Fat Loss Scientists Reveal How to Burn Fat and Build Muscle FASTER

28:06Shawn Stevenson:This was highlighted in a study from Brigham and Women's Hospitals. Reveals that being on our light-emitting devices in the evening, the researchers found that participants took longer to fall asleep. They spent less time in REM sleep. They'd reduced secretion of melatonin. And they also had delayed circadian rhythm as well. Thus, of course, they're waking up feeling much more tired and more lethargic the next day. So what do we do about this? Yes, give ourselves some screen-free time before bed. At least 30 minutes. At least 30 minutes. Put the phone down. Find something else that doesn't require us to stare into artificial light.

28:49Shawn Stevenson:Whatever that might be for you. Again, the art and science. The art is what works for you. For you, it might not be reading a physical book or journaling or doing some meditation. Maybe it's spending some time with your significant other. Maybe it's listening to a podcast where you don't have to stare at a screen. Maybe it's doing a crossword puzzle by your salt lamp or by candlelight. Maybe it's taking a nice relaxing bath with the Epsom salts. Maybe it's having a cup of relaxing chamomile tea before bed. Finding that thing that works for you. But also, yes, we're going to have exposure to artificial light in the evening for most of us.

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30:20Shawn Stevenson:So again, go to bondcharge.com forward slash model. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E dot com forward slash model. Use the code model at checkout for 15 % off. they've got an array of incredible frames to choose from as well lots of different styles and so you're going to find something that you love head over there check them out and also if you happen to wear glasses like reading glasses you can actually get these in prescription frames as well so they're really doing a great job over there bondcharge.com forward slash model and Moving on to our second expert, fat loss scientist in this very powerful conversation around the science of fat loss.

31:07Shawn Stevenson:Next up, we have Dr. Ben Bigman. Dr. Ben Bigman is a professor and metabolic scientist who's in the lab doing biopsies, studying body fat and uncovering the real factors that change it. His work has been published in the most prestigious medical journals, and he's an excellent teacher in giving us insights into mastering our metabolism. And in this segment, he's going to be sharing why you must address insulin and inflammation to effectively reduce body fat. Plus, he's going to share four science-backed principles to support you in burning body fat. Let's dive into this next segment with the incredible Dr.

31:52Shawn Stevenson:Ben Bickman. First thing, and this will blow some minds, you cannot have a fat cell grow unless insulin is elevated. It is totally, completely, utterly impossible. Now, I know people want to say, oh, well, calories matter too. They do matter. But if you just take out that one single variable, if you deprive a fat cell of insulin, it cannot grow. 100 % full stop. Take this from a guy who literally grows fat cells in my lab all the time. In a human model, you even see this. If you have a person with type 1 diabetes, they can eat 10 ,000 calories in a day. And all they do is skip an insulin injection and they will be as skinny as they want.

32:38In fact, this is so well known to that diabetic that it's a known eating disorder. It's more of a hormone disorder. But if they just skip their insulin injection, they'll be as skinny as they want it's a condition called diabulimia you only eliminate one single variable the insulin they cannot not only grow fat they can't even hold on to it so as much as calories matter and they do insulin is an absolutely necessary signal to tell the fat cell to grow and then the calories help fuel that growth now that was a bit of a tangent but so let's come back to the hypertrophic fat cell so you have a fat cell that's getting i promise it matters because as the fat cell starts to get so big, it's like a water balloon that's getting to the point of maximum growth.

33:21And if you continue to put water in that balloon, it's gonna pop. And so as insulin is high and there's sufficient calories to fuel the growth that the insulin wants the fat cell to undergo, the fat cell starts to tell insulin, insulin, you continue to make me grow, but I can't grow anymore, so I'm gonna stop listening to you. And so the fat cell that's grown so much becomes insulin resistant to stop growing. So it's a survival mechanism. The poor fat cell, it literally, if it continues to grow, the membrane cannot hold it together and it will start to fragment and literally start to pop, which will be very unhealthy, cause a lot of inflammation and it'll be a messy process in that fat tissue to try to clean up.

34:04Very unhealthy. So the fat cell becomes insulin resistant to stop further growth. At the same time, as the number two, as the fat cell gets bigger and bigger, it starts to get pushed further and further away from the capillaries, which is the main blood vessel where the blood is giving up its oxygen and giving up its nutrition to a cell and taking all of the waste products away from a cell. So if a cell is getting pushed too far from a capillary, it starts to suffocate. The technical term at the level of the cell is it starts to experience hypoxia. It becomes hypoxic. And if the cell doesn't get sufficient oxygen, once again, it will die.

