more loose and feel more recovered. The pull for the beginner, what are the best pull movements that, again, you know, you and I talk, we're really training for longevity. Even, and everybody should, whether they're a military operator or an actor, it's your body's your tool. Resiliency, yeah. Exactly. Yep. what are some of the key pulling exercises that you like? Yeah, I'll break it down from like a vertical pull or a horizontal pull.

1:14:22So it's no different than the pressing, right? Vertical pull can be your pull-up, chin-up, neutral grip pull-up, lat pull-down, right? Like that's your vertical pulling, right? You're pulling high down. And then your horizontal pull could be like your one-arm dumbbell row, your chest-supported row, your face pull, right? Some with equipment, some with dumbbells, some with machines. It's, you know, if you have access to that equipment, I'm all for you. You know, have fun with your training also. Like if you're getting in and you're training at home all the time and you're bored and you're just like, oh, you know, Don and Gabrielle wrote me this dumbbell, wrote this dumbbell program and I'm just getting bored of it.

1:14:56Like go to a gym, get some variability, like have fun with your training, like go in there and, you know, don't make it miserable. Like I want you to enjoy it.

1:15:03Gabrielle Lyon:I have a question that I don't know the answer to and you might not know the answer to this. Probably not.

1:15:10Gabrielle Lyon:This is so fun having you on the podcast. Thank you, thank you. where did these exercises come from? I mean, who invest, I mean, just think about it. We create these programs and then we continue them. A squat makes sense because that's something that my kid could do. But where do we, where did one determine that a pull is important? I mean, a pull-up would make sense, but some of these exercises, have you ever thought about who develop them or why? Yeah. I mean, I think we have a few names for a few of the movements out there, right? But I mean, people are inventing crap today. They're just like throwing a name on it.

1:15:49And you say to yourself, well, obviously through social media and through the reach that we have, I think these things are so much more visible and fitness now is so much more accepted than it was, you know, even back in the sixties and seventies, like that was fit that people who are fit, Jack LaLanne, I'll never forget it. Like I was, um, I trained with him once.

1:16:07Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. So he was, he came into Gold's Gym. I want to say it was either his 90th birthday or Gold's Gym's like 100th or 90th anniversary. And they had Jacqueline kind of walking into the gym. And he looked at me, I was in a sleeveless shirt and he's like, let's get me on camera with that kid. So I ended up working out with him and, you know, he was 90 years old. He was inclined pressing 55 pound dumbbells. And I got to sit with him and hear his story a bit. And when he passed, I was invited by his wife, Elaine, her name was Elaine LaLanne, right? And down, we went down to the Tribeca, one of the Tribeca theaters, and I sat through this documentary.

1:16:46I gotta be honest, I was teary-eyed most of the time because this guy, people, he was like, you know, back in the day, he's like, you know, I'm mixing all these fruits and vegetables in this blender and blending them together. People are like, this guy's crazy. And he's, you know, pulling a barge, he's swimming and he's pulling this humongous barge and he's doing all these feats and he is really one of the people that kind of set the standard and I think kind of, yeah, in a way normalized like what it is we all go do now, moving weights and moving. And I think it's such a beautiful thing. But when you turn around and you look at these exercises, some of these exercises have been around for centuries.

1:17:20I mean, thousands of years, like there've been people doing some of these movements and once in a while, you'll be able to find a picture of a physique from 100 years ago and you're like, oh my God, like he's obviously natty. Like he looks amazing. Like, but it's cool to see that. It's cool for me to see it. But nowadays, like, yeah, like you look at the RDL, like it's a hinge. Like people have been hinging forever. And suddenly someone's like, oh, we're going to call this the Romanian deadlift or, you know, it's like -

1:17:50Gabrielle Lyon:There are movements that again, have been around for a really long time. Yeah. The pull-up. Like, oh wow, that's a real scientific name. Like someone's hanging from a bar, like pull yourself up. Like we're calling that the pull up. Like it's probably how it literally happened. And then we just hung with these things. And then now you see all these sports scientists now, um, researching and trying to find out other ways to do things more efficiently. But, um, I also, it's interesting about a lot of this research is we we've all seen research that, um, have been published and, you know, you've seen it then contradicted, you know, decades later.

