Forget crash diets: How to maintain a healthy weight | Alan Aragon & Prof. Sarah Berry

30:31Yeah. Okay. That's a great question. And there's a hierarchy of importance with protein intake. So of first importance is your total for the day. So if you get enough protein by the end of the day, then the other details are just distant secondary importance. You know, the distribution of protein, the timing of it, the spread, the individual dosing sizes, all that stuff is just pretty trivial. Secondary importance is the timing and distribution of the constituent doses. There's a whole science to that. And Alan, could you help me to understand in really simple words why you're saying that that protein is important if I'm following this program you're describing to help me to lose fat?

31:20Because I think a lot of people listening to this are like, well, don't I just have to eat less food overall? I'm increasing the quality of it, but I'm just eating less food. So why on earth do I need to worry about how much protein I have while I'm doing this? Okay. So protein is crucial for supporting your lean body mass. So your lean mass is all the tissues in your body that are not fat mass. And if you do not consume enough protein, then over time, and especially over the life stages, you incur conditions like sarcopenia, and then the umbrella over sarcopenia being frailty. And this is one of the unfortunate fates of the general population who's not involved with any sort of training or any sort of awareness about eating enough protein.

32:11And so those are the big reasons. And protein has other aspects to it that help with the fat loss process, including keeping people satiated. So of all the macronutrients, protein appears to be the one with the most potent effect on hunger control. So there's a bunch of research out of Joey Antonio's lab where he had the subjects just literally stack lean sources of protein on top of their habitual diets. And this is five studies running now. And there's no gain in body fat over time. And this is in free living conditions in participants who are engaged in training, so resistance training. So they're recreationally athletic subjects.

33:03And so protein has a very interesting effect on appetite regulation and the prevention of fat gain, even if you stack it on top of your existing diet. So there are some very interesting effects of protein, but if I were to boil it down to why is it so important, it's because it supports our lean body mass. And our lean body mass is really important for supporting what people know as our metabolism or our resting metabolic rate or resting energy expenditure. So when you can support that, then you can support the fat loss process. If you can retain your muscle tissue over time while reducing body fat, then that is the ideal scenario.

33:46And that's where getting enough protein comes in, plus resistance training. And we see with our own data from the studies that we've done as part of the Zoepredict research, If you're adding protein to your carbohydrate-rich meals, then you're having a smoother metabolic response, so to say, so that you're preventing that dip in blood glucose that I talked about earlier that means that you go on to feel hungrier more quickly. You go on to consume more calories more quickly. Adding in fiber, adding in fat will also have the same effect, but protein is even more potent. So as well as the fact that it stimulates these hormones that make you feel fuller, it also has this lovely effect in kind of smoothing out, so to say, your post-meal metabolic responses.

34:34Before we move on and talk about practical tips, one thing that hasn't really come up in this episode so far feels a bit like the elephant in the room, which is all of these GLP-1 agonist drugs like a Zempik and Wagovi and all the rest of it, which are obviously everywhere at the moment. And I think a lot of people listening are like, oh, I mean, come on, guys. If I wanted to lose some fat, I would just take these injections and then surely I don't need to worry about the rest of this. What are your thoughts on them, Alan? Okay, so I'm coming from a bias of nearly 30 years of helping people transform their bodies and never having, in quotes, needed to implement these types of drugs.

35:14And so I almost want to see them fail, but the evidence is in favor of them. And so, you know, as much as it hurts our ego sometimes, we just have to give credit to where it's due. And the GLP-1 drugs have been quite the significant positive in certain populations. And some people genuinely need them. And they originally were developed to control diabetes, which they're very good at. I think they have the potential to be abused by folks who want to, you know, lose the last 10 pounds or something to that effect. I think that they have the potential for being knee-jerk prescribed to people who are too young and also knee-jerk prescribed as sort of this first-line defense even without first making lifestyle changes.

