Barbell Shrugged - **Bonus Episode** Metabolism Made Simple w/ Sam Miller and Anders Varner Barbell Shrugged #666

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

The conventional approach to dieting is fundamentally flawed. Metabolism Made Simple offers a better solution. You can change your body and your health for the better without quick-fix gimmicks or fad diets. In Metabolism Made Simple, health, fitness, and nutrition expert Sam Miller provides a wealth of readily understandable science, easily followed systems, and repeatable strategies. He exposes the real reasons why many diets fail and helps you avoid preventable pitfalls on your way to your goals. Using clear language, he guides you to achieving optimal health or your ideal physique. It’s time for a nutritional intervention that promotes metabolic health, extends longevity, and puts you in control of your body. Ditch the diet fads forever. Instead, take advantage of an individualized, transformational approach. There is no reason to wait. PURCHASE “METABOLISM MADE SIMPLE” In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged you will learn: The intersection of Diet Culture and Nutrition Stress and Energy as the foundation of your metabolism The S.H.R.E.D.S. formula for Biofeedback  The differences between perception and practice in optimizing metabolism 5 M’s of metabolism Pros and Cons of Popular Diet Styles   Sam Miller has more than a decade of experience as a health, fitness, and nutrition coach. His programs help coaches and health professionals improve their clients’ results.  A popular online educator, podcast host, and mentor, he consistently offers simple, strategic methods for transformation and translates complex concepts into leverage for any health and fitness goal. His workshops, classes, and specialization programs have served over 2,500 coaches worldwide.  He has been a featured speaker for companies like LinkedIn and a content contributor for industry titans such as Barbell Shrugged, Muscle Intelligence, T-Nation, Elite FTS, and more. He is a certified nutritionist and licensed, board-certified health practitioner who holds a master’s degree from North Carolina State University and a Bachelor of Science from Elon University. To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Sam Miller on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we've got a bonus episode today. As I mentioned, kind of in the show here, but I went and grabbed coffee with my good friend, Sam Miller, the other day, which the reason I hadn't gotten coffee with him in a while is because he's been sitting down writing a book and that takes a lot of energy and effort and focus and not enough time to go get coffee with your bros. But what's super cool is when I found that out, I was like, dude, we've got get you on shrug so we can talk about it. And here we are. So Metabolism Made Simple is his brand new book.

You can find it on Amazon today or you can head over to metabolismmadesimple.com. That is where you can purchase it as well. Find out more. There's all kinds of fun resources he's put together. And we go through kind of the outline and why he wrote this book today, what you can get out of it, the benefits of understanding your nutrition on a deeper level, and it's a really good template for just understanding what your metabolism is, how to actually get the results and the goals, results for the goals that you have, and get over to metabolismmadesimple.com.

Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Sam Miller from Sam Miller Science. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about, dude, your new book, Metabolism Made Simple. Yes, sir. This is super exciting. We had coffee last week. You're actually my only in the industry friend and all of North Carolina right now, which is super cool. Um, I had no idea you were even writing a book and then you sent me an awesome overview of it. I'm stoked to, uh, dig into this thing. Um, one of the, one of the, every time I hear the word metabolism, I have like a, a light chuckle in the back of my brain because the number of times metabolism is misunderstood.

And when your client's like my metabolism, I think it's broken as if it's like a, it's like a twig that like one day it's together. And then the next day it's broken. Um, I'd love to kind of just dig in at the highest level of like, can we walk through like, what is your metabolism? Why isn't it broken? And why is it so hard to really like, just as an overall thing, so hard to understand that we all have them. It's how we process food. And like, it shouldn't be such a challenging thing to understand the process. Right.

And I think a lot of us, you know, too, we have experiences, whether it's as children growing up early adult experiences, you know, the first time we make kind of an attempt diet or get in the fitness industry, you hear metabolism thrown around a lot, especially the speed of your metabolism. So I've used the analogy before that, you know, let's say you were as a kid, you know, you carried a little bit of extra weight, you know, you might've been, maybe your parents said, Oh, you know, you have a slow metabolism, or maybe you had a friend, you know, you carried a little bit of extra weight, you know, you might've been, maybe your parents said, Oh, you know, you have a slow metabolism or maybe you had a friend, you know, Timmy just ate whatever he wanted. And he was, um, you know, a little bit on the skinnier side

and people would say, Oh, you know, that kid just has such a fast metabolism. And we start to use a lot of these, uh, very like layman's explanations for things that don't really give us the full picture of what metabolism actually is, which in the most simple, you know, kind of definition, I think of it as a stress and energy regulator. So energy obviously coming from food is calorie containing, and our body is very perceptive to that. It likes to sort of keep an eye on things from that energy availability perspective, which includes the food in our diet that provides calories and also stored energy that we have in our body in the form of things like body fat. We also can store energy in things like muscle glycogen, but for simplicity's sake, think about

