Dhru Purohit Show - Celebrity Trainer Reveals His Weight Loss Playbook And Why Cutting Carbs Might Be Hurting Your Goals with Harley Pasternak

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Fatty15, Levels, and Ollie. When it comes to diet mistakes and fad diets, social media is full of trends and extreme ideas. But what works, stands the test of time, and is sustainable in the long run? Today’s guest shares his experience and top tips without leaving you feeling deprived. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with celebrity trainer and evidence-based educator Harley Pasternak to discuss the biggest diet mistakes he’s seen with his clients. Harley shares his controversial take on cutting out entire food groups and following overly restrictive diets. He also breaks down the top reasons why people overeat, introduces his PATH protocol, and explains the success his clients have experienced using it. Plus, Harley reflects on how his views have evolved over the years and highlights the research that now supports his current beliefs on sustainable weight loss and healthy living. Harley Pasternak is the author of six popular diet and fitness books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Body Reset Diet and The 5-Factor Diet. He holds a Master of Science degree in exercise physiology and nutritional sciences from the University of Toronto and an honors degree in kinesiology from the University of Western Ontario. He is an adjunct professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Harley Pasternak lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles. In this episode, Dhru and Harley dive into:  Breaking down the biggest diet mistakes (00:24) Why removing carbs from our diet is detrimental to our health (2:31) The PATH protocol (20:35) Excess fat consumption and how to balance calories in and out (25:05) Why are we overeating? (37:41) Harley's carb hierarchy (47:36) Things Harley changed his mind on (56:15) Harley’s perspective on health: the art of moderation (1:05:59) Toxin exposure, social media, and living an active lifestyle (1:09:09) Final thoughts and takeaways (1:14:18) Also mentioned in this episode: THE CARB RESET: Store Less Fat, Burn the Rest, and Harness the Power of Carbs to Lose Weight For more on Harley, follow him on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Fatty15, Ollie, and Levels. Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today.  Want to give your dog the best in clean eating? Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Right now, Ollie is offering 60% off your first box of meals when you subscribe today! Just head to Ollie.com, use the code DHRU and you’ll get 60% off your first box of meals in your subscription. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harley, welcome to the podcast, brother. Thanks for having me. I want to start off with something that I think will be super helpful for our audience. You have some pretty nuanced and maybe for some people some controversial takes when it comes to the topic of diet and especially weight loss. I'd love to start there by asking you, give us a few of your biggest diet mistakes that you regularly see as a celebrity trainer and evidence-based educator that's in this space. I would say short-term goals that have long-term compromise. So doing something that's not

sustainable where you remove entire food groups or a food group for hopes of short-term gains that are going to give you long-term negatives. What's an example? An example is cutting out carbs as one, cutting out entire food groups like grains or certain fruits. or you'll see books written where you have to, half the vegetables are toxic and they're bad for you without any scientific basis. So I think that's one thing I see where people are a little extreme in a way where they're doing something short term, whether it be a fast or a cleanse or something that is really, really short form. I think that's a big one for me.

Another one is over dependence on a certain ingredient or supplement. So, you know, people will lean too hard on a one powder or a pill or a capsule. or one food thinking that there's such a thing as a superfood, I think that's a challenge. And I think overcomplicated meal plans where there's, you know, I remember reading South Beach diet when it came out. And if you lived in South Beach and had access to all those restaurants or were gourmet chef, you could stick to it.

But if not, good luck being in any other city in the world and not having all the time on the world to cook these very elaborate recipes and meals. So I think those, for me, are the three that are the lowest hanging issues or problems. Let's take one that's super topical because of your new book. And that's the idea of carbs. Let's start off with this first. So removing an entire food group like carbs or going on an extreme low carb diet in some cases or just maybe even going low carb, depending on how you feel about it,

you feel that that's often detrimental to people's health. Give us the biggest reasons why. what are some of the things that end up happening or how do people end up sabotaging their ultimate goals when they end up doing that? I think first I tell people, if it works for you and you're having success and no one else gets harmed in the process, then what I say is irrelevant because if what you're doing works for your lifestyle and you feel like you look good and you feel good, there's no need to heed anything I say.

That being said, I think a lot of us think that there's some degree of sacrifice we need to make, when we're trying to be healthy. There's some pain and suffering that needs to happen when you want to be a healthier you, and that's just not the case. So I remember the first time I got to Japan, I didn't see anybody overweight. I mean, less than 4% of Japan is obese. I think 44% of the U.S. is obese, just to give you a concept. And every meal, we had white rice.

And at the time, the low-carb thing started to get really big in the United States. And it's like, I'll have the sushi, but not the white rice. I'll have this, but not the white rice. And at a certain point, I started to question, well, wait a minute, if carbohydrates are the culprit, why does the country that's the healthiest, longest living, lowest incidence of diabetes, heart disease, most cancers have amongst the highest carbohydrate intake on earth, how does it work for them? Is it genetic? So I went on and I did a pub med search and I found that there was this really interesting study

that compared Japanese people in Japan, Japanese people in Hawaii and Japanese people in California. They all have the same genetics, but the further they get away from Japan, they have less of a Japanese style diet. And they start to consume more saturated fats, and they start to consume more sugars. And what you learn is genetics are removed that the consumption of carbohydrates did not contribute to obesity or diabetes or heart disease. It was the overconsumption of certain fats. It was the overconsumption of certain sugars. It was the reduction of certain carbohydrates that actually became a risk figure. So for me, that was the first time I started to think about carbohydrates. I was a bodybuilder in my younger days.