1:18:22And there's some, there's certain research papers that we'll, and you even explain, yeah, that you'll look at and you're like, oh, this is solid. But, you know, I also look at specific experts in our field that have been doing this stuff for 20, 25, 30, 35 years. And they're some of the best research experts without having things published. Isn't it amazing?

1:18:40Gabrielle Lyon:I know exactly who you're referencing. Yeah. So for me, that's impressive. Like just because a paper might come out and might say, well, there's no evidence that mobility is helpful. Well, this guy's been doing it for 30 years and this guy now is 70 years old and he moves beautifully my evidence is gonna push myself in that direction or sometimes it takes time for for evidence to catch up with what we know or hypothesis the we talked about squat push pull core exercises yes tell me how important those are for a beginner and what we should be doing because i remember i went on a good morning america and I called you, I'm like, Don, they want me to do exercise.

1:19:23Gabrielle Lyon:I'm like, do you remember this? And I was like, here's what I'm thinking for the core exercises. I went, blah, blah, blah, sit up. And you're like, no, we're not doing a sit up. So explain to us good core exercises and what. Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear. The sit-ups have been around for a long time and there are plenty of people that can do sit-ups and never have back issues. I'm just, when I - But maybe it's not the best, I mean - Yeah, so the reason why I don't program it is because, you know, statistically, Basically, a lot of people have sore backs and a lot of people are sitting in this position.

1:19:53They're in this kyphonic position all day. And just adding, I think, that flexion under strain can be detrimental, right? So I'm a huge fan of one-arm carries or some type of form.

1:20:09Gabrielle Lyon:As a core exercise. Yeah. Because always core exercises, we think that we're going to be laying on our back doing sit-ups or Matt over there doing flutter kicks. But no. Some of the strongest people I've worked with, they have, you know, we have assigned, you know, carry variations into their training diet. And they've had an incredible level of success with it. I mean, there's so much benefit. There's so much bang for their buck out of that movement. And, you know, like I've seen as a rehab tool, I've seen Dr. Charlie Weingroff, you know, post-surgery bring someone in. And it's a very, whether it's shoulder surgery or whatever it might be, you know, starting them with a weight down low.

1:20:49is gonna be a lot safer than getting them up in this position here. So I have seen this used as a rehab tool from medical professionals, very successful. I've seen it used -

1:20:59Gabrielle Lyon:And a core stability, your number one exercise is a, is it, would it be called an offset carry? It's just a one-arm carry? Yeah, I mean, some form of a carry depending on what they're capable of doing. But I love one-arm carries. Planks are, I think, a great introductory movement. I think teaching someone to get into a plank position and create tension, these tension techniques, getting into position and say, listen, we're not going to hang out in this extended position. Squeeze your glutes, squeeze your legs, squeeze your legs. You talked to something yesterday about a plank. It was, it's not about the length of time that you can hold a plank because an individual could likely.

1:21:36How much tension? Yeah.

1:21:37Gabrielle Lyon:But you said that it was about creating tension and being able to hold the quality of the plank under tension. Right. And that I thought was a really good learning tip. I think it's a great way to kind of supercharge your plank a bit, right? Where most people, I can hold a plank for eight minutes. Like, great. Like there's, trust me, there's plenty of strength carryover from that. But when I see most people holding in those positions, they're in a bad position. And they might be loading themselves in a way that I don't think is, I believe, in my opinion, isn't the safest thing for them. So I think teaching them how to do a hard style tension technique plank for 10 to 20 seconds where I'm literally like telling them, envision a tornado is blowing over you right now as you're in this plank position.

1:22:19What are you going to do? How are you going to stabilize? They're like, well, I'm going to try and rip the floor apart to stabilize. I'm like, exactly. Are your glutes going to be tight? They're like, yeah. Is your chin position going to be packed? Yeah. It's like, I'm moving around them trying to like palpate their body, trying to move them a little bit. And they're just literally shaking within 10 to 20 seconds.