the energy coming in from your diet. Your body's very perceptive to that and it's going to regulate metabolism accordingly. And then we also have the energy out portion, which is our exercise, our movements. If you go for a walk, obviously burning some calories, their resistance training, all of those things can impact metabolism. Then from the stress perspective, we have things that we do in our daily life that can impact our metabolic health. So Anders, obviously lately on Barbells Truck, you've been talking a lot about sleep, stress management, all of these foundational principles that go into our metabolic health that can influence things like thyroid function, adrenal function, sex hormones, and really that can impact our quality of life and

also our behaviors. So if we look at metabolism, we're really looking at this gauge. It's kind of like a thermostat in a way where it's picking up on these different environmental influences of stress. And then also what we're doing in terms of our food choices and our movement choices, and it kind of computes that for us, but it's not necessarily just this calculator of calories in calories out. And it's also not necessarily just the biochemistry portion. It's really this beautiful integration, both the stress and hormone side with also the energy regulation side, which is a lot of what the conventional fitness industry focuses on is, you know, that sort of diet, uh, dietary approach, subtract X number of calories and, you know, add this many

calories in the form of movement. So I really wanted people to zoom out and just understand that, you know, there's more to metabolism than that. And we can also manipulate our metabolic health by really understanding some key lifestyle factors and, you know, basic foundational habits. The, um, the interesting thing when you're talking about that, cause I actually kind of was when I was like pre puberty, like the chubby kid, like I never really understood why. And like, now when I look back, all my kids, all my friends that were like lean, like kind of shredded, like preteen kids, like kids growing up that like somehow just were like, look, Jeff, they were also the kids that would probably be on ADD medicine in 2022 because they were just like wired and

running all over the place. And they were constantly playing. And now that I'm much more educated, it's like a, it's like the aha. You're like, oh, it's because that person like never sat still and always had too much energy and was constantly running around doing playing sports and being outside and didn't drink from like a TDE perspective. We've got that higher non-exercise activity, right? So it's like, if they're running around, they're outside, they're on the playground, like they're never sitting down. All of those things are really going to influence metabolism because that non-exercise portion is actually a huge part of our energy expenditure, which is basic things like going for a walk or playing outside with your kids or doing yard work.

Those things add up on a weekly basis if you're consistent with them. And a lot of people just kind of overlook those aspects when they're thinking about metabolism. So I love that you use that example because I was in kind of a similar spot. I went from probably carrying a bit too much weight to them being underweight because the dietary practices that I chose and activity, like I just didn't really understand it all. I was just kind of picking up, you know, your men's health magazine and, oh, I need to eat this way at this exact time. And that's the only way that I can look the way that I want to look. I didn't understand that it was like, okay, we have these various inputs. And if you control those,

you can move in the right direction for whatever your goals are, whether that's building muscle, losing fat, optimizing for health and hormones and things of that nature. So once you start to be able to zoom out and see it that way, it's very much like a light bulb moment. And I just wanted folks to be able to have that realization because I think they hear the term, they hear the catchy buzzwords, they hear of the different fat approaches, but nobody really teaches anybody about metabolism and the intersection with nutrition, especially. And so that's really the core focus of the book is like just making sense of metabolism was actually, you know, before we went with metabolism made simple for the title, making sense of metabolism was going to be one of the front runners for the title, because to me,

I'm just like, there's so much misinformation out there when it comes to looking at it. Just one is like an overall kind of idea beyond, you know, like a scientific journal. And then also the actual principles and things that you would implement for as a health and fitness coach. I think the more that I worked with clients and the more that I was seeing people in the trenches, I was like, the marketing around this is just, just awful. Right. So we needed to get people to understand, like, you know, do I really, is it really about speeding up your metabolism or, you know, is there, there more to the story there? Um, and I think that's kind of, as I move into part two of the book, kind of, uh, after dispelling some of those myths, like giving people some practical strategies for, you know, actually improving their health.

Yeah, I actually and kind of on a on, you know, that's like the the childhood memory of metabolism when you hear people like, oh, they just have like a fast metabolism. Oh, you got like the parents saying, oh, you got my metabolism. And it's slower because the parents are overweight or whatever. You're big boned. Yeah. Big bone, right? Husky. Those are the genes for Husky kids. But even nowadays, because I'm so hyper aware of seeing people in the way that they move and kind of like maybe in a creepy way,

like observing the way that they live their life as adults and seeing just in general, it's not like when you go outside and many people that are listening to the show have kids and they probably are outdoors with other parents. I'm like the parent that is constantly trying to get a foot race going with the kids. Most people just stand there. No one moves. It's like there's this just sedentariness of, of life and it bothers crap out of me, but I'm not allowed to talk about it unless I'm talking to you professionally about metabolism.