And bodybuilders are probably when they step on stage, the leanest people you can imagine. We have veins on veins. We have striations on muscles. And we consume carbohydrates up until the day we step on stage. And so I never saw carbs as an enemy back then. So, okay, the leanest people in the world who have the most extreme physiques consume carbohydrates. The healthiest, longest living people in the world consume lots of carbs. carbohydrates. And the United States has amongst the lowest carbohydrate diets in the world, yet is

amongst, if not the most obese, unhealthy country in the world. So all of these things started to kind of make me question, like, why are we cutting out carbs again? And so that's why I started to research the book Carb Reset. We'll get into all that. But just to set up our audience, who's listening, what do you think when you saw the arguments that are out there for people talking about, hey, going low carb and some of the potential health benefits. What were the common most top reasons from the people that you felt that maybe had some truth, maybe it wasn't the whole truth, but was there some truth that was there that you were seeing that people were advocating for reducing some carbs? Yeah, I think you lose weight really quickly. When you cut out carbs,

you have the fastest weight loss. Now, almost all that weight is water because carbs are a sponge for water. So someone can say, I lost 10 pounds this week cutting out carbs. And that's probably the case. It's not 10 pounds of body fat. So for one, if you want to step on a scale and see a number get really low, really quickly, regardless of what that composition is, cutting carbs can be helpful. I think some of the foods that we tend to overconsume tend to be carbohydrates. We can over consume, you know, lots of pastas and lots of breads. And so we look at that as if we cut out carbs, we're consuming less pastries and baked goods. I think people who suffer from epilepsy, there's some interesting research on having a low carbohydrate diet for epilepsy. So I think

there are certain things where, cutting out carbs, I understand the justification. However, that it doesn't apply to most people and that doesn't apply for long term. Yeah, a lot of what people would come on this podcast and talk about, even I talked about it as well. And I'll give you kind of my take on it and then we'll go a little bit deeper into some of these recommendations because I've basically changed my mind over the years and I've kind of fallen into more of your camp. So my audience would know that a lot of individuals would come on this podcast and I would talk about this as well is that we have 88% of America is metabolically unhealthy.

Right. Right. 80 to 88% depending on the different surveys that are out there. Right. And you have a huge percentage of people, hundreds of millions of people that were pre-diabetic. Right. Forget even diabetes. You have pre-diabetes, which often goes up.

undiagnosed for years. And what people would see, whether they were using like a continuous glucose monitor, and I've invested in some of those companies, whether they would just go on carbohydrate restriction experiments themselves, is they would often see their lipids improve when it came to the classic markers of metabolic syndrome with some caveat around, let's say, their lipids, depending on how much saturated fat they were having. and when they were doing, you know, a clean keto or maybe more of a dirty keto with a lot of fat inside of the diet. So people started to see, and individuals, including myself, were big champions of, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

You want to get somebody who's pre-diabetic to immediately start to improve their life and clean up their blood work. This is fantastic. And they're not on this glucose roller coaster throughout the day. They're fasting insulin improves. Their glucose improves. people start to feel better because they're not having these crazy ups and downs. And then around, like I would say, you know, during COVID, maybe a little bit afterwards, the whole space started shifting because people realized that if you're only pulling the lever of diet as one aspect,

you're so limited. And all you have is this carbohydrate restriction. And you don't have any other tools in your toolbox. And the big piece that people were missing, including myself, they were missing this whole aspect of, actually, if you just put on a little bit more muscle and you're a little bit more active, your diet doesn't have to be as restrictive. So that's sort of the arc of where a lot of people have come. And then actually, carbohydrates can be super helpful for your goals, your gym performance, satiety, and other aspects. So I just wanted to give that background because if people in my audience are listening,

They're like, wait, what the heck? Maybe they've missed a few of these episodes. How all of a sudden have you changed your mind? And I'm just giving them the arc. But let's have you take over. When people start including, and you have a whole framework, we're going to get into it that you talk about in the book. When people start including healthy carbs in their diet and they're not overeating on ultra-processed foods. You're not telling anybody to binge on Oreos, although eating a cookie a day is one of your secrets to sticking on your diet.