34:46It will be a very messy process and we don't want our cells to die. And the fat cell doesn't want to die. And so it starts leaking out these pro-inflammatory cytokines. This word I mentioned earlier, some of those cytokines kind of act like a trail of breadcrumbs, where when the capillary senses those breadcrumbs, it can follow them back and start growing a new blood vessel to feed that suffocating fat cell. So the fat cell has another mechanism to ensure its own survival to correct its hypoxia in this case. But in the process, it is now leaking all of these pro-inflammatory cytokines throughout the entire body, causing what we commonly call subclinical chronic inflammation.

35:30So it's not like their inflammation has reached the point of an autoimmune disease or a cold or flu, but it's higher than it should be in someone who's otherwise healthy. And it's all because of the hypertrophic fat cell. And so we have the high insulin and the insulin resistance as the fat cell tries to stop growing. And then we have the inflammation as the fat cell tries to correct its hypoxia, both of which just contribute to insulin resistance throughout the body. So I generally say the fat cells, the first domino to fall. And then when the fat cell becomes insulin resistant, it's promoting this insulin resistance to other tissues like the liver, like the muscle, like the brain, you know, causing fatty liver disease, causing sarcopenia or wasting of the muscle or causing Alzheimer's or migraines or depression in the case of the brain.

36:17The three, what I consider to be primary causes of insulin resistance. And I, and I use the term primary very carefully and deliberately because there are other causes or other contributors of insulin resistance, but they don't meet my standards of being called primary. So there are secondary causes, which for the sake of time, we won't get into. So the primary causes, which are by my standards, stimuli that are capable of causing insulin resistance on their own, so independent of any other signal, and have also been shown to cause insulin resistance in every biomedical model used in science. So in isolated cells growing in a little Petri dish, in laboratory rodents, and in humans, you know, the top of all creation, we go all the way through this, and we can see that these three things will cause insulin resistance.

37:06And you just mentioned all of them, stress, inflammation, and then insulin itself. So to the astute listener, they can already start to see a bit of a vicious cycle that can be created here. And in fact, I'll end on that one, just as I kind of cover these briefly. So the first one I've mentioned is stress. I define stress by an elevation in the prototypical stress hormones. Those stress hormones are adrenaline and cortisol. In both instances, if you increase either of those hormones, they start to really want to push up blood glucose. That's the one thing they have in common. Cortisol and stress are very, cortisol and adrenaline rather are very, very different hormones.

37:49They have practically nothing in common except they really want to increase blood sugar levels. That puts them at odds with insulin, whose most famous job is to lower blood glucose levels. And so the more those stress hormones are creating an upward pressure on the glucose in the blood, well, the harder insulin has to work to bring it down. Thus, it's no surprise that they cause insulin resistance. I believe the most relevant variable then when it comes to stress is sleep, Actually, even one bad night of sleep can cause quantifiable, demonstrable insulin resistance the next day. Very, very well established.

38:26So I focus on sleep as the most relevant variable when it comes to stress-induced insulin resistance. And then just moving on to inflammation, any time immune signals are up in the body, and this is most obvious with things called cytokines. Cytokines are basically little pro-inflammatory proteins. Almost like a pro-inflammatory hormone coming from the white blood cells. Macrophages, for example, are releasing a lot of these cytokines, but a lot of other cells can too, like fat cells when they get too big. They can contribute to this increased inflammation. So anytime inflammation starts to go up, it directly causes insulin resistance throughout the body.

39:11And in most instances, I believe that's primarily relevant because of food sensitivity, as well as fat cells that are too big. And that's a conversation all on its own. Why do fat cells get big? And it's a combination of insulin and calories. But then mentioning insulin brings me to the third point. And I end with this point because I do believe it's the most relevant, which is chronically elevated insulin is a cause of insulin resistance. It's, in fact, the one that I believe is the most powerful and prominent of all of the variables. And this is why my approach generally to resolving insulin resistance starts with this heavy scrutiny of carbohydrates, because we have three macronutrients in our diet.

39:55I mean, just to put things in perspective for people so they can appreciate how relevant this is, because I could imagine someone listening thinking, well, my insulin isn't elevated all the time. Let me just sort of suggest to the audience just how wrong that view is. At a global level, so we have three macronutrients, the three things that we eat, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Fat has no effect on insulin. You know, if you and I were to eat a stick of butter and we measured our insulin for three hours, I've done this kind of study, not with butter, but with oil, with olive oil. There is no effect on insulin.