And, and so many parents or so many older as people age, they just assume they're stuck with this thing. And one of the key things that you talk about kind of is like diet culture and how it plays into just our perceptions and what we think is real about our health. Can you dig into that of just like society wise, how has nutrition diet culture really played into kind of leading people astray and how they can affect their body and get healthier? I think one of the first things that you really articulated there is that people have sort of this fixed mindset, black and white

mentality about their metabolism instead of understanding that it's malleable and adaptive, right? So rather than people looking at dietary choices and even let's say, you know, for example, Anders, you were in the CrossFit space for a long time. Paleo was super popular. Well, if you want to eat paleo and that works for you and you enjoy the foods and you can stick with it, then that's great. But we need to understand that essentially what we're doing is we're just picking a nutritional style that's, you know, provides energy, provides micronutrients. And based on those choices, that's going to have an impact. My metabolism is essentially, you know, adaptive in response to that stimulus. And so rather than people looking at, okay, what choice can I make that I can sort

of adhere to and implement and follow over time and then adjust accordingly, depending on how my body responds. A lot of people view it as like, you know, my metabolism just is the way it is or worse off. They think, oh, it's slowing down and I'm getting older and all these things. And we're not looking at the actual habits and behaviors and daily practices like resistance training and walking and basic things you can do to preserve, you know, your metabolic rate and your metabolic health, uh, over your lifespan. So from a, a perceptions perspective, I think that's certainly one thing is, is people have this, uh, they have a little bit of sort of an all or nothing mindset around certain things.

There is also, like you said, rather than viewing metabolism, you kind of used almost like a light switch analogy, right? Or kind of the black and white that's like it's on or it's off, it's faster, it's slow. And the truth is, it's really more of like a dimmer dial. Or like if you think of the radio in the car, you can go to a bunch of different levels in terms of volume. And the degree to which we're adjusting that is largely dependent on us. And I think that's what's inherently really powerful about understanding metabolism and adaptive physiology and just how responsive the body is, is it's amazing because you can change it. It's inherently very empowering, but also it requires

you to take responsibility for where you're at, which I think as a society, like we're not necessarily doing a great, great job of. And so it's very easy to point the finger and be like, oh, it's this way because of this, or my metabolism is just this way instead of looking at it as, okay, you know, I I've gotten this result and this is where I am. Um, and there's a lot of gray area nuance when it comes to nutrition. So most of these diets, essentially what they're doing when we think about diet culture is usually they're just eliminating a food group, eliminating a macronutrient, or they're doing something to achieve a caloric reduction, but there's no

seasonality in the approach. And so when people can't sustain that over time, we end up with a lot of yo-yo dieting behavior where people lose the weight, they regain the weight, they lose the weight, they regain the weight, and they don't understand how to sort of manipulate that approach over time after the initial weight loss. And so that's really where some of these other tools, strategies, and interventions come into play for the book. But definitely from that perception perspective, I think it's the way people view the diets in terms of rather than understanding it's like a short-term intervention. They look at it as like, they don't really look at it as like, can I follow this forever? And then they get stuck.

Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthReport.com. When you get to RapidHealthReport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover

everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my

health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. They get stuck and then they blame the diet rather than understanding like, okay, my body just sort of responded to that and is going to naturally adapt over time. And really, we play a role, we have, you know, responsibility in determining that adaptation. Yeah. Super interesting. You brought up the yo-yo diet thing. Last year, I got down to,

it was like 181, which is like the leanest I've probably ever been. Photo shoot life for, you know, 38 year olds, 38 year old men. We need those every once in a while abs and stuff. Um, but really my goal for the last year has been to like maintain a healthy body weight, which is insanely hard to do at the beginning of that process because your body's in such a deficit that it wants to eat so much and like get back to where you were because that felt so safe there. And then what I found over time is I just focused on eating healthy food, being healthy and moving kind of like the basic things and seeing and using the scale, not as a tool of like, this is what you weigh. It's good or bad. But using the scale of like you're eating too much or you're not moving enough.

And this is out of balance and using it as like a thermometer for, um, my actions over like a rolling average of call it seven days a month, but just kind of like understanding over time. Um, the scale is not some like number that's pointing a finger at you and saying like, you are either overweight or underweight or you're losing weight or you're gaining weight. Um, many, so many people get trapped in that. Like, I mean, they're bulking to get giant, which they're not getting giant as fast as they think they are. They're just putting on fat and they're not getting shredded as fast as they are. Cause

that's a long process. What you're doing, you're just either eating a lot and carrying a lot of food volume, or you're just starving yourself and you don't have a lot of food volume until it gets to like a very long, uh, timescale. Um, all of this, because I think the scale is really hard, but I also just started it. And you mentioned this in the book of like your metabolism really breaks down into like two main buckets of like stress and energy. And I think that that's like an awesome way to look at it because if you're eating too much, you can increase your output or you can decrease the amount of food you're eating. And if you, if you're able to get away from the scale pointing at you and saying like, you're either good or bad, um, there's, there's like, it's an empowering situation to stand on it and understand it in a different

frame of where's my energy balance. And I'd love for you to dig into like, what is the energy side? What is the stress side? And how do those two play with each other? Because I think in the end, what people really want is to just not have to think about, am I losing weight? Am I fat? Do I need to be too skinny? It's like that stress alone causes so much additional problems that people just want to be at a weight stable and healthy. And that's so hard. Right. So from an energy side, you know, historically we took kind of the physics carryover of thermodynamics and calories, and that's our unit of measurement when it comes to energy. But I want to remind everybody that just like a mile in Kansas is different than a mile up Mount Everest, we need the context of sort of our environment. And that's really where stress comes in, right? Because if I told you, hey, you know, you've got to run a mile today, there's a huge difference between a sunny day on flat ground versus it's snowing, and there's a vertical elevation of thousands of feet, right? And you're doing it at altitude and there's treacherous terrain. That's a very different mile you need to embark on.

