Dhru Purohit Show - Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, One Skin, and Cozy Earth. Sticking to a healthy diet isn’t always easy, and it can feel almost impossible when you’re just starting out. While some may see this as a sign of weakness, today’s guest explains that our bodies simply haven’t evolved to keep up with modern lifestyles and the constant availability of ultra-processed foods. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Mike Israetel to discuss how our modern food environment taps into our evolutionary drive to consume and store calories for times of scarcity. Dr. Mike explains why punishing yourself or approaching weight loss with self-hatred is counterproductive and shares a practical guide for sustainable weight loss, no matter your goal. If you’re considering semaglutides, he outlines the key factors for a successful experience. Ready to crush your weight loss goals in 2025? Tune in for these expert tips!  Dr. Mike, PhD, is the co-founder and Chief Content Officer of RP Strength (Renaissance Periodization) and the face of its popular YouTube channel. With a doctorate in sports physiology from East Tennessee State University, he is a seasoned expert in fitness and performance. As a former sports nutrition consultant for the U.S. Olympic Training Site in Johnson City, Tennessee, Dr. Mike has shared his expertise at global scientific and performance conferences, including seminars at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid. He has coached countless athletes in nutrition and weight training and continues to push his limits as a competitive bodybuilder and professional Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu grappler. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Mike dive into: Why the human body is good at storing fat and why it has been a key part of our survival as a species (00:28) Forgiveness and acceptance of your current body while empowering yourself to make changes (10:06) How to lose stubborn fat in a sustainable way (17:13) A balanced and practical approach to fat loss (32:02) The role of obesogens, calories, and seed oils in weight gain (38:45) Hidden calories in foods and how easily we overeat without realizing it (48:34) Weight loss and appetite-suppressing drugs (57:19) Key cultural and genetic differences in obesity levels between the USA, Japan, and other countries (01:10:33) Are semaglutides appropriate for individuals trying to lose less than 30 pounds (01:26:30) How diet can help reduce addictions (01:34:57) The difference between business meals and fun meals (01:41:30) Also mentioned in this episode: Learn more about Dr. Mike and access free guides from RP Strength here For more on Dr. Israetel, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, One Skin, and Cozy Earth. Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves.  Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Mike, welcome to the podcast. You know, fat loss is tough for a lot of people or can be tough, but actually fat gain is really easy for most of us. And there's a reason for that. And I was wondering, I'd love for you to take us down a little bit of evolutionary history as to why the human body is so good at putting fat on and how it's been a key part of our survival as a species. You know, the animals, and humans are animals, animals survive with a couple of like non-negotiable needs. One of those is to acquire enough hydration, water. One of those is to stay away from predators. And another one is to acquire food in some capacity.

And that's actually true for animals that even that don't reproduce. So it's true to say that your desire, for example, for something like air, what's called air hunger, is higher than your desire for water. if someone said, listen, I'm either going to not let you breathe for the next 30 seconds, or you just don't have to drink water for the next 30 seconds, you'd have to be unbelievably dehydrated to actually prefer the water more. And you got air hunger, you got fluid, the hunger, aka thirst. And then you have food hunger, aka hunger, hunger. And that drives you to consume calories and any kind of food you can get, really.

there are gradations of food that you prefer more than other foods. And that evolutionary drive is probably about as old as nervous systems, like all of them. Worms and flies and, you know, parakeets and monkeys and humans and everyone. And so the drive to consume calories being one of the fundamental animal drives is also a fundamental human drive. And that means it is ultra, ultra deep. And it has a function, which is to make sure you get enough food. But if we look at how humans evolved over the course of, let's say, just last common ancestor

several million years ago, we split from primates, or actually technically still primates, I guess, we split from the Great Apes lineage. And what was our environment like in the interim? And it's almost completely true to say that it was largely an environment of pulsatile moments of lots of food availability here and there, you know, some running into a few trees which have a ton of apples on them sort of situation or felling a large mammoth and, you know, eating as much of that as possible, interspersed with probably longer and more severe times of food is either just not much of it is around

or none of it is around. And so intermittent starvation is pretty much a thing for almost all animals, definitely a thing for humans during our evolutionary past. And so evolution doesn't design you necessarily for the future, it really only designs you for like the here now. And it also works very slowly. And we're roughly the same biological creatures that we were, gee, 100,000 years ago, 500,000 years ago. And the way we were living then is of periods of intermittently, you would just not have enough food. And so our bodies, and by our bodies, I mean animal bodies, and no change for humanity, same for humanity, developed really robust mechanisms by which that if we had access to lots of food now, we had better store that away for later because animals that did

more of that in evolution simply survived more, reproduced better, and continue to pass on their genes at a higher frequency, because when you dependably have times of lots of food and then times of very little food or almost none, if you're just burning the food off as it comes in or you eat a couple bites and you're like, I'm pretty full and you got shredded six pack, you look really cool, but you're dead on the side of the creek because you ran out of fuel for your body. But if you are particularly good at first, finding food, second, determining which food has probably the highest calories, and third, eating as much of that food as possible, and fourth, storing it away as efficiently as possible into as much body fat tissue as you can,

in the times in which we evolve, you're a survivor. Because there's just the right answer. But let's fast forward now to all those mechanisms being extant in pretty much every human. Now, where are we? We walk outside and there's grocery stores with aisles as far as they can see of foods that companies meticulously choose with their very best marketing research so that we buy them. And these foods relative to our ever-growing incomes are cheaper all the time. They're more convenient all the time. They're tastier all the time. And because human tastes are determined by human consumer preferences, it really determined by

evolved preferences, which really means good taste. tasting foods and high calorie foods have an enormous intersection. It's not 100%, but gee whiz, it's up there. And so because we live in this what's called modern food environment, and we have these ancestral drives of like, well, look, there's a lot of food around and it's delicious. I'm going to keep eating it so that I can, you know, like the chipmunk who stores the food in his face, I can store it for later when I'm starving. That logic is applied automatically by the parts of your brain that you're not even conscious of unless you choose to be through mindfulness meditation practice.

And then what could possibly be the result of that other than lots of people becoming significantly overweight? To me, the obesity epidemic is just not a surprise. It has no mysterious cause. The 90-something percent caused the obesity epidemic and why most of us are somewhat or a lot overweight compared to what's ideally healthy is because we were designed to survive in environments with intermittent starvation. And capitalism has simply solved the problem of food availability.

in any extent that you measure it in modern countries. And, you know, like, that's a thing that is here with us. And now it's our job as consumers and as educated people to be like, okay, now that I know all that, what can I do to improve my situation that's realistic and at least a siege to the fact that, yes, okay, evolution is a thing and it really does make me want to do this. and I'm not going to try to search for like some kind of corporate poisons or pollutants or marketing tricks. I know they give me the food that really I'm just buying.

And so, but I can always buy different food and I can always change my approach, but I just have to recognize that all of us come from that same evolved background. And it just makes sense that this is what our bodies and brains want to do. All of that makes sense. It makes a ton of sense. And it brings up the feeling that a lot of people, especially around this time of year, they look at their body, they pinch their love handle. they look at their flabby arms or whatever else might be there.

And there's this feeling that my body is failing me, that there's something going on and my body's not doing what it's supposed to do. But in the context of what you just shared, I feel like a huge part of what people should feel is a sense of, hey, my body is doing exactly what it's meant to do. And if I can have a little bit of forgiveness and not punish myself or blame my body, now I can actually talk about, okay, If I don't like the results, then what are the next steps of the things that I can get a chance to do?

So it brings up actually this piece of forgiveness. Hopefully, I feel like for the people that are listening today of, hey, your body is just doing what it evolutionarily was designed to do. I love that you're bringing that up. I'm actually potentially, I shouldn't be talking about this, but here I go, yapping my mouth again. I'm highly considering writing a book that teaches people how to get more muscular and get leaner. But a big part of the book, probably the first part, is going to be a drive. the question of vanity. Like, is vanity a sin or should we actually be okay to care about how we look? Basically, TLDR, like, almost everyone is to some extent, quote unquote, vain. And there's also,

for almost everyone, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Like, it's okay for you not to love your love handles. However, at the same time, trying to forgive means probably to me that an injustice occurred. You don't forgive thunderstorms for like putting hail on your deck because they're not sentient beings. There's no injustice. I'm going to tell you something crazy. But your body also isn't sentient. Your brain is. Your body's not. And so like there's no one to be mad at when you have love handles and flabby arms. There's not even anyone to forgive. So Drew all do you one better. Does that even need to forgive yourself? As you didn't do anything wrong is just your body doing what it's supposed to do and it does it well. The only question to ask is, can I change how my body

looks and feels and affects my health by altering what I eat and how I train and how I live the rest of my life? And the answer is like, that's also a nearly solved problem as far as knowledge in the scientific community. There are almost no mysteries left about how to do that. And I'd love to share all of the insight with, you know, your listeners. But the good news is like, not only is your body doing what's supposed to, all you got to do is kind of turn it on to this off ramp, take it out another super highway that has all the good stuff on it, and then you're going to see radical changes without having to, like, you know, berate yourself or be upset or think that something's wrong or broken with your body, and I'm broken with your body, if you are eating lots and

lots of food, okay, like pizza and cookies and ice cream, and you are losing weight to the point your face look gaunt, 100% go to the doctor and he's probably going to do a bunch of screenings, including for cancer. That would be your body malfunctioning. But you're eating lots of tasty snacks and you're gaining weight. This is not a difficult thermodynamic mystery. Yeah, I guess what I say forgiveness, really what you're talking about is acceptance and the sense of acceptance of this is the reality. There are things that contributed to this reality, no judgment, and no judgment that you want it to be different. Now let's actually look at what we want to do that's been proven in the evidence base to take us in that direction.

I think forgiveness, though, is such a great point because to me, the forgiveness can be best applied to earlier versions of yourself that berated yourself for having a body. You can forgive yourself for being mean to yourself because it's not nice to be mean to yourself. You could say you're your number one biggest ally. And there are times to be strict with yourself, but mean and berating and disparaging, you don't want to live inside of a mind that hates itself. So when you look at the love handles and you look in the mirror and you want to try to hate yourself, a little bit for it. Look, hating things doesn't even help them change all that much. You know, like, can you imagine looking at, like, you know, the outcast golf teen at school

and is not doing his homework? And someone's like, you know, if we just hated him more and really let him know, he'd really fix his ways. I mean, I just don't think reality works that way. What you want to do because you're ultimately your number one teammate is love yourself in a way that's not like, you know, weird Hollywood dystopian, like self-love where you just stay in a mirror for forever with those wide cult eyes. But love yourself in a way, like, look, I'm on my own.

own team, I want to live in a better body is a mechanics problem. How do I get the body that I want? So we have things right now that are easier to get and easier to fix, but here it's just a matter of work and effort. It's not a matter of mystery. So for example, if you're in an outfit that you don't like, it's unlikely you're going to hate yourself for it. Like look at you in this dress, Linda, you like in the mirror to yourself. Like you really thought you were going to look good in this dress. Almost no one does that. They go, oh, I look like, man, I don't like this. And what do they do? They go on Amazon, they do their returns, they return the dress, they get a better dress, and they like it, they put it on, they go, boom, problem solved. They never have to hate themselves. I would ask

people to treat their bodies as kind of a style of clothing that they're wearing. It's just like robot thing that you exist in, and you can change it. Just similarly to how you buy clothes, but what you'll be having to pay instead of money is diligence, effort, and time. Not a magic and psychotic amount of those. These are all tractable problems that most people can get a big bite into. and really change how they look. But that's kind of the payment process. So, and here's the thing. I'm not saying that people don't have all kinds of feelings about their bodies because they do.