40:28It's an absolute flat line. If we did the same by eating pure protein, maybe we get a little bit of an effect. Some people have a higher effect. Some people have none. It's going to be, I guess we'll say, little to no effect with pure protein. Then when we eat pure carbohydrate, now buckle up. Insulin is going to go up by 10 to 20 times, and it's going to be up for about three hours. And this isn't a healthy insulin-sensitive person. This isn't a college-aged male who's healthy. This is the most metabolically sound person among the entire population. Take a 20-year-old man. That guy can handle all kinds of metabolic abuse and shrug it off.

41:07And yet, even in his body, give him about 50 to 75 grams of glucose, it's going to take him three hours to clear it. And his insulin would have gone up 10 to 20 times. Now, however, if we take the average adult, which is insulin resistant, it's going to take them up to five hours to clear that glucose. And eating 50 grams of glucose, that's pretty easy. And you don't even have to, you don't have to bat an eyelash at that. And you already found you've eaten it. Even still, if you take that young metabolically bulletproof 20 year old man and give him about three to 400 grams of carbohydrate of glucose, which again is not hard to do.

41:44It's very easy to drink or eat that much. Even in his body, his insulin is going to be elevated for 10 hours, 10 hours. So now let's just take that information and put it in the context of a standard – I was going to say standard American diet, but the more accurate term is a global diet because globally, 71 % of all calories come from starches and sugars. So they're carbohydrates. 71 % of all the calories we eat at a global level. And when you look even sort of more microscopically, we've been told to eat six times a day. And so you take someone who's eating six times a day, including an evening snack, and 71 %-ish of what they're eating is coming from carbohydrate.

42:27Everything starts to become clear where the moment a person wakes up, maybe finally when they've woken up, their insulin has finally come down overnight. It's been working hard overnight, and they finally get to a kind of fasted level. And then what do they do? They immediately spike it by drinking and eating refined, starchy, sugary food. and then the insulin has peaked within about 30, 45 minutes to an hour, right as it wants to start coming down, maybe two hours in, they of course have a mid-morning snack and they bump it back up and then their lunch, then their afternoon snack, supper, evening snack and so every waking moment is spent in a state of elevated insulin and depending on what you eat before you go to bed and let's face it, most people don't eat protein and fat, they want something salty and crunchy or sweet and gooey.

43:13So it's going to be some refined carbohydrate coming from a bag or a box with a barcode. And thus they go to bed having just dumped in a hundred or 200 more grams of glucose into their bloodstream. And now insulin is elevated for hours while they're sleeping. And one final note on this, if you go to bed hyperglycemic, you activate your sympathetic nervous system. You're actually spiking your adrenaline right before you go to bed. So there are a lot of people who blame their insomnia on their anxiety and they wonder why they're so hot. Their heart is pounding. They wonder what they're anxious about.

43:48You're not anxious about anything. You just spiked your blood sugar, which activates your sympathetic nervous system. So good luck sleeping well. Now you're going to have higher cortisol tomorrow because of your poor night of sleep. And you just keep feeding the metabolic beast. And thus, it's little wonder why insulin resistance has become the single most common health disorder worldwide. So the nutrition plan, which absolutely matters most, as much as I'm an advocate of exercise, exercise cannot fully make up for a diet that is not up to code. If your diet is really lagging, exercise is only going to help so much.

44:24So it's based on the principles that I mentioned earlier. But to kind of wrap all of them up, it's focused on control carbs. So it's a heavy focus on the starches, the carbohydrates that have the least impact on glucose and insulin. That is the primary motivator here. How can we nourish the body but keep glucose and insulin in check? So it's focusing on smart sources of carbohydrate, namely fruits and vegetables. So that's the control carb part of it. And then the prioritize protein. And I would say the don't fear fat principles, they really should come together. In our fear of fat, we have pulled the two apart because in nature, you never see that.

45:11There is no such thing as a protein that exists in nature that comes absent fat. In other words, every protein in nature has fat with it. And that is how we should eat it. If you eat protein in isolation, you don't digest it as well. You minimize the anabolic effect of that protein at muscle. This is all evidenced in human studies. When protein comes with fat, we both digest it better, and it has a stronger anabolic signal than the protein alone. So muscle protein synthesis is stronger when protein is consumed with fat. That's how I advocate people eating it. whether you want to invoke a divine authority or just nature and evolution.

45:54If nature says all proteins come with fat, it stands to reason that the human body is built to bring it in that way. So who are we to defy evolution or God and pull those two things apart? Keep them together. Protein and fat come together. That's how we should eat them. So prioritize protein and don't fear fat. I could say don't fear the fat that comes with that protein. And it's going to have little to no effect on insulin. And speaking of nourishment, that is the nourishment that matters most. I'm not an enemy to carbohydrates, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Literally, it does not exist.