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and actually see the impact of my daily choices. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners, two free months off their annual membership when you sign up using my link levels dot link slash drew if you've been waiting to take your health seriously now is the time get clarity get control and start improving your health with levels today just go to levels l-evels dot l-in-k slash drew to get two free months off their annual membership today i mean number one satiety so if you want to have fiber fiber comes from carbohydrates. You have water soluble and insoluble, and they come from whole grains and vegetables and fruits. And so the more fiber you consume to some extent, the fuller you get

and for the longer period of time, you reduce transit time, gut health, et cetera. Mental focus, your ability to be present and have the energy to do things for sustained periods of time. You don't have this brain fog that people talk about when you cut out carbs. You kind of come a little bit foggy. And there's research to support that. It's really interesting in the military looking at soldiers on no-carb diets trying to disassemble and reassemble a firearm, it's a little bit more challenging when your blood sugar is very, very low. I think quality of life and socialization, you know, so many of us think we have to do these really strict antisocial eating plans

that preclude us from eating with friends, family members, going out, and that's just not necessary. There's nothing sadder than me than someone who goes to Japan for the first time in their life and says, I can't have sushi. or goes to Italy and like, I can't touch the pasta or the pizza. Why live? What's the point of having all of these incredible experiences and staying away from them because you have this misconception that a food group is bad for you when in fact it's not?

Yeah, I like to look at the nuances around it because like a lot of things, there might be some elements where people had truth, but then you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and miss out. And in particular for me, I saw once I started getting more serious about training when I turned 40, I kind of was not regular. I was active, played pickleball, tennis, hiking, all that other fun stuff. But I wasn't regularly doing resistance training. I immediately saw you do your end of one experience.

You immediately see that in the beginning I was following a little bit more of a lower carb diet. Because I thought, wow, this is what makes sense. And my blood looks great. I feel great. I actually was one of those individuals that felt when I have too many carbs at once, I kind of get foggy brained a little bit, which is I know different than what you're talking about. But then I would perform at the gym, I would be so gassed on the days that I didn't have healthy carbohydrates. Because I'm eating protein, I'm eating fat, but I wouldn't have enough glycogen reserves to actually perform.

And then immediately the next week I'd try something different based on my trainer's recommendations, include some more white rice, sweet potatoes, whatever it might be that I feel good about. And I would see my performance immediately go up. And I think when you have that experience as somebody who is training, like a lot of our audience or getting into training, you're like, okay, there's something that's there. And I just have to personalize my unique approach to how I want to eat. But if I, the other element that you touched on, which I'd love to tease out a little bit, is that if it's so restrictive, what ends up happening, and I'm sure you've seen this even with your celebrity clientele, you have this ideal vision. I'm never going to have anything, quote, unquote, unhealthy. Right.

Or I'm never going to have a birthday cake. I'm never going to have a chocolate or a chocolate cookie. You get so restrictive. Great. Sounds good in theory, but we're not robots. You end up eating that thing, which is totally fine. And you feel so bad about it, you end up saying, fuck this whole diet.

I'm not going to do anything anymore. Talk about that. Yeah, it's very binary. It's very all or none. And it comes back to this idea that there has to be some sense of sacrifice, pain, or suffering in order to be a healthier person in order to lose weight. And I think the most important thing I always start off telling people is, if you're here to lose weight, it's very simple.

If you burn more calories than you take in, you'll lose weight. End of story. And so I give them the analogy of money. So if you spend $100 a day and you don't make any money, it doesn't matter if you're spending 1001s, 520s, 10, 10, you're spending $100 a day. So if you're consuming, we have two identical twins and they're both consuming 2,000 calories a day.

And one is consuming 2,000 calories a day from broccoli and salmon, and one is consuming 2,000 calories a day from chocolate cake. Within reason, they're going to lose the same amount of weight if they're the same active, same genetics, if they're consuming the same calories. One will be healthier than the other. One will have better energy levels.

One will have better blood lipid profiles. One will be able to keep it up longer, but at the end of the day, it's calories in versus calories out. So as you mentioned before, if we're only focusing on the diet part of things, if we're only focusing on that, cutting out carbs has no benefit over cutting out fat or cutting out protein. You're cutting out calories. And you're cutting out calories that are important and that are healthy and fruits and vegetables and whole grains. There's no reason for us to cut those out thinking we're going to be healthier for them and then replace them with a bacon, double cheeseburger with no bun

It's not the bun that's going to get you. It's the bacon double cheeseburger. I think that's something we need to remember and be a little more logical about. So one of the quotes, I can't remember, I think a few people have said some version of this on this podcast, on X, on Instagram, wherever. They'll say, hey, listen, calories in versus calories out is factual, right? Thermodynamics. And the context is it's not always practical. Right.

And what they mean by that is often that, hey, we do know, based on studies from the NIH, people like Kevin Hall and other individuals, that people who eat the same amount of calories, but more of a percentage from ultra-processed foods, they spontaneously eat 500 more calories a day. Right. They kind of trying to, they're, they just naturally gravitate, which obviously is eating more calories. Right. Right. So that's creating the weight gain.

Right. But people who have the same amount of calories roughly in a controlled study but are eating more from whole foods just don't have that urge to sort of overeat that's there. You would agree with that. And that comes back to satiety from fiber, satiety from protein and healthy fats. And that's the key thing is yes, if you consume 2,000 calories a day of chocolate cake, you're probably still going to be hungry at the end of the day. And the person consuming 2,000 calories from legumes and broccoli and salmon probably won't be healthy or hungry at the end of the day like you're in. Okay, so you've made this super simple and you have a framework. We're going to talk about it in a second. It's called Path. Yep. Right? Yeah.

