Dhru Purohit Show - 10 Cheat Codes to Help You Burn Belly Fat and Add Muscle with Max Lugavere

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, WHOOP, and Lifeforce. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Max Lugavere to discuss all things weight loss and what Max did to lose 10 lbs of fat in just two months while continuing to build lean muscle. Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and author of the New York Times best-seller Genius Foods, and The Genius Life. Max is the host of one of the top health and wellness podcasts on iTunes, The Genius Life. He is an international keynote speaker that has given talks at SXSW, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Biohacker Summit in Sweden, and many others. In this episode, Dhru and Max dive into: -The biggest weight loss mistakes (1:55) -Prioritizing protein for fat loss and muscle retention (7:34) -Max’s cheat codes for weight loss (19:29) -Overeating healthy foods as a source of weight gain (25:18) -Using a digital food scale (28:49) -Added fat as a source of excess calories (41:16) -How to simplify cooking at home (46:41) -Examples of how Max reaches 30 grams of protein at every meal (54:32) -Walking as the ultimate fat-burning tool (1:00:24) -Boredom snacking (1:10:42) -The value of the food matrix in weight loss (1:16:12) -Max’s views on society’s narrative around obesity and weight loss (1:21:15) -How not to eat like a snob (1:28:22) -Common sources of overconsumed dietary fat (1:39:00) -Satiety per calorie (1:45:22) -Consistency and patience (1:50:30) Also mentioned in this episode: -Get Max’s Fat Loss Cheat Codes -Max’s Fat Loss Cheat Codes Tweet -The Genius Life Podcast -Sign up for Max’s newsletter For more on Max Lugavere, follow him on Instagram @maxlugavere, Twitter @maxlugavere, YouTube @maxlugavere, and through his website, maxlugavere.com. Cozy Earth are the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, and non-toxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRU. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get your first month free. Lifeforce is a revolutionary new health platform that’s changing the game when it comes to personalized performance and longevity-based action plans. Right now, get 15% off your first purchase at Mylifeforce.com with code DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of the day, people have the capacity to lose weight. Whether you're obese or just overweight, you have the same capacity to lose the fat as anybody else with the right know-how and with the right tools and with the right dedication and motivation and ultimately discipline. And so I think it's a big problem to be undermining that. Today we're talking about the top 10 cheat codes to help you drop fat, gain muscle, and improve your body composition. Welcome to the Drew Prod podcast.

Each week, we explore the inner workings. of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. And this week's guest is Max Lugavir. Max is a health and science journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Genius Foods. Become smarter, happier, and more productive while protecting your brain for life, which is now published in 10 languages across the globe. Max is a nutrition expert and on today's podcast, he's sharing with us,

his top 10 cheat codes that have helped him and many of his followers, drop fat, improve their body composition, and even add muscle. Now, a little bit more about Max. He regularly appears on the Rachel Ray show, the Doctors, and the Doctor Oz show. He's contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, The Daily Beast, and many, many other outlets. He's an internationally sought-after speaker and has given talks at many venues, including South by Southwest and the New York Academy of Sciences. Lastly, Max is the host of the Genius Life podcast and he's extremely active on Instagram at Max Lugavir. Max, welcome to the podcast.

Pleasure to have you here. We're talking all things, weight loss, the top do's and don'ts and healthy body composition. You went on an experiment recently and you got yourself to drop from around 16% body fat to 8% following 10 cheat codes. We're going to walk people through these 10 cheat codes, but first, what do you think? is, especially in the context of people who consider themselves healthy, what is one of the biggest mistakes they make when it comes to going down the weight loss journey? Such a great place to start. I think on social media, there are these, especially within the realm of weight loss, there are these two seemingly warring factions. One group is the group

that claims that calories don't matter at all, right? Like calories in, calories out is a fallacy. myth. It's all some big, you know, conspiracy pushed by the junk food industry or fitness influencers, what have you. And so they completely ignore that fundamental tenet, the first law of thermodynamics, that does ultimately dictate whether or not a person gains or loses weight. It's important to recognize that that is the mechanism, right? It's not necessarily the method, which I'll get into, but it is the mechanism. So whether you're on a ketogenic diet or a paleo diet or a vegan diet or a low carb or low fat diet. If you are losing weight, by necessity, you are going to, by definition, you're going to be in a calorie deficit. If you're gaining weight, you're going to be

in a calorie surplus. And just to unpack what that means is a calorie deficit implies you are burning more calories than you're ingesting every day. A calorie surplus, on the other hand, implies that you are ingesting more calories than you are burning every day. So that creates a weight gain situation. And then, of course, you can be weight stable at maintenance calories and not gaining or losing any weight. So that does matter, unfortunately. I mean, it's sort of the, it is the, as I mentioned, the mechanism. And there are many roads to take. You know, if you, if you, if you want to, as I mentioned, achieve a calorie deficit, you can go on any number of diets. They all work, provided you adhere to them. And unfortunately, on the other hand, most diets fail because people,

people tend to adopt these extreme diets, right? So the other warning faction is the side that claims that calories are all that matter, right? So of course calories matter, but they're not all that matter because it's, you know, I think of a calorie as a unit. Well, a calorie is a unit of measurement similar to a mile. Like a mile is a unit of measurement. Whether you are walking a mile uphill or downhill, it's still a mile, right? Obviously walking uphill is going to be more difficult than walking that mile downhill. They're both miles, but it's the quality of the road that makes the difference in terms of your subjective experience with traversing that mile, right? Now, when it comes to sustaining over, you know, on a chronic basis, a calorie deficit

with the intent of losing weight, there are a number of variables that come into play that determine whether or not or that influence whether or not that is going to be some that is more or less difficult for you to sustain. For example, one, one data point that we received over the past couple years from a seminal study funded by the NIH from Kevin Hall, who's a really highly regarded obesity researcher, is that if you're consuming primarily ultra-processed foods, which are foods that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen, they tend to be shelf-stable, package-processed foods that line are supermarket aisles, you're essentially setting yourself up for failure because when consuming those foods to satiety,

by the time you've consumed them to a point of fullness, you've already overconsume them to the degree of about 500 additional calories, if that's essentially all the food that you're provided to provided over the course of a day. So by sticking to minimally processed foods, the kinds of foods that you were perhaps to create in your own kitchen cooking at home, that's akin to making that mile that you inevitably are going to need to traverse to lose weight, the equivalent of the downhill mile. It's going to be a lot easier. because that same study showed us that when people are given only minimally processed foods to consume, they tend to effortlessly, to the same degree of satiety, come in at a calorie deficit of about 300 calories.

So both variables matter. Calories do matter, but they're not the only thing that matter. Yes, hormones matter. Yes, insulin to some degree matters, although I think that attempting to micromanage insulin is putting the cart before the horse. And then even within the foods, there are other very very very very important. variables that play a role like protein. Protein is the most satiating of the macronutrient. Yeah. You want to talk about that one for a second? So this is number three on your cheat code list. And sorry to interrupt you, but the reason that I got excited was that you were also saying like I wanted to lose weight but in an effortless way. Yeah. Right. But you didn't want to lose weight. You want to just independently, you wanted to lose fat or burn fat, but still maintain your

muscle mass and you gave me your in-body scan over here. Yeah. Right. Here's your receipts. These are the receipts. Yeah. This is no BS. And not only did you drop down to 8.5 or 8.3, I don't know exactly where it is on this list over here, but you also added a little bit of lean muscle mass. We'll talk about that as related to strength training. But one of the things that you've shared on social media that has helped you make this as effortless as possible, which also meant that you weren't trying to go overboard, you were trying to lose about a pound a week. Yeah. Right?

That was your goal. A pound a week without going crazy hungry and still feeling like you could focus and live your life. And you felt that one of the top things on that was protein. So let's talk about that. That's number three on the list, prioritizing lean proteins. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth. I've recorded over 400 podcasts to date.

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That's join. Dot whoop-wop.com slash D-H-O-O-O-P.com slash D-H-H-H-H-H-E. Which are you for your first month free of whoop? So protein is a very important macronutrient with regard to body composition. I mean, it's important for, I mean, it's an essential nutrient, but focusing squarely on its role in fat loss and muscle retention and possibly even muscle growth, if that's your goal, which I think it should be probably for most people. It's the most satiating macronutrient.

So when I say macronutrients, what I'm referring to. are the three big ones, carbs, protein, and fat. You could argue that alcohol is in a way a macronutrient provides seven calories per gram. You could argue that fiber in a way is a macronutrient, although we technically classified as a carbohydrate. But generally, we're talking about carbs, protein, and fat. Carbs and protein provide about four calories per gram. Fat provides nine calories per gram. When we consume protein, it tends to fill us up the most. It activates gut-derived hormones that basically send the signal quicker than carbohydrates and and fat do that we've consumed food and that we're essentially getting what it is that we

ultimately require from our food, which is nutritional value, right? Not just energy, but nutritional value. And protein is really important because it breaks down to amino acids, which, you know, builds our body essentially. Like our neurotransmitters are made of amino acids that are derived from the protein that we ingest. We, you know, our bones, our muscles, all made from protein, enzymes, you name it. And so there's this idea that our drive to consume food is in many ways dictated by our necessity for protein. It's actually referred to as the protein leverage hypothesis, that we leverage our food

environment to ingest adequate amino acids because they're so valuable. It really is like the most valuable macronutrient. And so it's highly satiating as a tool to turn off your hunger signals, which is a struggle for anyone who's ever endured a diet, right? Particularly somebody who's endured the, you know, just move more, eat less paradigm, which is like, let's take the obesityogenic food that I'm currently eating that has gotten me into this state where I aspire to, you know, that I aspire to improve on. And I'm just going to eat less of that. Eat less fast food, whatever.

Yeah, you're just, you're setting yourself up for failure because you're going to be hungry, right? And nobody wants to be hungry when on a diet. That's just a recipe for disaster with regard to long-term adherence. And so protein is a really important tool. It fills us up. When we under-consume protein, we tend to consume more carbs and fat, which is just energy. Like whichever way you like to slice it, carbohydrates and fat are energy. Like we can use, we use carbohydrates in the form of glucose for energy.

We store fat as an energy source when those carbohydrates cease to be available to us. And so protein is actually not readily used as energy. It's very difficult for the body to store as fat. The body doesn't prioritize storing protein as fat because it's, as I mentioned, so valuable. And so if you're hungry, reach for protein, whether it's a high protein snack. You should be basing your meals around protein. I know, you know, some of our colleagues like to downplay the role of protein, suggest that, you know, protein isn't really all that important, that it should be almost like a side dish to our plates. But I actually think that when you look at the data and particularly clinical trials, it's always the high protein diets that lead to like the greatest improvement in terms of metabolic health and body composition.

It's so hard to overconsume protein because it's self-limiting. It's that satiating. So protein is a little bit of a, you get a little bit of a caloric free ride with protein too. About 30% of the calories that you ingest by way of protein are actually burnt off in the digestion of that protein. It's called the thermic effective feeding and it's higher for protein than it is for carbohydrates and fat. I mean, you know, if you do tend to be the kind of person who enjoys tracking, which, you know, I don't think most people need to, but it certainly is a tool that many people have adopted and see value in. You still want to track it as roughly four calories per gram. But that's just, you know, it's got a very high thermic effect.

It's highly satiating. It directly supports your musculature. And it tends to come, it tends to provide along with those valuable amino acids, other important nutrients. So Stuart Phillips is a highly credentialed protein expert. And he's actually published research showing us that high protein foods are actually also very nutrient dense foods. They contain nutrients that Americans tend to underconsume like zinc, vitamin B12, and the like.