They have all kinds of emotions about how they'd want to look, about how they look. Do I look like this? Turn to the side. I hate this. I hate that. All that stuff is valid. But like most feelings at the end of the day, when you want to change something in the world, you kind of get a little bit, you rest with your feelings.

You let them express themselves. You're not trying to, like, suppress anything. But then you ask the question, how do I change the situation for the better? And then that is really very straightforward process instead of having to cycle through your emotions and try to find who you really are deep down inside or something like that. So I'll set you up for some of the mechanics with the question that often gets sent in where people want me to ask experts like yourself. So the question often goes like someone who's listening to this conversation says,

I want to lose 20 to 30 pounds of stubborn fat. Stubborn is always in there in typically like a four to six month window. So I would add in for somebody who's asking that, what would you say are like the three to five non-negotiable principles that have to be kept in mind if somebody wants to go down that path? You know, for the last few years, I've been really prioritizing my muscle strain. With that comes soreness, tension, and just general. aches and pains that come as a natural part of the recovery process. Now, if you can relate to this,

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It's also perfect for busy moms or dads or anyone looking for a quick, effective relief without downtime. I've tried a lot of methods to ease muscle tension. And the bond charge infrared devices, these P-E-M-F devices, have made a noticeable difference in how I feel. It's simple, it's effective, and it's given me the relief. I was searching for a special with muscle recovery. I'll use these devices before going to bed, sometimes when I'm on a call or when I'm watching a movie with my wife. And the setup is super simple. Just unfold the mat, plug it in, and select the settings. It's great that the settings are customizable to meet your specific needs. If you're looking for deeper relaxation, better sleep and recovery, check out bond charges P-E-M-F devices.

They make it hassle-free worldwide to order easy returns and exchanges in a 12-month warranty. Right now, bond charge, as always, is offering my community 15% off. Just go to bondcharge.com slash D-H-R-U and use the code D-H-R-U, that's me, Drew, to save 15%. That's bond charge, B-O-N-C-R-G-E dot com slash D-H-R-U with a coupon code D-H-R-U to say 15% off today. As we kick off the new year, I want to share a little secret with you. I'm not a huge fan at all of New Year's resolutions, these grand resolutions that everybody does. Instead, I'm a huge fan of habits doing something good for my health every day. And when it comes to doing something good for my skin, that's one skin. Only one skin has the OS-01 peptide. The first ingredient to target

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OneSkin, which is founded by an all-women team of scientists, is the first and only skin longevity company to target cellular senescence, a key hallmark of aging with their proprietary peptide OS1. OneSkin is the world's first skin longevity company. By focusing on cellular aspects of aging, OneSkin keeps your skin looking good and acting younger for longer. Give it 12 weeks and see it for yourself. Make 2025 the year that you invest in the habits that keep your skin healthier

and help you look your best. Get started today with 15% off using the code Drew, that's D-H-R-U at OneSkin.co. That's one-skin.co, not dot com, dot CO, with the code D-H-R-U for 15% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them, and please support your show and tell them we sent you over. I would say, I'm not so sure if it's a principle, but I would say what to keep in mind is that you have scoped out a problem and assumed the solution was possible

without doing due diligence on is the solution actually probable? Like you can get out a map of the earth and the moon and you can draw a line from Houston all the way to the surface of the moon and draw a little picture of a rocket and go like, we're going to make it. And in just the same way, people say,

I want to lose 25 pounds in four months and I'm just, it's like a line, it's like a straight line, right? The reality is that up until the late 1960s, we just didn't have the technology to send rockets to the moon. And when we did, it cost billions of dollars. And it's also true to say that because the human body has certain fundamental constraints on how quickly it's willing to lose fat, while still keeping you sane and upright, it is highly unlikely that you will lose 25 pounds of fat in that amount of time in four to six months. It is much more likely that you'll lose about half of that fat. but if you try to shoot for losing that much,

just like shooting a rocket into space without doing your calculations, you're likely to have a bad time. You're likely to burn out of the diet. You're likely to rebound out of the diet. Even if you don't burn out, you're likely to regain all of your lost weight or the vast majority of it while doing a whole lot of suffering.

But if you aim for roughly half of that amount during that time, then there's a high probability that you'll have great success and be able to keep it off. And keeping it off is good for two reasons. one, I don't suppose you want to just get fat or later, so it's good for the obvious reason. Like someone's like, hey, here's a million dollars. And you're like, great. And they're like, but you don't get to keep it.

You're like, what? So, no, thank you. But the other really good reason is that your body doesn't like to lose a lot of weight at once. Because of those, again, evolved evolutionary mechanisms, good God, evolved evolutionary. That's a hell of a hell of a phrase. Those evolved mechanisms that kind of freak out on you and go, dude, we're starving. I've noted this in my little body's notebook. And as soon as I get around food, I'm a.

blast you back up into the stratosphere with all the fat I can because we're going to fix the starvation problem. However, after you maintain your new body weight, let's say you lose weight over the course of three months, let's call it 15 pounds, significantly more reasonable. You probably need about three months more of just maintaining that new low body weight. And then the first few weeks, your body's like walking up and down the hotel hallway chain smoking about it. Like, oh God, oh God, how do we get this body fat back on? This is bad. This is really bad. Call in. all the calls and all the stuff. After a few weeks, your body's just kind of sitting in the hallway and, like, you know, a little seat. Like, uh, there's nothing bad's happened yet. It kind of feels like a little

bit normal, but still, if I get some food in me, I'm blown back up. And then about two to three months later, you catch your body in the street and you're like, hey, remember that whole weight loss thing? And it's like, what? No, I got to go to work, man. I don't even know you. And it walks off. And you're like, oh, my God, it forgot. It didn't forget entirely because as it's walking away, it's going to be like, ah, I remember that guy. But it's going to be a faint memory. And so your body gets used to whatever weight you're at much more than right after you got there after a few months. And then you're able, if you like, to take another chunk out of that journey. So we lost 15 pounds in the first three months.

Another three months we chilled. Chilling means you're still diligent about everything and making sure you don't regain the weight, which I have tons of tips on and we have tons on our RPP YouTube channel, a lot of stuff. And then the next phase is maybe another three months of weight loss, but then you aim for 10 or 12 pounds. Why? because as you get leaner, it's more and more difficult to lose fat.

It becomes a more difficult, more expensive process for you psychologically, physically, and so on and so forth. So your goal is a little less. And then you take three months after that. So we got three, three, three, three, we have one whole year, but you might have successfully lost and kept off 27 pounds. And after that last three months, you are new fresh you at that new 27 pound less weight and just with a few real basics

and how to conduct yourself around the food environment and basic resistance training and cardiovascular work, real easy stuff, you just don't ever have to gain the weight back. So the big part of that answer is understanding the scope with a problem and not picking arbitrarily insane things to aim for. Can you imagine if you were doing a pitch for a company? And like, oh, so you got this product, it's a new kind of computer. What are your Q1 goals for profits?

you're like 10 trillion. They're like, are you on drugs right now? Like, who says things like that? But you're like, well, I always say ain't big. Like, okay, but if we give you 10 trillion of capital and you don't spend it appropriately, we lose so much on interest that we all go broke, there's a cost to shooting for goals that are impossible. And here's the worst one, I think, probably.

It's the psychological cost of having really poured your heart and soul into a plan that most nutritionists could have looked at and been like, you're not, this is crazy. You're not going to be able to do this. You're like, I got it, bro. No worries. you just never talk to anyone, and then you pour everything into it. You try so dang hard. And then on the end, you just fall apart.

It breaks you. And you start regaining the weight. And then you consider yourself a loser. You consider yourself an ineffectual person. You lose a substantial amount of self-efficacy of self-belief. It's good to succeed on average more than you fail in life because it teaches your brain like, I'm a competent person who can do things. And someone's like, hey, do you want to start a 5K running program?

You're like, yes. And they're like, you sure you're going to be able to stick? too, well, generally, I stick to most things. But listen, it's not very hard to set so many goals up that are so exotically crazy for yourself that you have almost no chance of achieving them. And over time, you can teach your brain that you're just not good at starting things or doing things. And then next time you feel like changing your life, your brain is going to low-key be like, that's not an us thing. We don't do that. We fail, remember? And you're like, yeah, well, it's not for me. And so a lot of people try dieting, but do it way wrong, mostly because they take these crazy bites out of this, like mouth more full, like, you can breathe air through type of situation, you know, a snake consuming the elephant type of goal. And then they burn out of it. And then over time they learn that just dieting is not something that works for them. But it does work for them.

They've just been doing way, way, way too much up front. And I know it's crazy. I'm supposed to be telling you all empowerment and stuff, but the best kind of empowerment is being in touch with reality and doing things at a pace that will require, or sorry, that cause you to have success rather than cause you to have very glorious burnout and failure. Oh, this is so great because it echoes on all the, data that's out there that we've been writing about in our newsletter that people like you've highlighted, which is that most people will actually lose some significant amount of weight in

their life. The challenge is 80 to 90 percent will gain it back. And what you're talking about is having realistic, doable goals that have a history of working for other people, like the mechanics of them, to get to a point where the weight you lose, even though it's a lot less than maybe this 30 pounds you have in your head. Maybe it's half that, but you're actually going to keep it off for good because you've changed your life approach. And the other thing that I think is an aha moment for a lot of people listening is that the body doesn't want to or the body freaks out when you lose weight too quickly. So I think those are like two big takeaways from everything that you've said for our audience. Yes, absolutely. And you actually can lose probably almost all,

if not all of the weight that you want in most cases. But it's just not going to be in one diet. It's not going to be in this grit your teeth and, you know, do what it takes for four months. And then voila, your problem is healed. It's going to take a few diets with a few maintenance breaks in between to get your body used to the situation again.

It's like, imagine taking your dog to a dog trainer at the pet store and being like, I need Wolfie's a new puppy, is great, but I need them trained up. And they're like, okay, cool. So we'll set you up with a schedule. And you're going to be like, no, no, no, Like, I'm actually, I have tons of money. I actually own the store. We just, my butler's just bought the store.

And I'm going to raise all of your pay by four. If you just stay here and train my dog, like sleepless nights for three days straight until he's just better. They're just going to have to tell you, like, the way dogs learn is like humans. And so it's a little bit at a time, but then they need to sleep and relax to let those memories take hold. And then over time, they build up their capacity. But it's going to take us like a week or two. It can't take us three days. It just doesn't work like that.

And so people know that. That's true with dog training. Did you come to dieting? They're like, once, took me 15 years to get overweight like this. Yeah, I think 15 weeks is enough to just reverse the whole process. But it's a very curious assumption that doesn't mean you can't reverse the whole process. It'll just take a little bit more time just the same way that we give dogs breaks between learning sessions and students. Can you imagine school?

There's just 24-7 school. They don't let you sleep. They don't you do anything. That's crazy. But when you're dieting straight through for months and months and months, that's what you're doing to your body. So what you want to do is give it enough dieting to make a meaningful change, but at the end, not have a lot of what we call diet fatigue, which is like insane hunger, sleeplessness, restlessness, the whole thing.