And so we think of stress as sort of the environmental circumstance and a bit more like your climate and topography in that running example. And then the energy portion is calories, which essentially are used to just quantify the energy that's provided from food. And in the fitness industry, you usually hear that defined as calories in, calories out. Now, to break that down a little bit further, when we look at the calories out portion, that's when people talk about total daily energy expenditure. So that's like your resting metabolic rate, plus also factoring in your non-exercise movement, your exercise movement, and then the

thermic effect from the food you eat. So someone eating a higher protein diet is going to have a greater thermic effect. Someone who gets more steps, those basic activities that Andrew's talking about, when you're walking more, you increase that non-exercise activity. Then on the exercise portion, obviously, depending on how stressed you are, your sleep, your exercise performance, and that exercise activity thermogenesis is impacted by other things going on in our life. If you're going in and hitting PRs and having the greatest performance ever, chances are you're probably managing your environment and that other stimulus really, really well. If all of a sudden, you know, you're training, you just lack the desire to train, your biofeedback's really poor, maybe hormonally things are off from like a biochemistry perspective, that's going to show

up in your training and your performance and impact the overall output. And now, obviously, if we don't have the same output, that will be reflected in calories, but also in terms of our ability to build muscle, progressive overload, and all the other important aspects of metabolism, strength training, etc. On the stress side, I kind of break this down into different buckets. So I talk about basic things like circadian rhythm, your overall health, that's kind of circadian stress. So let's say you're jet lagged or consuming far too much caffeine, having a hard time sleeping, social jet lag. So maybe you go out on the weekends and you're drinking. Those types of things can really impact the stress on our body just from basic behaviors or your job and the lifestyle that you live. We also have elements like inflammation and glycemic regulation. So by managing inflammation and glycemic regulation, that is good for our metabolic health and theoretically should make it easier to achieve energy balance through a variety of mechanisms. So inflammation has some consequences in terms of thyroid health, reproductive hormone health, and then glycemic regulation, that's, you know, plays very close,

very, very closely intertwined with appetite management and adherence. Because if you're riding the blood sugar roller coaster, that's usually when you're going to grab maybe that convenient snack that maybe you shouldn't have or meal by meal decisions become harder because we're not able to stabilize blood sugar as well., can also lead to dips in energy and mood, which then can impact your non-exercise activity. Because Anders is geared up, ready to go, foot race with the kids. Other people, maybe they're having that post-lunch lull, and they're not really in the mood to engage in that activity. And therefore, their blood sugar, their mood, environment, all of those things start to impact the TD equation side as well. So we really want to look at these as like an integrated concept. And it's not necessarily that you couldn't achieve

an energy deficit of some kind and lose weight and do all of those things, but it's how sustainable is that going to be over time, which is really where I start to incorporate some of those other pillars of like, well, how do we actually build a nutrition protocol that checks the boxes to make sure that we don't have these problems, but within the stress and energy bucket stress side is really looking at circadian stress, glycemic and inflammatory stressors, all of which are usually a result of our lifestyle or choices and patterns of behavior that we're engaged in. Um, a lot of the big things we can focus on is just improving sleep, food quality, environment, stress management. So I talk about stress management strategies in the book, largely based

on evidence that we have. That could be nature walks. If you like creative therapies like music and art, that's great. If that's more your style. I even talk about community, family, pets, different things that you can do depending, because not everybody is like, I'm going to go meditate right now. I'm going to do yoga. So I really wanted some practical strategies for folks because we hear stress all the time and we hear, hey, you should manage your stress, but there's not always like, hey, this was actually shown in research to improve your physiological response to a stressor or this lowered serum cortisol levels or something like that. Yeah. So that's, sorry about that. That's kind of the stress side. And then energy side, just remember guys, like, yes, we are using calories to quantify energy intake, but it really, uh, still requires context there. Just like any other unit of

measurement. We want to know a little bit more to the story, but the calories are still important because as Andrew's tied in the scale weight portion, obviously if we're over consuming calories relative to our movement, we are going to see an uptick in that scale weight. If we are under consuming, uh, and we're, we're moving a lot, we may see impaired recovery. If we're, you know, over, over consuming and also have a lot of other, um, poor lifestyle behaviors, that's going to be bad for our metabolic health. And we start to see a lot of other poor lifestyle behaviors, that's going to be bad for our metabolic health. And we start to see a lot of the lifespan considerations that are impacted by those choices. So really, when we start to unpack all these variables, we can start to see how people