36:13However, I would concede that they do make a good life jacket in the sense that if somebody has a lot of excess body fat and their biomarkers are off the charts and they're in a really bad spot health-wise. I do think that they make for a good life jacket. For example, you wouldn't have somebody jump out of the boat and tell them to come swim to shore, let's go. The GLP-1 drugs serve as a good life jacket. But I think, and this is my bias, I would prefer for people to see it as that rather than something that they are going to commit to from here on out. I think that the GLP-1 drugs should, I mean, they're a good tool, but I would like to see them placed more in the light of being a sort of a triage situation that should be weaned off of rather than just sort of this convenient Band-Aid.

37:17And if someone was on GLP-1s and is listening to this, and there will be lots of people like that, does your advice change significantly? I think that in all of those cases, we need to just assess the individual situation. Some people need them and will benefit from them depending on their circumstances. And some of them, it is more of the scenario that I described where let's use this as a last resort and then let's also focus on weaning off. I think it's really tough to universalize a yes or no type of prescription with GLP-1 drugs. When you have people that are morbidly obese, this is their life jacket.

38:03It's their way to get out of that rut. I know a few individuals that have now reached a stage where they can hardly leave their house because of how obese they are, that they can't walk downstairs because they're so out of breath. They're desperate to get GLP agonists. This is a perfect candidate. that that could transform their entire life. They have tried everything, but unfortunately they've reached a stage where they are so obese that it's too big a hurdle to overcome now, despite trying, and they're not in the position that they can physically exercise. And so I do think that in that situation, that yes, we should embrace it.

38:38But yeah, absolutely. For someone that's got maybe one inch of fat to lose around their waist to look like amazing in their bikini, no. But I think something we've got to be really mindful of is that for people who are on these drugs, and there's a growing number of people on these drugs, we have to be really, really mindful about the diet that they are then eating because they're a hunger suppressor. They get rid of all the food noise. It means that you're not eating the same amount of food. You're not eating the same amount of calories. So you've got to make every calorie count. And I think this is something that we need to be really, really cautious about, that people who are on these GLP agonists suddenly think, okay, that's it.

39:13It's all fixed. Oh, well, my meal today or my one meal, I'm hungry. I'll go and have a McDonald's because the weight's coming off. No, this is the time where you've really got to think about it. You have to get enough protein in. That's critical to keep the lean mass. You have to still get enough fiber in. You have to still get enough diversity of different bioactives, different micronutrients. And so it is a very, very critical time to think about your diet as well as being on these drugs. Thank you both. I think we have this great sort of background story to where we are, sort of grounding, I think, Alan, in your approach.

39:49And so if I was going to summarize quickly, but it's sort of like food quality is really important. Getting enough protein is really important. Resistance exercise is an important role. I'd love to now make it really actionable for our listeners so they can begin their journey as if, you know, you were there taking them through this. Maybe we can imagine a new client, Alan. So let's say they're in midlife. They want to lose, say, 10 pounds. where do you start and could you take us through the journey with them sort of step by step okay so not everybody is ready to go on a program where they transform their body okay let's say somebody thinks they're ready i would start with let's see your sleeping cycle how much sleep are you getting do you feel it's enough and what is your history with regard to that because sleep is the X factor for a lot of the success or failure in programs.

40:43Because when you don't get enough sleep, not only does it kind of affect the obvious stuff, meaning your energy to be physically active and certainly your energy to engage in any kind of progressive training program, but it also increases your appetite and your cravings, your hunger levels, and increases your cravings for calorie-dense, hyperpalatable foods. That's what sleep-deprived people mostly reach for almost instinctively. There's some very interesting research showing that subjects who are sleep-deprived consume, across studies on average, about 200 to 300 calories more per day while they're sleep-deprived.

41:26There's studies where they actually take people into these kind of chambers and they monitor them for weeks and they actually sleep-deprive them. They say, right, you're going to become a short sleeper, so less than six hours. And they see anywhere between 150, 300 calories per day increase in how many calories they're having just from depriving them. I mean, it's a pretty cool study that these guys do. Yeah, and the interesting thing is it went the other way too. They took a group of habitual less than six and a half hour sleepers and they put them through a coaching and training, sort of this education program on how to improve their sleep hygiene.