1:22:35Gabrielle Lyon:An isometric hold. Exactly. And how many reps would they, or how many, yeah would it be considered a rep yeah yeah i mean i i would put them maybe under time like so i would start someone off like hey listen let's let's see if you can hold that position because i put people in the positions and they're like i can't hold a plank and i'm like okay we're gonna work up to that and then there's other things like yeah like if they can't hold a plank which i've seen um we can hold a light dumbbell with two hands how light are we talking as light as we have to go to where we're adding external resistance to the equation we want people to get under load yes you want them to get under load and i think that that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions for people is they'll say well um you know i can't lift that that's too heavy and it might be a 10 or 15 pound weight but that's a problem in my opinion but i think it's just a thought process right because you could go lift your child or a suitcase and it's going to be back of groceries that's right it's going to be much heavier than that back of groceries how about this i'm traveling this afternoon we got a suitcase that we're carrying that suitcase is going to weigh a lot more than two pounds.

1:23:34Like you better make sure you're able to carry this stuff. I'll quote recently, I was listening to a physical therapist talk about the one-arm carry and how he likes loading it so heavy that he's like, if you can do a shrug with it, like it's too light type of thing. Right. So I thought that was a really good indicator, but I also understand I am not taking a newbie into the gym on day one when they're feeling vulnerable or they don't have that foundation. And I'm turning like, Hey, Mrs. Smith, like you haven't trained in 40 years or ever. Like, let's go over and grab that 24 kilogram kettlebell and go for a walk.

1:24:06Don't worry if it's heavy. Like, God forbid something happens. Like we have to develop that confidence, whether she can do it or not. We have to develop that confidence. I want them to turn to me. And I want people to feel empowered when they come in to exercise. And when they go and they play with their kids, I want them to feel empowered. We saw a woman that, you know, the other day in her sixties, she was killing it in the gym, healing it, healing it. And you know than me she's my size she's she's stronger than me sled pulling sled pushing sweating out of breath walks by me gives me like a fist i'm like oh my god who is this like superwoman over here uh she runs ultras yeah it's impressive and now we've just and she moves well there's not too many people who run ultras where i'm like wow they move really well oh yeah she moves really

1:24:51Gabrielle Lyon:well yeah it's interesting i was on a podcast and they said okay well how long does it take to see these results? Could it be 24 weeks? And yeah, it could be. It all depends. It's a funny question. It is. Yes. It's like saying, you know, how long is it going to take me to get to Cleveland, Ohio? If I drive from Detroit, we can answer that. But the question of how long am I going to really, like, is my car really going to be going pretty fast? Like, Ooh, I don't know, like within 30 seconds, if you're getting out of your driveway, bathroom stops, right? A hundred percent. And so when people say like, how long until I see these results.

1:25:23It's like, well, like every week you're going to be losing a pound and a half for as many weeks as you keep cranking until you need a psychological break. That could be 12 weeks. Easy. It's like, just keep doing it. And what I would say psychologically, a really good advice, I think is don't worry about that end goal too much. The process, eat your healthy foods, get your 10 ,000 steps, take yours up bound, just let it cook. It'll do its thing. Don't you worry. And if it's not, you adjust your food, you go to the doctor, they adjust your medication dosage and the cycle repeats itself. It's another quick public service announcement because it doesn't get said enough, I don't think.

1:25:57A lot of people have all sorts of interesting ideas and opinions about Ozempic and all that whole craze. And most people, many people come from some place of either kind of a reflexive anti-drug ideology, which is nonsense to begin with. You can steal man it, but it's really tough. And other people come from kind of an iconoclasm, like, well, I'm not into these. These drugs, there's a problem. And it's mostly just people's feelings. It's not really based on ideas, but it's true that some of these drugs are, um, can be improved upon, but it's not a hypothetical because I can tell you two true things.