46:30There are such things as essential amino acids. Thankfully, you'll get them all from any animal source protein. There are such things as essential fats. Thankfully, you'll get them all and more from every animal source fat. So I'm an advocate of animal sources in those instances just to ensure you get them all. But again, no essential carbs. That doesn't mean don't eat any of them, but it means don't make it the main part of your diet. Why would we make the main part of our diet the very one thing that we don't need? Focus on the things we need. And then the fourth and final principle is fasting.

47:05Frequently fast. Find a way to incorporate fasting into your daily plan. But my only point on that is how you end your fast matters more than how long you fast. So the food you eat when your fast is over matters much, much more than how long you fast. And I say that born from abundant experience of seeing people who will go on a 24, 36, 48 hour fast, and then binge. Whatever they can shove in their mouth, they shove in their mouth. And then they end up feeling sick. They feel ashamed. They hate to admit this kind of addiction that they're trying to fight with food. And it ends up becoming kind of a form of fasting bulimia where they're binging and purging, but in a sense of fasting.

47:52So they only eat one time a day, but man, it's a bunch of garbage. It's gummy bears, it's candy, it's cakes, it's cookies. No, it'd be better to have a shorter fast and keep those macronutrient rules in mind than have a longer fast and throw the macronutrient rules out the window.

48:09Shawn Stevenson:All right. I hope that you enjoyed that segment with Dr. Benjamin Bigman. We've got two phenomenal fat loss scientists in store for you coming up. And next up in this masterclass, you're going to hear from the one and only Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a board certified physician, author of multiple peer-reviewed studies, and founder of muscle-centric medicine. And in this segment, she's going to be sharing with you why muscle is anti-obesity and anti-fat, except when you have, quote, chubby muscles. Let's dive into this next segment with the one and only Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Skeletal muscle has multiple impacts on the body.

48:53And when we think about mobility and we think about it as a metabolic sink, you know, in the face of obesity, which that's what we all talk about, is this concept of how obesity is driving all these illnesses. And again, obesity is a side effect of unhealthy skeletal muscle. And again, we're going to begin to see that more and more. Skeletal muscle in and of itself as an endocrine organ is very valuable, especially when we think about pain and inflammation and contracting skeletal muscle allows this interface with the immune system through these hormones called myokines. And there's hundreds of different myokines.

49:35And some of the original research on this came out of Pedersen's lab in Copenhagen. And still to this day, she is a immunologist, an exercise immunologist. So she's an immunologist, an MD, as well as a PhD in exercise immunology. and she looks at the interface between skeletal muscle and the immune system, the more healthy skeletal muscle mass an individual has, the more that they are physically active, the more myokines they secrete to help temper the immune system and to help limit inflammation over the long term.

50:10Shawn Stevenson:So number one, there's a high probability that we're carrying more, and it's not just about strength, as you pointed out earlier. No. It's about actual muscle mass on our frame. we're going to have increased resilience, not just against injury, but also things like infections, things like chronic diseases as well. You mentioned our muscles being like a metabolic sink. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So we've got myokines. What about the amino acids? Yeah. Skeletal muscle is number one. It is absolutely your metabolic sink. And I think that we all appreciate that. We say, okay, well, I'm going to exercise so that I can eat more.

50:50and this is really a common way individuals think about it, but skeletal muscle, especially in the face of obesity, insulin resistance, it is the pinnacle, the pinnacle place to begin. So let's think, what does skeletal muscle do? Skeletal muscle is your site for glucose disposal, for the carbohydrates that you eat. Skeletal muscle is the site for glucose disposal, not just at rest, but when an individual exercises, it allows for glucose uptake of the muscle without insulin. You're leveraging your body's own capacity to move substrates or foods that you eat out of the bloodstream into skeletal muscle.

51:35What happens when an individual doesn't have a lot of muscle? Like these elderly studies that the loss of skeletal muscle becomes so detrimental. the question becomes, what are the outcomes? The outcomes that we're worried about, they are cardiovascular disease, they are cancer, they are Alzheimer's disease, they are immobility, this way of not being able to maintain your activities of daily living, all directly relate to the quality of skeletal muscle. And arguably, and people are going to push back on this statement, the amount of skeletal muscle mass you have. People will push back on this.

52:13And I just want that it's because the research is young. These first group of studies coming out where they will begin to actually directly measure skeletal muscle will change the paradigm of how we begin to think about muscle mass as important. And just to circle back, it's your place for glycogen storage. The more healthy muscle mass you have, the more you have places to put glucose. When you lose that, blood glucose goes up. When you lose that, insulin levels go up, all of which in the long term become very detrimental.