So for anybody who's trying to like lose fat, you really want to keep your protein high. That's not, you want to modulate ultimately the carbohydrates and the fats in your diet to a, to a ratio that, you know, basically is going to be sustainable for you and incorporates the foods that, you know, ultimately you enjoy that are going to make this a sustainable plan for you. But protein is not the variable that you want to mess with. You want to actually keep protein high, if not increase it over the course of this process. Because when you're dieting, particularly for people who are already starting out at a somewhat lean body composition, you're keeping your protein high is one of the best ways, aside from resistance training, from a dietary standpoint, it's the best way to ensure that you're losing only fat, which is what you want, right? You don't want to lose weight because then you're just going to end your diet as a smaller version of yourself.

that's not what most people want. Most people want to lose the fat, right? And so by keeping protein high, you're ensuring to your body, you're ensuring in no small way that it's the fat that you're going to be losing. Yeah, you don't want, especially older people losing muscle. No. Unless if they're like severely obese, which they just need to lose a total amount of weight. But at some point in time, still the protein is going to help them stick to the diet.

And most people are, would you say most people are probably already under-eastern, eating a lot of protein in their diet compared to how much they need. Yeah. They're overeating a lot of other calories. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, most people in the Western world are not protein deficient. The RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.

And so that's essentially to avert population deficiency. But that's not, and that guideline hasn't been updated in decades. You know, new research now is showing us that even for non-sedentary, for non-physically active people, you really want to set your protein target to about 1.5 times that. So about 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. And then for the resistance training, for the active, you know, weight training individual. And resistance training doesn't mean that you're like necessarily going to the gym and like you're a bodybuilder or an athlete or anything like that. I mean, you know, resistance training could be like yoga. You're resisting against gravity, which is a body weight. Your body weight, yeah.

You really want to be double what the RDA is, 1.6 grams. per kilogram of body weight. Here in the US, you know, we don't use kilograms. It's roughly 0.7 to 0.8 grams times your body weight. So take whatever your body weight is. If you want to get really granular, if you're really overweight, you could use your goal body weight. Ideal body weight. Yeah, your ideal body weight.

Multiply that by 0.7 or 0.8. And that's what you should be getting roughly every day. And in yours, when I was reading your sort of tweet storm about this, which we have linked to it as well. well that people can follow. You were shooting for about a pound of, you're sorry, you're shooting for a gram of protein for your sort of, you weren't overweight when you started this. You just had a little bit extra body fat percentage and you wanted to lean out, right?

I wanted to lean out because I wanted to, like, as an experiment, as a challenge, as a personal, like, just endeavor to really understand what it takes. because I had the mechanism in the back of my, you know, in my knowledge base, right? The mechanism, calories and calories out. But I really wanted to understand the methods that I could speak to it and make it really easy for people. Because today, as simple as fat loss should be, it's really not that simple because we have all these cooks in the kitchen, no pun intended, you know, influencing people's

decisions and making it really complicated for people. And to me, I felt like if this is something that I wanted to speak to and help people unpack and get to the truth of, then I needed to kind of undergo it. the process myself. And so I was already at a healthy body weight. 15, 16% body fat for a male is totally healthy. There's a range. For men, it's roughly, I mean, there's obviously going to be some contention around this, but 10 to 20% body fat for a male is totally healthy and normal for a woman. It's 20 to 30% roughly. I could be getting those numbers, you know, not like somewhat skewed, but generally it's, you know, higher for women than it is for men.

And so I was at a completely healthy body fat percentage, but I did want to lose weight just from a challenge, a personal challenge standpoint. And you also made it a challenge for your audience, too, that if they wanted to do this and they wanted to follow cheat codes, you put it out there. He said, text me for your cheat for the cheat codes and try this yourself, see what you notice? What are the things that you saw back? Because I saw a bunch of people replied to you.

Some people sent you photos before and afters. Like, what kind of feedback did you get back from people doing all. 10 of these. And of course, we'll be getting to the rest of these in a second. Yeah. I mean, people thought that, like, so I put them out in this document, fat lost cheat codes. And people just like, it, like, spread like wildfire. People were like started embracing and integrating these so-called cheat codes into their, into their, into their lifestyles. And they were starting to see like really impressive gains. People that have been on like yo-yo dieting for years read this document that I put together. And, um, and, and, so,

everything like clicked for the people who read like this document. And, you know, I don't like to gatekeep this information because I think people should have it. And ultimately, as I mentioned, it does, whether or not you are losing fat or gaining comes down to energy balance. But today we live in a highly obesogenic food environment. And as I mentioned, there's so many different voices trying to like gatekeep this process and make it sound super mysterious. But it's really not that mysterious. One of the first things that I did that made a huge impact, aside from the protein angle, which is very important, was I started eating home more. Now, I'm not like a super extravagant, like I'm not talking about like fancy restaurants or anything like that, but I, you know,

whether if I'm on the road, I'm eating in fast food chains or maybe not fast food for me. Fast casual. Fast casual. Yeah. And then, you know, because social engagement is so important, I do find myself in restaurants with friends fairly often, I started eating home more, like cooking my own food. And that right there is an intervention, if you want to call it that, that is going to pay massive dividends. Because when you eat out in restaurants, restaurant food tends to be coded in mystery fat calories that essentially nobody in the Western world needs, you know, any additional, like,

fat calories. Like, we're arguing about like carbs and fats. Your average American is eating too much of pretty much everything. And in the restaurant setting, food tends to come coated in whether we're talking butter or, you know, unhealthy, cheap cooking oils or even cream sauces, right? Like, if you're, if I were a chef, and I've written a cookbook, but I wouldn't classify myself as like a classically trained chef, I would want my food to be delicious. And one of the ways that you make a food delicious is you cover it in butter, right?

And so if you're eating out on a regular basis, you're ingesting tons and tons of phantom fat calories. And fat is the most calorically dense of, of, you know, the macronutrients, for one. But oil is the most calorically dense food that exists, period. And so when you're consuming excessive amounts of oil, or any oil for that matter, I mean, I think it's really important for people, as much as I love to talk about the benefits, the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil, for example. It's a very calorie-dense food. And so during, over the course of this journey, I reduced my consumption of a very healthy food, extra virgin olive oil. And I basically, I said it, I, you know, made the plan to get all of my essential dietary fat

from food, from red meat, from eggs and things like that. And I cut out the added fats and the oils and things like that. And that was like another huge win for me. I mean, that was like, because I think another big thing that people don't realize, especially with the warring like diet tribes online, carbs versus fats, you know, a lot of people assume, and I see on social media that they've got to cut the carbs to lose fat. But this is another, even where I had to, like misconception where I had to challenge my own biases, if you look at any bodybuilder who's preparing for like a show, right, and they're going to be

exceptions to this, there always are. but one of the first macronutrients that bodybuilders will reduce their intake of is fat, right? And success leaves clues. And bodybuilders are like a tremendous source of not just inspiration, but information. And they're not often regarded as such. They're so diligent. Yeah. Track everything.

Every workout, every rep, every food they eat, exact amount of macros, the weight of it, everything. A hundred percent. So if you follow any bodybuilder diet, right? The standard bodybuilder meal is lean check. chicken, broccoli, and rice. Yeah. Right? It incorporates carbs.

Now, why does it continue? Why do bodybuilders continue to incorporate carbs? Why don't they just cut the carbs? Why are they cutting the fat? Well, because carbohydrates are an energy source that becomes particularly valuable when you are in a calorie deficit and you want to sustain intensity in the gym, which is that second signal that I mentioned earlier that tells your body, okay, we're going to shed the fat. We've got to keep the muscle because, you know, we're, you know, we're, you know, we're,

whoever it is, like, is demanding that, like, that we're using our muscles on a regular basis in the gym, right? So that's when the body, like, recognizes, okay, well, the fat is the most, like, expendable here. So let's get rid of it. But the carbohydrates are what provide you the energy so you can sustain those lifts. So early on, for any bodybuilder, they cut the fat calories. And just to be really clear, it's not a no fat diet. It's not even a low fat diet. It's just like a reduced fat diet. Yeah, and I think this goes back. You know, you hit a few points there, but I'm jumping ahead. This goes back to this larger idea that you talk about, which was number two.

You already hit number one, which was eating home way more. That already was a simple win. I have a few questions about that. We'll come back to that. But your point that you just made goes back to number two, which is people actually don't know how much food they're consuming because they've never really ever had to weigh it or kind of roughly. It doesn't mean that you track your calories forever, but roughly get an idea of how many calories for their regular meals they're consuming are.

So they never, as you called it, they never audited their portion size. Yeah. Let's see if Tessa, if you can bring up Max's Instagram. Max, I think you know the image that I'm talking about. It was the image where,

I think it was from your friend, Meow Mix or whatever her account is, Amanda. Yeah. And she had three different photos of what looked like the same meal. Yeah. But the first one is titled, right?

Weight loss. Mm-hmm. The second one is, maintenance, like a meal that's made for maintenance. And the third one, which looks very similar, just a little bit more and has some extra bananas, was weight gain. And the whole idea of this image was if you're not careful and you haven't ever had a chance to audit or note down how many calories your favorite meals are, which again doesn't mean you do it forever, you can easily be in a place even if you eat healthy. And I think that's a lot of the people that we're talking to today.

They think of themselves as being healthy, but every year they keep on adding more weight. And they're wondering like what's going on and how do I maybe reverse it a little bit to look as good as I did when I was 18, 19, 20. So if you're not careful, you can just easily overconsume. And I think my last point on this is that there are, and we've all benefited from this, there are so many healthy tasting, wellness junk food that's out there that still they're clean and still they're a healthy part of a regular diet. But they're so good. It's easy to overeat, nut butters, keto snacks, anything like that. Food that has olive oil and this thing in it, that thing in it is just so easy to overdo those if you're not paying attention to these

10 cheetos. Yeah. Well, this is a massive misconception, I think that pervades the wellness industry, is that you can overeat super high quality food and still get fat in so doing, right? Like, that's why this polarity doesn't do anybody any favors, right? It's counterproductive. We can't make it all about calories, but we can't also make it only about food quality. Because if you're overconsuming avocados and extra virgin olive oil and grass-fed beef and nuts, foods that are super healthy, right? Like, we know how beneficial nuts are from the standpoint of health, extra virgin olive.

But you can over-consume those things and get fat in the process. So we have to like take the middle ground where we recognize that like, yeah, food quantity matters and so does food quality. Quality influences quantity, right? But at the end of the day, that mechanism, you know, you have to hold that mechanism in the back of your head that if you're ingesting more calories than you're burning on a daily basis, you are going to put on fat. And the one thing that I'll add, so you brought up this like food auditing and portion size auditing with it, which I think is super important. Also in the wellness industry, we live in a time where, you know, there's endless, there's an endless barrage. Your average wellness interested person is inundated by an endless barrage of marketing

for biohacking tools, gizmos, gadgets and things like that. And my house, trust me, is loaded with them. Like I'm very much a consumer of these kinds of things. But I will say that the number one biohacking wellness tool that a person can have in their kitchen, by a long shot is a digital food scale. Like the digital food scale is like the number one investment from like a technology standpoint. It sounds rudimentary, but from a technology standpoint, it's the number one investment that you can make in your, in your health. It's like 10 bucks on Amazon, 10, 12 bucks. It's super cheap. Yeah. I mean, mine was like $16. And so just explain

to people who have never used a digital food scale. What are you using this for in your day, right? when you're thinking, I don't know if you do meal prep or you're planning out your meals exactly or how you cook at home, but walk them through how you're using a digital food scale and how that's tied into you dropping down to, you know, you probably lost. How much fat total do you think you lost? I probably lost like 15 to 20 pounds of pure fat. Yeah. And as you can see on there, I've actually increased my skeletal muscle. Your skeletal muscle. Yeah, which is not, which is not the most, not necessarily the easiest thing to do for most people. Anybody who has tried to do it, it's tough.