1:26:33One is there are already drugs in late stage clinical trials that blows Epic out of the fucking water. If you're at home, Google retatratide, retatrutide, all one word. Triple agonist hits the GLP pathway, GIP and glucagon. And I don't know how the fuck they did it, but the glucocon pathway, non-stimulant increases your resting metabolic rate. You just burn more calories. It doesn't wig you out. No psychotropic effects. You just burn more calories and you're less hungry and whatever the fuck GIP does. I don't even know. Triple agonist. Retetritide is going to be on the market probably in a year.

1:27:12And Ozempic is going to be like super discount cheap drug because it's saying shit. If you look at the studies of how much weight people are losing, it was like Ozempic was a big deal. Trisopatide was a bigger deal. Retatratide is that same step. And major pharmaceutical companies around the world, so retatratide would be generation five in this drug scale. They're working on six is an early testing. Seven is in development.

1:27:34Gabrielle Lyon:I have to ask you a question. I don't want to go down a conspiracy rabbit hole, but I love those. Okay. Um, now we have a highly palatable processed food, massive food industry. Mm-hmm. I love that industry by the way. Yes. I will sit here and defend it. Okay. Now we have a drug that is severely limiting people's challenges with obesity. I mean, I mean, people are losing weight, food addiction from some of these highly palatable foods are going away. Do you think that some of the influx of anti-obesity narrative drugs, do you think that potentially that is influenced at all by the food industry?

1:28:28Or where do you think the division is going to be, if at all? That's a great question. So you have the situation where the food industry is just trying to get you to spend as much money as possible, but they're not such big fans of you dying because then you don't spend money anymore. They're also not big fans of you getting out of shape because then you don't like your life and you blame them. And that sucks. It does not like a Hershey CEO that when they see morbidly obese people barely getting out of her car, perfect. They don't like that at all. They would ideally like to see people eat Hershey's candy bars in a state of caloric balance and enjoying their lives.

1:29:06That's how they were meant to be eaten. That's how they were eaten in the fifties and sixties, et cetera, et cetera. So the vast majority of the food industry wants you to have the tasty food you want and have a great time and not die. The problem is they had no idea how to do those last two things. Cause most people were like buttered popcorn. I'll take 50. They blow up the food industry is like, sure. We could help these people, but we don't even, the food executive has no idea how to lose weight and fat. It's not his job. His job is just get people to buy tasty food. And it's not a job he chose to be like, this is what we're going to make Americans do.

1:29:39There is no conspiracy. The reason the food industry exists and it's massive and makes all these foods that kill you is because you want it motherfucker. Not you, but the Royal you, you get me to get a stop people from pulling up to Taco Bell every fucking hour of the day. I'll start to believe there's a food conspiracy. If they're still pulling up, talk to those people be like, who, where did you see this? Where's the advertising? They're like, I just fucking like Taco Bell, get out of my face. Wait, wait, don't, don't, don't get out. Hold up. Watch this awkward beat a crunch. Now go. People want the stuff.

1:30:09So that's the food industry. Then you have the anorectic drug industry, very nascent, very just getting born. That's going to combat a part of that. The excess part. There are two ways for the food industry to respond to this. Primarily one is to change their advertising and go, Hey, you're on these drugs. Amazing. You do you, but you can still have a Snickers bar every now and again. And they're completely correct. Healthy balance. I love it. Dope. Cause like, I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in living in a society where the government's like no more, no more Babe Ruth bars or whatever, no more fucking Kit Kats.

1:30:44They're illegal because people are too fat. What the fuck? I moved from the Soviet union to get the fuck away from that kind of stuff. So that would be great. Another other idea they could have, there will be a combination of these ideas employed over the next several years is they're going to try to outrun the drugs. It's competition. They're going to try to make their food even tastier so that it used to be something you could resist on some amount of semaglutide. You need a retratortide to resist that now. And that competition is going to heat up very likely over the course of the late 2020s and 2030s.

1:31:14I think it's entirely reasonable to expect this will either age very well or very poorly that in the mid 2030s at some point, most of us, maybe all will have at home universal robots cooking all of our meals for us. and they'll be able to source recipes from all over the internet, make it a tasty shit you've ever seen in your life. So if you want to get fat, the 2030s will be dope time to get fat, but the degree of drug advancement at that point will also be really gnarly. So what we're leading to is a world, and this has been increasingly true for the world, the developed world for as long as we can measure, you can get more of anything you want.