end up down different paths in their life, in terms of their body composition, metabolic health, blood work, biofeedback, quality of life, all of that stuff is very, very closely integrated. And I just wanted to give people a little bit more simple way to think about that. Um, you mentioned biofeedback in that answer as well. And I think that that's something that I just became very in tune with in over the last year. Um, in, in, in being like whatever an ex ex athlete of some sort, where you're always in some sort of phase of like, I'm trying to get as big and strong as possible. And then it's time to compete. And now I need to get as lean as possible, but keep as much muscle mass that I can still perform, but perform better because now I'm at

a lighter weight. Um, as we get away from competing or performance being the number one thing that we're focusing on in the gym, um, and being weight stable for a really long time, it forces you to think about the biofeedback pieces of this. You've actually come up with an awesome formula. We've done an entire show on the shreds formula. So people can go back and, um, just search for Sam Miller on barbell shrug. I think there are three or four episodes in now, but, um, so you can, you can hear the

deep dive, the full hour plus on, on what the shreds formula is, but can you go over your biofeedback system? Because it's very simple to understand. I think it lays out a lot of the things that I've been personally going through and, and a way when people say like stress or sleep, that's like, it's like, okay, you just want me to sleep better. Right. How, what, what does that mean? How do I know if I'm even getting good sleep, even though I'm getting eight hours? Um, and learning what this, the biofeedback side of it feels like is really one of the best indicators. It's way better than the scale. Um, cause you're, it forces you to tune into your body. Um, but what is that formula that you created?

Sure. So shred stands for sleep, hunger, recovery, energy, digestion, and stress. And if we look at those components, they're all really important aspects of managing metabolism and our overall health, right? If our digestion's off, we may feel bloated or we're not absorbing our nutrients properly. If we're not sleeping well, that may impact our energy levels. If we're not sleeping well, that's going to impact exercise, other behaviors. Sometimes we make different food choices when our sleep isn't super great. So by walking through sleep, hunger, recovery, energy, digestion, and stress, we have an easy checklist that we can go to. Now, typically I like to look at quantitative or like numerical markers for each category, in addition to just how you feel as though you're doing right. So there's a difference if I say,

oh, my energy levels a seven, but I also want to know, okay, well, is it low when you're waking up or are you having low energy levels in the afternoon after your lunch? Is your energy crashing or dipping between meals? Am I wired and tired at night? That's the type of thing you want to think about when you're working through shreds. So for sleep, for example, it could be, oh, I fall asleep really easily, but I don't stay asleep very easy, or I have a hard time falling asleep, right? That's a great example of sleep and biofeedback inside of shreds. In terms of hunger, that might mean, oh, I'm not really hungry in the morning, but I do get really hungry before dinner.

That is a very specific piece of data that we can incorporate to improve your overall plan and approach when it comes to your health and wellness recovery. I usually like to look at, okay, if I've been consistent with my training, am I able to progressively overload my movements? Do I have the desire and motivation to train? Do I feel like going to the gym? Those are the types of things we want to look at when it comes to recovery energy. As I mentioned, this could be energy dips. It could be low energy in the morning. Um, it could be, maybe I'm wired at the wrong times, like in the evening when really I should be winding down and getting ready for sleep, uh, digestion. As I mentioned, this, uh, is imperative for absorbing your nutrients properly, but also connects closely with inflammation, which we talked about as a key stressor, uh, when we go overall health and its implication as it pertains to a lot of chronic diseases. So with digestion, I'm usually looking at both the frequency of, you know, are you having a daily bowel movement? And then we can also use something like a Bristol stool chart to see, okay, is this a healthy bowel movement or are we basically on, you know,

one side or the other in terms of that spectrum? And that's super easy. You can just Google Bristol stool chart. That's been something used in research and clinical practice for a really, really long time. And then stress being that last one, you mainly want to be thinking about not only kind of perceived stress, but anything else in your life that is sort of adding up to contribute to that stress bucket overall. So we may be thinking about work stress, family stress, other elements that are coming into play that are going to impact your transformation. So you could use a simple rating scale here, but I also like to add some specific details if you can. And then from maybe that beginner level biofeedback, we can begin to use more advanced questionnaires. If we're working

with more intermediate clients or athletes or high performers who are willing to kind of dive deeper, you can have specific questionnaires for each category. So you could do an entire questionnaire about sleep. So underneath shreds, you have the ability to essentially have a deep dive in each category, which is imperative for digestion. We could do, you know, kind of a digestive appraisal or digestive questionnaire within shreds, And then we can connect it to biochemistry and look at different markers. So whether you're using different testing methods, so for example, my energy levels, maybe I'm looking at my overall thyroid and adrenal health, my testosterone levels, you know, I could be looking at circadian rhythm and those overall