42:06And the goal was to add two hours of sleep a night. So they wanted to bring them up to, I believe, eight and a half hours or so. Seven hours of sleep appears to be this sort of threshold where below that, the outcomes are somewhat adverse. So they trained these folks to bring their sleep average from less than six and a half hours up to eight and a half. And they ended up eating about 260-ish, 270-ish calories less per day, which is pretty dang significant in the scheme of things, especially when you consider that while they were sleep deprived they probably had some sort of compromise in the amount of energy output that they had through either the exercise pathways or the non -exercise pathways.

42:58Just lower spontaneous physical activity and less capacity for purposeful physical activity. So that's sort of the basis of everything. Get the sleep right. and also so by changing the sleep it changes the types of foods that you're having we did a study at king's called the slumber study which was one of those sleep extension studies where people who were short sleepers less than six hours of sleep were asked to increase by two hours exactly similar to the study you're saying and what we saw was that by people increasing their sleep they had no advice about what food to have at all all they were told was the here's good sleep hygiene we want you to increase your sleep and we happen as part of this to be measuring the kind of food you're having, they significantly reduce by quite a large amount the amount of sugar intake that they had.

43:44So this deficit in calories is coming from the bad foods as well. So we are in this sort of perfect storm where we're surrounded by all this terrible processed food and we've got these incredibly addictive phones, you know, with TikTok and Instagram, whatever, keeping us up late at night so we sleep less and then we need to eat more processed food. So there's a sort of, We are surrounded by this environment that is attacking us, aren't we? Oh, yeah. Bidirectional badness, basically. Yes. So you fixed my sleep. What happens next? Right, right. So fix the sleep. And then the other elements we're trying to simplify this is, okay, so you have a goal of fat loss.

44:27You have to make the individual understand that this is about fat loss. and the scale is just a very, very vague proxy of what's going on. And so the usefulness of what the bathroom scale is telling you will get progressively less. So it'll get more and more useless the more fit that you become and the closer you come to your goal. Why is that? Because some people can actually gain lean mass or muscle mass while they're losing fat mass. And so they're losing inches, their body fat percent is coming down, but the scale won't necessarily register that. And so people have to understand it's not 100 % about the scale telling you what's going on.

45:13I'll give you an example. So if you were to take somebody through who is completely untrained, they're fresh off the couch and their goal is to reduce their body fat in half. In that process, they may gain, depending on the time period, let's say it's a six-month period, they may gain up to six, probably more pounds of muscle mass during that period. And I would rather people look, when they engage a program, I would rather them look at the six to 12-month overview rather than the popular, okay, I want this in six weeks type of thing. And so if they understand that they're going to gain a certain amount of muscle mass just by virtue of engaging the right training program and getting their diet correct, then this is going to offset, who knows, six to 10 pounds of weight loss that they would have wanted.

46:13And in that case, that's where it becomes important for people to take note of how clothing is fitting, you know, take note of how that might reflect circumference measurements. If you have more fancy devices for guesstimating body fat percent like the InBody or Dexa, BodPod, any number of these devices, then that gives you a little bigger picture than what the scale is saying. But let's imagine that somebody just, you know, they don't want to wrap tape around themselves and they don't have necessarily access or they don't want to go over to get their of body comp done at some facility, well then you would want to limit your weekly weight loss to, I'd say a maximum of 1 % of your total body weight per week at max.

47:04So if you lose more than that, then there's this tendency that you're sacrificing too much lean mass while you're losing fat mass. And so that would be the other sort of simple thing. We got the sleep, we got the rate of weight loss, you want to limit it to half a percent to a full percent. And really, the one pound per week benchmark is fair. It's fair and it's realistic. Now, with that said, I don't think people should be discouraged if they're losing even half of that. So if you're losing half a pound a week, two pounds a month, you know, heck, that's still 24 or 25 pounds in a year. And most people have spent the last 10, 20 years putting on that 25 pounds.