52:51Shawn Stevenson:This is so powerful. There's so many pieces of this. Just the fact that we can absorb or draw that glucose out of our bloodstream into muscle without the activity of insulin, that should just change the game right there in and of itself. As you know, one of the big issues we're struggling with as a culture is insulin resistance. and muscle supersedes that in many ways. And not only that, being a reservoir for these powerful myokines, basically, I'm just gonna consolidate it. Stress, if we're talking about stress resilience, our muscles are really a reservoir for anti-aging compounds. I would agree with you.

53:33And I think that we're still learning so much more about it. And we do need to shift this to become the focal point. You mentioned something else that's really important is that it's an amino acid reservoir. And basically, there's data to support that the more healthy muscle mass you have, the greater your survivability against nearly any kind of morbidity and mortality. And let's just take cancer. One of the reasons individuals die of cancer is because of cancer cachexia, which is muscle wasting, this highly catabolic state, directly related to the amount of muscle mass you have. So when you are younger, like I look at your son, he's been training forever.

54:13He is doing and, you know, taking care of the actions that set him up for a much stronger trajectory of aging.

54:23Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. And the crazy thing is this used to just be a part of our culture. You know, we would develop muscle. We were active. We were lifting heavy things. We were moving, doing a lot of activity through the day, but we've become more and more and more sedentary, especially in the last few decades. And again, the big ramification, yes, we see the outer appearance of fat gain, but your research indicates clearly the biggest villain in this whole equation is our loss of muscle. So I want to ask you about this. There's something you mentioned throughout the book, basically chubby muscles. All right.

55:01Shawn Stevenson:So So we know about visceral fat, we know about subcutaneous fat, but there's an integration point. I wasn't taught this in my university education, that fat and muscle are really kind of intimately connected. We have this intramuscular fat. Yeah, intramuscular fat. Let's talk about chubby muscles. First of all, I've been reading this for a very long time and studying these things. I have never had someone say chubby muscles. So pretty creative there. Skeletal muscle, when you have healthy skeletal muscle, think about it as a filet. When you have unhealthy skeletal muscle, you think more about it as a ribeye.

55:41Unhealthy skeletal muscle gets elevated levels of intramyocellular fats. This really changes not just the composition of healthy skeletal muscle, but its ability to do its job. When muscle is infiltrated with fat, it changes its strength. It changes its connectivity over time. It changes its resilience. And that's from the physical architecture. The physical architecture of the muscle changes. And the trajectory of that is something that we see through this concept of sarcopenia or obesogenic sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is this idea that we lose muscle mass and function. And less known, which by the way, that ICD-9 code, that classification of disease only came about in 2016.

56:36Shawn Stevenson:Super recent. That's crazy. The identification and classification of the loss of muscle mass and strength came out in 2016.

56:52Oh, right. I mean, that in and of itself is so impactful. And this idea that chubby muscle is, it's not just one day you get chubby muscle.

57:03Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. The changes in skeletal muscle will happen before you see any subcutaneous or visceral fat. Skeletal muscle changes. There's some early data when this concept of insulin resistance in skeletal muscle started out of Yale. And they looked at healthy, sedentary 18-year-olds. No excess body fat. Healthy, sedentary already. Yes, you caught it. Oxymoron. The oxymoron. And what they found was those individuals were already showing signs of insulin resistance without any outward signs of gaining weight. It's happening below the surface. It's happening below the surface. It's also happening before we recognize it.

57:53Shawn Stevenson:Let's point to one takeaway already from this conversation for today for everybody. and this simple act of if, you know, post eating a meal, which I just had a friend that just got back from traveling in Europe and one of the towns that she stayed in, basically she said, essentially like the whole town seems to get up and go for a walk together after dinner, right? So our muscles being a site of glucose disposal, but what is it that's triggering this? Let's say, where do we put this? Can we have pre-activity and absorb glucose post-activity? You talk about that in the book too. Let's talk about this.

58:36Yeah, I think that's a really great point because it's so easy. It's just such an easy takeaway. This idea that you get up and you go for a walk. Glucose disposal utilizes insulin at rest. And when you think about how you're going to move carbohydrates out of the blood into skeletal muscle, it does require insulin. There are transporters, glute 4 transporters. When you get up and when you move, let's say you go for a 10-minute walk. You do not require insulin to move glucose out of the bloodstream into the cell. You are augmenting your body's ability to manage and regulate not just insulin, but blood glucose.

59:18So simple.