That's kind of like pulling on a slingshop to get you to rebound back to a higher weight as much as possible. We want to lose as much weight as we can without pulling back on the slingshot too much. And then you need that several months break afterwards, the equivalent of rest and sleep for dog training to come back to a point where, okay, now this weight has. settled in. This is now your new body weight. Your body recognizes, okay, I'm leaner now, and this is okay. It doesn't freak out as much. The diet fatigue is gone. And then you're ready to do the process again. It's a multi-stage process. Unless you have less than 10 or 15

pounds total to lose, you can do it in one fell swoop then. The maintenance period is just as important. There's going to be three months of very due diligence you have to do after so you don't balloon back up like everyone else. But then one phase of dieting, one phase of maintenance, six months total, you could be done with 10 to 15 pounds. But if it's 30 pounds, if it's 40 pounds for many people, it's more. This is going to take months and months and years and years. It's going to be a process that's at times difficult, but mostly just a matter of checking the green boxes in your daily plan. I'm eating all my meals like I should be. I'm working out like I should be. You don't have to be like bleeding to death on the gym floor. You don't have to starve all the time, especially with the new modern anti-obicity drugs. You actually just don't have to starve at all. And so you can do this. is it just going to be a little bit more of a long haul than I think people plan for? And I think also one of the number one reasons that people have this tendency to, like, kind of want to do it all at once, is because they're just vibing off the emotion of frustration. When you look in the mirror January 3rd and you see this love handle situation, Drew, you feel frustrated, right?

You're like, ugh, what is this? And frustration is literally kind of like a bias to the large language model of your brain. Like if you bias chat GPT by telling it, only answer things in a funny British accent. Now it does all those things in a British accent. Frustration biases your brain to look for really quick short term. Let's just fix this now solution. Like it's frustrating to feel a mosquito like making you itch when it's like taking your blood. So you go slap and you kill the mosquito.

Get out of here. Mosquito or the flies buzzing. Get. Get. That's what the emotion of frustration is good at handling. The emotion of frustration is not designed to handle mega projects like re-archics. like re-architecting your entire body. The better emotion for that is calm and to patience and an optimistic attitude.

And exactly the emotions you get looking at your love handles in the mirror. Can you imagine that? Someone looks at their love handles and you're like, what do you think? Like, it just makes me so serene to know that I have a lot of awesome logical work ahead. You're like, are you, you're in a cult again. I know you keep joining cults. Stop lying. And so we get frustrated and then we think, oh, how about I have to do this now?

I have to do all this now. I'm going to lose weight right now. This is the big change. It's an old Debbie. and there's new Debbie, and new Debbie's lean, and she's going to be lean in three months, and we just make up numbers in our head. And a lot of the reference frame we have for numbers is like stuff we've seen on transformation challenges on the internet.

You know, it's Instagram posts, you look at marketing. Transformation challenges and companies that promote them, mine used to all the time at RP, we don't do it anymore. It's a great thing, but also like, it's this marketing 101 that companies are going to put up and clients and coaches are going to put up their absolute best results without care for maintenance. So someone lost 33 pounds and 15 weeks and you're like, that's me. But she whiz, you know, what is the probability that's you? And have you checked in with her? Well, you look at her recent Instagram and she's posting mostly pictures of her face. You know what that means. The body's

kind of gone back to its usual. And you're like, oh, oh, she actually wasn't successful in long term. Hmm, I sure shit didn't work. So it's a lot of reeling back frustration and anxiety and impatience and instead laying a foundation of like, I'm just going to do the right things and it's going to take what it takes and I'm here for it, which is tough, but it just works. So once we have a much more realistic understanding of what's possible, because again, we're trying to maintain consistency to lead to long term results. We're completely sort of changing our life. What is a more appropriate way to move forward?

For example, if somebody dialed back that, you know, massive weight loss in a short period of time to say, hey, I'm shooting in this first phase that I want 10 pounds of fat loss, right? Not weight loss, but fat loss. And I want to add a little bit of lean muscle mass. Is that an appropriate way to approach things? And then what would be the next step from there? You know, my wife cannot stop raving about our new cozy earth bedsheets. Since we've made the switch to these best-selling bamboo bedsheets that are not only cool, but free from toxic chemicals, she said that she's sleeping better than ever. Honestly, we both have.

You know, because high-quality sleep is so important, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my bedroom to give my body the best sleep environment it needs to recover and rejuvenate. And Cozy Ertz bedsheets helped me do exactly that. Cozy-Eert's best-selling viscous bamboo bedsheets are made from more. moisture wickening fabric that is designed to keep your body cool throughout the night, which is exactly what you need for a night of good quality sleep. Their bed sheets are the softest sheets I've ever slept on and they're ultra-breatheable, viscose from bamboo fabric, take comfort to a whole new level. And the best part about it, Cozy Earth avoids toxic chemicals when making their sheets. Cozy Earth is so sure that you'll love their bed sheets. They even offer a hundred-night

free trial and a 10-year warranty. Right now, Cozy Earth is offering my listeners 40% off sitewide at checkout. Just go to cozyEarth.com slash Drew. That's D-H-R-U to get 40% off site-wide. Take advantage of this amazing sale right now. Yeah, I think shooting for something like 7% of your body weight in a 12-week fat loss phase is really sharp. Five to seven, seven, better, less than more, so that you can succeed and not experience crazy diet fatigue and have that much more left for later phases and also less probability of rebounding again. 5 to 7% of your current body weight losing in, if you want more aggressively 10 to 12 weeks, so I really am trying to speak against the aggressive approach here. Once you have that as your

goal, you're going to want to think about what you're eating, what your physical activity is like, and then what your resistance training is like. Why am I mentioning resistance training, which is training with weights in the gym. Because if you lose weight, it's cool. Like, it's better for your health and good things happen. But if you lose a lot of muscle while you're losing weight, the visual effect isn't as great. People think you look a little bit more sick maybe than lean. And if you can maintain your muscle mass, your health skyrockets, your aesthetic look looks way different and way better. Muscle fundamentally on almost everyone looks really awesome. Even if you have just a little muscle, it's like these natural curves that look really cool. Like muscle is most of the reason why

young people have young people looking butts because they have muscle in there and it makes the whole thing prop up and shaped really great. So muscle is awesome for all of those reasons. Also, it highly, highly curtails and prevents osteopenia and osteoporosis. It also makes you more enabled. You'll lose 10 pounds and you'll feel sharper. You'll feel stronger, more endurance. And you can command of your own body weight, more mobile. If you lose muscle, a lot of stuff, it doesn't hit nearly as much. You just kind of feel like more blah, but congratulations, you're leaner. Are you way less? So resistance training is a critical component. That one's easy. Work out two to four times a week for probably 20 to 40 minutes at a time. So it's very realistic to make dramatic

gains to your appearance, especially if you haven't been hitting the gym, just going twice a week for 20 minutes. If you're training correctly, it's going to be able to keep and grow tons of muscle on your body. Tons is a relative term. You're not going to turn into Arnold Schwarzenger or rock or something like that. That takes impossible because you're female, where if you're male, takes lots of steroids. So it's not exactly a realistic thing. It also takes decades. So you're not going to wake up with veins in your forehead and wonder why you even went to the gym last time. So that's the weight trading component. That's very straightforward. And then the physical activity one is also very straightforward. You generally want to get something like between 8 and 12,000 average

daily steps per day during that 10 or 12 week diet. So getting a step tracker like I have on, This one's like $17 from Amazon. I mean, they're super cheap. I would even say, like, unless you have a compelling reason, don't get the expensive, fancy ones, because it's a lot of data that you almost certainly will never use. Just track your daily steps. And this is a great thing because when you go shopping,

when you're on your phone pacing around your kitchen, talking of friends, when you go walking around with your dog or you go to the park or the zoo with your kids, you're just racking up steps. And so it integrates all of your physical activity, which is really great. So I would say anywhere between 8 to 12,000 is awesome. If you don't get super tired from it, anything over 12,000 is just awesome bonus points, but

not exactly something you want to shoot for because a lot of times it makes you tired. And then the diet is really where the rubber meets the road. And the diet's getting responsible for, if I had to guess, of the 80% of the total magnitude of this transformation. And the diet really is this. Eat enough protein. Eat mostly or only healthy foods. And make sure that your calorie level for your whole diet is such that, you

you're losing, you know, whatever amount of weight per week on average that's on track to meet your goal. We have an RP Diet Coach app that we make that just does all this calculating for you. It just tells you when to increase calories or decrease. It does that for you also. It keeps track of where you are on your plan. But you can do this just with Microsoft Excel or just a little mental math in your head. You say, okay, I need to lose like, you know, 10 pounds and I have 12 weeks to do it. So like about a pound per week, I'm on, I'm in the clear. And so you just dial back your calories until you're getting reliably week on week, roughly a pound lost. If it's a lot more, you need to increase your calories because you're going to burn out and have all those bad things

happen that I talked about earlier from rushing the diet. If you're not losing hardly anything or it's just half a pound, you need to cut the calories substantially. But fundamentally, eating higher protein, healthy foods is the way to do that. And meal timing and specific foods and all that matters almost not at all for most people's results. And I can absolutely get into what I mean by healthy food and what I mean by high protein diet if you're curious. Thanks to a lot of the work of like Dr. Gabriel Lyne who's been on this podcast multiple times and has really spoken to our demographic and I know you're friends with her. I loved your guys' episode together.

Please everybody go watch that after this. If you want more content from Mike, our audience has gotten the memo over the last few years on protein. Okay. Where things still feel fuzzy for a lot of people and I have definitely contributed to this as not being a subject matter expertise like yourself of learning on my own journey, I've had people on this podcast who have had a lot of different ideas and thoughts about how the intersection of calories meets with different foods, how it plays in with hormones,

how it doesn't play. And I've been very honest with my audience since right around I turned 40 that my mind started to shift as I was doing my own personal experimentation and that I actually started to have other voices on who had the data to back. up with things. So, you know, if I could set the stage a little bit for the question, my audience is an audience that generally leans and has a bias towards whole foods, you know, not many of them are eating the vast majority of their diets from ultra-processed foods. And they generally go for minimally, you know, not processed foods within that category. And they generally are not afraid of, you know, fats that might be out there.

And the area that might be fuzzy because they're listening to a lot of different people in this space is that many of them are confused. Is the reason that they can't lose weight? Is there something going on with hormones? Is there something going on with blood sugar? Is there something going on with seed oils? Is there something going on with obesity? In the food system that's out there.

And is there something else that might not be known about? So for that audience that has that sort of what I would call a natural sort of biosegents, How do you want to talk about calories in the context for them? To the extent that I'm aware from the current scientific literature, Obesogens are some combination of poorly or undefined and account charitably for no more than 10% of the reason that people overfat and rigorously close to 0%. There's actually no need to suppose the existence of obesitygens

as unique chemical compounds that make you fatter. There's a real cool chemical compound make you fatter called a double cheeseburger. They discover that a long time ago. And there's no magic involved, nobody's being poisoned. So, Obesagens I can talk to for you at hours length, if you'd like, about technical details and the assumptions. But they're just not a factor that almost anyone has to consider. Beyond that 10% you're saying. I mean, probably not even 10%. If I had to bet my money, I would say there's probably no robust obesity that exists in our diets today. Just not a thing. I don't know.

It would be a curious metabolic effect indeed if something like that were discovered. I'm sure there's something like that that functions in such a way, but its effect is generally so small that when you account for the caloric load of a diet, this doesn't leave anything left to be explained as far as why aren't people losing weight. So that's one. Seed oils in every meta review of the literature. I take all the studies have been done and they analyze them and then they parse them and then they say, okay, what conclusions are they coming to and try to draw commonalities. Almost every review like that, as a matter of fact, every review that I've ever seen shows that seed oils are usually healthier on average than saturated fats and are some of the healthiest sources of fat that you can have and are no more deleterious or bad for

your health or likely to promote body fat than any other kinds of oils or any other kind of fats. So the seed oil's myth is a myth. It's actually one of those things that borders, I don't want to sound curt when I say this, I sound curt, but I promise I mean it with all the best. It borders on a mass delusion where there never was much convincing evidence about seed oils being bad. And then everyone got on the bandwagon for them being bad. And the study after study shows that seed oils are really healthy, it costs fat loss, improved blood lipids, markers of quality of life and longevity go up. And I just, it strains the imagination how it is it that seed oils are bad. So the reason that you're struggling with fat loss is almost certainly nothing to do with seed oils either.