47:54And so people have to have these realistic expectations of weight loss. So I would say half a pound to a pound a week is a good rate of expectation. If you lose more than that, then that's a bonus. And then finally, from just a sort of a programming standpoint, okay, we got the sleep, we got the rate of weight loss, and we've got protein. Most of the focus that my colleagues and I have been on research-wise has been on protein. So I have certainly a biased interest in protein. So the amount of protein that people consume per day that is optimal has been a matter of debate without overcomplicating it.

48:35In the general public, 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a fair and realistic protein target for the general population. But I think that that is just kind of a good starting point. I really think you start getting into optimal and helpful for fat loss and lean mass preservation once you get to the 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. And in imperial terms, that's 0.7 grams per pound. If you fall somewhere between 1.2 on the low end, I'd rather see people do 1.6 all the way up to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. So about 0.7 to one whole gram per pound of body weight is really sort of the sweet spot for the goal of weight loss or fat loss.

49:36you're saying you like people to eat a lot of protein but you're also talking about the ways in which you want to make sure that they're getting all the benefits of whole food and not too much processed how do you balance a diet if you don't want to be eating really large amounts of meat because you really want to be getting other foods onto your plate right which have all of these other benefits and you don't really want to eat some sort of like ultra ultra processed protein powder because you look at all the stuff on the back and you're like i don't want really want to put this in my diet. This seems like a challenging combination to pull off.

50:09What's your thoughts and what's your advice there? So protein powder makes hitting protein targets very easy. Two scoops of protein, bam, there's 40 grams of protein. This could be a third of your intake for the day pretty easily for a lot of people. And so if you're already consuming like a mix of high quality animal-based proteins in the diet. Then it can be of benefit to do a plant-based protein powder if you wanted to sort of bias towards this higher diversity of protein sources. Or you could just go with sort of a standard way of which the ingredients don't, you know, don't offend or that you're okay with the ingredients list.

50:56and short of engaging the protein powder tactic, getting protein from the diet is pretty easy when you've got the kind of the food lists and the resources in front of you. I personally have at least two protein shakes a day and I get a good 80 grams of protein from those two shakes a day. So the rest of my protein requirement for the day is pretty smooth sailing. and I have a lot of control over how I make these protein smoothies. And they always have fresh fruit. Sometimes they have like chia seeds. There's various recipes I engage in the direction of protein smoothies and they're really like delightful desserts for me twice a day.

51:45And one of them has a lot of peanut butter in it, so that's a bonus. If you found this episode useful, the chances are there are a lot of other people who will too. Why not pass it along to someone who could benefit from it? Maybe someone who spent too much time thinking about quick hacks and would really benefit from the real science. It might be what puts them on the path to long-term success. I would love to go on to what's next. You know, you solved me sleep, you solved me protein. I have a feeling you're going to start to talk about some of this exercise you were talking about before. Exercise is similar to food in the sense that you have to find the type of exercise that you actually enjoy and even look forward to.

52:30That's the way to get compliance. And so with some people, it'll be going to the gym. With some people, it'll be going to the park. In either case, what a lot of people don't understand is that it has to contain a resistance training element. And when I say resistance training, a lot of people automatically think of bench squat and deadlift and stuff. But any resisted joint movement is going to qualify as resistance training. Calisthenics and even various forms of group exercise are beginning to engage resistance training type movements as well. As long as people can find what they enjoy and sustain that, then they're going to be ahead of the curve.

53:16So, yeah, it's a whole big role with exercise, but I think people miss the fact that they need to actually enjoy it. And you talked about resistance training. So I think a lot of people listening, and I think we see this even more so with women who are listening, have never done any sort of resistance training. So it doesn't fit in really into the category maybe of things that they're used to and they think about naturally. But I know you said earlier that you thought that was a really critical part of this program. Oh, yeah, yeah. So as we get older, we just lose our functional capability muscularly because we just sit around and barely move.

53:52and for people who have really no clue as to how to engage like any sort of resistance training program, then you can just think of three basic movements in any variation of the planes, push, pull, squat. Those three movements. If you can engage those through, you know, a progressive amount of volume over time and you become familiar with how to apply effort to various movements within a simple pull, push, and squat type of thing, then there are ways to do full body training sessions. There are ways to do split sessions where you might do upper body one day, the next day you do lower body, and then you repeat that cycle again through the week.