59:20Shawn Stevenson:So basically just contracting our muscles. This doesn't even need to necessarily be a walk. It doesn't. So we could sit in our chair and maybe do some - Well, you and I should do some more pushups. We are doing it. He beat me last time. Listen, barely, barely. You're about that life, you know? So what's so special about muscle is that we can make it. I can't think of another organ system where you can consciously control through voluntary action its ability to grow. I mean, I cannot think about my liver growing and do something about it in a healthy way. Maybe drinking, but... Right. But skeletal muscle is an organ system that we have direct control over through our actions and behaviors and arguably the pinnacle of health and wellness.

1:00:11And it has been so overshadowed by this bro culture, by thinking about being jacked and tan and the guy in the tank, I think that it's really turned people away from saying, that's for me. That life is for me. The person I have to become to create these disciplines and do these actions to build this skeletal muscle, that's not for me. I'm not like a meathead. But it's that very tissue and that very organ system that is the focal point of all the issues that we're talking about. The CDC doesn't even list the loss of skeletal muscle as a cause of death. It looks at heart disease. It looks at cancer.

1:01:00It looks at accidental falls. It looks at respiratory illnesses, kidney disease, diabetes. Those are all related to the health of skeletal muscle as an underpinning.

1:01:19Shawn Stevenson:it's crazy. It's crazy. We're looking at the wrong thing. I want to ask you about this. And I was happy that you brought this up, but it can be a little bit unsettling, which is, and I know you're like, what the hell is he about to say? I already know. You did share some data on it essentially being difficult. Once we venture into loss of muscle or having chubby muscles, it can be more difficult for our bodies to manage inflammation and also having difficulty gaining muscle. So let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that was a really interesting area to go into this idea of some of these mechanics of healthy skeletal muscle.

1:02:03We talk a lot, and I've talked to you about muscle protein synthesis, and that's really this incorporation of amino acids. It's this physiological biomarker of what we believe to be muscle health. When muscle is functioning in a healthy manner, it has the capacity to generate this muscle protein synthetic response. And again, it's this incorporation of amino acids, which is necessary for the accretion of skeletal muscle. That process can be blunted. Muscle protein synthesis, this process that is so critical to the health and well-being of our muscle can be blunted a few ways. It can be blunted through aging and inactivity, this concept of anabolic resistance, where the efficiency of skeletal muscle decreases, because I didn't mention this before, but skeletal muscle is also a nutrient-sensing organ, and it senses the quality of the diet.

1:03:08And one way skeletal muscle does that is through these amino acids, in particular, the branched-chain amino acids, that ability becomes blunted as we age in the way that we think about traditional aging now. Could it be overcome? It certainly can be. The other aspect is there is some evidence, and this was out of Bird's Lab, some evidence to suggest that obese muscle can have a blunted response. And people are not going to like to hear that. And there is evidence to suggest that that unhealthy tissue becomes blunted, that its capacity to respond becomes a bit blunted. Now that's not to say it's going to happen to everybody.

1:03:56And that certainly doesn't mean that you cannot reverse your health of skeletal muscle, which is what's so empowering. You can absolutely generate healthy skeletal muscle.

1:04:06Shawn Stevenson:I hope that you enjoyed that segment with the one and only Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. We've got one fat loss scientist left in store for you. Now, as you're probably hearing, many of these scientists are affirming the importance of prioritizing protein. This is not necessarily a high protein diet. Okay. It's about simply making it intentional because of the powerful metabolic effects that high quality proteins have. We can get protein, obviously, from a wide range of different foods, plant foods and animal foods alike. But we've got to make sure that, especially when we're getting into the domain of animal foods, make sure that we are prioritizing foods that are grass-fed because of the ideal ratios of omega-3 fatty acids that are found in those particular animal foods.

1:04:58Shawn Stevenson:and when we're thinking about purchasing higher quality fruits and vegetables or animal foods, many of these foods are going to come at a premium. They're going to be more expensive and we've got to support brands that are making it more accessible and taking away a lot of the cost that we normally see with purchasing these higher quality foods. And for me, this is why I love the company Wild Pastures. They deliver 100 % grass-fed and grass-finished beef, pasture-raised pork, pasture-raised chicken, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. And they source exclusively from regenerative family farms.

1:05:37Shawn Stevenson:No antibiotics, no added hormones, no added steroids, no feedlots, and absolutely no GMOs. Fast delivery from their farms right to your door. And with a Wild Pasture subscription, right now, if you take advantage, you're going to receive 20 % off for life, 20 % off for life plus free shipping and$15 off your first order. Just go to wildpastures.com forward slash model. Take advantage. That's W-I-L-D-P-A-S-T-U-R-E-S.com forward slash model. Take advantage for a trusted source of regeneratively raised foods and being able to invest in companies that are doing things the right way. And now without further ado, let's get to our final expert in this powerful compilation of fat loss scientists.