I'd love to tackle some follow-up questions before we get into the whole hormones and all the other stuff. Yeah, I think I have some follow-up commentary, which is that I don't feel great when I have a lot of seed oils in my diet. But I'm not out there telling people that seed oils. What kind of seed oils are you having in your diet, Drew? Like if I go to, let's say, a restaurant where I know. Doesn't count because restaurants have a ton more calories and fats in their food than you are remotely aware of. And if I showed you the real numbers of what they're putting in your food, it would baffle you that they could stick that many actual calories and fats into your meal. We're talking about most commercial kitchens.

Start a fetichini alfredo with one stick of butter. That's for one person. That's 900 calories only from fat. That's insane. And so it's usually the load. So the real study is if you buy a high quality canola oil and you put it in your kitchen and you mix it with pasta and brown rice and ground beef and veggies, do you feel worse eating normal amounts of that?

That's a seed oil. So I was just going to just to add in to my commentary that I was saying. I got real aggressive. No, no, I appreciate it. I appreciate you jumping in. I love these spirited conversations. So take like a super healthy restaurant that's here in Los Angeles. just where I live, Air One, right?

They make some of their meats with seed oil. Again, this is an anecdotal thing. I'm very clear on it. I have no evidence to support it, just how I feel. I was eating one of their items on the menu that they make with rice bran oil. I'd always feel a little bit foggy afterwards. Now, I tracked my calories. I think I had mentioned to you.

Dr. Gabriel Lyne came on this podcast right before I turned 40, convinced me, you know, my big issue. is I'm in the skinny fat category. I need to get serious about building muscle, you know, and I, and naturally sort of improve my body composition through that process. I found an incredible training group out here. And I really started to track my macros.

And one of the first things I saw is that I overeat a ton of calories on fats. I under eat proteins. And as soon as I started tracking, I started noticing major shifts that were there. And I'm 43 now, but at that time when I got serious about it, my audience knows it, in a period of about eight months of working out three to four days a week and really paying attention to my macro, still eating, you know, very healthy, I was able to go from 25 point something body fat percentage off of caliber testing.

This was in Texas. So there's going to be some variation that's there and drop down into as low. is 12.5 and then I kind of stabilized at 15% because I felt better there and I actually felt like I looked better there at that category. Most importantly, though, I added about 8.9, almost 9 pounds of lean muscle mass and I felt fit and I felt strong, way stronger than I felt in my 20s and earlier when I really wasn't serious about the gym and I wasn't tracking my macros that are there. So I'm on the train of, you know, applying these things that are there and feeling it firsthand. And for those that are, you know, aware of blood work and other things like that,

my fasting insulin actually improved and my A1C improved and I was eating more carbohydrates, right? Where previously before, I had a super low carb, you know, bias that was there. I was eating not a crazy amount of carbohydrates, but I was eating more carbohydrates and I wasn't afraid of having carbs in my diet like white rice and sweet potatoes and other things like that that might be out there. And even, God forbid, you know, oatmeal. So going back to the, the seed oil, seed oil conversation is I personally would feel like if I would have what they were making is like this Korean barbecue beef, which actually tastes really amazing. And it's cooked in rice bran oil. Okay, great. It's a personal preference. I eat things like that. Even before I found out that I had rice bran oil

in it, I didn't feel amazing. And it's more of a mental thing. It's less of a calories thing because I track my calories. I track my calories. How do you know how many calories are in that Korean beef? I asked them. I basically have gone to them and I said, hey, for this one. And then I would take it at home and I would measure it. I would measure it at the house. So I don't eat it right away. I go home. I take out they kind of serve it in a combo plate and I would put it on a food scale and I would measure each component. And I was estimating based on the kitchen how much rice bran oil or other things are priced inside of it. Again, this is an anecdotal thing. Sure. You know, maybe 10 years ago, I would have shared the same things about seed oils that a lot of people say they're the cause of all inflammation, they're this, the that. Now it's just for me, hey, I don't feel great on it. And I know the data all actually supports that seed oils are not bad for you. And it's not a hill that I want to die on, nor do I have the expertise to die on.

And I don't think it's actually going to do us a lot of good as a society to, you know, focus only on that. You know, the one, Japan is in the conversation a lot, especially on X, right? A lot of people talking about Japan and why they have such a lower obesity rate. I think their obesity rate is around like 4% compared to America's, which is the answer to that question. I would love to talk about that. Yeah. But one thing that people don't talk about Japan that I, that I just saw on Twitter the other day by this guy named Dan that'll link to, he said, you know, in Japan, they use a lot of seed oils in their cooking. I don't know how true that is, but he said he had some support around it. So I actually have a personal bias towards seed oils, but I'm not going to tell anybody that the

evidence supports that. I just feel better when I avoid them. And I'm still doing all the other basics that are out there that you talk about. So that's my own personal opinion on that. No, that's great. That makes total sense. Sometimes food just doesn't vibe. And I have plenty of foods that I eat. And after I'm like, I feel like I'm just not going to do that. And so a lot of it's a very personal thing. So see, it's not obesity gens. It's not seed oils. Let's talk about hormones. If your thyroid hormones are insufficiently being secreted and you can get blood work to confirm this or find out if this is the case, that it's going to put a big, big damper in your ability to lose fat, 100%. But it's also true to say that the vast majority of people, 95 plus

percent, and I'm being charitable, just do not have an underactive thyroid. It's actually quite rare. And so if you suspect you have an underactive thyroid, it's absolutely great to go to a doctor and get the testing, but it sure does not explain the vast majority of people overweight do not have underactive thyroid by a long shot. It's possible, but unlikely. Other hormones are more complex. Estrogen, testosterone, they exert their effects more subtly. Their effects aren't as closely linked to body weight. And again, most people have them in the quite normal range. Now, if they aren't abnormal, fixing them can do a lot of good, but not going to be the thing that solves the obesity epidemic anytime soon. So we're left with this question of like, so what is causing people

to like have more fat in their bodies than they want? And the answer is generally just eating more calories than your body can use at any one time. And so it puts this away into fat. The number one way people eat more calories than maybe they want is food tastes really good and you just end up eating a lot of food. And the higher calorie foods just tend to taste better. I mean, a drippy, juicy cheeseburger or some healthy pasta with a rich olive oil cream sauce and, you know, a couple of pieces of grilled asparagus and just a juicy salmon filet. Doesn't that sound great? That's even healthy. That's actually very healthy food that you can cram so many calories into dishes like that and eat a portion and a half that you just end up getting in too many calories and gaining

weight. And there actually has been no documented instance of someone gaining a large degree of body fat and weight while simultaneously under eating calories. It's thermodynamically, roughly saying impossible, probably strictly impossible. And so it ends up being that, yeah, it is the excess food that we're eating, and it doesn't just have to be junk food. Now, junk food is the best way to get an excessive amount of calories by a long shot. But you can do it without junk food just by eating really tasty, well-prepared food that's pretty healthy, but you got an appetite on you. And you eat more than you need, and you just kind of keep eating, and all the healthy snacks add up.

And all of a sudden, you have an excess body weight. So the real thing to do is you don't have to count calories. at all. But if you know roughly how much food you eat through the day and you know that's the amount that's been leading you to gain weight, taking a chunk off of that, subtracting away some amount of food that's meaningful, is almost certainly going to get you to maintain your weight. And then if you subtract out more, going to get you to lose weight at that earlier thing we were talking about of that rate of weight loss, maybe about a pound per week that's nice and sustainable over a 10 to 12 week period. I think the thing that, you know, the component that

that I'm hearing from you is that you can have all your personal preferences for dietary. Some people might like low carbs. Some people might like higher carbs. Some people might feel better when they're eating a diet like I do where my blood sugar doesn't have a constant rollercoaster throughout the day. Instead, I eat a meal. My blood sugar goes up and then it naturally kind of comes down. There could be a lot of different things and there's a lot of variation. And at the of the day, you cannot ignore the fact that if you're putting on a weight, there's the caloric component that's in it. It's absolutely a part of it. And there has to be an aspect where however you're choosing within your own personal preference of wanting to eat still respects that law

of thermodynamics, that we have to account for not overeating more calories than we burn. 100% and a lot of people who have a success with ketogenic diets, carnivore diets, things like that, does they see it was the hormones and not the calories. But if you look at their calories, they're eating less calories than they were before because when you cut out an entire food group like carbohydrates, it's just really difficult to stuff yourself full of proteins and fats that you just don't feel like eating anymore. Though to your point earlier, you were successfully at a higher body fat level still eating a low carb diet. So it is possible. And for many people, we have this frustrating moment where they're like, I'm eating low carb,

I'm doing all the things. Why am I not losing weight? And why am I not losing fat? And the reality is almost always and almost everywhere a calorie situation. And this is something that like athletes in the space know very well. Like if you told your bodybuilding coach, like, hey, like the fat's kind of not coming off this week. At some point, he's going to cut your food. Like he's just going to reduce your food intake.

And you're going to be like, what are you doing? He's going to be like, what do you mean? What am I doing? Like, this is how fat is. loss happens functionally at the end of the day. The way you got fat or was eating more food than you needed. And the way you're going to get less fat is to eat less food than you need so that your fat stores are liberated and power the rest of your body functions that you just don't have enough food to power anymore. And then your body fat reduces. So bad news,

it is a food thing. Good news, it's a food thing. So there's just no reason to suspect it's any more complicated. And I do get a little passionate about the abysogens and the seed oils and all this other stuff and the processed food because on the one hand, there's some validity to that stuff. But on the other hand, I feel like too much it's being used to take the onus off of the thing that really is causing it. And to some extent, taking that onus away is the easy way out because no one really wants to look at the elephant in the room. It's like if someone told you, you know, like, hey, like, you know, your addiction to playing video games is really kind of screwing things up at home and at work. And you're like, no, it's not the video games.