54:47And then you have other splits yet where you're doing some variation of either the three times full body or the upper lower split, plus some specialization on a lagging body part. So that's some of the basics of it. I think there's ways you can fit it into your lifestyle without it feeling daunting as well. I'm someone that's never liked exercise. I've never been to a gym. I play a bit of tennis, But other than that, the thought of doing any kind of exercise class fills me with horror. So I'm just not going to do it. So I've started doing what I call exercise snacks because I am sitting at my desk all day.

55:28I am now 48. I do need to be thinking of not how I look, but my muscles, the fact that I know I'm at that age, they're all going downhill. And so I have by my desk one of those exercise bands. So I do what Alan says every now and then. You might see me on calls going like this. And squats every time I boil a kettle. I do squats. I can get 20 squats in. I have about eight cups of tea a day. That's 80 squats without even thinking about it. How do you keep people motivated, Alan? So you've got this brilliant program all laid out, but I think we all know that the hard thing is you go in really motivated and your motivation declines.

56:03Wow. Wow. That is a huge question. As a general statement, Most people get motivated most powerfully by health scares in their middle age. Aside from that general statement, motivation is just going to be different with everybody. How to keep them motivated while we as coaches just try to maintain a certain accountability with clients, midweek check-ins, even daily reports from clients, individuals, even in coaching groups. that seems to work a lot better than just sending them off on their own untethered for a week. Yeah, that's a tough one, the motivational thing. I would like to think that results are self-motivating.

56:53So the pressure is on the practitioner to help the client get results. And I don't think that everybody needs to constantly chase body composition goals. You can take a break from them because it can be very psychologically fatiguing to be dieting for weeks and weeks and months and months. So you can diverge from that goal just by focusing on performance goals or building a skill and also taking regular diet breaks and maintenance phases through the journey. And so there's a way you can systematize that. I wonder that Jonathan as well, whether another way to motivate people is to give them more kind of tools in their toolbox.

57:38And there's some really interesting work we've been doing, Alan, at Zoe, where we've been looking at how you eat impacts your energy intake, your healthfulness. And so looking at factors like time-instricted eating, which I know you've done a lot of research in, but also looking at other factors such as eating rate. And so we know that if you can get people to eat more slowly, i.e. if you just say slow down the rate at which you eat your food by 20 percent so that's having your breakfast in 10 minutes instead of eight minutes without them even thinking about it that that results in a 15 calorie deficit just from slowing down the rate that they're eating timing of eating again i know you've done work on this as well but eating earlier in the day trying to avoid late night eating trying to avoid late night snacking there's all of those kind of things i think as well that we can make sure we communicate with people so that they've got a few different tools to choose from.

58:31Yeah, there are some interesting non-quantitative tactics that people can employ that do work. I think the evidence around time-restricted eating is really strong, and especially if it's what we call early time-restricted eating. So having your first meal maybe at nine in the morning, but finishing your last meal no later than seven or six in the evening. It doesn't have to be excessive. It doesn't have to be, you know limiting it to you know six hours and be really restrictive even giving yourself a 14 hour rest period overnight so you've only got a 10 hour eating window that can result in a calorie deficit it can result in a weight loss we've seen this and the studies overall show that on average obviously it depends on the regime that there's about a two to three hundred calorie deficit from practicing time-restricted eating even if people aren't told okay you know reduce your energy intake I agree.

59:28There's consistent positive results from time-restricted eating, whether it's early shifted or late shifted. Yes, the early shifted regimes show more favorable outcomes. I would like to see more long-term research to see if it still bears out that the early time-restricted feeding is the optimal version of that. But as far as biomarkers, especially glucose control and things, it appears to be so. So there's one long-term study I know of by Liu, L-I-U, and colleagues, which you might be familiar with, where they dragged out an early time-restricted feeding regime versus an 8-to-8 regime. And they actually didn't see any advantage to the early time-restricted feeding model.