1:06:37Shawn Stevenson:And our final expert is the one and only Alan Aragon. Alan Aragon is a fat loss expert, metabolic scientist, who's authored multiple peer-reviewed studies on fat loss, muscle building, and overall exercise science. And in this segment, he's going to be sharing with you a phenomenon called collateral fattening and how much training is actually necessary to prevent collateral fattening to burn fat and build muscle. He's going to give you the prescription on the volume of exercise to target. All right. So let's dive into this final segment with fat loss scientist, Alan Aragon. We want to be protective of lean body mass, muscle specifically, because you can look at muscle as the metabolic engine of the body.

1:07:36So the metabolic blast furnace of the body where all the fuels are used and partitioned and directed to where they need to go. And if we lose muscle tissue, then you can reduce your resting metabolic rate. You can get reduced functional capacity and just a reduced capability to metabolize incoming fuels from the diet. And so the importance of muscle and maintaining muscle mass, it just can't be overstated.

1:08:10Shawn Stevenson:You've denoted this phenomenon that you call collateral fattening can take place for people. So what is collateral fattening? Yeah, think of collateral damage, like the original way that that term was used. one of the earliest contexts of collateral damage is when you have to go in there and you know rescue some folks from a particular region or whatever and then you got to blow things up and then well there's casualties there so that that would be collateral damage collateral fattening is when you try to do the uh you know the the noble and legitimate effort of let's say losing body weight, but in the process, you lose a lot of lean body mass.

1:08:56And what happens when you lose lean body mass is the body doesn't know that you're just trying to get rid of the final 20 pounds or whatever. At the end of the dieting cycle, your body senses an energy crisis. Let's imagine if you lost 10 pounds of lean mass along with 10 pounds of fat mass, your body's like, oh boy, we need to survive. We got to get that lean mass back to gain back metabolic function. And so what happens is you will actually have higher levels of hunger hormones and your appetite will be just dysregulated and raging all the time compared to if you were to preserve lean body mass while losing body fat.

1:09:40And so what happens when you lose this lean mass at the end of the dieting cycle, along with fat mass, then the collateral fattening effect is when you have a behavioral drive to gain that lean mass back, and then you end up overeating. And that starts like the overeating cycle of the yo-yo dieting circle. And so gaining more fat back than you started off with would be kind of the ultimate bad case scenario of collateral fattening. It's like, okay, you lost weight, but you lost too much lean mass. You were too hungry at the end of the dieting cycle. So your body sensed an energy crisis, ate back the calories in order to attempt to gain back that metabolically precious lean mass and then collateral fattening occurs.

1:10:34So that's what it is.

1:10:37Shawn Stevenson:You kicked this off. We talked about being able to build and maintain our muscle mass and how important that is, especially as we advance in age and how possible it is. Now, my question is, and what I really always taught from, you know, when I was working with people was what is the minimum effective dose, right? And even my first book, I was writing from that perspective, like how little can we change somebody's habits in their life to get them these results. So I want to talk about minimum effective dose as far as strength training, but I want to start off by talking about optimal. Because that's my passion.

1:11:22Shawn Stevenson:And I know a lot of people who listen as well, what is optimal for us to build muscle as we advance in age and so that we can protect and sustain our muscle, what is the ideal strength training structure? Like how often should we be training? Man, this is a great topic. I love this topic. There's been a bunch of really good research that answered or attempted to answer these questions within the last 10 years. And so I have to give my colleague, Brad Schoenfeld, a lot of credit there. So let's start off with set volume per week, set volume per body part, per muscle group per week. Optimal for maximizing muscle growth.

1:12:16The range is roughly on the upper end, on the upper end, 10 to 20 sets. Okay. So like once you start crossing into the 20 sets per week, then you really start courting the potential for overuse. So wear and tear, overuse, injuries. Junk volume. junk volume, et cetera. Yes. That's right around the 20-ish point. Now we're talking sets per muscle group per week. Okay. So that leaves us with this kind of sweet spot that, okay, it's for the advanced dudes, it's somewhere between 10 and 20. For people in the real world who have maybe an hour to train per session, it's honestly difficult to get more than depending on, you know, rest time between sets, it's honestly difficult to go much more than 12, 12 sets per muscle group per week, 12, you know, 14, 15 possibly sets per muscle group per week.