Yeah, but it's actually pretty easy when you follow the cheat codes, when you keep your protein high and when you train intensely, when you keep your training up. It's actually, so this is what's called body recomposition. So losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time. Many people think that that's an impossibility, but it's actually not an impossibility. And particularly for somebody who's naive to training,

like you can very easily gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. And the leaner you get, it becomes more difficult, but provided you're keeping your protein intake up, it's still possible. It's still very much possible. It's not inevitable that you lose muscle is the whole point, which is really important. Because, again, nobody wants to come out of a diet looking just like a smaller, more gaunt version of themselves, right? They want to look more muscular, more able-bodied, right? Whether you're male or female. Yeah.

And so the digital food scale, I think, is really important. For one, all the calorie counts of all foods, well, there's a few, there's a few reasons. For one, the calorie counts of foods are determined by food weight. So volume can lie, right? But food weight typically doesn't. Like the volume of a food, I mean, we see this on, you can see this on food packaging, right? Like the volume is foods are measured and packages are filled with accordance in accordance to their weight, not necessarily their volume.

Food settle over time. So that's one. Two, just the mere act of observing your, your, the serving size that you're consuming and the number of servings that you're consuming is actually, um, there's a phenomena called the Hawthorne effect where when a person is being observed, they tend to act more morally, morally sound, right? Just because they feel like they're being observed. So it automatically influences the way that we behave. So I've actually applied this effect to just observe. the amount of food that we're eating, observing ourselves, essentially. When you observe that you're consuming three servings of a food, right?

It's just a, it adds a little bit of friction, right? Like, you, because you see the amount of calories per serving and like, are you really intending on consuming three servings of a food? Like, is that really what you need right now? Or are you just pouring mindlessly, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the rotini from the, you know, from the box because, I mean, that's super, it's super easy to over consume and like, you know, we have no sense of how much we're consuming when we're just pouring mindlessly. On the other hand, when you use a digital food scale that weighs on a gram

to gram basis, it's just a lot easier to audit and become, and thus become conscious of what it is that you're eating, which I think is just so important, bringing a little bit of like mindfulness to our food, right? And so, yeah, and so I think that that's like a big, a big, boom to health, right, to make sure that we're not over-consuming food and to just put a little bit of attention on the food that we're, on the foods that we're consuming. This episode is brought to you by Lifeforce. Are you ready to unlock the secrets to a vibrant life? Well, listen up, because I'm super excited to tell you about Life Force, the groundbreaking health

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priority list, then check out Lifeforce. And right now, my audience can get 15% off your first Lifeforce purchase. Just go to My Lifeforce.com. That's M-Y-L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-C-com, My-Lifforce.com, and enter the code Drew, D-H-R-U, that's me, to optimize your health span today. That's Drew, D-H-R-U at My-Lifference.com for 15% off your first lifeforce purchase. Last year, I turned 40, and it's funny you mentioned olive oil. Like, I am such a huge olive oil fan.

And, like, I go on olive oil tastings during my vacation. It's like a big part of, and I love going to Italy. And my wife had been a few times. So for my 40th birthday, I took my whole family to Italy. And we were at this villa, and we had set up this olive oil tasting. And, you know, you're generally there and you're eating a lot and other stuff. But I go ham on olive oil. Like, I go crazy.

So then I came back. I said, all right, largely in part of like interviewing really great guests on this podcast, some of the people that have been on your show as well to Dr. Gabriel Lyon and other individuals, I said, okay, I'm 40. I know that I'm under muscle. I grew up vegetarian. I wasn't really eating protein. You know, I got to focus on that and I got to start strength training.

I kind of started to get into it, but I haven't been like working out since high school like you. So I was like, let me get serious about it. So I knew I needed support. I signed up with this group here in L.A. called Ultimate Performance. Love it. And they were the ones that really were like, okay, we're going to look at every single thing that you're eating.

You're going to take a photo and they made it simple through an app and everything. And initially, because I had some very strong goals, I needed to not only take photos of it, but I had to use a food scale for it. And I actually had to enter into the app. They have their own custom app, but there's plenty of apps that are out there that people can use. And I got a chance to see firsthand that I was having in one of my sort of big fat salads or whatever, I was having like a quarter of my total calories just from like olive oil and dressing alone. And when you are trying to, in my case, I was trying to drop fat because sure, it was right after

the trip, but I came in, I didn't do in-body scan, but they did caliber testing, right? Multiple point body caliber testing. I came in at 26% body fat. Wow. Right? probably before that trip, I was probably more like 22, still out of my ideal zone of what a, you know, a young healthy male should be. So I started at 26% body fat. I started tracking things. I started following, we were kind of on a simpatico journey, but I didn't know your cheat codes

at that time yet, but I was kind of following it with this group, who was also respecting the fact that, hey, I don't like to eat a ton of carbs because when I ate a ton of carbs, some of my markers on my life force get out of whack, my fasting insulin, my glom, my glom, glucose variability, variability is all over the place. I can't focus as much. So I don't want to eat no carbs or low carbs. I just don't want to eat a ton of carbs.

So they were willing to work with me on my journey. I want to have some questions for you on that. And just through regular strain training and cutting back on some of these things, following a lot of these cheat codes that you have here, keeping my protein high. By January, I'd gotten to 12.5% body fat.

Amazing. We'll have to throw up a little before and after file. Wow. I went from skinny fat to, skinny lean and now I'm just trying to add muscle mass you know just add like 0.8 to a pound of lean muscle mass a month through strength training and things and I think that was a big aha moment for me similarly to some of the things you're talking about I don't study nutrition I'm not like writing about it like you I'm definitely not the expert I get just get just to ask great questions to people

like you but even I found myself in that position of the confused individual thinking I'm eating really, I'm eating so healthy. I'm eating all these clean foods. I'm even watching all these glucose spikes and watching my continuous glucose monitor. My fasting insulin is in the optimal range. It's like a 2.5.3. And yet still, I have all this belly fat around me, right? I'm in the skinny fat category like a lot of Indians are. And I had to go through this own process myself to see, oh wow, you cannot ignore the whole calories conversation. I think a lot of people are waking up and having that moment as well. How do you think, if you would think from the other side of things, right?

Like you said there was two groups. There's the extreme energy balance people that even say like it doesn't even matter to have extra chemicals in your diet. Everything is a chemical, right? That's one of your favorites. To this other group is like, look, whether it's extreme carnivore or fat people that just say, look, just eat whole foods and nothing else matters. How did the whole foods, extreme fat people,

if you would stress test their sort of framework, how they got there, not to lump them all together, but kind of have to for the sake of this question, what do you think led them to that conclusion that calories, you know, didn't matter? Yeah. Not that they weren't important, which is what you're saying here.

You're kind of somebody that I see that's in the middle, but they got to a place where they were like, like, hey, calories don't matter at all. You don't even need to really be tracking them or thinking about them. Yeah. I mean, just because somebody doesn't count calories doesn't mean that calories don't count, right? A lot of people make the mistake of adopting these diets, whether it's the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or whatever. And it's just so dramatically different from their prior diet, which in often cases is the standard American diet. So somebody on the standard American, Obesogenic way of eating will, you know, they'll get caught up in one of these diet

tribes on social media, typically how it happens, you know, whether it's a ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or the vegan diet. And any diet generally, any dietary modification, any added attention that one puts on their diet is going to be better than the standard American diet. And so they'll start to see progress, right? They'll start to see an improvement, whether it's in their health or their body composition, especially when adopting a diet like the ketogenic. diet, which is, you know, going to be higher in protein, higher in fat, a carnivore diet, which is typically going to be way higher in protein. Again, protein's most satiating macronutrient. And so these are, these are diets that are inherently more satiating than their standard

American diet counterpart, right? Same with the vegan diet. The vegan diet, you know, maybe it's, maybe they are more protein conscious if they, if they, you know, if they're on ramp to it was like, you know, a more rational, reasonable, you know, advocate for it. But even if not, I mean, the vegan diet tends to be higher in fiber, which is satiating, right? So generally people will adopt these somewhat more satiating diets and they'll lose body fat to a point, right? Until they start adding in the fat bombs or they start, you know, or their carnivore diet is composed primarily of really fatty meat, right? And then they see their weight loss stall. And that's typically what you'll see happen, right? People on, you know, ketogenic diets, you know,

they're putting lots of butter in their coffee perhaps, right? Which don't get me wrong, I think you know, buttery coffee is delicious. But, um, but that's when people will start to see these like weight loss stalls and they're wondering like, what am I doing wrong? I'm doing all the things that I'm supposed to be doing right. And that's where it becomes clear that they're neglecting the fact that, or maybe they just haven't been told that calories still matter regardless of what your dietary way of eating, you know, what your preferred way of eating is, right? And so they made, there's this fallacy that calories don't matter because it got them to a certain degree of progress. It led to a certain degree of progress. But if they neglect to acknowledge that calories do matter,

then that oftentimes can serve as a pitfall where they stall. And that's where you really start to have to, you have to look at your diet and be like, okay, well, where can I remove, maybe I can cut back on some of the fat calories. I thought it was really cool when Sean Baker, who's a well-known carnivore advocate for the carnivore diet, he's a fairly aggressive personality on social media, but I, you know, I enjoy his content. He only eats meat, right? And he acknowledged recently that he aspires to get leaner. And to get leaner, what's he doing? He's cutting back on the fat calories because he already doesn't eat any carbohydrates. So to get leaner when you're on a carnivore diet, it turns out calories do matter after all, you do have to reduce the fat calories.

And you see this all the time with the carnivore diet, ketogenic diet. Because if the carnivore diet and the ketogenic diet, you know, if for whatever reason calories didn't matter on those dietary plans, then everybody on those diets would be shredded. And they're not. Like I look at people all the time on social media. I go into people's accounts. And usually it's the people, it's those that have their, you know, carnivore diets, you know, carnivore diet or ketogenic diet are in their bios.

Hashtag. Hashtag. Yeah. it becomes like that's part of, that's their, that's suddenly their tribe. And they're not, they don't have like, they're not, they don't have like great body compositions. So we have to acknowledge that that calories do matter, but they're not all that matter. It's kind of like one group is saying, hey, look, it doesn't matter that you save. It's all about how much money you make. Yeah. And the other group is like, no, no, no, it's about saving. And then it's

actually like if you're really trying to build wealth in your life, it turns out it's a little bit of both. It's how much money you make and it's also spending because we've all read those stories of celebrities who made a shit ton of money and yet ended up bankrupt because they were spending a shit ton of money. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, it's yeah, I mean, you just like for me, somebody who was starting out at 15, 16% body fat and is well aware, for example, of the benefits of extra virgin olive oil. Like I was consuming extra virgin olive oil liberally and I was healthy and we know that extra virgin olive oil is the healthiest oil to consume. It's got an anti-inflammatory effect.