patterns as well as blood sugar regulation. I might be looking at, you know, fasting insulin, a one C and a facet blood glucose score. So biofeedback is kind of like your gateway drug into these other areas of tracking that allow for sort of more advanced, uh, interventions down the road. And I think also it's like the, it's the most interesting thing. Um, I think in, in like a, the beginner stage of it, when you're tracking calories, and then all of a sudden you're like, well, I still don't have the body that I like. Then you get into tracking macros. That's like stage two. You start to focus on your protein. And then all of a sudden you're like, well, I'm doing all the right things. I'm eating the right

percentages, but I don't feel great. And then you start to understand micronutrients a little bit. But once you start to understand how those three steps, once you get to the end of that, start to influence the lifestyle side of things from the sleep, how hungry you are digestion. That's where like the real game starts to be fun because there's, there's so many levels that you can start to play on biofeedback and taking that really down. I mean, you can, you can go all the way as far as running labs on yourself to be able to see how these things start to play out. Um, and then really how to the, how to visible stressors, um, play into total health, what's going on inside

your body and, and then through that testing, you'll be able to live. Yeah. Yeah. And through that testing, we can see underlying stressors as well beyond the surface level stressors. And what's interesting though, is for a lot of clients, you know, the biofeedback and blood work portion, if you're paying attention to it may actually change first before you see amazing changes in body composition, right? You may actually get metabolically healthier by going for walks, getting sleep, eating a protein, getting the micronutrients, you may actually make great strides as it pertains to your health, biofeedback, quality of life, body composition, before you see that you've lost 20 pounds on the scale. And that's why I think it can be a really informative indicator for progress. Or let's say, and that's even on the beginner side, for the advanced person

who maybe doesn't have a ton of weight to lose and they're looking towards optimization. Well, once you get to a point where you don't have another 17 pounds to lose on the scale, and we're talking about maintaining your weight within the same four to seven pounds year round, you really need to start to look at these other variables as far as indicators of forward progress along with performance in the gym and, uh, you know, different elements that we can look to, uh, overall. So definitely super important. I think it's, it's very undervalued by like the fitness space as a whole. Um, and, and really is a great sort of additional gauge or barometer on what's going on from a

metabolic perspective. Yeah. Um, the next piece I want to dig into it actually really caught my attention is it's kind of like your five laws of metabolism. I think you call them kind of like the five M's. We've dug into the stress or the shreds side of biofeedback many times on Shrugged in the past, but this is the first time I've seen this presented by you. So I'd love to hear kind of what are the five laws? How do they pertain to kind of current diet structures? Why some of them work? Why long-term many of them end up failing, which is why this is such an important topic for people.

Where are those, where did those laws come from and what are they? So the laws are, I'll kind of run through some of the biggest ones, talk about their relevance and importance and overall application and how I kind of came about some of them. So overall, you know, when we look at any approach, if we cannot maximize adherence and stick with it, it's not going to work, right? Any change in life requires consistency and sort of this stick-to-itiveness in our approach. And if we can't do something where we can repeatedly show up every day and kind of benefit from the compound effect of repeated behaviors, we're not going to change, right? So that was one of the key things that I wanted effect of repeated behaviors, we're not going to change,

right? So that was one of the key things that I wanted in there is like, we have to have some sort of adherence component to sticking to the program. We also need to manage our appetite because nobody wants to be hungry all the time when they are, even if you are in a calorie deficit and you're trying to lose weight and you're hungry a little bit because you're eating less and exercising more, we still need to manage that to some extent. Otherwise, we're going to be very unhappy or we're more likely to go off the rails, deviate from the approach and potentially sabotage our progress overall. We also have mitigating adaptation. So a lot of diets don't necessarily teach seasonality in the approach. I think reverse diets have made a ton of headway in the fitness industry. Maintenance phases have made a lot of headway, but understanding that we move through the phases seasonally. So if I'm focused on performance,

I'm probably looking at more of a maintenance phase or reverse diet. Whereas if I'm looking at my overall body composition, my physique, my aesthetic appearance, visual goals, how I look in photos, like your photo shoot, for example, that's really more of that sort of, we're wanting to change how we look and we want to maintain performance during those phases as much as we can to preserve muscle, but it's, it's, we risk injury if we push that performance too far without enough food coming into the system overall. So the biggest thing within mitigating adaptation that I teach is called the seasons of nutrition. So let's say you're going to embark on a diet phase in January and you're trying to lose weight. Well, it's probably important that at some

point in 2023, we have a maintenance phase or reverse diet or something that is helping us to mitigate metabolic adaptation, which is basically something that naturally happens when you subtract calories. So we'll see changes in thyroid function, reproductive hormones, but we also see an increase in stress hormones and ghrelin, which drives appetite. And if you have lower body fat levels, that's also impacting leptin as well, which then plays with both short and long-term satiety and appetite regulation. So mitigate adaptation is really the hormonal component there as part of the M's. We also have minding your micronutrient status. So a lot of diets don't really teach that foods are not only energy containing, but they are micronutrient containing. So when I eat fruit, yes, I'm getting