1:13:22So if you look at a model where if, for example, you hit a body part twice a week, and that's a whole other you know conversation typically when you start when you start doing more than eight sets per muscle group per week it might benefit you to split the frequency up at which you train the muscle to two times a week rather than just getting it all in on one single session so that breakover point seems to be like eight ten ish sets if you're at that level. So if we look at 12 sets per muscle group per week, you hit the muscle twice a week. You hit it with two exercises, three working sets per exercise.

1:14:10Most people can do this. Most people can fit that in. And most people can get in and out of the gym in less than an hour when they do it that way. So if we're talking about, you know, optimal, optimal for advanced, advanced guys, Well, some of those guys will be pushing beyond the 12 sets per muscle group a week towards the 16, towards 18. Some guys will be pushing the 20s, but they're typically, if you can honestly do 20 sets per muscle group per week and take them all to failure or close to failure, you're probably going to have to cycle that. you probably won't be doing perma 20 work sets to failure per muscle group per week.

1:14:58If you're a real world working person. So yeah, your question about optimal, it's almost like, okay, what is, are we talking about an influencer, a fitness model type who can shoulder that 15 to 20 ish? And are we talking about a regular working person in the real world? We'll probably top out it 12 to 15 and would probably be do just as fine with six to 12. Okay. So that's, that's optimal. And I know that that was very, that wasn't super specific. So I'm hoping I answered the question

1:15:33Shawn Stevenson:somewhat usefully. Absolutely. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Because, you know, within that average, what an average person could do, that would put you in, in our society today, really like the top 5 % fittest, you know, in society, you know, if you, if you have that kind of training volume and that I think that's doable for a lot of folks is just having the, the insight that you just delivered on, like, what do I actually need to do? Like how much, like where, what would put me in that, in that space? And now with that being said, what, for, for those who are like, I just want to get the benefit and I'm not trying to be, you know, superhuman or super fit or in that top upper echelon.

1:16:17Shawn Stevenson:I just want to age healthfully. What is the minimum effective dose? Okay. Okay. So I'm going to answer that, but I want to add some nuance to that, you know, the optimal stuff I talked about with like that 10 to 20-ish range where you're pushing advanced adaptations. And of course, with the 12 set limit being what most people in the real world can do.

1:16:44It's a mistake to treat every muscle group the same in terms of how hard you're going to go at and how much effort you want to put in. Because every one of us has our strengths and limitations. You know, every one of us has our muscle groups we want to bring up and our strong muscle groups that kind of grow when you just drive by the gym, right? So when you're trying to optimize muscle hypertrophy and you're juggling these larger volumes of stuff, some muscle groups, just train them casually, train them at maintenance, lower the volume that you train them at, lower the effort that you train them at, effort and volume that you train them at, save that energy for the muscle groups that you are trying to purposely bring up and, or, or the ones that you are already good and you purposely want to make them stand out.

1:17:33Um, so that, that's a little bit of nuance that I would want to add there because you can't be, you know, adding, you know, doing like 20 sets or 10 to 20 sets for every single, uh, muscle group and putting the same kind of effort for every single muscle group. You don't have to do that. Just the parts that you want to work on. And for most people, it's not going to be all parts. So yeah, I just wanted, wanted to add that. Thank you. Yeah.

1:17:58Shawn Stevenson:That's great. Yeah. Minimum effective dose per, you know, as research stands today for muscle hypertrophy, the maintenance of, I have to say, you know, the populations that we study in research trials are not extraordinary specimens. You know, people who are resistance trained, the way that you qualify as being labeled resistance trained for a given research study, typically if you've been training for six months. Then they call you resistance trained. And some researchers are a little more diligent and they'll say, okay, we'll try to recruit subjects who have been training for at least a year.

1:18:41And the reason for that is it's hard to find participants for research studies. So if you put these pretty strict and lofty parameters, okay, we can only find people who've been, you know, training for at least five years and can, you know, bench press like triple their body weight. It's like, you're not going to have a study. You're not going to find participants. So as the research stands today, you can maintain muscle gains as a non-extraordinary specimen on as little as three sets per muscle group per week. three to six is kind of the catch-all minimum effective dose three to six sets per body part

1:19:28Shawn Stevenson:of muscle group per week thank you so much for tuning into this episode today i hope that you got a lot of value out of this if you did please share it out with somebody that you care about and if you haven't already done so pop over to the youtube channel you get to actually hang out in the studio with me and all of these phenomenal guests. And it's just a vibe. It's a vibe. And we also have exclusive content that we release only on YouTube. You're not going to find anywhere else. Also, we do some really cool giveaways over there. So it's really a great place to be. So hop over there and subscribe to the Model Health Show on YouTube.

1:20:07Shawn Stevenson:And listen, we've got some incredible, incredible masterclasses and world leading experts coming your way very, very soon. so make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.