1:31:46In the United States, which is one of the freest countries in the world, most developed capitalists, one of the most developed capitalist countries, people observe time and time again. If you want to get fat and lazy, best place in the world to do it. You want to get lean and fit and shredded. Best place in the world to do it. It's options. You can take the anorectic drugs and here's a really cool idea to try. This is crazy. I know when you go to the grocery store, don't fucking buy the junk food. The food corporation doesn't lie to you. It's not like broccoli is really chocolate on the inside and they fucked with you.

1:32:14It's really broccoli. I can attest to that. And you just listen to me. The food industry does not care what they sell you fundamentally, as long as you buy it. So if a lot of people are like, dude, I want healthy shit. Oh my God. They healthy shit right away. McDonald's had a thing where they tried like some salads and shit for a while, a couple of different sandwiches. They were healthier. And it turns out there just wasn't enough market demands. They pulled them off. That's not a McDonald's problem. That's an us problem. And so there's going to be tastier and tastier junk foods guaranteed. You don't even need an anorectics battle for that.

1:32:41People just want to taste your junk food. And there's going to be an anorectic situation. In the end, the anoractics will win because the, at some point, if you just successfully show up to the doctor's office once a month and he gives you whatever 2032, you know, eighth gen drug, you will not look at food and be able to put it in your mouth past a certain point.

1:33:03Gabrielle Lyon:Fascinating. It's fascinating where we're going. And if anyone wants to understand how that feels in an intuitive level, they've never taken the drugs. Take all of the malaise away. It's a little tough from a foodborne illness, stomach flu. And just remember how hungry you weren't. Like you sit with someone who has stomach flu and they're like, oh, you're like, hey, juicy cheeseburger. What's it? I can't even think about it. You can get that not hungry on two and a half migs of Ozempic for six weeks straight. Someone talks about food. Don't, don't, don't, don't. I'm going to throw up. There's so much upside on that.

1:33:36And the drugs are slowly reducing side effects, increasing primary effects. They're going to win against the food industry. but those people that don't take the drugs and just, well, say it exactly as I mean it, randomly buy food at the grocery store, they're going to get real fat because the food's just fucking delicious and getting cheaper all the time. It's getting great. At some point, an individual has to say, I want something out of my body to go a certain way. If you just show up to the store and eat fuck all, but many of those people aren't even compliant with medications. You're a practicing doctor.

1:34:10You know how it is. You're like, take a shot every week. And they show up and they're like, eh, you got great patients. I do. You know that's atypical. Most of the folks that are severely obese, they're not your most compliant patients. They forget to take all kinds of drugs. Does he fundamentally just like maybe give a little bit less of a shit than most other people? Which first of all is kind of dope because you're like, fuck it. YOLO, Taco Bell. It's great. I watch fat people eat food and I'm like, dude, they're really getting out of that. Something I don't. This is amazing. But on the other hand, it's going to lead to some side effects you're going to have to deal with sooner or later.

1:34:40So the whole conspiracy thing, there is no conspiracy. Uh, we can try to find one to be a great New York Times piece.

1:34:46Gabrielle Lyon:I really like this answer. Yeah, but it's more of like, I think the world's a little bit more libertarian than people like to think, which is great because we have so much freedom, but it's also kind of meh because like, yeah, freedom means you can make terrible fucking choices and there's no one conspiring to make you do it. You're the one that pulled up to Taco Bell at two 30 in the morning. So what you're saying is you can tank your health or you can actually be in incredible health is truly a choice. And we have education and resources like your RP strength and your app, which you should probably sign me up for free because I'd like to try it.

1:35:22Gabrielle Lyon:Oh, free, huh? Well, I mean, I didn't become a trillionaire by giving away things for free. I know, but what you're saying is powerful is that actually there are choices and we here have the opportunity to leverage those, whatever those choices are in an extreme way. 100%. Oh, you have more. Tell me. I wanted to make sure we hit up your, the muscle factor. That's what my next question was because I still cannot get over the fact that you are dieting and talking to me. So we took care of most of the theory behind how people can lose weight, but there's a missing piece. Weight loss is cool. It's really healthy in almost all cases, but we can do better.