And not, I'm fine, I'm fine. It's the fact that I'm just not generous enough with my family. It's the fact that I haven't been, you know, doing all biking trips around the neighborhood. It's the fact that my boss is just a mackle all the time. And it's kind of annoying. And then at some point, you go see a psychologist and they kind of just figure out what your life is doing. And they're like, it's the video games. And I know why you don't want to say it because it's painful to remove them or curtail their,

influence on your life because you're really like playing them. And so how many people, Drew, don't like eating plenty of tasty food in an unrestricted manner? I mean, can you find me one person who doesn't like, at least in some capacity, to just like eat tasty food and not have to worry about what's going in their bodies? Even people that like to concern themselves with healthy food, they don't want to count individual walnuts. That's crazy. And so when people are like, hey, you know, you're over fat and like, yeah, I wonder why. And someone's like, it's some special thing in the environment that as soon as we get rid of, you're going to be back to normal. It's so tempting to believe that. But every piece of evidence we have so far, since it's just not true. And it really

is just overeating. But now that we know that overeating is a problem, we have lots of solutions to it. One is just the willpower situation of just like making sure to organize your diet in a logical way, pre-plan what's going into your body, find a level of eating that's getting you to lose weight. Stick to that until you get really diet fatigue 10 or 12 weeks later. And then then coast into maintenance. But another one is we have a new class of drugs. I call the modern antarctic drugs or modern obesity drugs, things like somagletide, aka Ozympic or Trezapotide, A.K. Manjaro and the Ozimpics also in one form known as Wagovi. And these medicines are, and I'm going to say this, I think it's the first time I'm saying this on a podcast. I've just done a

literature review myself on this. For most Americans that are either of normal weight, yes, I said, and especially of overweight, it's probably better for their long-term health to be on these drugs than not on these drugs. That's how powerful they are. And they come with risks and they come with downsides and they come with side effects to manage. But these are generally quite tractable problems you can work through. Whereas the drugs power in directly reducing your hunger and food drives so that you eat less, their power in allowing you to focus better through your drugs.

day and have better sleep because you're not concerned about food all the time, ravenously hungry, is immense. And their way of affecting tons of other health aspects of your body is just nearly universally. I don't want to say a panacea, but it does so much good for your body that nowadays, because before it used to be before, I mean, three years ago, you try to do a diet and it's just got to be tough and the hunger is crazy. And you go to a mixer after work and your friends are eating gourmet sushi and dipping pizza slice into the sushi. You don't even know how the physics of that work. You just want some of it in your body. And it's so difficult. But now with this new generation of medicines of medicines, you can have a higher probability of success on any diet you choose by a huge factor. So this is the era of empowerment. And the way it works is like we now know how the medicines work. Most of the reason they work to potentiate fat loss is just because they have what's called an anorectic drive. They just make you not want to eat as much. And then you get full or fat. you stay fuller for longer. And for the first time in modern recorded history since the 60s, I think, the U.S.

in 2023 just saw its first dip down in obesity rates exclusively because of these drugs. So just something to throw out there, it's a new world we're living in. We have the technology, so to speak, to do a lot of good for our bodies if we're open-minded to that sort of thing. Yeah, and I think open-minded is the key. I've had a lot of people on who have all sorts of different views. on these new classification of drugs. And we've welcomed everybody to share their views on it.

And especially when clinicians who come in, who largely people feel that are pro-lifestyle change, come in and talk about, you know, to mention her name again, I think she was one of them. Dr. Gabriel Lyons said, I absolutely will use it as a kickstart for some patients, not all, who also have committed to do resistance training, have their protein, other things.

And I also don't think it has to be a lifelong thing for a lot of people. And it's a kickstart that allows them to have momentum. Then we've had other people on, especially more in the early days that we're talking about what their concerns are around these medicines that are there. Largely, I think a lot of those have been cleared up, minus the national debate that's going on in the sort of Maha movement led a lot by, you know, Kelly Means, who's been on this podcast before, which is talking about more of the economic aspect of the, drugs and how they're paid for and the alternative of where that money is being could be used.

Yeah. Did you know that Kelly Means runs a supplement company not as a nonprofit, but as a for-profit venture? I don't know what the supplement company is, but I know he's not or. Yeah. And so his critique of the pharmaceutical system is profit-driven is to me baffling because he's profit-driven. And he's actually selling supplements that don't go through FDA approval. And so most people in the street would be like, what's safer? Something that goes through FDA approval or something that doesn't? 98% of people will be probably something that goes through it.

And they would largely be correct. There are many, many problems with the FDA and the approval process I can talk about. That, you know, the supplements he's selling are functionally unlicensed and unapproved. And somehow he's able to claim that the FDA is putting all these drugs out that are really hurting people. But, oh, but his supplements are they're the ones that are going to save your health, I am not a big fan of that kind of outlay of opinion. I'll phrase it generously. Can I share what I think I think his, he's sort of saying? Sure. I think that the argument that I

understand it, right? And it's great to have these conversations here. You know, that's the, that's the reason we have long format podcast is that, you know, these GOP ones, which let's take some of the big ones that are coming out of countries like Denmark, that the pharmaceutical incentive is they're being charged at a price in America with that being their largest sort of opportunity for business that they're nowhere near that price in other countries. So if I would add it up, I would say like, that's one. And that there could be some benefits that are there for people who are, you know, really needing these things. And why aren't we also having the conversation, you know, we talked about Japan, you know, these drugs.

have largely not been super popular in a country like Japan, which invest heavily in things like school nutrition. Every school has to have a licensed, you know, nutritionist, and all food has to be made on site from scratch. And they're investing so much effort and energy and into sort of education, growing food, teaching kids about food, healthy habits. That is it a question of, you know, all. Off of these drugs are not off these drugs.

Not really. It's more also, can we have the simultaneous conversation of how else can we make sure to be investing in education and healthy meals? Why do we just assume that it has to be through a drug intervention? That's my understanding of it. I could have some of that wrong. But I'd love for you to chime in on any of that. The price situation, I don't really particularly understand that criticism. What specifically is a criticism about the price?

That basically these drugs are being charged in a mirror. at completely different amounts than what they're being charged in in Europe and that if that they're being charged because our payer system is completely different and national health care over there is not allowing for these pharmaceuticals to be charged at those levels. Our health care system suffers from an insane burden of overregulation by a humongous, humongous factor. That's definitely a problem. Part of the ways that problem presents itself is sometimes egregiously high prices for pharmaceutical medicine. But almost never are these prices actually prices people pay.

These are prices charged to insurance companies. And there's a bit of a funky thing there where you can charge an insurance company a lot more money than you can charge an individual. And individual is like, nah, I'm not buying that. But if you can get it approved through your insurance, they can begrudgingly approve it in some cases. And so they can pay much more money for the drug. So in a properly competitive market-oriented drug development,

environment, you have multiple drugs competing and a direct patient-to-drug purchasing pipeline with the approval of a doctor, of course. So if I'm actually able to buy these drugs out of pocket, and I see that terseptide costs two times less than somaglotide, I'm buying, I'm buying tersepotide for sure. But if I really want some agletyte, I'll pay double or whatever. The way this works in every single market ever studied is that eventually prices trend to very, very low levels because of the fierce competition of companies who make different drugs. There's also a bunch of drugs in development, and the next few years we'll have a bunch more released.

And then OZemPEC, for example, will be like four years outdated, and you almost certainly find it super, super cheap. Am I for making drugs substantially cheaper via deregulation? By God, I couldn't say any more about that. Like, absolutely. But it's some, like, specifically nefarious thing between Denmark and the United States.

I'm also sure that that's the case. It would be curious. I mean, the ideal amount of money supplement or drug companies would charge you is infinity and the ideal amount of drug they would ship you is zero. Your ideal is that they charge you nothing and give you all the drugs you want. The market finds an equilibrium somewhere between those two points. So the price issue is a technical economic discussion. It doesn't really belong in the realm of fat loss and obesity and those kinds of conversations,

though it does in the sense that we need to try to drive these costs down as cheap as possible, which means we need more innovation and more economic freedom. and more competition. Those are the absolute undisputed ways to reduce long-term price without sacrificing availability or quantity, because governments and other countries can drive down the price by simply negotiating a lower price, but then the availability falls into very few people can get them. As a matter of fact, I have many friends in Europe who say that accessing these drugs is functionally impossible or highly unlikely for them to do. So that's a bad deal. And so the education component is a curious one. I would say the idea that we aren't focusing on

nutritional education, but we are focusing on pharmaceuticals is just wrong. It's just not true. The United States has had many concerted efforts of nutritional education over as many decades, and most of them just don't do that well. I'm going to tell you why, because most people just don't care. Most people, it's not an information problem. It's a, I want tasty food that's in front of me and I'm going to eat a problem. You interview people coming out of McDonald's, what fraction of them are going to tell you that's healthy food they're eating. Almost none. Regular people.

No particular kind of education. We'll be like, yeah, this is burger and fries. It's that health food? They're like, come on, man, stop. And they'll walk away. And you and your camera guy are like, this guy's not going to talk to us anymore. He thinks you're joking, which surely you are. And so the reality is like somewhere here we lost the personal responsibility situation.

The reason most people are over fat is because of the amount of food coming in. And I don't want to lay blame. There's no one at fault. these are mechanistic things. But now we have a class of drugs that can radically reduce your appetite and radically improve your long-term health in addition to that as both because of your appetite reducing and you're losing weight and in total independent mechanisms. There are like eight independent mechanisms by which these drugs are really good for your health.

And so when we have something like this and we do the appropriate work to drive the costs down, we have something that's just way more powerful than nutritional education, even if you take nutritional education and somehow managed to propagandize and inculcate everyone into always exuding their best practices, which no one's ever succeeded with. Here's another piece of interesting literature for you. The absolute best predictor of how teenagers eat is who they're genetically related to. There are twin and adoption studies where they have identical twins separated of birth or siblings separated birth adopted to different families. And so they know the genetics of their birth family, they know the genetics of their adoptive family, and they know the genetics

of the individual, which the individual, because they're adopted, the genetics are no more likely to be the same as their adoptive family as, you know, by chance. And it's shown that after about age 12 or 13, the variance explained in that individual teenager's eating habits, that can be explained by what they learned in the home growing up with their adoptive family is between zero and 10 percent. The best control studies show it's closer to zero. So I'm going to say a crazy thing here. As a parent, you can 100 percent make sure your child is eating really, really well in the home when they're there because you have total control. And it's a good thing to do. As a school program, you can make sure that kids are getting healthy lunches. And healthy lunches are something we just

don't have much of in the United States. And it's not for mysterious economic reasons. It's just for preference. Most people like pizza and burgers. That's what the school serves. And I think it because it's school and it's we want to keep people healthy, 100% we should be doing healthy food. You know, cheap way, but an effective way. There's tons of ways to do that. But once those kids are off doing their own thing, mostly it's their genetics that explains what kind of food preferences they'll have and it's almost nothing else. So once people turn into adults, all of that awesome nutritional education you got in the home and in the school seems to fall on relatively deaf ears. And then it's really like, what are you as a free adult interested in doing and how

are you interested in changing your life? And at that point, the onus comes all the way back. It goes right by the schools. It goes by the parents. It goes by the pharmaceutical companies. And it comes right out of your mirror and hits you right in the face. Crap! It's me again. You know that Spider-Man meme where they're pointing at each other? You know you. It's you again. Or the villain is enmasked Scooby-Doo meme, whereas just you as an anime, you're also the villain. And that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or bad or terrible, but fundamentally, the reason you are currently over fat is because some of your food choices or the quantities in which you eat those foods are inappropriate or excessive.

And it's really straightforward to make good choices. Healthy food is not rocket science. It can actually give you all of the several, just five or six food groups. That is, that's all healthy food. And if you do that and you watch the scale, and if the scale isn't going down, and you eat a little bit less food, keeping your protein up, of course, then you're just going to have very predictable results. Am I saying that's a fun process?

Not necessarily, but it's predictable, and we understand it really well, and there's just no reason to suppose that any other kind of nefarious forces are involved. And if you want to do this by yourself, listen, that's awesome. But if you want to do it with these modern obesity drugs, there's no reason to suspect they're particularly deleterious or dangerous. There's no conspiracy to get them you addicted to them or something like that. There's not some kind of evil corporation manufacturing them ulterior motives. They're just unbelievable breakthrough medicines that are, again, probably healthier for most people to be on rather than off.