Meta-analys show, and it's a staple in the Mediterranean dietary pattern, which we know is associated with positive health outcomes and the like. So a perfectly healthy food, right? But one tablespoon of oil has as many calories as a large honey crisp apple. And when you're looking to economize in your diet and to reduce the calories so that you can drop some body fat, it's a lot more, I think, enticing to look at where you're ingesting all of these added fat calories so that you can continue to eat really satiating whole foods like a honey crisp apple,

for example. I'm just using that as an example. And ultimately, it's only 500 calories a day that you need to cut and maintain on a consistent basis to lose a pound of fat a week. Right. And so if you're ingesting two tablespoons of oil, which if you're eating out on a regular basis or if you're consuming, you know, as I often recommend a salad a day and you're just liberally pouring the extra virgin olive oil and without auditing it, right? You could be ingesting hundreds potentially of calories of just pure fat that could be sabotaging your weight loss. Yeah, even though it tastes great and you had a little bit of salt, it's just so easy to consume. Yeah. Like I go to a salad chain frequently. There's a salad chain, you know, like there's a few of them on the coasts. I don't,

They're probably fairly ubiquitous at this point. And I would get my salads made with custom dressing of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, right? And the person behind the counter, underpaid staff, asks you, would you like your oil light, medium, or heavy, right? They're not measuring it. They're just kind of willy-nilly squirting it in there. And you're essentially leaving your fat loss progress in their hands without properly auditing that fat. And the swing is likely massive, right? It makes a lot less of a difference with the balsamic vinegar, which has negligible.

calories, but with something like oil, which is, again, the most calorie-dense food that exists, yeah, it can be a big barrier to somebody like losing, you know, and it could also be a source of like unintentional fat gain, right? Because we talk all the time about how healthy extra virgin olive oil is for you. But even that needs to be, like we need to, I think it would be really helpful to audit, right, like where these added fat calories are coming from. It's so true. So when you were covering a few of those cheek. codes ones, just to kind of summarize, you covered the first one on your list, which was eating home way more, right? And you talked a little bit about that. Do you typically for yourself, obviously,

you don't have kids, you're single right now. Do you typically, would you do meal prep? Would you do anything to sort of make that easier for you? Would you plan out your meals? Or do you feel like generally, you kind of know, because even though you aren't a chef, you're pretty good in the kitchen, so you just make something as you need to. Yeah, well, one of the, yeah, meal prep is a fantastic option. I think one of the best things that people can do is to, um, to essentially have meals that they eat on a, on a consistent basis. I think variety is, is great. It's really important to keep things interesting. And I love, you know, variety in the, in the culinary sense, but it can be really helpful to, especially for, you know, on for somebody on a weight loss journey to have, you know, one, maybe even

two meals a day that they that they can lean on and they know you know that they basically have already audited and they just eat on a on a consistent basis first of all it reduces decision fatigue right so it reduces the amount of times in a day that you can quote unquote screw up right so to know that I'm eating a breakfast every morning of three whole eggs and what have I been eating well I work out in the morning so I've actually been which is a very controversial food but I'm enjoying the occasional like gluten-free oats, like organic gluten-free oats, pre-workout, which a lot of people think is like a not a health food, but it's a starch and it actually provides the energy that I require when I, you know, have those morning workouts,

right? Three eggs, fruit. Again, highly satiating, self-limiting. And I kind of generally know that that's going to be like a 500-calorie breakfast, you know. I can vary it up. I can change it up. I can increase the protein. I can do two whole eggs with a bunch of egg whites added. And so I'm increasing the protein calories while keeping the fat calories static. And I'm still getting those highly nutrient dense egg yolks. But yeah, adding adding like egg whites to a to a scramble is a great

low cost way to increase the amount of protein calories in your diet. And then for lunch, I think it's really great to just generally like opt for a grilled protein of some sort, like whether it's a beef tenderloin, grilled chicken breast, fish, things like that, some kind of non-starchy vegetable, always incredible. And then, you know, because I'm working out on a consistent basis, I love those, you know, those carbohydrates are really valuable to me. So again, not a no-fat diet. I'm still getting plenty of fat in like whether it's fish or steak. But then I've been integrating like the occasional like rice or sweet potato. Yeah. And, again, you go to look at any bodybuilder's diet and they're integrating these foods because it supplies your muscles

with the glycogen that the next day you can go to the gym and burn off with your exercise. Well, I used to avoid a lot of rice. I would avoid, you know, even like an organic, occasional like organic sourdough bagel. I would avoid a lot of these things because I was on sort of like that glucose train. And then as I started doing these and I was also regularly getting my, you know, lab work done like normal, the interesting thing that I saw is that as I started to add more lean muscle mass, and since August of last year, so almost spent about a year as we're recording this, I added about nine pounds of lean muscle mass over that period, which is like a big deal for me being like a skinny Indian vegetarian food. And in that process, one thing that I saw is that even though I was

eating more carbs, and I've talked about this a bunch on the podcast, often from things like rice, sweet potatoes, other things like that, I was eating more carbs. but my fasting insulin was still staying in the optimal category. I was probably eating triple to quadruple amount of carbs because I'm adding lean muscle mass and my muscle mass from everything that I've listened to everybody that's come on the podcast is a thing that's soaking up all that sugar

that's coming into the body. So if you're strength training, which is another cheat code, we'll get to that in a minute. If you are moving, walking, another cheat code, and you're being mindful, you can do exactly what you say. You can lose fat and you can add muscle along the way and recomposition your body. Yeah, 100%.

I think a lot of people will try to micromanage their blood sugar, neglecting to appreciate the fact that when you increase your muscle mass and when you lose body fat, your blood sugar regulation is going to improve. Like one of the, they've done some really interesting research where they've found that. So like we have, you know, our bodies have these. fat silos, these energy silos, essentially, which is our adipose tissue, right? Our adiposites are fat cells that store calories as a source of energy. But where genes come into play is some people are better at storing fat than others, right? And once you hit your personal

fat threshold, which I think for South Asian populations might be a lot lower than it is for other populations, right? Like you might not actually be able to get as fat as somebody with a different set of genes, right? But at a certain point, once your fat tissue starts to become essentially filled, right, then those excess calories then start to spill over and get stored in what's sometimes referred to as non-professional fat storage sites. So this is like ectopic fat, right? This is like fat stored in your liver. This is fat stored in your pancreas. And that's when real problems start to happen. I mean, that's like when like real insulin resistance type 2 diabetes starts. Now, there was a study a couple of years ago that found that all it takes is losing one gram of fat from the pancreas for essentially type 2 diabetes to be reversed, right?

And so this is that, this is fat that's not supposed to be in the pancreas, right? This is when you become, when your fat cells, and you might not in the mirror, depending on your genes, look all that fat. You might just be skinny fat, but that's your body's personal fat threshold where like you just can't store any more fat in your adipocytes, right? And that's when that fat starts to spill over and create insulin resistance. in type 2 diabetes and widespread inflammation, all the problems associated with type 2 diabetes, right? But the good news is that it's like fat is like, it's last in first out, right?

So the minute you start to lose the fat that's stored ectopically and in your organs and the like, that's when you start to regain insulin sensitivity and your body becomes better at partitioning glucose and you'll start to see your blood sugar levels, regardless of what you're eating, improve. And so I think that that's a really important, take home for people. It's like you don't, I think it's important to be mindful of your blood sugar

curves because blood sugar also can influence hunger and things like that. So we want to make sure that we're, you know, generally consuming foods that are not super high glycemic, not ultra-refined. But we also don't want to put the cart before the horse, right? If you're overweight and you're focusing too much on the on the blood sugar, blood sugar absolutely matters, but you can improve your body's blood sugar regulation by building, as you've discovered, building more muscle, right, and losing the fat. Yeah. And just, just to echo what you were saying, I still occasionally would wear a CGM. I was still look at my blood sugar because, again, focus plays in a role. If you read any of the literature on ages,

these advanced glycation and products, right? Turns out a lot of sugar at once is something that increases those ages that are there. So this is all in the context of my already quite optimized diet compared to the standard American that's out there. So these were just some few tweaks. but again, understanding where to, as you say, where to major in and where to minor in when it comes to things. So we talked about eating at home. We talked about auditing portion sizes. And we talked about prioritizing lean proteins.

One question about lean proteins. Some folks in this podcast have said that for especially people who are not used to consuming or are significantly under-eating protein, many women might find themselves in that category. they would recommend that the individual might try to have 30 grams of protein sometime earlier in the morning. Have you seen anything about that being helpful, not helpful, especially with protein being as satiating as you say it is? Yeah, I mean, you've had Don Lehman on the podcast.

Yeah, and he's great. And he, you know, I mean, he's definitely like somebody worth listening to in this field. You want to consume protein soon after you wake up generally to halt muscle protein breakdown because it's assuming you've slept eight, nine hours, and maybe you had dinner three to four hours before bed. It probably was a good 12 hours before your last protein bolus. So, you know, in that scenario, you've entered essentially muscle protein breakdown. And so you do want to consume protein for your first. If you're going to break your fast, like with, you know, if you have your choice of what to break your fast with,

it should be with a high protein bolus. And generally, the reason why there's nothing magic about that. number, but why we recommend 25 to 35 grams of protein generally as the minimum threshold is because that is generally what will provide about two and a half grams of lucene, which is the amino acid that's rate limiting in the process of muscle protein synthesis and halts muscle protein breakdown. So 25 to 35 grams of protein is a great way to break your fast for your first meal of the day. Now, you can go higher than that. There's also a misconception that we only will utilize 25 to 35 grams of protein, you know, per sitting. But that's

not necessarily the case. In the context of a mixed meal, you're digesting that protein, you know, for the span of hours. So there's no need to micromanage. Now, protein timing does become important if you're trying to, as you should, hit that protein threshold over the course of the day. It's, you know, it's just difficult to hit the entirety of your protein needs in one or two meals. Sometimes it helps to, you know, supplement with like a protein shake or, you know, a high protein snack over the course of the day, which, you know, again, success leaves clues. Like anybody with any physique of note on social media, like they're using their, vegan or carnivore, they're, tend to be utilizing protein shakes and things like that. So it does pay to have your

protein kind of evenly distributed over the course of the day. But if you're the kind of person who only likes to eat, you know, two or three meals a day, you just want to, that's when you want to make sure you want to have, you know, there's that whole nonsense that like you can only absorb 30 grams of protein per meal, not something that you need to listen to. Well, you can't talk about the idea of weight loss and adding in muscle. So fat loss and then adding in muscle, recompositioning the body without talking about lifting. You mentioned Dr. Donald Lehman. He's been on the podcast, been on your podcast too, and talked about the idea that protein is key, but also lifting is really where you, when you talk about muscle, 75% is related to lifting

and resistance training, and then 25% is the dietary side. And that is number six on your cheat sheet. So if somebody is actually interested in losing fat and recompositioning their body and maybe not even adding muscle, but maintaining muscle, why is it so important to talk about lifting? Yeah. So a lot of people make them, this is one of the biggest mistakes from an exercise standpoint that people make when they, when they, you know, set off on a weight loss journey, they change their workouts, right? They'll start going higher reps with the intent of like, I don't know, toning or adding more cardio and reducing the amount of resistance training that they're doing. It's a huge mistake. You shouldn't assume that you're going to get weaker on a weight loss phase. And you should do your best to continue to do activities that stimulate. optimal maximal muscle growth because the exact whatever it takes to stimulate to stimulate muscle growth maximally in the body is also going to be what it takes to maintain that muscle when you're in a calorie deficit. And so you should aspire to keep improving your lifts. Like keep, you know, lifting heavy in that, I don't know, the rep range kind of, it's not as strictly

defined as I think was once thought, but, you know, generally like between five to 15 repetitions for a given exercise and going to failure on at least one set per workout and focusing on the big compound movements, whether it's like, you know, for somebody who's just starting out, maybe push-ups, but, you know, for somebody who's more familiar with like gym, you know, a gym-style workout, bench pressing, you know, inclined dumbbell presses, squats, you know, pull-ups and things like that, you want to continually tell your body that we need to hold on to this muscle because strength is part of, you know, of daily life. Like we need to continue to, you know, we need to maintain this muscle. And muscle, like losing muscle is not an option. And so

keeping those workouts intense, super, super important. That's where carbohydrates come in and play an important role. But yeah, when I went on this fast, loss journey, I kept my workouts the same. And I, with every workout, I continually tried to lift more or for more reps that I did the prior workout because I knew that that was going to, you know, that's what it was, that's what it takes to tell your body to send that signal to your body, that anabolic signal to hold onto the muscle, which becomes mission critical. I didn't start adding in a bunch of cardio. I increased my walking. That's all I did. Walking is like fat loss magic and I talk about that in the cheat codes as well. But I didn't start like running or anything

like that. First of all, running is not sustainable for me. I don't enjoy it if you enjoy it. By all means, you know, continue to do it. But walking, I think, trumps more aggressive forms of cardio for with regard to fat loss because it's so low intensity. It's easy to sustain and it doesn't deplete you of energy that is better put towards resistance training. That's powerful. Yeah. So walking is like literally fat loss magic. You can sustain it. It doesn't significantly. There is data to back this and I'm not as familiar with it as I should be.