1:36:07We can do fat loss. Weight loss with conservation of muscle or an increase in muscle at the same time is a big deal. because not only do you get even healthier, but you take on a shape that I'll just say it becomes so much beating around the bush on the ship, but it's not 2019 anymore. It just makes you look hotter to most people that shape, shape. You're like, I want to look like JLo. And then you show them someone dying of anorexia. They're like, that's not what I had in mind. Like, you know, JLo's got curves. What'd you think curves made of either fat or muscle? And if you get lean enough and have enough muscle, everyone's got awesome looking curves.

1:36:50Now you may not be into muscular people. I find them grotesque to be completely honest. Just kidding. But like, is that a joke? Is that a can't tell?

1:36:58Gabrielle Lyon:Never can't tell. Yeah. Yeah. I can't even tell if it's a joke coming out. I have to like hear it again and be like, Oh, I guess I was joking. And then I don't remember. So, uh, basically gaining muscle or keeping your muscle while you lose fat has a completely transformative effect on your health in the best possible way. Like if you just lose 50 pounds and the doctor gets the blood work done, they're going to be like, a lot of stuff is going good. We're a little bit worried about your muscle mass level, a little sarcopini here and blah, blah, blah, your bone mass. But if you do the kind of thing we're talking about where you spare muscle, your doctor's going to be like, I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I want some of it.

1:37:36Do you have like a website or what is, who's your coach? So it's all great stuff and it makes you physically stronger. So when you lose weight, a lot of times when people are pretty overweight, I'm currently technically on paper, quite overweight. It's just a lot of body to carry around. It's annoying. It's just, it just sits there. You gotta like get up to go to the fridge, like lean on stuff. If you lose, just lose weight, you feel better and healthier and cleaner. You don't feel that you can still kind of feel a little bit frail. If you lose weight while keeping your muscle or increasing it, you just get more or less superpowers.

1:38:12people talk about how they felt when they were in their 20s generally have almost no idea what they're talking about because i crush my 20 year old self like with one hand like matrix style keanu reese what do you mean you crushed yourself i can i can crush my 20 year old self because he's a fucking little bitch compared to what i am now mostly because my skeletal muscle mass is much higher but if it was comparable and my fat was lower then you see like that fucking like shining golden 55 year old man at the gym who still has hair somehow and like the fucker how and he's got that like florida texas sort of tan that's just gorgeous and he still has like a trim waistline and he's like pretty lean you could talk to him you're like hey like 55 huh you must be feeling it he's like i feel this i'm in the time of my life my dad is just a person that's genetically pretty good shape and he's very physically active and eats really healthy.

1:39:04He's like a damn near 70 years old. He's like, things are great. That's how you're going to feel if you lose weight without losing muscle and gaining it. You're just going to be like, I don't know, this fucking shit. I can do things. If you lose a lot of weight and you lose a lot of muscle, you might be feeling a little bit frail, a little bit tired, walking up the stairs is tough, picking up groceries and stuff. How do we lose fat without losing muscle? One of the things is protein intake, but 0.6 to a gram per pound makes very little difference from most people in that. The biggest thing is resistance training.

1:39:37And if you want to know about that, tune into our last episode, but resistance training, training with weights two to four times a week is enough for most people, whole body, et cetera. We cover that in the other podcast. It is a huge stimulus to your body that when you have a caloric deficit, your body points metaphorically at various things. It goes organs, brain, and we still need you. don't siphon off any of your resources. Body fat, what are you up to? I'm busy, I've got meetings, fuck you. Start losing yourself. Oh, crap. Throws parts of itself off, right? When it goes, muscle, what are you up to?

1:40:13And if you're not training, muscle's like, oh, meetings all day. Shut up. Give up some of your muscles. Start losing it because we need you. But if you're resistance training, that still happens. But then the muscle, when you're in your off hours, recovering from training goes, hey, I'm going to take some of those amino acids and carbs and fats from the blood, and I'm I'm going to put them back in me and grow and guess where all those nutrients don't go your fat. So your fat's doubly starving. Not only is it starving from the deficit, but the fats like finally food comes into the blood and the fats like, Oh, come to me.