I don't think it sounds nuts. And there's a lot of people that there's, you know, there's individuals that have come on this podcast like Dr. Tina, who's talked a lot about the myths around OZempic and and these GLP1 agonist and clearing them up and their potential role in things like dementia, addiction, all these other categories that have nothing to do with fat loss. should be paying attention to and how people should really understand that largely, you know, these are these are peptides that are there. And within that conversation, I'd like to connect it back to something that we kind of touched on a little bit earlier. You know, I read the book, Magic Pill by Jonathan. I forgot his last name. Jonathan, it'll come back to me. And it talks about the history of these drugs. You know, they've been around for a long time. Like people have been using them for a long time for treating type two diabetes. And looking at these different,

you know, societies in America, what we have going on. He does a pretty deep dive into his trip to Japan. I was recently in Japan with my wife over the holidays and getting a chance to see some of these things firsthand. I brought it up and you kind of hinted at it. So what do you feel is the reason why a country like Japan would have 4% levels of obesity, 3.5, 3.8, 4% level of obesity compared to ours. What are some of the key things and principles you see from your end? The biggest fact, is genetics by a long shot. They're Japanese people in Japan. And Japanese people just don't develop as high degree of adiposity. It's usually because they just have a lower food drive and experience less of a pleasure response and a reciprocal reinitiation of food drive

after eating tasty food than the rest of us do on average. They're like, you know, I went to school with a ton of Asians when I was at the University of Michigan, tons of Asian friends. And like they'll eat like three pieces of sushi and be like, oh my God, I'm so full and it'll just like exist for eight hours longer. And I'm like, oh my God, I could inhale three pieces of sushi, not even through my mouth, like just through my nose and that I can eat the rest of the sushi bar and they'll kick me out for overeating. Like, that's just a thing I can pull out of the hat any time. It's genetics. Uh, you know, like there are absolutely physical differences between major human subpopulations and they're real. And if we try to

overindex some of the specific ways in which they're living their lives and thinking that's what's doing it, but we fail to, you know, address the confounder of genetics, which is going to be quote-unquote learning a lot of stuff that probably either has much less of an impact. And there are certainly things the Japanese culture does that are better than ours. But there are other things the Japanese culture does that aren't as great as ours. Like, their older adults don't seem to engage in resistance training nearly as much. They have a much more muted gym culture than we do, for example. And so on down the line. Also, their bar culture is like just tied completely into junk food of the most despicable quality.

Like the Japanese exclusively like oil-frieded meats when they get drunk. And like I had a basically stomach collapse when I tried doing that in Japan recently, but they seem to think it's just fine. They eat plenty of junk food and tasty treats. But they just don't seem to have a high food drive on average. And this is also reflected in the fact that while Japanese people in other countries, especially the United States, tend to be fatter on average, they're not fatter by nearly as much as you would expect if the obisogenic environment

of the United States was really the thing causing all of us to be super fat versus just tasty foods around and some of us like it a lot more than others. I mean, there's all kinds of subpopulation differences that present like this. For example, if you look at the Indian subcontinent, then you tend to notice that the average Indian person just does not hold as much skeletal muscle naturally as, you know, the average human in the world. And nor are they particularly prone to rapid obesity, but what you have is a situation where many of folks who are genetically Indian or from related region of that world, South Asians, they tend to exhibit higher than expected rates of simultaneously low muscle mass and relatively high body fat levels. So like in clothing,

they present as totally normal, but then you do a body fat exam and they're like a 33% and they're 32 years old and pre-diabetic, which is quite rare for most folks. And so we can say like, So what is it about Indian food? Fundamentally, Indian food is only one scientifically, you know, confirmed thing to do with this. It's like maybe the tastiest food in the world. It's just better. Indian food is better. If you've never had Indian food, you've never really eaten until you've had it.

And so, but like, you know, it's not just the food that's doing that. That's a lot of that's genetics because if you fed, you know, northern Europeans a ton of Indian food, they would have lots of muscle mass and body weight. They would be gigantic, way over fat, but they wouldn't be skinny fat to that same extent. And so if we over index on the differences between nations or peoples and thinking, oh, it's these social and cultural factors, which do play a role, say, a minor role relative to genetics. Genetics. Genetics plays by far the biggest role in that. So I'd love to just toss my own thoughts on that. And it kind of connects back to something that you said.

When I went to Japan and talking to people there, I largely feel like it's a society that actually really embraces the personal responsibility side of things. The conscientiousness, it's not that just my decisions are. impacting me is that my decisions are impacting everybody there's this whole sort of i think they even have a word for it i'm blanking on it but and it leads to you know some bad things as well you know a lot of people talk about japanese society being less entrepreneurial less willingness to fail being judged other things like that and how that sort of impacted the economy you know over the last like you know 20 30 years but there's a sense of higher levels of education of the decisions and it's a more you know focus society I mean, it plays into a lot of things like Japan is pretty anti-immigration.

It's very hard to, like, move there. There's a lot of layers of other things that kind of have. I'm not saying it's good or bad that have preserved it into a very specific society where everybody is largely operating and living the same way. But when I look at their decisions, and I'm not enough of an expert to know about the genetics aspect, there's a larger sense of awareness around food, food culture, even to the extent of a lot of the restaurants that you visit, even in the big cities, it's not uncommon to find the person who actually owns the restaurant who is actually still working in the restaurant. They may not be a chef,

but they're working there. And they have a direct relationship with the food. And they take a lot of pride on trying to get better quality food. And I would probably suspect that they probably spend a higher percentage of their income on actually, even though food is very cheap there, you know, on getting food. Now, they have a ton of processed food around Japan. The best in the world of processed food. They have a ton of processed food, but you don't really see that over abuse that's there. And I actually feel like a big driver of that is the personal responsibility to the degree that they are all largely growing up in the society that's like, hey, we don't do things like

that. We don't over eat. We don't do things. And I will say this was news to me, not that this was ever fly in the United States, but for certain corporations of a particular size, they are at. actually mandated to track employee health, which includes weight. And when when the weight increases too significantly, you are mandated to make sure that that employee gets a plan to reduce their weight over a period of time. Now, Drew, to the point of cultural differences, and some of these

are genetic differences expressing themselves as culture, some of these are purely cultural. Let's take a quick think you and I as about how different that is. Could you imagine an American corporation coming up to Linda, the overweight secretary, and going Linda, the corporation needs you to lose weight. Lawsuit, national news, friggin billions down the drain. That's fat abuse. It's fat shaming. How dare you? Are you serious? I work for corporation. My output is what I type into this computer. How dare you tell me about anything else about me? The response is 360 degrees different from anything that would occur in Japan. Whereas in Japan, if someone's like, hey, like, the corporation cares about you. They're like, oh, okay.

just try not to disappoint the corporation, trying to do what I'm supposed to be. I'm a big team player here, and I got to rein in my stuff, and they're instantly cooperative nine times out of 10. Where Americans, I mean, 50, 50 may be an exaggeration for how much cooperation you're going to get. Because if you were a middle manager and your boss told you, he has, we have this health initiative. Let's say you work for, you know, General Motors or something. And we go, yeah, sure, boss, we do. That's okay. So you see Jameson and your staff are like Jameson.

He does great work. He does. You see your job tomorrow to go talk to him about the fact that he's too over fat. You've got to tell him about we have a gym in the workplace and by, he's getting some food vouchers to get healthy food or whole foods is your job. Drew, are you looking forward to that conversation? No, absolutely not. And I don't think that would fly in the U.S. Right. I think it would fly in the U.S. So when people say we need more education, they have a really good point, but then actually doing it and actually imposing these rules and ideas requires people's

buying at a deep level. And before we get that, all the stuff about education is kind of like, is there anyone listening? Does anyone care? Is anyone actually going to do this? And those are kind of the bigger questions I've been asking recently, not facetiously. but in the honest attempt to say, like, I think most people have a giving a shit problem. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Look, if I had to make a list of all the things you could do with your life that are better than just trying to eat lean and get, you know, skinnier or whatever, that's all of them, spending time with your children, walking your dogs, you know, loving her grandmother more, dancing at the club all night.

This is the stuff of life. So I'm not saying that folks that just don't really care much about their health are bad people. They're awesome people. but then they have a certain health. And you look, because you don't really care, like a Japanese person tends to look a little bit more ahead. Like, if I eat five Twinkies today and I do this tomorrow and the day after, where's that going to lead to?

And I'm nothing good. Some of us are more Yolo. Like I like Twinkies, they're going in my mouth. And there's nothing wrong with that. The consequences will be different. And we already know the primary cause, human choice. So as a society, we should probably look towards people to be like, listen, how can we empower you, if you'd like, to eat differently and to exercise and to do all

these things that are better for you? But it has to be a question because, thank God, we don't live in a totalitarian society. We just tell people to stop eating. It has to be a gentle invitation that we have some answers and we can help. And it can't be, you do this. Because if you say, you do this, the probability you would get traction with most Americans and most people in the world is very, very low. I definitely agree. And I think that's where the ideas are sort of merging. It's the personal responsibility with also the landscape. We all know, and I believe the evidence supports this, that if you keep more snacks in your home, you're going to eat more snacks.

If those snacks are not in your home, right, you're not going to be eating those things. So our environment plays a role in that. And I think the healthy discussions that are happening is that, and largely I think that it can be a states-level thing, because every state might have a different sort of, you know, approach that's there. We don't really want our federal government to be mandating everybody have the same approach. We've seen how that's gone in the past with things. The food guide pyramid, you know. But I feel like one thing that's really interesting is you used to have the, you know,

if I would say from a political lens, people who typically were on the liberal side, green, granola, crunchy, who were shouting through the rooftops of saying like, hey, let's at least have the ability for schools that want to to make better decisions that are there and not be forced to have a vending machine inside, not be forced to have, which was the case in certain instances. You actually have to take all of, you know, Cisco's sort of supply that comes in, food provided, vending machines, sodas, not even diet sodas, regular sodas that are there. let's give more option of choice that's there. And if we can at least provide better and healthier choices that are there, maybe we

make it a little bit easier. And ultimately, it all comes back to personal responsibility. But how do we encourage personal responsibility? That's the million dollar question. I will say that the anorectic drugs, Ozympic and et cetera, they lead to less addictive behaviors, which is awesome and actually allows you to express more personal responsibility. do they also reduce your food drive, which is your hunger and your desire to do something about eating more tasty foods so substantially, that for any amount of willpower you happen to have,

you'll be able to be more successful the weight loss plan if you have that hunger reduced. So for example, if you have a same person, in one instance, they have their full weight of their hunger and cravings, and you're like, look, you know, you can make better choices. It's going to cost you a little bit more time and you're going to be able to plan your whole week out, or you could just right now drive over to Wendy's and just show Dave Thomas what really business support looks like talking about throw them a $100 bill and just jump into the window and start eating fries. When you're hungry enough, that last thing sounds like exactly what your body designed you

over millions of years to do. And the first one sounds like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Like I can't plan anything. I'm starving. Get out of my face and give me a donut. And if you're not a donut, definitely get out of my face or I'm going to eat you. That doesn't seem to comport for many people. However, you take that same person and you take their food drive and their hunger down substantially.

And these medications, it's like a turn dial. The more of them you take, if you can manage the side effects, the less hunger and food drive you have. You turn down the food drive from a 10 to a 3. You talk to the same person. You go, what do you think about eating next week? Do you want to try this, like, healthy meal plan? You damn well know you're supposed to be doing anyway, hint, hint. Or do you want to go to Wendy's and just like let it all fly?

And they're like, you know what? I really should be doing something for my health. You're like, well, let me try it. And you're like, well, why say yes now? And they're like, because I'm not starving to death. And that's a big deal. It's kind of a similar idea with something like, you know, I'll go on the political left here because it sound pretty right wing.

Something like universal basic income. When people are dirt poor, they got nothing to build on top of nothing. Tell them, pull yourself up by your boots traps. I don't have boots. It falls on deaf ears. The whole thing is a rat raise maze for survival. But if you get people some decent housing and some decent health care and some decent food to eat and a little bit of money, then all of a sudden, if they're not interested in improving their condition, you can fully blame them now because you got everything you need to start making your life better.