calories, but I may also be getting vitamin C, certain antioxidants, things like that. So if I have berries, yes, that is calorie containing. We need to look at overall energy, which is why that's one of the two pillars. But within the M's, really what we're looking at here is micronutrients, but also how do I absorb that particular food? What are the micros in that particular food? And how does eating that food influence my subsequent meal-by-meal decisions? Because you might enjoy a food, but if it doesn't actually help you manage your appetite, maybe that's not actually the best thing. That's like when people say, oh, I love intermittent fasting. It's great. I skip breakfast and I create this deficit. It's like, well, maybe you did until 1 PM, but you overeat for the rest of the day. And then you

completely blew it out of the water. Well, maybe that's not really working for you because from a managing appetite and adherence perspective, not super great. Now other people are able to do that just fine, but this is really where all of the M's integrate. We also have maximizing absorption. So this is really my take on gut health and the fact that yes, gut health is a trendy topic within the industry, but we can look at basic responses to the foods that you're eating. Like some people do a little bit better with more fiber. Other people don't tolerate it super well, right?

And they need to eliminate certain foods to have improved digestive health. And that's something that I noticed throughout sort of my own fitness journey, my own transformation, like my digestive health has changed throughout, you know, my pursuits in health and fitness. And I've also seen it happen with clients as well. And so we just need to be cognizant to the fact that like, Hey, not everybody, you know, I, you know, I eat a banana, Anders eats a banana. It doesn't mean we have the same response in terms of digestive health, blood everybody, you know, I, you know, I eat a banana, Andrews eats a banana. It doesn't mean we have the same response in terms of digestive health, blood glucose, you know, regulation from that perspective, how it manages appetite, you know, he might be hungry in 24 minutes. And for me, maybe I'm fine for a period of time after that. So we really want to be looking

at all of these together. So biggest things, adherence, appetite, mitigating adaptation, want to maximize absorption, which is mainly the gut health pillar. And then we also have a binding or micronutrient status because most common sort of fad diets, uh, we actually have some diagrams in the book for you guys, but essentially certain, certain diets, when you eliminate food groups and nutrients, um, you're basically missing out on micros, right? So if I get rid of, let's say dairy is a basic example. Well, dairy contains calcium. So if you're not going to get the calcium from dairy, you need to get it somewhere else. Um, if you are not going to get, uh, let's say you eliminate meat and you're vegan. Well, we need B vitamins, zinc, iron. There's a lot of things that we may

be deficient in as a result of that food choice. So really just getting people to understand that with each nutritional decision, there's a nutritional consequence and we can either backfill that for optimal health. Like let's say you're vegan for religious and spiritual reasons. Cool. But you're going to need vitamin D. You're going to need B12, omega-3 fatty acids, iron. We need to be able to address that. Otherwise your health is not going to be an optimal place. So that's where the five M's come in is because if we're not paying attention to one of those categories, it will eventually rear its head and impact other aspects of our health and fitness journey. I, um, I think education like this long form, being able to

dig into these topics in depth, like every single one of these could be its own podcast. And you probably have been through many of these on your own show. The interesting thing after kind of like, understanding the principles of your metabolism, and I'm by no means like the ultimate expert in metabolism or any of the biochemistry side of things, but it's like, every time I hear a new diet, and then I go, Can you just shoot me like the top three bullet points of what that is? And you go, oh, that's what you're doing. Cool. Like you've reduced calories. You've done it in this cool, creative way. It sounds awesome. It sounds catchy. Probably a lot of people are going to do it. But when you do dig a little deeper, there are people that are

better at higher fat diets. There are people that just respond better if they're able to not overeat during a feeding window. How can people find out or actually understand, like maybe there are certain diets that are better for their physiology specifically. And is there a way to know like intermittent fasting may be a great way for you to do it, or is it just a lifestyle approach is going a little bit more, uh, fat focused than carbohydrate,

a better thing for you because yes, overall, there are these principles. And then when you get down to N equals one, what is the best way for somebody to go and figure out what actually works best for them? Right. So I do include a self-assessment process in the transformation frame, which is in part of the book in terms of the application section. So the focus of self-assessment is really being able to say, what diets have I done before? How do I typically eat? If you're a total novice, you're going to have to try things. Otherwise you're never going to know. So part of it is there is a bit of self-experimentation, but also starting with basic principles, which is why within each of the five Ms, I sort of teach you how to build

based on that. Right. So for managing appetite and maximizing adherence, there's a general consensus that protein is pretty important there. We also know that protein contains micronutrients. So if I'm already checking off three of the five, just with protein, cool. All right. Like we got to make sure that's in there. And so there's basic sort of principles that you can apply to build your own approach. But really the big part is self-assessment, the transformation frame. How recently have you dieted? How many diets have you tried? What's worked for you before? You might like the idea of keto, but if you're constantly overeating the dietary fat or it doesn't manage your appetite, you're really going to struggle.