1:40:44And it's a note muscle takes it and then it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so that effective resistance training is massive and is transformative because, um, a great example of that effect recently was a Dana white UFC. Yeah. I made a video about, I'm not a big fan of the gentleman he worked with. I said all sorts of mean things about that in that video, but huge, huge fan of Dana White, huge fan of what he's doing and a big fan of what he did, which is he lost something like I think 35 pounds ish of weight, but he must have gained 10 or 15 pounds of muscle at the same time. So the metabolic effect is something you would see in someone who's lost maybe 60 pounds of fat, but the muscle came up.

1:41:25He looks amazing. His blood work is amazing. That's the ticket. And he trained with weights multiple times a week with Milo Sarchev, who's one of the best to ever do it. I mean, we can't all be trillionaires like Dana and get the best guy ever to do it, to be our personal trainer, but everyone go to the gym more or less. Well, almost everyone planet fitness is like$10 a month, which is if you can't afford that, I don't believe you. I'll say that. Um, everyone has access to it and the resistance training is that big of a deal. but one thing that really starts to be important with resistance training is important in its own right is let's say like the periodization of because people say okay I've got all the tools to do fat loss the big thing is dieting is tough a condition in which your body is not getting sufficient calories to maintain its weight almost always accrues some fatigue and we call that diet fatigue in the industry.

1:42:22Diet fatigue expresses itself in a couple of different ways. One is your energy levels decline, your sleep quality declines, your brain power doesn't do anything good. And you're like, sounds like you're a parent. Don't get me started. I'm, I'm like a, what did, uh, my, my, my wife did most of the dog raising at our house. So at one point she was talking to a friend on the phone and she's like, yeah, I'm a single dog. Mom, but she's like, you don't do anything. I'm like, okay, You were correct. So the dog's hard enough. Kids are totally different level, but yes.

1:42:54Gabrielle Lyon:And you have met mine. So yes, they're adorable by the way. They could just be terrible monsters and you're like, why did I have them? So you're not in that book. They're so cute. See, I can even tell it's a real emotion to share. They're wonderful. There was a complicated. Yeah. Yeah. The, I forgot Wanda Sykes. Do you know who that is? She was a comedian comedian. She wrote for like, uh, all the big guys like Chris rock and stuff. She had a standup once where she was like, yeah, people with kids, man, anytime you're like, yeah, like, do you, do you like your kids? It wasn't worth it. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:43:23It's worth it. Like, do you mean that? So in any case, diet fatigue, the biggest problem you run into with it outside of all the other problems I already listed, which are kind of gnarly is increased, um, food focus. Now food focus has hunger within it, but it has all kinds of other stuff. Like that story I told earlier, where you're watching your favorite show and They're just looking at the dinner rolls and a glass of milk. Why isn't anyone going to, are those just props? Are those cold? Was the shot number five is no, really, really hungry. And there's a thing where you've just eaten, you're no longer hungry, but you're still food focused.

1:44:00If you do the diet too long, your diet fatigue gets too crazy. So at RP we've, we've probably diet coached several hundred thousand real humans at this point. Uh, tens of thousands of them with an intimate personal coaching relationship because we We have a team of psychotic PhD coaches that are like, they look like we made up their certifications, but they're real. I'm not good enough to work on that team, so I don't bother. And we have app suite that helps the templates and apps, tons on tons of people. And we found is somewhere between eight weeks of consistent caloric deficit, fat loss, dieting, and 12 weeks is where most people shine.

1:44:38Eight weeks is like enough to really make a visual difference. So if you do a diet for four weeks, the scale's down maybe five pounds, but you order a Chinese and then it's up a pound because of the salt and you don't even know what's going on. You can't really tell the one lady from your work said you look better, but she always says nice things to her and she just assumes she's a liar. And so, and so it's not, you're not going to get motivated by the process and you might quit and be like, I don't know. What is it? There's an amazing, uh, one of my friends had a, his mom had a sticker on the fridge, a fridge magnet.