But to my knowledge from what I recall, walking doesn't significantly increase your hunger, whereas more aggressive forms of cardio does, you know, after like a really intense run, you might be more hungry. Whereas walking doesn't seem to increase your hunger, right? So it helps to, it helps you on your on your fat loss journey. The reward to agony ratio, I think, is really high with walking. And it's not as high with running, meaning, you know, you burn significant calories from walking. And you'll burn more with running, but with walking, it's just not commensurate.

Like, the increase is not commensurate with the amount of effort that you have to put into it. So walking is really something, like, you can easily sustain it. Like, I can easily, you know, get on the treadmill and walk for 45 minutes. and by the end I've burned 500 calories, which, again, I wouldn't even have to change my diet in any sense. And I do that every day. That's a pound of fat loss. And it doesn't eat it doesn't eat into your muscle because walking is a low intensity activity that primarily oxidizes fat as a fuel source.

So it's really, I mean, from a fat loss standpoint, walking is really like, I think, one of the best activities there is. Obviously, it's going to vary every day. And by the way, walking was number seven, right? So right after lifting heavy is number seven. Was there a target amount? Would you ever use a step counter? Was it time-based?

How did you sort of have a rough goal, just like you're using a food scale to weigh out things and make sure you're not overeating and getting enough protein and the right gram per pound of ideal body weight? What did you use for walking to help you know, are you hitting your goal or not? Yeah. So I, we live in Los Angeles and Los Angeles is not a pedestrian city, unfortunately. And so for me, I tend to walk like on a treadmill. It's a way for me to I get to listen to podcasts and kind of like zone out and not be afraid that I'm going to get hit by a car, which is a real risk in Los Angeles.

I also can do some work for my phone while I'm walking on the treadmill. So for me, walking on the treadmill is really easy. And I would set it at like a 3.5 to 4.5 incline. You know, not an insanely brisk walk. I would set the speed to 3.2 to 3.5, depending on how I'm feeling. and I would generally try to walk a mile to two miles a day. Nothing crazy. But here's the deal.

If I wanted to create a 500, we'll just say 500 calorie deficit, right? For me, I think the most sustainable way to do it would be to roughly remove about 250 calories from food, right? And burn 250 calories via walking. So to do that via walking, it's like a mile, right? And then I only have to cut 250 calories worth of food. And right there, I'm like, that's a pound of fat loss, you know, doing that roughly every day. Now you can tweak it on some days, like, you know, maybe you'll walk outside, you know, walk through the farmer's market or take a stroll in your neighborhood.

You won't have to do that on the treadmill, maybe some days. And also, like, you know, it's important to take diet breaks, too, especially the more you do it. So, like, this is not a, this is not cheating. This is part of the plan. When you're on a diet plan to, you know, to lose body fat and you are sustaining that for a while as you need to, you know, consistency is what is really the name of the game here. It can be useful from a psychological standpoint to take what are called diet breaks. So, you know, depending on what circles you peek into, they're referred to either as diet breaks or refeeds. But from a psychological standpoint can be really effective.

And so, like, you don't even need to be in a calorie deficit every single day. Sometimes it pays to take a break so that you can follow through on the following day and maybe go to like the restaurant with your friends or whatever and just like stop thinking about dieting for a period of time. This is all done regularly by people in the fitness space. The difference for me, I think Drew is that I'm not like a fitness competitor. I'm not a bodybuilder. I'm not an athlete.

I'm not particularly obsessive about this stuff. I just wanted to see what it would take, you know, to easily and with like, the least amount of effort possible do this. But I think by studying kind of how the pros do it, I think it's very valuable to see like how they do it, right? Because they're the professionals and success leaves clues. And so yeah, so kind of splitting it up like a mix between, you know,

a 250 calorie deficit with your food, which, you know, maybe that's like two tablespoons of oil. Maybe that's like just putting a little more attention on like reducing the added oil. And then a mile of walking on a treadmill like daily or, or like taking a mile long walk around your neighborhood. I mean, that's pretty easy. Like, you know, you'd have to be like really stubborn to not see that.

So that 500 calorie deficit a day coming from walking or some sort of, you know, movement like that, a little bit of food, you're splitting it between the two. That leads up to what you were saying about a pound. Yeah, because a pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. So a pound of fat on your body sitting on your body, sitting on your. hips or in your belly, that stores about 3,500 calories, right? So what's 3,500? What's 500 times 7? 3,500. Yeah. So all you got to do is burn 500 calories a day, be in a 500 calorie per day calorie deficit, and you lose a pound of fat. Yeah. It's so straightforward when you look at it

this way. And obviously, a lot of people have had that aha moment kind of going through your cheat codes. And it's like, wow, this is really doable. If it's so doable, why aren't people normally in their life sort of automatically losing weight? What actually throws them off in this process? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, it's the Obesogenic food environment. It's that today, 60% of the calories that your average adult consumes comes from minimally satiating, highly calorically dense, ultra-processed foods that are depleted of protein, depleted of fiber, depleted of hydration. So they're minimally satiating. We over-consume them in part for those reasons, but also because they're very easy to consume rapidly.

So eating rate is another variable that makes these foods easy to overconsume. It takes a bit of time for our stomachs to register that it has food in them. So the fact that ultra-processed foods are so readily consumed, especially when we're talking, not even food, but like sugar, sweetened beverages and the like, we just consume these calories so quickly in a way that our bodies just don't, you know, are not set up to be able to, like, register. And so the standard American diet is defined in part by the overconsumption of these ultra-processed foods. And by the way, machine learning, there was a study that came out showing us that 73% of the foods in your average supermarket are ultra-processed.

So that's, I mean, that's the big problem. And these foods aren't, here's the other thing that is that I've learned that's really interesting. It's like you don't have to, you can still integrate all of your favorite foods while losing fat. Like if you, if there's an ultra-processed food that you happen to love, it's not that that food is, you know, the sole smoking gun for all of your health problems is that you tend to over-consume them as those foods are designed to, you know, that that phenomena that those foods are really designed for, right? These foods are designed to create repeat customers. And we see that they, they tend to very easily be over-consumed. Potato chips. But if you have a food scale in your house, for example, and, you know, maybe if the potato chip, is the one thing that's going to make it easier for you to sustain this diet. At the end of the day, you get to go home and, like, after a day of essentially dieting and you get to have your single serving of potato chips. And that's going to be the one thing that helps you to adhere.

For some people, it's like diet soda. I don't drink diet soda. I don't drink artificial, consume artificial sweeteners. But for some, you know, if that's the one thing that is going to allow you to sustain this diet over the long haul, at the end of the day, you get to enjoy your whatever it is, you know, by all means, like, you should be able to, right? And that's where I think being a little bit more moderate about our, you know, how we think about these variables and not so polarized, right? Like, it's all calories. Calories don't matter at all. That's when we start to realize that, like, you can actually integrate, you know, these foods that you thought were, you know, perhaps off limits

to you. Over the course of this process for me, I didn't really, you know, exclude any foods that, you know, that I, that I love. Like I found a way to continue to incorporate them, but I just became more mindful of like, of portion sizes, which you're really unable to do without, without, I don't know if, I mean, I think a food skill really helps. And it's a lot easier not to overeat on those foods when you're following all other fundamentals

that allow you not to be super hungry, like prioritizing protein, anything so satiating, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right? Monitoring, auditing your food. it's just harder. And then on top of that, you're working out. People naturally, when they start to do a lot of the basics, they just find themselves actually not reaching as much

for a lot of these ultra-process foods. But as you mentioned, that doesn't mean that you don't have to ever reach for them because how much you can stick with a diet is the best indication that it's actually going to end up working for you in some capacity. Yeah. I mean, the biggest enemy when you're on a diet is hunger.

That's like the number one enemy, right? And also your proximity. Well, I would say it's a, it's a little reductive to say it's just one thing. I mean, hunger is a big problem, but also boredom. Bortem is a major reason, I think, for people to mindlessly snack on things. Sometimes when I get bored, I just, you know, I miss that phenomenon of like opening the fridge. I'm not even hungry. I'm just opening the fridge to see what's in it.

Okay, so talk about this. This is number eight. No boredom snacking. Yeah. Okay. So when would you find yourself in a place of boredom snacking? Like what time of day? you know, people generally have their schedules.

Like, what was going on that you find yourself boredom snacking? Yeah, I mean, I personally work from home and we live in an era now where more people are working from home, right? Like remote working is a big thing ever since the pandemic. And lo and behold, data suggests that over the course of the pandemic, people gained more weight, right? More time at home, more time spent in proximity to the foods that we love, which tend to be ultra-processed, right? And so when we're bored, we tend to be on the, lookout for that dopamine hit. And for most people, the easiest way to increase dopamine is to go and eat something tasty, right? And I'm no different. Like I, when I'm working from home, I'm always,

like chronically in and out of my cupboards, in and out of my fridge, whether or not I'm hungry. I'm always looking for something to put in my face, right? Because it's fun. And it assuages for a brief moment that boredom. Maybe I'm in between meetings and, you know, and I'm just like, it's just been a really like rough day. Maybe I'm stressed out. Maybe my cat. puked in a place that it shouldn't have, that she shouldn't have. And, uh, and, you know, we all want like that, we all want that reprieve from the daily stresses that are inevitable to some degree today. And so I will typically go to the cupboard. I'll look for something tasty. But oftentimes what I've had to come to realize is that it's literally just that. I'm not hungry. If I'm just able

to bring a little bit of awareness to it, I'm not necessarily hungry. I'm just bored. I want to put something in my mouth. So I've stocked my fridge now with sparkling waters. which are great. Like you can throw some stevia drops into your favorite flavored sparkling water and suddenly it becomes a calorie-free soda with no artificial sweeteners. Tees, I think, are phenomenal. I also now stock like high-protein snack. So if I do want a snack, it's going to be something that is going to be most adept at

assuaging my hunger. So, you know, cold cuts or Greek yogurt is a great option. you know even the occasional protein shake which you know is technically a processed food but it's pure it's essentially pure protein and so yeah and then you know also what I'll do is I'll just get out of the house like I think it's like a big boredom is like is definitely like a number one driver of snacking yeah a lot of people struggle with it especially there's that late at night snacking were a late at night snacker oh definitely

Yeah. And most things that people are consuming, it's not necessarily, although there is data that suggests that late night snacking does increase next day hunger and to some degree reduce next day energy expenditure. The biggest problem with late night snacking is that nobody's snacking on anything healthy late at night. Unless we're talking fruit, which is great. But most of the times, most of the snacks that we reach for when we're sitting on the cabs. binge watching our favorite streaming show, those snacks tend to be some combination of carbs and fat, usually both, highly calorically dense, typically ultra-processed. And so by cutting out those foods, I mean, that's where intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, I think, can play

a role. I mean, there is good data on it now coming out about circadian rhythms and all that stuff. but at the very least, it's a parameter that you can put in place that ensures that after dinner or whatever time you set for yourself, whether it's 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., you're not going to be snacking. Because again, most snacks for people tend to be of that ultra-processed hyper-palatable variety. You know, that quality that food manufacturers assign to ultra-processed foods that just makes them so delicious, It's impossible to, you know, to stop our, to moderate our consumption of those foods. It's amazing that when I really started hitting for me, my protein goal every day was about 48 grams of protein a day, right? 145, 150.

When you're eating that much protein from whole food sources and not, I never was really eating ultra-processed food since I was a kid, you are also just not as hungry. Not that I don't have a sweet tooth just like everybody else, but genuinely you feel like you're not reaching for things as much because you just feel so full in the day. I was never a big late night snacker, but even what little I might have, you go and have a meal, even if it's out and you're prioritizing that protein first, you just don't feel as hungry. That's something that I've noticed. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite foods is fruit and I love honey crisp apples, right? I have never eaten a honey crisp apple and then immediately felt the compulsion to go and eat a second one.