If you're a CrossFitter or doing a glycolytic sport and you need lots of carbs, or we were actually talking about some fighters prior to this, well, they may need carbohydrate to optimize performance and that's okay. So their diet style should include that. If I'm super sedentary, I don't move a ton, maybe I'm mildly insulin resistant. Maybe I would benefit from a more moderate approach there versus someone who's following that higher carbohydrate plan. So part of this is like, I didn't write the book to replace coaching. I even say in the book, Hey, this is to teach you how to think critically about metabolism and nutrition. It's not going to replace a coach. It will improve your experience

in working with a coach because you can have better dialogue and conversation. You'll also know how to self-coach a bit better if you choose to, but it's not necessarily meant to say, hey, you don't need anyone to ever look at you with a third-party perspective ever because I'm a big proponent of coaching. A lot of my work is in mentoring and training coaches, providing continuing education there. So the book was really meant to get people to understand metabolism, nutrition, and really from a thought leadership perspective, walk people through and lead people through how to critically think about their decisions. Because a lot of people, it's like, well, I heard Sally was doing keto at the water

cooler, so I'm going to do keto. And it's like, well, let's zoom out a bit and see if that's actually best for you. Uh, but the biggest thing is, you know, I do build in some intake forms and different things you can do in the application section, thinking about your diet history, thinking about what you're willing to do to achieve those results. Cause if you're not willing to eliminate certain foods, well, then we have to take a different approach. You know, it's probably not going to work for you to do autoimmune paleo because it gets rid of a number of different food groups, whereas other people, you could have them pretty much eat that day in and day out and they'd probably be fine. So it's not necessarily geared to replace the oversight of a health professional,

but it does help people think about, okay, if I've tried this three times before and this hasn't worked for me, maybe it is time that I just stopped trying to combine intermittent fasting and keto. And I actually just try to take a, you know, kind of protein forward approach. I'm going to work on my attentive eating. I'm going to moderate my carbs and fats. I'm going to try to walk more, sleep more, et cetera, and just start with those foundations. And then maybe they, they sort of iterate off of that as they go. That's, uh, I'm going to cut that out and send it over to at least one of my family members who loves going back to keto. And, um, I think people also, uh, in that and trying to figure it out, whatever the thing worked the first time and then

stopped working. Um, the reason that stopped that stopped working is the newness many times just stopped being cool. And you realize, I don't want to live my life like this, but there is no like backup strategy to be weight stable. And it's such a challenging thing because people want to attach themselves to a specific methodology instead of just being like, I'm going to eat healthy and make sure that I get all of my, my vitamins and minerals every day. Yeah. But that doesn't have a name Anders and it's not sexy. But that, but it does, it's the shreds biofeedback model, which I love. Like it's,

it, that really is. If you, if you get away from connecting to the, the, the way that you're eating specifically and attach yourself to the biofeedback of like, is this feeling better? Am I sleeping better? Is my digestion better? I think that those pieces, uh, can be the thing that you attach yourself to versus whatever the new cool book that just came out is except your book. Um, which we need to do. Tell us where can we find it? So the book is at metabolism made simple.com it will go live on november 1st and uh through there you'll be able to patch through to any any websites that will be carrying it uh online and then eventually distribution will expand after

the first in terms of where it launches uh first seven days we'll be doing a kindle promotion and also a free master class for anyone who wants to attend. You just kind of send your receipt into my team and I'll be doing a little metabolism made simple live education on top of the book to help enhance people's understanding. You can also find my information on similar science on Instagram, my podcast. I actually did a couple of little book previews. So if you're interested in checking out some chapters so far, I have two of the chapters shared as podcast episodes, uh, in audio format on these similar science podcasts. Uh, but other than that, yes, metabolism made simple goes live, uh, November 1st. And, uh, we'll be doing some special promo for the first seven days, uh, to make it really, this is just designed to get it in people's hands. Um, you know, I like, like I say in the book, I'm not trying to sell

a particular diet style. I don't really have a dog in the fight when it comes to different nutritional approaches. I just want people to understand how to think critically about what's going to be best for them. And really try to, you know, make a dent in a lot of the problems that exist within the health and fitness industry. And hopefully, you know, people are better for it. I love it, man. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbara shrugged at Barbara underscore shrug. Make sure you go over to rapid health report.com. And dude,

thanks for hanging out. It was great. A little bonus episode for everybody on shrugged in the shrugged world. And, uh, excited for the book launch too. You're an official non ebook writer. Actual author.

That's like, that's like, that's incredible. That's, that is so not new age to just turn it into a PDF and say, I'm an author. Look at that. There it is. I got one for you, Andrew. I love it. I'm going to get a signed copy. Friends, metabolismmadesimple.com, correct? Yes, sir. And we'll see you guys next week.