You're clearly just being a piece of shit about this. And on the other hand, also the folks that needed the help, now that they have a place to live and medical care and food, they're like, well, man, this is so helpful. Now I can determine, I take all of my energy and putting it towards getting a great job, increasing my education, saving away for the future, you've enabled these people to do that. So in just the same way as some universal basic income might help some folks, in some instances, do better because you're just deburdening them. In a similar way, the pharmaceutical drugs are deburdening people from having psychotic hunger all the time that they're typically used to after a few weeks of a diet because the psychotic

hunger after a few weeks of a diet is not some weird mystery of the universe, so the obisogens are causing it. This is just how most people's brain react to dieting because you're, brain's not designed to make you lean. It's designed to make you as fat as humanly possible when the opportunity presents itself in most cases. And again, that's why America and Mexico and half of the world looks as obese as it does now. So empowerment is a big thing these drugs can give you precisely because they can allow you to be the best version of yourself, unencumbered by insane drives to continue eating as much food as possible. So in our space where a lot of people have sort of change your mind or at least been a little bit more open-minded or have seen somebody firsthand in their

family that was significantly overweight, they're like, okay, great, I get it. These drugs have a role, even if I have a bias towards, you know, people moving towards like the less reliance on drugs in general as a theme. If somebody has a personal bias, right, I'm not saying anything other than that, you know, even if they have a personal bias towards that, which, you know, I think a lot of us inherently have. We don't want people on too many drugs that are out there, even though that might be seen as subjective, a lot of people have felt, okay, I get it. These anorexics, is that what you're called? Anorectics. These anorectics drugs have a place that's there. Where I think that people have a little bit of feelings around it, maybe myself included, it's like awesome. For the person who is

probably 30 pounds or more overweight, they're doing more harm carrying that weight around for the rest of our life, then, you know, any potential, potential even, once you take out even like maybe the misinformation around it, potential side effects that would be associated with the appropriate dose of these drugs that are there. How do you feel about the people that are in the five to 29 pounds, right? Do you feel that these drugs have a role for those individuals, especially if they've not taken that sort of more evidence-based approach of auditing their calories, increasing their protein starting to do some resistance training. How do you feel about that classification of people? I feel great about them. God bless them. I hope they take all the Ozempic they want.

There's not a damn thing wrong with them doing that. However, if they do it in that haphazard way, where, so you're sort of, this is a group of combined two things. One is they're less than 30 pounds overweight, right? And the other is they also just aren't attending to anything fitness related, like eating enough protein, healthy foods, going to the gym. And they're like, oh, I don't need any of that stuff. There's a pill for that. So they're going to lose all the weight they want, probably, and that's awesome. They can even get skinnier than they planned, which most people think is cool.

I don't like the skinny look. That's not for me, but other people think it's great. God bless them. It's a great look. So nothing on the moral side at all. But there's a consequence to not paying attention to the quality of your diet, especially if you're on powerful drugs that can now wrap. reduce your body size. For example, if you're not eating plenty of healthy foods is the core of your

diet. These drugs, you just say you just did junk. You know those people that aren't super overweight, but all they eat is junk? You ever have coworkers like that? Like, I swear to God, if they stop making Twinkies and beef jerky, you would starve to death. Like, how are you real? Those folks will eat less Twinkies and less beef jerky when they start taking these medicines, and then the total amount of micro nutrition, vitamins, minerals, for chemicals, and fiber that they got just barely kept them in working order because they were able to eat enough of this awful foods that have very few of those things in there.

Now that they've reduced those foods, but they haven't eaten any better foods, they're like at decent risk of vitamin mineral deficiencies and not getting enough D vitamins and B vitamins and calcium and all the way down the line. They're going to like shrink down and you're going to be like, Debbie, how are you? She's like, good, good. You're like, holidays treated you well. She's like, yeah. you're like, Debbie, we haven't known each out a long time.

Are you sick? Is something going on? I don't want to, like, send you flowers or something. She's like, no, I'm out of Zempec. I'm feeling great. You look her up and down, you're like, okay, just walk off. Like, your parts of you are disappearing and not in a fun way. And bags under her eyes, her skin looks really pale.

She's just under nutrition. That's what we call it. And so folks like that suffer greatly from that situation, which is simply remediated by eating most of your diet as lean meats, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats. If you do that, then as you reduce the amount of that food, it's still so vitamin and mineral and nutrient dense that you're just going to be a leaner, more awesome version of yourself. The second problem is protein. So people don't eat enough protein when they, you know, take Ozempic and they just eat mostly junk food, now they eat less

junk food. Now they're eating even less protein. Then they can become what's called hypoprotenemic, which means they just don't have enough protein for normal body functions, which means they start to take protein from the parts of your body that need it the least for survival. So it doesn't happen like this exactly, but you could see it blown out as like, oh, your body's like, all right, everyone line up. We need amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. We don't have enough. Who's willing to give them up?

Heart, heart's like, dude, I'm pumping blood. We'll die if I don't have enough muscle. Like, hey, heart, you're good. Get out of your brain. I'm thinking all of these solutions and ideas. Like, brain, get out of here. Liver, like, liver. Are you kidding me?

We do all the detox. Okay, liver, get out of here. Hey, skeletal muscle. What are you up to? When it's like hoarding amino acids, like, I'm good. Do you need all those? Like, well, yeah, I got to move us around. Like, where are we moving?

We got elephants chasing us down. Give me up some of that. So what ends up happening is because muscle, skeletal muscle isn't critical to your survival until you have very low levels of it. These people just lose lots of muscle mass, which gets looking like a Zempic face and ozempic butt, which, again, just makes you look sick. It increases your risk of all kinds of diseases. It does not make you more mobile.

It barely makes you more attractive. Can you imagine a guy looking at a girl like, man, she's really hot. Oh, why do you like her so much? Like, she looks like she's dying of illness. Like, what? That's not anything. No one says that. And so all of a sudden, the poor nutrition is bad because now you have too little

nutrition from taking these drugs and doing nothing about it. The insufficient protein is real bad. But you also said something, which I think was awesome. Point number three, they don't resistance train. They don't lift weights. They don't exercise. OZempe gives you such a huge anorectic response. It drives your hunger down so much.

You're likely to cut your calories by a substantial amount. And that's all hunky dory. But that means the catabolic muscle breakdown drive and your body just escalated a ton. It's a formula for muscle loss. How do you prevent that? Well, you definitely have to have enough nutrition. We covered that. Enough protein.

We cover that. Lifting weights. There is an argument. I'm not endorsing it. There is an argument for every prescription that a doctor writes in America for the next several years of these antarctic drugs to come co-prescribed with. Go resistance train. Because, and Dr. Lyon probably told you this extensively, skeletal muscle is an incredibly

health-promoting tissue. You don't want little of it. You want plenty of it. And if you lose weight the bad way and you don't resistance train, the signal for muscle loss is profound. The signal for, hey, regain some muscle and keep it on your body, just really doesn't come through. So you just lose a bunch.

But if you resistance train while eating a healthy diet, while getting enough protein, while taking these drugs, it's the friggin' miracle. out here. You're going to re-architect your body. You're going to functionally appear, feel, look, and metabolically be like 10 years younger after losing 25 pounds of weight because you'll gain something like you did, five or 10 pounds of muscle, lose a load of fat is just a hugely enormous thing. So the real problem to me with those folks that are less than 30 pounds overweight that they're using the drugs isn't that they're like taking a shortcut or it's the easy way out. I mean, like the shortcuts are there for a reason. Like we want to take a shortcut.

someone you getting on a flight of JFK to go to, you know, Dubai or something, and someone's like, you know, you could swim to Dubai. You're like, what the hell is wrong with you? I guess, hypothetically, if I had a raft to rest on all the time, sure, it's just going to be faster, like, cheater, you know, also pours carbon dioxide in the environment when the plane turns on. You're a bad person, too. But, like, these shortcuts are seen as normal.

The drugs here are just an empowerment tool. That problem I have, there's no problem with at all. But the fact that these people just kind of willy-nilly the thing, and they don't look at their healthy food intake, their protein consumption, and their resistance training, they run into problems. And the only reason fatter people don't run into problems is because they have so much excess musculary from carrying their body fat around, they just can't lose as much muscle relative to their size as everyone else can. And so, yeah, they still lose muscle. Oh, my God. But, and also because what's low calories for them is a higher number than it is for folks that way, way less, then they also

don't risk the undernutrition part nearly as much. And if they don't resistance train, but they just kind of walk around, it's pretty good resistance training for their legs, they don't pay as much of approximate cost. But if those fatter people just kept losing weight, they pay all those downsides. So yeah, long story short, sorry for the giant rant, but these drugs are awesome and amazing. You don't have to take them, but they're an excellent option, but they're even more excellent by a huge factor if you combine them with healthy eating, higher protein intake, and resistance training. And that's to me the big kicker here is it's not drugs versus lifestyle. it's a teamwork effort and everyone can contribute.

Drugs can contribute, though not necessary. Lifestyle can contribute and it's a little bit more necessary and just has a huge yield on everything. So that's kind of how I see the space. Let me know if I'm totally off my rocker on that one. No, it makes complete sense. I'll add into something that you shared is that I'm very friendly with a lot of the doctors that are working in the space

of metabolic and ketogenic diets to work with people who have had severe damage to mitochondrial health that looks like a major contributor to schizophrenia, psychosis, all the things, talking like Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Georgia Ead, the two doctors at Harvard, individuals who are doing robust clinical trials on the therapeutic benefits of these types of things. And in particular in the United States, especially for young men, it seems to be that two areas are leading to a massive crisis in young men. And these aren't really even getting as much of attention as things like social media, gaming, pornography. It's gambling and how

pervasive online gambling has been sort of gone out there and how much these companies sort of have a predatory approach on the people who are the small percentage, not like me and you who might gamble occasionally. I don't do any gambling. I don't do any gambling either. How dare you insult my Jewish hair? Okay. So we don't we don't do any gambling, but the people, the one to two which make up a massive percentage of the profits of these companies whose brains are already wired in that direction and now they're being taken advantage of, right? So gambling is one and the other one that is not really getting hardly any attention except for a few small circles is the rise of things like high THC weed, which is leading to all sorts of problems for young men who are

already predisposed for schizophrenia and other situations like that and addiction that's going on that's out there. So I'm actually even more than the health side, and I am pretty excited about the health side, especially for the severely overweight. I'm very curious about how these things can help us reduce the addiction aspect that especially a lot of young men are facing in this country. Yeah. And it's, it's tough too. I'm glad you brought that up. It's, it's, there are a few reasons why it's tough to deal with anything other than the individual at this case. One reason is they say, okay, okay, let's, let's make weed and gambling illegal. We already tried that all around the world and all through history. It just leads to like insane amounts of organized crime and there's just net

negatives are horrendous. Okay, well, that sucks because people still like precisely the people who want to gamble and do high THC weed the most are exactly the ones that are just going to go do more of it in really shady circumstances. Because if you don't let like New Jersey's online casinos let you gamble, guess who you're gambling with? The guy named Saul, and if you lose money to Saul, he's not taking your money away. He's taking kneecaps for that. There's bad news for everyone. And, you know, this is shady, shady stuff. So we, it's difficult to make these things outright illegal, even if most of us are like, well, yeah, just making me illegal. Who cares? The other problem is most people who gamble and most people who do marijuana do so responsibly and to great effect and it's a

great time. And so you're saying, okay, well, literally one or two percent of people having a problem, but we're going to ban this for 98 or 99 percent of the rest of you. But that seems kind of curious, right? If we took children into account as citizens of our country, which they are, can you imagine like banning everything for adults that should also be banned for children? I mean, good God, you wouldn't be able to drive a car. It's crazy. Also, cars kill way more people than gambling and marijuana or any of that stuff. So we're left with this thing of like, okay, we can't just ban these things. That just didn't work.