I've never felt that. And they're one of my favorite foods. And so right there we can see, you know, one example of where whole foods are more satiating than processed foods. Right. Like whole fruit is self-limiting. It's the food matrix, that, you know, invaluable food matrix that, you know, I've done, I've talked a bit about this in the past. but the fibrous matrix, the water, the minerals, right? It's like you don't feel compelled, that compulsion to go and eat more after you've eaten

one the same way that you would with like an ultra-processed food. And the same thing goes with, you know, chicken or steak or, you know, eggs. Like, you know, people tend not to overconsume these foods because they're so self-limiting. So, I mean, yeah, if that's, I mean, that's another important intervention that people, these are all tools, you know, like maybe intermittent fasting. rings a bell, you know, for your average person. Maybe eating home more is going to be the trick. Minimizing your consumption of ultra-processed foods, that's another huge one today. When your average adult is consuming 60% of their calories, you know, by weight from these,

or, you know, by calories from these types of foods, reducing their intake of those is going to be a major win. And I think even for people that are already considered themselves like super healthy, they listen to your podcast, listen to mine, maybe some others, that oil concentrated calories in the form of nut butters. I can't tell you how many friends of mine that are just like, dude, I feel like something really complicated is going on with me, right? Maybe it's cortisol levels. Maybe it's my insulin's out of whack. Maybe my hormones are thrown off. I just can't lose the weight. And then doing a little bit of auditing, not that I'm a nutritionist, a dietitian, but just asking good questions and referring them to somebody. They saw that just that avocado

toast that they make with extra guacamole and extra olive oil and then extra this. And then they're also having, you know, some oatmeal, but they're putting in four tablespoons of nut butter. Yeah. And they don't realize that great, none of these foods are bad in themselves. There's nothing wrong with the fat. There's nothing wrong with the carbs. Nothing wrong with this. But it just got a little out of whack and some small changes can help them bring themselves back into balance. Absolutely. Yeah. If you are. carrying extra weight, audit your way of eating and just see what reducing, you know, like your consumption of these ultra fatty foods, you know, ultra, you know, high fat foods will do. This doesn't

have to be permanent. This could just be like a little experiment that you run for yourself. I guarantee you you'll see, you know, an improvement. And nuts are a really interesting food category. Nuts are one of the most calorie dense foods that exist, but they don't seem to be associated with obesity. We seem to see that when people consume more whole nuts, they tend to actually have lower risk for obesity. And there's really interesting data now coming out, again, just about the value of the food matrix and particularly where nuts are concerned. There was a study published by, funded by the USDA that found that we actually don't absorb the full caloric contribution contributed by whole nuts. That about

30% of the calories that we ingest by way of nuts. You could be calorie counting looking at the label actually passed through us. I was in London recently and I interviewed one of the researchers on this, Sarah Berry. They've done really interesting studies where they'll have people chew whole nuts and they'll have them spit out the bolus just prior to swallowing. Or they'll take people with like ostomy bags and they'll take the, they'll have them consume nuts and then they'll see what comes out at the other end of the small intestine, you know, in these ostomy bags. And they'll see that about 30% of the calories, it differs nut to nut, but generally goes

unabsorbed, basically. So nuts actually whole nuts contribute fewer calories than previously thought. Again, because of this whole food matrix, that the calories, the fat calories are bound in some ineffable, you know, characteristic of the nuts that makes them in some way, despite their caloric density, less obesogenic than, you know, perhaps an ultra-processed food of equal calorie content. Now, where this concept goes out the window is when you take nuts and you grind them into nut butter, right? When you grind nuts, when you process nuts into nut butter, you're likely absorbing 100% of the calories from that product, right? When you, and this

goes for likely all types of foods, right? We see that whole foods, not only are they more safe, but they might even have less of a caloric impact than was previously thought. In fact, there's a very well-known, I'm not going to name the brand, but there's a well-known brand of like granola bars. That's on the market. You find them in gas stations and whatever. They updated their, their calorie counts on their bars after that study came out. Wow. Yeah. And they were legally allowed to because that's what the data shows that nuts actually have a lower color contribution than was previously thought. Fascinating. Yeah. I love it. Connecting all the dots. Before we go to the last few cheat codes that you have, number nine, which we chat about a little bit,

but it's worth going through. And then number 10, I want to chat a little bit about just this idea around the permission of people allowing themselves to, if you want to lose weight, if you want to recomposition your body, that, hey, that's not a bad thing. That's okay. And it's also healthy. It felt like for a while in society, we weren't. allowed to really talk about sort of weight loss and body composition.

I know you're always following the hot social topics here and there, but any thoughts that you want to toss in the mix about it and what you feel is kind of happening now where it feels like we're having a lot more of a balanced conversation about it, not that there aren't still extremes that are out there, but I think the world is sort of waking up and realizing like, okay, this is kind of nonsense that we can't talk about certain subjects in any kind of category that's there. And that also doesn't mean we're blaming people who are overweight. Anybody who has been overweight, I've never been overweight or servile obese or has family members or friends, they know that that individual, all they think about all day is being overweight. They wish they could

do something to get. And they've tried so many different things. They've spent so much different money. They've been lied to a little bit about the things that kind of contribute to that and the role of different foods and things like that. But there seems like we were in a place where you couldn't talk about weight loss and now we're kind of getting out of that. What's some of your commentary on this space? Yeah, I mean, weight loss is a fat, obesity is a huge problem today, societally, and we have to be talking about it. Weight absolutely matters. I mean, today we're trending towards a world where, or country rather, where one and two adults is not just overweight, but obese. So it's a huge problem. And being obese increases your risk for any number of chronic,

non-communicable conditions. You can be normal weight and metabolically obese. It tends to be the minority. And you can be overweight and metabolically healthy. But again, that's the minority. In general, being obese is not as good for you as being not obese. And that shouldn't be controversial to say, to state. Obesity is a disease. And so I think we need to approach it as such. Now the problem is when we shame and when we finger point, I think a lot of people are just not set up with the tools to understand how their food environment might be influencing their, you know, their predisposition to weight gain. I think a lot of people like to adopt like a victim mindset, which I think has become very common today. There's a lot of competing like variables, right? There's now this influx on the market of actually really effective weight loss drugs, right?

Like OZMPIC and things like that. And we have physicians, highly credentialed physicians going on major nightly news shows claiming that obesity is primarily genetic, right? Which I think is highly deflating for anybody who's, you know, struggled on the weight loss journey. But at the end of the day, people have the capacity to lose weight. Like whether you're obese or just overweight, like you have the same capacity to lose the fat as anybody else with the right know-how and with the right tools and with the right

dedication and motivation and ultimately discipline. And, um, and so I think it's a big problem to be undermining that. You know, I mean, I know a lot of people who are, you see them on social media. People who, you know, started out terribly obese and they, they, you know, they embody, they, they begin to embody the hard work and they and they radically change their lives and it's like incredibly inspiring. There's a guy on Twitter, he's gone viral recently and he's built up a really great following. His name is Dave Deanna, I think is his name. I don't know his last name, but he set, his mission has been to set out to conquer obesity. He's like an obese guy and he takes photos of himself in the gym and he's, you know, he's making incredible progress and he's now an inspiration.

to many on Twitter. And so I think we can't, we have to stop the victim blaming and the fat shaming. I think that's a really important part of the equation. And we have to acknowledge when we're seeing overweight people exercising, that is incredibly healthy. That's amazing. It's incredibly healthy to see somebody of any size exercising. It's if we see somebody who's overweight sitting on a couch and we say that's healthy,

suddenly we're lying. That's when we start lying to people. So yeah, that's my take. And I think we just, we have to, we have to just continue to fight the good fight. Yeah. You know, I have a lot of being Indian and all,

even though it's stereotype, it's true. A lot of my family members are doctors, physicians. And the thing that I've heard from them is that they even feel nervous about bringing up weight. Wild. In appointments, even from a very compassionate standpoint. Now,

I think that part of that is that the medical system for a long time just told patients that would come in, hey, you're overweight, you need to eat better and exercise without really giving them any more tools. Not that doctors are equipped with those tools. They, many of themselves, are struggling on this journey to be into a optimal sort of body composition. But the ones who are educated feel a little bit nervous about the best ways to be able to talk about it. And they know that patients are quite sensitive these days and they're trying to find the right angles. In fact, there's this sort of movement where a lot of patients are carrying around a card that they handed their doctor and saying, you know, please do not weigh me unless if it's medically necessary. Now, I see both sides of that, right?

Somebody might have a lot of trauma. They might have that. Maybe they've had bad doctors that they should have fired and found somebody who's really a partner with them on the journey. Maybe somebody that's like integrative or functional leaning who has compassion for them. Maybe there's zip code that they were raised in. The fact that their parents were never taught out of cook. The fact that they grew up in an area that only had 7-Elevens to shop in, right? You have to have compassion for people in their situation.

But that also said, hey, listen, this isn't just about weight. And this isn't just about how you look. This is about your metabolic health. This is about you not being in a place where you have preclampsia during pregnancy, gestational diabetes. This is in a place where the number one thing correlated. We had Dr. Sachin Pando on the podcast recently. You know, the number one thing like, you know, obesity is so correlated with cancer. Right. So many different chronic diseases that are out there. And having a more compassionate

conversation saying, listen, I know this is concerning to you, but I want to tell you why it matters for all the goals that you have in your life, regardless of what those goals are. So it's tricky, but I feel like we're collectively waking up. And sometimes it takes things getting really nutty before everybody's like, okay, this isn't making sense and people are just getting fatter and sicker. And we need to go about things in a different way. Yeah. And people are so judgmental. I did a video recently on on Instagram and Twitter that went kind of viral and the comments that I got on it were insane. So I did it I did a video where I went to how do I set this up? So sometimes when you're traveling you're in a pinch, you can't find it's hard to find healthy

food. Like some people literally do shop at 7-Elevens and at gas stations and things like that. Right. And I think it's important not to be a snob about like food, right? And I think in the wellness world, it's easy to project this perfectionist image where, you know, all we're doing is eating like avocado toast and the finest organic extra virgin olive oil all day and grass fed, grass finished, this and that. And I think that's great. It's great to like, I'm very lucky and privileged and I live in Los Angeles. And I've curated and worked very hard to build a life where I can afford these access and afford these kinds of foods. but for people that can't, I also try to make it really easy for people to understand what they can do, given their circumstances, to eat healthier than the average person, right?

healthier. And so I went to him, I found out, I was giving a talk recently in Arizona and it was to college students and college students typically don't have a lot of money. And so one of the students who I was talking to after my talk told me that there's that McDonald's of all places has a hidden menu where you can order foods from McDonald's a la carte. Wow. Yeah. I had no idea, right? I haven't had McDonald's in 20 years.

Okay. I'm not a fast food consumer. But he told me that if you go to a McDonald's and if you order their quarter pounder beef patties, you can order them just the patties. and it's super cheap. And they're prepared. They give them to you in a tray, ready to be consumed. And God knows there's like McDonald's everywhere. Like McDonald's is one of the most common fast food.

I was in London there all like McDonald's. Like if you don't have access to McDonald's, like you've got to be like living in a forest somewhere. Right. And so this was not a sponsored post or anything like that. But I went to McDonald's. I went to the drive-thru at McDonald's and I ordered four quarter pounder patties. off the a la carte menu, and it was like eight bucks, and I got a pound of beef, seasoned and whatever, ready to be consumed.

And I sat there and I filmed it, and I put it on my Instagram in the parking lot of the McDonald's, and it was a pound of beef. And you know what? I went to the McDonald's website. According to them, it's 100% beef, no fillers, just salt and pepper. I have followers that work, have worked at McDonald's. They don't use any oils to cook the burger, no seed oils, nothing like that. It's just pure meat thrown on the grill.

Right. And I ate it. And it, I swear to God, tasted indistinguishable from any other, from any other burger, you know. And so I posted that and I was like really psyched that I like posted this and is provided, you know, first of all, if I'm on the road and I can't find access to a high quality protein. I'm not saying it's high quality meat, but it is high quality protein. And that's all I have access to. Then I'm going to go for it. Right.