But tee it up. Tell us how you kind of arrived at this place that you give this recommendation, not only to your followers, but your celebrity clientele. And basically anybody that will listen to your approach, tee it up a little bit. Give us the background and then let's break down the protocol. So for years, I've been giving people hand gestures to let them know how much they should have at each meal of each meal. of each macronutrient. And so the first is a P for palm in the word path.

And palm full of carbohydrates, whether it be sweet potatoes, whether it be whole grains like rice, quinoa oats, millet, amaranth, teff, barley, whether it be high fiber fruits, whether it be legumes, beans and lentils of any kind, this much in a meal, approximately. And then A, in the word path, is all the vegetables you want, as many as you want. There's no limitation to the amount of non-starchy vegetables

that you want to have. T is about the mass of your thumb of healthy fat from the base to the tip, avocados, nut, seeds, olives, about that much. Tea for thumb. And H is at least the mass of your hand of protein, fish, chicken, mean meats, et cetera, this much. So if you follow the path, you don't have to weigh your food because that's not sustainable and that's, you know, that's difficult and pretty antisocial to walk around with a scale. And we don't need to be precise with these things. We need to be approximate because this is a marathon, not a sprint. So this is easy for me to do. And also, I have bigger hands than some other people because I'm a bigger person. And I tend to have more requirements than someone else. So that's why I find this to be very helpful. So give us a little bit

more background. So any meal that somebody might be having, they can use this process. Yep. So that includes breakfast, lunch, dinner. This morning for breakfast, I had a yogurt parfait. So I had this much Greek yogurt. I used a plain non-fat Greek yogurt, an Icelandic yogurt, Bisiqi, this much. And then I had a palmful of blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, from wild berries. And I had some nut butter in there for my healthy fat. And now, I don't have vegetables at all of my meals. Sometimes at breakfast, when you want something sweet, you're probably not going to have a vegetable. But, you know, today at lunch, I definitely did. I had a shirashi bowl. So I had this much rice. I had a palmful.

A palm full of rice. Yep, a pomeful of white rice. I had a fist size of salmon sashimi. It was really simple. I didn't have to cook it. I had tons of seaweed in there. Went to Korea Town today at lunch and got a bunch of some seaweed. And then for my healthy fat, I had some avocado the size of my thumb.

So it was a great, simple way to assemble with no cooking involved. Amazing. And, you know, it's midday right now. But let's talk about dinner. So tonight for dinner and you have a family. Are you using this method with them? Absolutely. Okay, great.

So walk us through how you're sort of thinking about and organizing for dinner using this path method. So tonight I know for a fact that we are having grilled shrimps on skewers as it's a barbecue season. So that's going to be at least the mass of my thumb of shrimps. So that's going to be the fist part, the H and path. The A part is going to be tons of vegetables that we put on the skewers as well. So I've got roasted red peppers and yellow peppers and zucchini that we're putting on the skewers with the shrimps

that we cook at the same time. And will you, obviously, you guys have been doing this for a long time now and you teach this. But when your clients are doing this or people you talk to, are they actually physically sometimes placing, so it's path, the age, hand of protein, are they physically placing like a piece of chicken or salmon or tofu or whatever their protein of choices?

Are they physically placing it in their hands? I think you can kind of eyeball it at a certain point. And there is a margin of error. Like it doesn't have to be precise. We're not talking ounces. But approximate. Yeah. So for me,

I can tell you that my fist is about eight ounces. So I need at least eight ounces of protein. I'm a bigger person. Someone who's smaller, there might be five ounces approximately. Once you know how many ounces, you're like, okay,

I can replicate this in a way where I don't have to actually put raw fish on my hand every single time. So, so shrimp, all the vegetables. Yeah, so dinner time, we have shrimp and vegetables.

And then we actually have sweet potatoes that we're doing on the barbecue. as well. I love sweet potatoes. Actually, we use the purple Japanese ones. And we have, our healthy fat comes from olive oil. So instead of a solid one, we're using a tablespoon of olive oil as we cook the vegetables and as we finish them off. And that's it. Simple. So a lot of people are listening to this, including myself, and they're like, that sounds healthy. That seems like very reasonable. That's kind of what I think I do. But you see everything that kind of doesn't work for people. So what's the opposite of that? What are people doing that is not that? I think, um,

A lot of the times people think they're eating carbohydrates, they're not. So when you think about, oh, I stay away from French fries because I'm on a low carb diet, French fries are actually a fat. They receive most of their calories from fat. They're deep fried in oil. The oils sucks in and absorbs into the potatoes that you're eating. They're primarily a fat. Potato chips are primarily a fat.

Donuts are not a carbohydrate. They get most of their calories from fat. They're cooked in oil and they're a sponge for oil. So I think, you know, I'm having a baked sweet potato, which is a big, about 110 calories for this whopping delicious sweet potato. Some people will have French fries instead of that. And it'll be 400 calories of French fries for the same volume that I'm having of a sweet potato. I think I'm having shrimp.