1:00:14But in the short term, it usually wins. so I tend to think that the better we can individualize these things than maybe the wider range of individuals that we can help some people like in Spain for example hate the idea of eating dinner earlier than nine o 'clock so I think that maybe with folks in that direction we can counsel them on how to position exercise so that they can kind of get the best of best of both worlds. Alan, final question. Sure. If you could combine all that you've learned about fat loss and maintaining this healthy body composition into one short motivational message, what would you say?

1:01:04That's a hard one, Jonathan. It is super hard. And I want people to run with this in the right way. Don't immediately believe everything you hear on the internet, including, well, even for me, don't just take it on faith. Okay. Be skeptical. Most of the information dished out on the internet, people can't support it with any real evidence or data, much less the weight of the research evidence. And yeah, just be more skeptical. Don't believe stuff so quickly. I love it. Alan and Sarah, I'd like to do a quick summary. We covered lots of things. I'm going to try and stick to the core, Alan, of what you were sharing.

1:01:48The thing that really sticks in my mind is that my diet has to support YOLO. You only live once. I had no idea what that was until an hour ago. And so you're saying like 10 to 20 % of the diet that you're designing for somebody who's looking for this fat loss can be just the things that they really enjoy. So if you like an ice cream, you can have an ice cream. But importantly, you want to encourage your clients to change their mindset. It's just food. It doesn't have power over them. So it's not off limits. That also means if you have some, you don't suddenly have to sort of binge on it because it doesn't mean you can never have it tomorrow.

1:02:21It doesn't mean you're a failure. And then in terms of your core approach, interestingly, you spent a lot of time talking about things that weren't food before you went to food. So the first thing you said is you need to be ready, but also you need to have like a six to 12 months mindset and you need to be like ready to make change. Then interestingly, you went straight to sleep, which was a big surprise for me. So you were saying, you know, if you're a bad sleeper, you're going to eat two to 300 calories. Sarah was talking about all this research about how it changes what you want to eat. So you've got to address that first.

1:02:48You can't just go to diet. You then said, you've also got to learn to ignore the bathroom scales. So the opposite of everything I was taught growing up that is literally just about changing this. I mean, there was a whole company called Weight Watchers, right? Which is like literally looking at the bathroom scale. So this is a big change. And that's because you're saying you want to increase people's muscle. So actually, that's going to make them heavier, but with this wonderful muscle with all of these great benefits. Good to put in the bank. Muscle on the bones is like money in the bank, especially as you get old and sarcopenia looms.

1:03:20So I love that. And I think both Sarah and I have got very sold on that over the last few years, which means then you say sound physical exercise program and really making sure there's resistance training within that for the reasons you described. And only when you've gone through all of that, interestingly, do you then start talking about actually the food that you eat, which I think for most listeners is really surprising. I think much of what you described, I think is not going to be very surprising to people who listen to these podcasts often. So, you talk a lot about sort of healthy, minimally processed foods, really focused on what the individual likes or loves.

1:03:55So, saying again, like if you can find the things that you enjoy, then you're much more likely to stick with that, which I think is the complete opposite of like eating the watermelon diet or the alkaline diet, all these things you're describing, which is sort of picking this very narrow set of things that are magic, but weren't necessarily what you wanted. Similarly, find a meal routine that's sustainable and that you can do also in terms of your time and your money. Again, personalized to what people like, right? So, if they like a food, a diet that's quite low carb, that's good. If they like a diet that's got lots of fat and it's good, like you can find a way to solve around that.

1:04:27And then finally, like the big thing I think you're adding on top here that's really striking is try and eat enough protein when you're in this fat loss phase. So you want to maintain your lean tissue and protein is also helping with less hunger. So you're really trying to push that up alongside all the rest of these things. Yes. Protein is, higher protein is more important and useful in people sustaining hypo caloric conditions or dieting conditions than it is for people just maintaining. I'll leave you with one final thought. What if there was one simple habit that, when repeated, could change how you feel for the better?

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