And so I posted that and I got an overwhelming amount of positive. comments. People were like, oh my God, this is amazing. I had no idea. I'm going to do this. I, you know, I commute three hours a day for work or whatever and like sometimes I'm in a pinch where I have six kids and like, you know, sometimes they're screaming for McDonald's and I don't know what to order and blah, blah, blah. So most people really appreciated it. But like a small minority of people were like unfollow, you know. How dare you? How dare you? What was it paid for by McDonald's? You're now shilling McDonald's. This is garbage. I'm like, it's not, it's not garbage. It's high quality protein that anybody can can go out and buy in a pinch. And I ate it. I had no

qualms. I felt great afterwards. But the amount of shame that some people launched onto me just showing this was mind blowing, like absolutely mind blowing. And I have compassion for those people because I probably would have been one of those people many, many years ago, right? When I was just starting off my journey and everything. And the more you realize that we are, sure, you can curate your own life and you can set up your life the way you want to to not maybe be in that situation where you have to order from McDonald's. By the way, if that's you, probably you're part of the Zoom class.

You're the individuals that get to work from home. You're like me. You might have a podcast. You might be living in a major city like L.A., Charlotte, somewhere where you can get access to healthier food options. But if you really care about society, there's plenty of people that are not in that situation. And then on top of that, people have kids, right?

Even my healthiest friends in L.A. will tell you, they're kids, unless if there's like some extreme situation, they can't, they're sensitive to certain foods. Every kid asked for fast food at some point in time, right? We don't have a lot of McDonald's around here, but there are some, right? And you've got to know what you can do along the way to still feed yourself the things that you want to do. So I have compassion, but it's not the right solution to shame everybody else when all somebody's doing in your case here. You're just

trying to provide good information about a possibility. We need more goodness in the world and we need more options. We're not going to get 8 billion people eating healthier by shaming everybody. You know, we're going to need a lot of different solutions and different types of education to help people actually understand how to make these diet and lifestyle choices sustainable. Exactly. And if you're an obese person, right, I've never been an obese person, so I can't even imagine. But if you're an obese person, obviously eating an obesity genetic diet, right? And you approach from an open-minded and naive standpoint, like the wellness world, right,

where again, this image of perfection tends to be portrayed, it can seem incredibly overwhelming, right? So I do have compassion. And for your average person who is obese, right? And like just like maybe that's going to be a vastly healthier option than what it is that they're currently eating, right? Like the four quarter pounders without the, you know, something that's like a meal that is incredibly satiating without the fries, right? Like maybe you're not getting the fries, but you're getting two additional quarter pounders for more protein, right? And you're not getting the, you know, and you're skipping the whatever, the soft drink, right?

which we know is problematic. That's an improvement, right? Major improvement. Major improvement. So yeah, I think it's really important to have compassion for obese people and to remind, you know, for people with obesity and to remind people that like, you know, sometimes it's like those incremental daily habits that like add up over the long term to really, really big wins. It's that concept of like compounding interest, right? So if you make a 1% improvement per day, that doesn't seem like a lot, right? It's pretty easy to improve.

It's pretty just to wrap my head around being 1% better today than I was yesterday, that's a pretty easy lift. If I try to be 25% better than I was yesterday, that's a bit more difficult. I'm not really sure what that might look like, right? But 1% better I could probably do. And if I try to be tomorrow 1% better than I was today, like, you do that over time and that adds up. And yeah, by the end of the year, probably equates to something dramatically different than what your current today looks like. Well, my favorite questions to ask people who are like super judgy. And again, I've been at that place at one point in time early on,

probably when I became vegan. You know, that was probably my most judgmental time period, although I learned very quickly and started holding my tongue because I realized like nobody appreciates that, you know, and I didn't even want to be that person. It was a very, short period of time. But one of my most favorite questions to ask somebody who's like very judgmental, almost like a wellness elitist, right, that everybody should be living a particular way. Should is really the key word. We should be doing this. We should be eating this. They should be supplementing this way, whatever it might be, is if they're open to it, it's like, tell me the last time that you genuinely change your mind. You evolved your thinking on something, right? And walk me through

it. And when they walk you through it and they talk to you about how they change your mind, Maybe they have heard all the great people over the last couple years talking about how important protein is. And before that, they were under eating. Or maybe they were consuming a lot of sugar. And now they're much more mindful of it. They're not doing so much added sugar because even though sugar doesn't have a lot of calories, it plays a role in diabetes and insulin and other stuff.

It's like, okay, great. Well, before you thought you were doing your best, right? How would it feel if somebody was like super judgmental on you and putting you down? You naturally had to take time. and it was probably you learning through something, hopefully probably in long format, where somebody explained you that there's a better way of going through things, and it was through education. It wasn't through somebody coming to your house and telling you you're a shitty person because

you're eating or living this way. It was probably because somebody educated you, somebody looked up to you admired them, even if you disagreed with them on certain things, and that's how you shifted your mind. It wasn't through harsh shaming as the bottom line. So we need to get out of that, especially when it comes to the internet and the whole comments and trolling. I don't know if you ever look on YouTube, but YouTube's a little scary place sometimes.

Yeah. You're my favorite person to read sometimes YouTube comments. I saw somebody the other day, wrote a comment, and they were like, which, by the way, 90% was positive, right? 10% was like something like that. Somebody said, I'm unsubscribing, and all you did was you put a piece emoji, which I think is a healthy, healthy approach.

Oh, yeah. If somebody wants to unfollow me, by all means, go for it. Yeah, I don't, zero, zero F's given. Because, you know, I'm just here to provide information and also to share my journey in this, in this process, like where we're all ultimately left to just figure things out for ourselves. If I can help somebody, you know, accelerate their progress, then that's an amazing thing. But if you're not, you know, if you're, if you're one of these people who, you know, is just looking for the next thing to be triggered by, then I have no business interacting with you.

probably not even a very low, you know, you're not probably not even supporting me anyway. You're probably just like taking the free content and whatever. And so, yeah, I have no very little patience for those for those types. All right, two more cheat codes. Yeah. One is a summary and both are kind of like a summary. But the first one is something that we chatted about before. It's dropping added oils and fats. Just do a little bit of a recap on that one, right? Separate from oils. You talked a lot about olive oil. You're a huge fan of it. You're still a huge. You fan of it. Yeah.

You just appropriately adjusted it to factor in the calories that you're actually consuming within your total plan that's there. Were there any other types of fats that you had to make swaps for to achieve some of your goals? Yes. And I'm glad we circled back to this because I, here's where I probably have updated my thinking. I used to kind of, how do I phrase this? Because when I was at 15, 16% body fat, I was very healthy. Like, that's, you know, I was, that's a healthy body fat percentage.

But everybody has different goals. And if, and my goal became to lose a little bit of body fat. And if that's what your goal is, one of the things that I found to be very effective was to swap the fattier meats that I was consuming with leaner cuts. Now, we, for the past few decades, have been told that fat is bad, you know, Fat makes you fat. Fat is bad. Fat and saturated fat is not good for our arteries and things like that, right? Which we know is not the case. Like, we know that fat is a vital part of food. It plays a role in satiety. It helps us to absorb fat soluble vitamins and compounds in plants and things

like that. But the, and of course, that's that kind of dogma has led to the influx of all these low fat and fat-free ultra-processed foods on the market. And so the pendulum has swung now in the other direction where in some nutrition pockets online, it's almost like you can, it's almost like fat gets a hall pass. You know, we can eat as much fat as we possibly want and fat doesn't, you know, when overconsume doesn't lead to any negative health outcomes, which isn't true either. Right. And so lean, lean protein has almost become like, I mean, it is a four letter word, but it's

almost become like the new four-letter word in certain nutrition pockets. And what I did was I started swapping like fatier cuts of meat that I was consuming on a regular basis and all, you know, super healthful. Like, again, because I was consuming it in the context of being 15, 16% body fat, so all good. But, you know, I was eating a lot of like rib eyes, for example, which are, it's a fattier cut of meat. And I made the swap to consume primarily leaner cuts. So, and people have this. misconception that there's no such thing as lean delicious red meat and there absolutely is. So I started consuming a lot more hangar steaks and flank steaks and tenderloins and New York strip steaks and things like that which are leaner than ribbys. And I also started to whereas I was consuming, you know,

I would consume a six egg scramble in the in the mornings, you know, for breakfast without hesitation. I started, I cut it down to, you know, two to three whole eggs. and started adding some carton egg whites, which egg yolks are amazing. They're one of nature is multivitamins, and they're incredible. But by doing that, what you're doing is you're reducing the amount of fat calories in your diet, and you're increasing the amount of protein calories. So it made it really easy for me to increase the protein in my diet,

while still getting all the nutritional value from whole eggs, but I just started eating fewer of them. So I made the swap to some leaner proteins. With dairy, I started consuming more, like Greek yogurt, but I started going for like the reduced fat Greek yogurt or fat-free Greek yogurt, which is essentially like a protein shake right there. It's not that dairy fat is bad. Dairy fat is super healthy. That's what all the observational research shows. But these swaps, what they do is they do a few things. For one, they give you more flexibility. So they give you

more dietary flexibility. So whereas on a rib eye, you know, I was probably consuming about a thousand calories, you know, in that setting. Maybe now I'm consuming a 500 calorie tenderloin and I've got an additional 500 calories to play with to consume, you know, maybe it's the extra virgin olive oil in my salad or maybe it's a few extra, you know, pieces of fruit or whatever so that or maybe even like some kind of starch so that I can have more energy in the work in my in my workouts. You need fat to, again, for satiety, to optimize hormones, to optimize digestion, as I mentioned, right? Fat is important. Essential fatty acids like omega-3 and omega-6 fats, but beyond that sort of minimal effective dose of your daily fat intake, there's not as overt

a performance boost with consuming more of it as you get from consuming carbohydrates. So for somebody who's resistance training, you want to make sure to maintain that flexibility in your diet so that you can continue to keep your carbohydrate intake up, as you shed the body fat. Because again, it's going to give, that's going to give you that energy that you need to sustain your workouts. So I just made a few deliberate swaps here and there

with the added fats and oils and the fatier cuts of meat and the, you know, the full fat dairy for low fat. With the intent of this being a temporary switch. And without counting calories, like the fat just kind of melted off, which was great. I also reduced my intake of

you know, fatier foods in general like, you know, dark chocolate. So whereas before I would eat, I would easily plow through like an entire bar of dark chocolate a day because I just knew that I know that dark chocolate is very healthy, but it's a very calorie-dense food, right? And so it kind of is at odds with that like fighting off the optimizing for satiety and fighting off the hunger. The satiety per calorie that you get with a dark chocolate bar or with any of these higher fat foods is not really as great, right? There's this idea of optimizing satiety per calorie.

Like you want your foods to be filling in as small, with as small of a, with as low of a calorie contribution as possible. Going back to that breakfast example that you brought up earlier, you want your foods to be equally as satiating, but depending on where you are, whether you're trying to gain weight, maintain weight, or lose weight, you have to modulate. You have to, modulate the calorie density, right? You want to keep your satiety up, but it's where, you know, reducing the fat goes a long way towards reducing the calorie density of your foods. Any other things that you found during this experiment, foods that you were trying, that you felt like, wow, you know, I've had this before, but I kind of underappreciated, just like you talked about

the honey crisp apple and how that's one of your favorites, but also you was very satiating. I know there's this guy on Twitter diet doctor.com, right? Yeah, yeah. The diet doctor. I know those guys, yeah. Yeah. And they kind of been getting a lot of flack because he was, I think, a hardcore keto guy before. Hardcore, yeah.