If you go to Cheesecake Factor and you have the coconut shrimp that's battered and has this really sweet sauce and got coconut with it, you know, my 150 calories of shrimp is probably going to be 800 calories the way that they're consuming it. And so, those are like simple examples of the way that you can take one great ingredient and prepare it in a different way. And it's almost always going to be through added fats. There's a great stat that will blow your mind. Between 1975 and 2024, the average American consumes about 700 calories more per day. Of those 700 calories, how many calories do you think come from sugar?

of those 700 extra calories reading per day. Probably a low amount. 700 calories. How many are coming from sugar? 100? 40. 40. All right, crazy fact.

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oat milk. We're adding fats to breads. We're adding oils to everything that we do to get a longer shelf life, to get different mouthfield to, you know, they're cheap calories. And so I would say that it's the addition of fats and sugars that are the issue and not carbohydrates. So I can't remember that stat, but there was that infograph, which was like Americans on average are eating like 200 pounds of sugar a year. Right. And I'll have to fact check that after the podcast and everything. But your argument is that of the quantifiable calories that people are having, right? Sure, people might be eating more sugar in different areas, but as related to energy expenditure, which directly translates into gaining weight, the vast majority are coming from added fats and added oils. That's what's

contributing to that. From eating too many calories. Yeah. And fats have almost two and a half times the color density of carbohydrates and of proteins. And two and a half times the calories of sugar. So, you know, if you're going to have someone have a licorice stick, well, I'm not saying it's healthy for you by any means, but if they're having 60, 70 calories of liquor stick, which is mainly sugar, they're almost more scared of that than they are of eating, you know, a whole bunch of bacon in clotted fat with coconut cream. Yet one of them is exponentially worse for you. One of them has, you know, triple the caloric density almost per ounce or per gram. And so I think we have to rethink things. This low carb thing, At the turn of the century before we had insulin, right? Banting and Best Institute at my alma mater at University of Toronto, we came up with insulin to save lives for diabetics, type 1 diabetics. At the turn of the century, if someone had type 1 diabetes, we would give them zero carbohydrates. They would be on a zero carbohydrate diet because if you had carbs because they didn't

produce insulin, they would essentially die. So it saved some lives for some periods of time. Fast forward many years later, you have Dr. Atkins who really popularized the low carb diet in a way that we see it today. and that's because he was a surgeon doing cardiovascular surgery on people who needed it. Most of these were very obese people. They were too obese to go under general anesthesia. He came up with this quick fix, rapid, ultra-extreme diet.

He never claimed was healthy for you. He never claimed was something that should be sustained. But if you cut out carbs, you step on a scale, you lose weight really, really quickly. And that weight's primarily water, a little bit of fat, and a little bit of lean muscle tissue. And so people were able to lose weight so he could operate on them, put them under general anesthesia. this was never designed to be healthy. This was never designed to be a lifestyle. This was never designed to stick with you.

And so we're seeing it ebb and flow over the years. We've seen the popularity of low carb in the 60s and 70s. And then we went to high carb and low fat in the 80s and 90s when I grew up. And then it returned back to the high. And every time we go to that low carb, you see obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, all of them go up. So statistically speaking, as America has become more of a low carb country, were actually exponentially more unhealthy. Could the same be said, I think I read online

or someone in your book that you kind of fell into the whole snack wall craze, right? 100 calories, this is fine. Couldn't the same be said that we just are on this general trend where we're just consuming more, whether it's high carb or low carb, because even during the snack well trend, everybody was like, get rid of fat, and they were probably eating different pockets, I'm sure.

They're probably eating a higher carb diet. but in general, people were just eating too many calories and probably getting a lot of processed foods. So I agree directionally with you, but I'm just wondering genuinely as a question, hasn't it been regardless of what trend that we've been on that we're just gaining weight because fundamentally at the end of the day,

people aren't working out, they don't have enough muscle, and they're overeating on calories. I would say the main driver is we're eating too much. Yeah. That's the main driver. and removing carbohydrates is not the answer. And in fact, most of the people that are, you know,

sitting down and having 1,500 calories from a filet mignon with blue cheese butter on top, et cetera, thinking they're being healthy are actually not. And I'd rather them have 500 calories of steak and some pasta or some lentils or a sweet potato for a meal that has 30, 35% less calories. And they haven't had to remove a food group. And I think that's the most important thing is you've said it well,

is we've replaced one problem with another problem. And when we remove one food group, one food group, we overdo another food group. And also, as you mentioned, this overconsumption of hyper-processed foods tends to be an issue. And high-carbohydrate hyper-processed foods tend to be more abundant and more available to us. The problem is not carbs. It's the over-consumption of overly processed versions of carbs. Rice is good, rice flour is not good.