What are we supposed to do? And the answer, I think, just as kind of was weaving through this whole podcast, is getting to the individual, finding out what their needs are, what their attitudes are, where their proclivities, where they are in their mental space of, are they interested in fixing a problem? And if there's pharmacology that we can leverage, like the Ozmpics of the world, which have really awesome anti-addictor properties, in many cases, maybe that's the right answer. But I'll tell you another thing.

I don't want to end on a depressing note here for this part of my rant, but you can actually avail people to drugs that help them with addiction and so on. What do you do when they either say no or they just take the drugs for a while and then they're like, eh, I don't want to do this anymore. And they stop taking the drugs and they go back to their ways. That's a tough problem. And again, usually we're taught to look through a social lens. Like, what are the societal factors causing people to have gambling,

addiction. The reality is it seems to be a human and animal universal that some fraction of people are just going to be addicted to almost anything that you can expose them to that does dopamine hits. That's tough. And that requires a much more thoughtful, nuanced, pharmaceutical-assisted approach. And the old finger wagon and making stuff outright illegal, that's probably not the right answer. I wish it was. It's fairly straightforward to do. It's just never really worked in the past. Well, one thing I really appreciate, and this comes back right to you know, you being so gracious with your time and coming on this podcast is that one thing that I am so passionate about is the fact that all these conversations are happening, regardless of who has

different views. And I say repeatedly, I'm not a subject matter expertise, but I like to ask thoughtful, interesting questions and let the expert, you know, get a chance to speak. But it's just great to see all these conversations happening because I truly feel that's how these debates, these people having different viewpoints, it's how we all, who largely are, centrist people who are open-minded. That's the vast majority of people. It's how we learn. It's how we actually become better citizens and contributed to projects. It's actually hearing people with a lot of different opinions and then getting a chance to make up our own minds. And you definitely did that by coming on today. You know, I thought we were having a conversation about fat loss and we went into a whole

other thing. You know, it's kind of like give the people what they think they need, but then give them really the conversation that they want. And I feel like you really got a chance to do that today. Thank you so much. It's wonderful that you have this forum. Absolutely excellent podcast and a great diversity of speakers is always really good. If anyone derived value from that, then thank God I did something good once in my life, you know? Yeah, you're broadening our horizons. You did provide a lot of value that's out there. I want to end on sort of one kind of practical note. Again, coming back to this idea, especially for my audience, it's largely eating whole foods, maybe not sort of tracking their calories on a regular basis, trying to pay attention to having more protein. But again,

some people track, some people don't track. If there was one sort of behavior, habit or something for this audience, again, largely my audience is not overeating junk food, McDonald's, other things like that. And they're in the, I have five to 20 pounds that I want to get a chance to make progress on. And I know I want to do it in a mindful way. I got the resistance training piece. I got the, I need to increase protein piece. Is there something on the calories end that you think is doable for them that at least

people could try on if they've never done it. For example, some people in the podcast previously have come on and said, hey, if you've never tracked your calories, just try it for 14 days in the true process of like weighing your food and actually tracking it just to do a little bit of an audit. Then whatever you decide to do moving on from there, that's completely up to you. But at least now you'll have the awareness. Do you think that's a good piece of advice? Would you add anything, subtract anything from that advice?

I think that's excellent advice. but because somebody already gave it, I'll give a slightly different piece of advice. I think something that I've kind of been getting to lately is the idea of treating your meals in separating them into two different categories, what I like to call business meals and then fun meals. Business meals mean that you're eating them

for the purpose of fueling your body for what it needs, like as an organism. And that means that business meals aren't really designed with taste and texture and maximizing the pleasure value of food as a first principle like this is top priority. They're designed with things like, is there enough protein in this meal of high quality?

Am I getting enough greens and combination of greens and veggies and fruits and whole grains? Other healthy fats in this meal. Is the portion size of this meal enough to squash my hunger, but not enough to stuff me? Am I eating any more of this meal than I should be because I'm already stuffed?

But damn, These mac and cheese taste so good. I have to have a few more bites. It's just a meal designed to fuel you. And there are so many ideas about how to make those meals on the internet. Just talk to chat GPT. It'll give you a trillion different examples of just healthy food that's really good and in the right portions and all that stuff.

But so those business meals are when you're through the workday, breakfast, lunch, dinner, they're into work week. When you're traveling, but it's not for leisure, you stick to business meals, which sometimes means just like a protein bar too. if you like at an airport late at night. Business meals mean I'm not trying to optimize for tastiness. So for example, if you ever see me at a Chipotle and it's a business meal, I show up, I ask for rice, I ask for beans, I ask for chicken, I'll do a little bit of queso or no

caseo at all, do some veggies, and that's it. And they're always like, are you sure you don't want anything else? And I'm like, nope. And there's a very plain looking meal. And of course, people, I'm a weirdo, I don't eat salsa and stuff. You can have all the veggies on there that you want. Different look. Now, the other type of meal is a fun meal.

It's a meal in which you, sure, you want to eat some protein in it. You want to be more healthy than not. But also, it's a little bit just for the love, right? Like, it's for, it's for the vibe. It's for the taste. It's for the texture. It's for the food experience. And that's if I show up to Chipotle and I'm having a fun meal.

I get a burrito. I get cheese and queso and sour cream in that mug. Because God, cheese and sour cream together are absolutely undefeated combination. It just so happens that they have tons and tons of calories. And I want to eat in a number of food. other burrito as soon as I'm done with the first one because it's so goddamn good. And so that's a fun meal, though, and I know just have it quite rarely. And so I'm able by eating mostly business

meals to keep in the shape that I want, and, you know, a long weekend, too many fun meals. I really clamped down. I do business through half the rest of the next weekend, and I'm back to my old body weight. Everything is problem solved. And so I encourage folks to think in this dichotomy of business versus fun meals so that they don't spend too much cognitive bandwidth trying to enhance the taste and texture and quality of their business meals, it's spending time to essentially trick your body into wanting to eat more of the food. And we're so kind of addicted to the idea of food pleasure all the time that it ends up being this whole thing of like, well, look, you know, like if you're engineering your food to taste as good as possible, you're just going to eat more food all the time. So

separating meals into business meals where the goal is just get the food in and make sure it's healthy and it can taste good, but just don't hyper-optimize on that. And then, you're You can't live like a monk all the time. So every now and again, you have a meal that is a fun meal, but you know it's a fun meal. So it doesn't have to be all this pressure to make it super healthy. You can eat and access, no problem. If you have more fun meals than business meals in your week, problem solved as to why you're fatter than you want to be.

If it's mostly business meals and a few fun meals, you're probably in a maintenance holding pattern and you're going to be great. If you need to lose weight, two or three months, easiest thing in the world. They're all business meals. No fun meals for two or three months. You're not starving to death. You're not bereft of nutrients, but you're not exactly going to McDonald's

and getting the new slushy they have coming out because that's not for business. That's for fun. Imagine aliens coming down when you're at McDonald's. And they're like, hello, human. What is the purpose of ingesting this food? And you're like, to support bodily function. And the alien looks at his assistant.

The assistant scrolling through our internet. He's like, nah, that guy's just having fun. Alien looks at you like, this is for fun. You're like, yes. Sorry, I lied to you guys. And everyone knows why I'm here. They just know which meals are for fun. which meals are for business, the business meals, number one is health and getting all the nutrients

you need and not getting too stuffed. If you follow those basic guidelines, the more business meals you have, the more your body will look like you want. And if you're at a place where you look great, some fun meals in there every now and again are awesome. If they're all fun meals, you're going to have a larger time. A really, really incisive illustration of this is, have you ever seen Drew the show My 600 Pound Life with the... On TLC, I think I've got a couple of clips on social media. Yeah. And I watched so. Yeah. And, For folks that haven't been availed, it's a show that chronicles, people who are preparing for candidacy for bariatric surgery, there's most of them weigh over 600 pounds.

And you don't have to believe me when I tell you, because you can look at the show yourself, maybe every single meal that those folks eat that was chronicled before their big transformation was a fun meal. Every single meal is how can I get the most food pleasure out of this meal? You start on that journey. I don't care if you're vegan or carnivore. or whatever, or you eat only at Aeroon. By the way, nice flex.

You must be quite wealthy to eat only an Aeroon. I'm kidding. I didn't say, I don't even chop there. My assistants do. I only eat there. That would be prohibitive. But, you know, any way you slice it, because here's the thing, people will go to Whole Foods.

Great establishment, amazing store. They'll go to the hot bar. Amazing food, right? They'll eat a ton of it. And they're like, I eat healthy. It's like, okay, what did you pick in the hot bar? Was it exclusively for function or was it more for taste? and they're like, I don't know, can I play the fifth?

Exactly. And so it doesn't even matter if you're eating a ton of junk food or you're eating a ton of healthy food. You start eating for pleasure of the number one organizing principle of what's going into my body next. You're going to be fatter in our current food environment. If you pick most of her meals, it's like, how would an adult eat if they just wanted to be lean and functional? If you answer that question, the affirmative eat most of the foods like that business-wise, you're going to be onto a much, much fitter body and a lot of savings for money. which I've also personally found is a lot easier for me.

Again, just my own sort of thing. When I stay away from ultra-processed foods, I'm not talking about protein powders and things like that. Sure, I'm talking about junk food. Junk food. Yeah. Like, if I have a little bit of junk food, it's so much easier to eat a lot more junk food.

If I have no junk food, it's so much easier to stick to just eating whole foods. It's almost like your palate gets used to that and you don't even have a craving for junk food until you start eating it. And then there's a whole downward cycle that ends up happening. 100%. That's a big deal.

Dr. Mike, this has been fantastic. I'd love to plug your company, RP, just talk about some of the resources that are available of what people might be able to find if they are curious about anything after our episode today. We have a YouTube channel, RP Strength, Renaissance periodization on YouTube. Just look for my face. It's ugly and is everywhere. So just click on my face.

And we just put out a video basically five days a week, educating people on how to get more muscle, less fat, and how to eat better and be healthier. So we do it all time. It's all free. And in addition to that, we have the RP Diet Coach app and the RP Hypertrophy app, which you can get linked through any YouTube video to go download those. And those are paid apps. And if you're serious about your fitness journey and you want to make a big change,

the RP Diet Coach app, it can entirely tell you what to eat and when to get you the results that you want. It'll actually even make sure you aim for realistic targets. It will, like, highly warn you like, this is too ambitious of a diet. most people fail this. You can always say I'm still good for it. But it does all the diet coaching. It reminds you every time you need a meal,

your meal pop-up occurs and all that other stuff. It's got barcode scanning, all the bells and whistles. And the hypertrophy app is an app that just makes you a workout routine that is plug and play. You can make it yourself. We have tons of templates for free in the app you can download and just use those. All the customization, I think it's probably one of the better training apps ever made. And you can access those apps and they're super swell.

The best thing about them is that they help you get in shape. and it's worth the money like crazy. The second best thing is that the CEO of RP, Mr. Nick Shaw, he has a Rolls-Royce collection, and he hasn't bought a new Rolls-Royce in a long time. And if you purchase one of our apps, you're helping a really great cause. That's awesome.

We'll link to it in the show notes below. Dr. Mike, thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.