Who then has updated based on all these surveys and databases about what actually makes people satiated. Yeah. Right? And like he's done a few where like, hey, butter is not as satiating as, you know, something else that people don't think is, you know, more satiating. So was there any other foods that came up for you that were very satiating foods that just left you in a place where you didn't feel hungry and you're less likely to boredom snack and you're less likely to reach for the more concentrated calories that are going to have you break what your goals are? Well, fiber is incredibly satiating. We haven't even touched on that. But fiber is, you know, not quite as satiating as protein, but it mechanically stretches out the stomach. It's like one of those, you know, growing up as a kid, we had these little things, these like little, little.

animals that would come in a pill and you'd throw them into water and they would like expand as they're dinosaurs yeah so that's exactly essentially what what yeah dinosaurs is essentially what fiber does in your stomach so mechanically stretches out the stomach and turns off hormones like ghrelin which is the hunger hormone so yeah optimizing for fiber and was there a way that you found that that like there's everything to like i have no affiliation but sometimes in the morning what i'll do for my hunger i'll do like greek yogurt right i'll add in a scoop away protein inside kind of mix it together but I'll also add in I came across this really cool fiber blend by Garden of Life which is like a bunch of different organic fibers and it's like

five grams and so there's like a nice little fiber boost was there any snacks supplement anything that you found like that that was a good go-to for you besides the traditional idea of like eating a salad or having an apple yeah um well it's very counterintuitive but um when you look at the satiety index of foods, potatoes rank very high, which is like it's a pure starch. But for some reason, maybe it's because they're not that, they're not really that delicious unless you, until you start adding the, you know, the sour cream and the bacon and the cheese on top of it. But, but potatoes are incredibly satiating. It could be because, you know, they contain resistant starch. I mean, that could be one of the mechanisms. But I definitely lean, you know,

started leaning more on some of these, yeah, starches like potatoes. As I mentioned earlier, um, in the mornings. So I'm glucose sensitive and I work out in the morning. So just again, to paint the picture of context, I started, uh, consuming some morning oatmeal, which is a very commonly consumed food in the bodybuilder community. Um, and I think part of the reason for that is that it's a satiating food. It's a very slow burning carbohydrate, not the, instant oats, mind you. These are like steel cut, very low glycemic index and provide that sort of slow release of glucose, like into the bloodstream, which I would then take to the gym with me. And oats, there are some caveats to be made, obviously, like, you know, generally if you're,

you want to make sure that they're gluten-free, particularly if you're sensitive to gluten or celiac. Oats can be, you know, pretty heavily sprayed, but it is possible to find glyphosate-free, certified organic oats. And so if you're able to find those, I think that, you know, oats can be a really great food for that, like to supply, you know, a really clean burning fuel source for exercise. And they're a great source of soluble fiber. We know that they contain compounds called beta glucans, which support your immune system. And they're very satiating. And that's, you know, this is an area where like, you know, I probably would. wouldn't have consumed them five years ago because I just thought that they were this like,

you know, unhealthy grain. And they're not the most nutrient dense food. I will say that. But in the context of optimizing around your workouts, you know, periworkout carbohydrates or even intra-workout carbohydrates are very valuable for people who are who are exercising. And so by providing starch, which isn't really a nutrient, but it does serve a functional role in that context. That's where I've sort of like opened my mind to those kinds of foods, which would have typically been off the table for me up until just a couple of years ago. Yeah, love it. All right. Number 10, and I think this is a good one to have some concluding thoughts around consistency and patience. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So I think a lot of people

want like overnight success. They want to see the scale move right away. They look in the mirror. They want to see a big difference. But you're actually incentivized from a body composition standpoint to lose fat slowly. Now this varies person to person. So actually the more overweight you are, you can actually lose fat more rapidly. And it's fine. It's all good. There's a hypothetical, there's a study on this

maximum fat transfer of about 30 something, 35 calories per day that a pound of fat can release on a given 24-hour period. So if you're not carrying around a ton of fat, there's only so much fat that can be extracted from your adipose tissue on a 24-hour basis. Before you start, your body starts looking for fuel elsewhere, potentially your muscle, right? So the leaner you are, in particular, the more slowly you want to lose the weight. Like, you really want, and you also don't want to incur any metabolic adaptation, which can occur with a more rapid weight loss. So there's metabolic adaptation and what's called adaptive thermogenesis with more rapid weight losses.

Your body basically thinks that it's starving to death. This isn't like a permanent kind of damage, but your metabolism slows to some degree. your adaptive thermogenesis is essentially your body, you have less energy and subconscious move, you're less inclined to move and fidget and things like that when you're in a more pronounced calorie deficit. Your neat actually declines, non-exercise adaptive, non-exercise activity thermogenesis decreases. And so that's where like your calorie expenditure will start to come down, which leads a lot of people to think that their diets have failed or they've stalled, you can prevent that, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can,

you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can't, you're adopting a less stark calorie deficit. So you're incentivized to lose weight, um, to lose fat, particularly when you can actually lose fat at a more rapid pace because you have more fat so you're able to release more calories from that fat. And also you can kind of get away with keeping your protein a little bit lower because there's just more energy to go around to fuel all the anabolic processes, you know, when you're exercising. But for somebody like me who was, again, at a healthy weight, you know, 15 to 16% body fat,

if you're in that range, then you really ought to approach your weight. loss from a slower standpoint so that you prevent some of those like adaptive changes. And a lot of people will get, I think, discouraged when they see that the weight on the scale, weight loss is generally not linear, which I think is another area where people get kind of confused and disheartened over the course of the process. Weight can fluctuate. I mean, it can fluctuate in accordance by way of like, you know, food that you're like, you're like, bathroom habits, like if you're not going to the bathroom regularly, when you're on a calorie deficit over a prolonged period of time,

you know, digestion can slow because, again, your body is like trying to suck as many calories as possible out of what it is that you're eating, whereas digestion is a lot faster when you're eating a calorie surplus, right? Because it's just like your body thinks that there's more food to go around. So, you know, if you're holding in food or whatever, if you're if you're if you're experiencing a degree of constipation like you can see an increase in the scale water weight also is another major variable here like depending on how many carbohydrates you're

eating whether or not you're in a calorie deficit carbohydrates cause water to be stored in your muscles so all that is to say that the scale the progress that you see on the scale isn't always linear but if you track over the long term it should trend down I think looking in the mirror like taking like progress photos it's a much better and more reliable indicator, although the scale should change over time, obviously, if you're in a calorie deficit. But yeah, going at a slower pace, I think is super effective. And it's also like going to be the most sustainable, right? Because like if you're trying to bite off more than you can choose, so to speak, with a greater calorie deficit, then it's just going to be harder to do.

So yeah, so I think approaching it more slowly with the intent of half a pound to a pound if you're on the leaner side of fat loss per week to maybe more two pounds or potentially even somewhat higher if you're more overweight. I think those are all reasonable goals to strive for.

And a lot of people are like, you know, that's not enough. like it's one pound. One pound is a lot. If you're on this trajectory for three months, that's like 12 pounds of fat. So I mean, like who wouldn't after three months want to look back and say, I've lost 12 pounds of fat, pure fat? It's huge. And also as you've mentioned at the beginning of this whole tweet thread is that you wanted

it to be as enjoyable as possible. It's still required effort, but this isn't something extreme. which also means the challenge is, you know, a lot of people can lose weight, specifically fat for a short period of time. But then, because they rely on extreme measures for it, they end up gaining back that weight and more because they're in a little bit of a yo-yo fashion. Yeah, that's the biggest loser phenomenon, is that they took all these aspiring dieters and they put them on these crash diets,

reducing calories to like crazy degrees without any of the stipulations that we've talked. about over the past hour and somewhat minutes. And as soon as that show ended, maybe not immediately, but years later they found that all of those contestants had just regained the weight. Yeah. So part of this is like creating the healthy habits that's going to allow you to sustain that the progress that you've made. And so one of the coolest aspects of this journey for myself is that I've also been able to

take away from it, things that I've learned, that I can continue to integrate over the long term. the value of, you know, food auditing, for example, like of weighing out your portion sizes. I'm not tracking, but I think it's good to know if, for example, I were to want to, for dinner, have a legume pasta, which I sometimes enjoy, very high protein, high fiber. It's good for me to know that I'm consuming, I like to know that I'm consuming a serving or two servings of this legume pasta and not six servings unintentionally. And so that food scale that I've had has been one of the best investments that I've ever made because of the amount of use that I'm getting from it for a $16 investment.

Well, Max, this has been fantastic. I'm going to recap these just one more time. So anybody has them. We'll link to you. You have them all in a PDF. We'll link to it. People can sign up for your newsletter. They can get the PDF and everything.

So number one, eating at home way more. Number two, auditing portion size. You just talked about that. Number three, prioritizing lean proteins. number four, ditching the ultra-process foods. Number five, keeping your protein high, and we gave the formula for that earlier. Number six, lifting heavy or at least having some resistance training in your workout regimen.

Number seven, walking and walking for at least, you know, one or two miles a day, easy to do on a treadmill, a little bit of an incline. And then number eight, no boredom snacking. That's a big one for a lot of people. Easier to do when you practice all of these. nine we just covered in our recap dropping added oils and fats and 10 consistency and patience max as we conclude here just on that last theme for anybody who feels like man i feel like i feel like i've tried so many different things what's the last message you want to leave them with when it comes

to the topic of body composition and weight loss and really related to like mindset there are a lot of people that genuinely feel like i've tried so much i've made progress or i feel like i'm older now I'm not in my 20s anymore. I can't just drop the weight as easily as I used to. Is there any sort of final words of wisdom on the mindset piece you want to leave people with? Yeah. I mean, I just would love to add that you've got this, you know? I mean, this is something that it's not rocket science.

It's totally within the realm of possibility to do and to achieve. You just have to shed maybe some of the dogma and some of the misconception and the the, dare I even say misinformation that we all tend to accumulate navigating these wellness waters occasionally. There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, a lot of people with covert vested interests. And at the end of the day, you've got to find the form of restriction that's going to feel the least restrictive to you. I think that that's such a pivotal way to think about this.

right. And you might opt only to consume minimally processed foods, right? And that is a form of restriction if you think about it today. Because again, 73% of our food items in the average supermarket are ultra processed, right? Maybe your form of restriction is you're going to track calories, which I don't personally do. I don't think that you ought to need to do that today, but that's another form of restriction. Maybe your intermittent fasting is the tool that you'll find is going to be the most effective for you, which new research, you know, research is starting to show isn't more beneficial than a standard reduced calorie diet, but it's as effective, which I think is a great. Yeah, saw that. So you've got to find the tool that's going to be, that's going to work for you. And at the end of the day,

you just have to do it. Like, you just have to kind of, you know, and not bite off more than you could chew, but just try to adopt. Maybe it's one small habit a day, one percent better. It's not, it's in all likelihood not your age and not your metabolism. I mean, there's great research just published over the past couple of years that really seminal research has shown us that between the ages of 20 and 60, your metabolism doesn't even really change that much. I mean, it does tend to change it after the age of 60, but if you're between the ages of 20 and 60, stop blaming your metabolism. You're probably less active and eating more ultra-processed foods and just eating more in general. than you were in the past.

And that's really what it all comes down to, you know. I love it. Max, just remind the audience where they can keep in touch with you. You have your own podcasts. And you're regular on YouTube as well for everybody watching on YouTube. And you have a great newsletter. So if you can mention those. Thanks, brother.

Yeah. So I'm super active on Instagram at Max Lugavir, M-A-V-E-R-E. My YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Max Lugavir. And my podcast is called The Genius Life. So if you listen to podcasts, it's on all podcast platforms. Got great experts that are probably familiar to you if you're a regular listener of Drew's show. And yeah, we have a good time. So come over and say hi.

Always a pleasure. And I really appreciate how often you're willing to be the guinea pig for the things that you're doing. Right? Your whole journey started off that way and you sharing and letting people follow and also celebrating the success of a lot of your followers who have done this and achieved great results. So thank you for that, Max. Always a pleasure. Thank you, brother. Hi, everyone.

Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about.

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