Kinawa is great. Kinawa flour is not great. and so on. Fruits are amazing. Fruit juice is not great. I know firsthand, I saw that when I was in a lower carbohydrate diet, I was really excited. I was getting my blood work done through, I had invested in this company Levels, which was one of the main companies that was doing like CGMs. I was so excited. I had so many my family members. And I thought, wow, this is like real time feedback of glucose monitoring so that you can see like how you eat. And then I was most interested in like, how do you feel? Do you feel like tired afterwards? Do you feel clear-headed? Do you feel this? And I would see a trend. I would see

that when people had more stabilized blood sugar and naturally you eat and your blood sugar goes up and it kind of comes down, but they don't have these crazy roller coasters throughout the day, they feel better. And I felt better that was there. What I saw though, and it's not a butt, it's more an end, is that also when I started training regularly and I added, I was super undermuscled. Yeah. And I added about 8.9 pounds of muscle, you know, tracking through like Dexa and working with my trainer, I saw that I could get away with more carbs, enjoy more, right? Enjoy more some white rice, some siete chips, whatever it might be, whatever your carbohydrate of

choices, still not overeat, add some muscle. And I even saw my fasting insulin go down a little bit more. It was never really high, but I saw it go more into the optimal category. And I think that that's where the wellness industry did a lot of like growing up. And I think a lot of the strongest voices there have shifted a little bit. I'm not going to say for everybody. I'm not here to speak on anybody's behalf. But a lot of the people have shifted because they realize like that can't be the only

lever that you try to optimize your health with. Right. Otherwise you become so restricted and you may not actually end up being any healthier anyway. Yep. You need to do an extreme of something to compensate for doing nothing of something else. Yes. And so if you're sleeping pretty well and,

strength training pretty well and eating pretty well, you're golden. If you're not doing any one of those, there's no amount of the other ones that's going to make up for it. Yeah, you can't make up for it. If you have this beautiful tree you've planted in your yard and it's getting no sunlight, you can't give it extra water and extra air to compensate for the lack of sunlight. You still need sunlight. You just need a little bit of all three. It's the same thing with our body. Were you aware of the whole controversy around Atkins dying and like how he died and everything?

Yeah, very well. In fact, as we were talking about Atkins, it almost came on a lot. my mouth. But look, bless him, I think had very good intentions. I think what was probably helped saved a lot of lives through being a surgeon and what he did. And maybe even through his diet for some people has really been helpful. But he died overweight and he died of leave heart disease. Yeah. And the sort of official statement was that he tripped and he fell and maybe had like a stroke or a blood clot or something like that. I can't remember exactly. You know, whatever it is to his family, I would never speak ill of him and I wish them all well. But I will tell you what's interesting.

is when I was trying to make the argument in the book of, it's all that matters is calories and calories out if you're talking only about weight loss, only about weight loss, as far as the input of calories, and not the output through muscle mass, etc. There's all these great case studies of academics trying to prove the point of thermodynamics,

and there was a professor in the 1980s that went for 90 days and only at white potatoes, and he had 1,800 calories a day of white potatoes, and he lost something like 44 pounds. And then there was another professor who went on the Twinkie diet. He ate Twinkies, ho-hos, and ding-dongs only for 60 days. And he lost something like 38, 40 pounds. Controlled for calories or just however much he wants to eat?

Controlled for calories. And then there was, you know, the McDonald's diet. And then there's all these great examples of diet. Here in Beverly Hills, when I moved to the U.S., there was a weight loss doctor. They were doing the Beverly Hills cookie diet. I mean, I've seen it all. And everything's in L.A. You have all this stuff.

Everyone crazy in L.A. But it does remind you to the fact that. at the end of the day, it comes down to how many calories are you taking in? How many calories are you burning? And if you're taking in less calories, you're going to lose weight. And if you're burning more calories, you're going to lose weight. And hopefully when you burn calories, it's in an efficient, sustainable way. And if you're taking in calories, it's in a healthy, sustainable, efficient way. And that's what it comes down to. And that's why I'm celebrating, you got to eat carbs. You don't need to punish yourself anymore. You can have a potato.

You know, you have this whole section of the book where you go into the trigger map. You help people understand why are you overeating? Because somebody can listen to you and say, listen, from a science standpoint, okay, great, I understand the laws of thermodynamics. You can't, you know, lose weight without eating more than what you expense. Even though a lot of people, even people that have been on this podcast previously and maybe even me at one point in time felt that, no, there's more of the story that's there, right? Whether it was the carbohydrate insulin model or whatever else.

But largely, largely, I would say the people that I respect in the space have, you know, changed their mind on that. And the carbohydrate insulin model is also about calories in versus calories. Yes. Yes. They argue it's not. And then at the end, they're like, and you gain weight because you're hungry and you eat more calories. So isn't that calories in calories out?

They're like, well, I guess so. Yeah. And even some people that still felt that way, I think OZMPIC and GLPs have really changed the conversation because people are like, at the end of the days, there are some people that are still eating ultra-process diets that are on g-lps what's happening ultimately they're just eating less food yeah right that's not the healthy way to do it we want them to do it in other ways uh but ultimately if you're going to lose weight you're eating less food so backing up i was saying that somebody's listening they're like okay that's factual but now help me make it practical help me understand why am i overeating

what do you want to share about the trigger map with that you could be overeating for a number of reasons. You could be overeating because of lack of education of understanding, you know, what foods make you feel full versus not. So if you're having hyper-processed foods that have no fiber, very little protein, very little healthy fats, there's an empty pit. I could, I mean, I don't know about you. I could have 20 bags of potato chips and not be full. Yeah. You don't even realize it. What's the worst example of that when it comes to starting your morning off and breakfast? What's the worst example of that you can think of? I would say juice is a big one. People think I'm having a healthy day.