1:45:06And it's just like 1950s woman and she's doing this. And it said, um, I, uh, I dieted for one month and lost 30 days. So like, that's how it can feel if you don't go long enough, you don't have anything show for it. But after about eight weeks, most people with a good deficit, they're going to feel different. They're going to look different. People are going to say stuff. Their clothes are going to fit differently. Go. This is great. But their diet fatigue isn't crazy yet. In most cases, after about 12 weeks, not all, but many people, they're getting amazing results, but this shit is starting to wear on them.

1:45:35It wears on them in a bunch of different ways. There's entire books written about this, but one of them is your type of social interaction that you can have is limited. It has to be limited. Someone, maybe you and your husband go to the movies. Maybe it's a thing you've been doing for a long time. It's just a tradition. You're on diet for nine weeks. You go to the movies still, you smell that goddamn popcorn everywhere. And your husband's like, those zombies are scary. You're like, what, what can I get some fucking popcorn? It's all, it's off. And so if you're hard as nails, you can just eat that shit.

1:46:07Like not Not literally just Canada, whatever. No worries. You just get it done, but it strains you and it strains you and it strains you. Here's a really cool revelation. If you go back up to roughly your maintenance calories, you still exercise, you still train with weight. You still eat mostly healthy, but a bit of junk. You can lose a bunch of weight, go to maintenance, chill for, we would recommend roughly at least two thirds of the time you were dieting. So if you've been dieting.

1:46:35Gabrielle Lyon:come from any kind of literature, just experience. Plenty of literature, but lots of experience. Got it. And what you end up having is you die for 12 weeks. It's probably good for at least eight weeks for you to be at least at maintenance, maybe even a little tiny surplus if you want to get a little more jacked, but at least maintenance. That brings you back to normal. It gives you breathing room and then you can hit it again if you want to lose more weight. One of the biggest problems in weight loss is people, whatever number they are, let's say you weigh 231 pounds and you're like, I want to move in 70.

1:47:06and you're like, okay, great. You get your zap bound, you get your diet and you just go. It doesn't work like that because you're going to accumulate so much diet fatigue that by the time you get below one 90, you're going to be like, Oh, I'm going to eat my own eyeballs today. And if you have to take enough anorecter drug for that to go away, you still, they don't take away all the food focus. You still look at cheeseburgers on TV and you're like, and it seems like you're missing something and you are missing something because you, you go to the family reunion and everyone's eating amazing hot dogs.

1:47:31You're not eating them. You got your own of bullshit. That's not a way to live life. That's a way to accomplish a task. It's not a way to live. So understanding that it's a multi-phase process that has times of destitution, times of deficit, and then times of getting back to normal, that is a big deal. And that eight to 12 week period, coupled with another eight to 12 weeks of chilling, you get to your little ratchet step-like effect, that works wonders. And empowered by anorectics and really good diet advice, people can get a couple of ratchets down that thing nowadays, completely transform their bodies.

1:48:05It's going to take a couple of years. But again, to, to paraphrase one of my friends brought our Chavez, um, it's baffling that people think that something that took them years to do like gain 80 pounds, they're just going to get off in weeks. Yeah, it should be like five weeks. I should be good. Like, no, no, it's going to take years. Luckily not 15 years, but it might take two or three and you got to hang in there and you got to give yourself breaks. So I talked to successful people. You're writing all your notes. You're scribbling. I'll say you, you just happened to like the CEO of Apple just happened to fly next to you in a plane.

1:48:36He's like, in my private plane broke down. So could you scoot over? Okay. And he's like, just sharing ideas about how to be successful at some point. You're like, okay, so work straight up 12 hours a day, no breaks, right? No vacations, no weekends. He'd be like, no, no, you need a lot of that because you need the creative process that doesn't happen unless you do the shit. Just the same thing is true with dieting. You got to go hard for a little while until your diet fatigue is like, bro, this is tough. You go to maintenance and then you repeat that process.