I'm going to take these beautiful fruits that were grown with love and, you know, so much went into them. And I'm going to put them in a machine and squeeze the colored water out of them. And I'm going to knock back 600 calories of just liquid sugar with none of the fiber, none of the satiety properties of them. You know, when you think of apple juice, orange juice, all of these guava pineapple juices, I just, people are in shock when you say, do you know, you just consumed 150 grams of sugar, zero grams of fiber?

How do you feel? They're like, I'm still hungry. Exactly. So I think that's one of them. I read this stat that Americans consume 60% of their daily sugar by 10 a.m. Wow. So I think breakfast is a big one. Sugared cereals, sugared coffees is a really big one. Pastries at Starbucks. You know, I'm nothing against Starbucks, but, you know, they really sell a lot of pastries in the morning to people. So I think rethinking breakfast, I would almost always do a savory breakfast in anticipation that you're probably not going to overeat as much. of a savory breakfast for some people. Replace juices with smoothies and make sure you're a little more thoughtful about it because you can't put eight apples in a smoothie.

It would just be too big. You could in a juice and still be hungry. So I think that's a big one. Yeah, so you were giving an example of a bad way to start off your morning, right? Something that's going to throw your morning off, going to have you consuming a bunch of sugar, which is not inherently an issue,

but void of any fiber and other things it might be there, void of any protein. And you got there because you were breaking down the trigger map. Yeah. The reasons that people overeat. So the first reason you mentioned, you're undereducated. Yeah. And you're shooting for something that might have marketing, trends around it, a juice cleanse, whatever it could be.

And juice was one example. What's another reason that people overeat? Distraction. So when you're watching Netflix or you're, you know, looking at your phone or you're texting people and you're not paying attention to what you're eating and you're not present, we tend to overeat when we do that, regardless of what macronutrient we're eating. So I think being present is really important and not being entertained while you eat. The idea of TV dinners was something that really changed the health of America. Swanson and all these other TV dinners where you would come home and just be eaten mindlessly

because you were watching television. So I think everything that's happened since then has just made the problem worse. Yeah. A big thing that I see there, as I've been helping my family sort of clean up their diet over the years and friends and getting away from sort of ultra-processed food, and maybe binge eating, is you see this thing when people don't eat enough, especially in the morning, right? I've noticed that you don't eat enough, you're not satiated enough, you haven't had the

handful of protein, maybe the thumb of fat, you know, the vegetables and the fiber and appropriate carbohydrates, right, the palm of carbohydrates that you talk about. When you haven't eaten enough, you're working, you're expanding all this mental energy. You know, something I learned from Dr. Walter Longo, who's been on this podcast, is that most Most of the world, when they fast, if they're fasting for religious reasons, right, from a particular tradition or Ramadan, Yomkin-Ramada, exactly, yeah, different traditions. They're not skipping breakfast. They skip dinner.

Right. And it's during a particular time or season that might be there. Some cases, maybe some health reasons that might be there tied into spiritual. But the reason why is that you need a lot of brain power in the morning. You're working out on the field. You're running around. You're a merchant. You need that energy.

So you have people who eat a very, like, sugary breakfast or no breakfast, right? I'm going to intermittent fast. I'm going to skip breakfast. And then all of a sudden they're working. It's midday, 11. Lunch is coming up. You know, they're going to eat a later lunch. And they're like, I'm freaking famished right now.

I just need to eat anything. I don't even have the time to order something healthy. What's the closest thing that's there or the thing that I can reach for? And then you naturally end up overeating. Right. So overeating because you're on this sort of swing of just being so hungry and not appropriately fueled throughout the day. And then you add to that, people working out fasted or doing some sort of hit training or

exercise in the morning without appropriate fuel. There's no wonder you're so famished and you're just going to eat anything that you can get your hands on. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yeah. You're saying, I'm going to fast and not eat for this chunk of the day. But you're inevitably, your body's going to be so ravenous by the time you do eat next time, like you said, you'll have less control over what you eat, how much you eat. You probably

won't be in as much of a logical decision-making place of the day. And we know from research that if you take two groups and one of them consumes 2,000 calories a day over three meals of the day, and one group consumes 2,000 calories a day through a feeding window where they've intermittent fasting at the end of the day, they've taken in the same amount of calories. There is no advantage of the fasting whatsoever. We know that through long-term studies. There is zero advantage for weight management of fasting at any amount. Yeah. There is some interesting data around fasting in the context of somebody doing immunotherapy,

chemotherapy that came out of USC and the Longo Institute. That is interesting. God forbid, I hope nobody ends up in that situation is there. But with cancer being on the rise and everything, there's some interesting data that's up there. And with pediatric epilepsy. Fasting. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because that's the ultimate ketogenic diet essentially is going to be fast. Exactly. Yeah. But we're talking, you know, such a small percentage, luckily, a very, very small percentage of the population. It's like making everything gluten-free because 0.8% of America is celiac. Yeah. You know, so when we talk about gluten, it's fine for almost everybody to consume, except for a very small group of people. Thoughts on that. You know, you have a lot of people. I'm definitely one of them that feels that way that I genuinely feel like I notice a difference between the gluten here and in Europe and there's different people saying that it's long grain.

over there and, you know, they're using, you know, better starters if they're using like sourdough bread and it doesn't feel like it sits like a brick over here unless you're getting like super high quality gluten. What are your thoughts on that? Gluten is gluten. I think people really romanticize ingredients and foods around the world. There are a few places in the world that produce most of the world's wheat. And when you look at Europe, most of that wheat comes from Ukraine to some extent. Most of the other parts of the world get wheat from Canada is one of the largest consumers of wheat in the world. It's less about where you get the wheat and it's more about what you do with it once you get it. And fermentation is a

massive part of how our body can process gluten. And so Michael Pollan, he had this great book where he talked about breadmaking. And for thousands of years, humans could live very healthy lives consuming almost only bread for most of their diet. I mean, they'd have other things, but bread was a the largest food stuff in their diet. And back then, we would ferment grains for a much longer period of time. And during that fermentation process, the nutritional bioavailability of the food changes drastically. And then we had the industrial revolution.

And so all of a sudden, World War I, the United States had to create food for millions of soldiers and very cheaply and very quickly. And so we found ways of using industrial yeast and not taking the time to ferment bread in the way that we used to ferment bread. 5, 6, 7, 8 days of fermentation. I mean, really beautiful bread making.

And as a result, we ended up with a very different product. It's sort of a cake. You think of Wonderbread, right? Wonderbread is very cakey and very, very different than a beautiful handcrafted, fermented bread that's been fermenting for many, many days. So I think it's a lot less about the wheat. Gluten is gluten, right? It's like the water here versus the water there.

Water is water. H2O is H2O. Sure, there's other things that can be in the water, and gluten can be accompanied by other things in that grain. But I think it's more about the fermentation and the preparation of the wheat after it's been picked. Yeah. So when you have bread and you regularly do, you have this framework called the carb hierarchy, right? Best, moderate, least often.

Sure. And it goes into sort of your larger principle of I'm not going to demonize any sort of one food group, although we did talk about fruit juice being pretty not healthy for you. But you can have it occasionally. Desert. Right? Desert. Yeah. Yeah.

So apply that approach, the carb hierarchy, best, moderate, least often, to how your family chooses, makes or selects the bread that you have regularly. And as you just mentioned, there is no banned ingredient. There's no such thing as a bad ingredient, just a bad diet. There's no bad meal, just a bad diet. And I think that's something people need to repeat as a mantra. Like, eating this will not harm you. You know, if someone has fruit loops and you have a blue loop, one blue loop, you can't say,

I don't want it. Why? it's not going to even make a ripple in your pond of health. Well, there's a second aspect of that. If you're that, I choose not to eat for loops, but also too, if you're that fragile, that a small, we're not talking about binging an entire box or whatever, right, but a serving of a particular food can throw you off without you having, let's say, like an autoimmune condition.

Yeah. Right? Or something where maybe you might not be celiac, but you're on the spectrum. of having some sort of, you know, extreme sensitivity, and you've worked that out with your doctor. Yeah. Because that's a debated area, right? One of the top researchers in the space of celiac disease is an Italian physician.

And he was the one that really helped people understand that, hey, there's this category that impacts gut health, zanine levels that's called non-celiac gluten sensitivity. And there are, and his name is Alessio Fasano. And his work initially was like poo-poohed, like this is crazy. But he's done a lot of strong research showing that there are some people that are there that have maybe not the healthiest guts or some other things that are going on with intestinal permeability. Right.

We used to not like the word leaky gut. It turns out there is some truth that's there to it. And the best way to actually not have it is having healthy fiber instead of diet. So there could be some reasons that people have or choose to avoid certain things. I eat dairy. I break out. I wish I could eat dairy more regularly. And I've tried so many different versions, a little bit of cheese.

So I would press you on that because, and not that you're wrong in any way. But when people talk about having an issue with dairy, dairy is, it's like, I can't eat salad because I get sick. Well, what is it in the salad? Right. It's not the salad. Is it the lettuce? Is it the cucumbers? Is it the radish?

There's something in the dairy that's aggravating you. Yeah. So maybe it's the casein. Is it the way? Because it happens with Way as well, too. Does Way have casein inside? No. Okay.

So there's something that's going on where it happens with it. Cheese and way. No, I get, I get pimples. Okay, so. I don't feel, I don't feel bad at all. I feel great, actually. Like, I love the taste of dairy. And again, this is a very unique thing.

I'm not saying this is being applied to everybody else. I'm not telling other people to stop eating dairy. Yes. I think dairy is an amazing food. My ancestors for years, probably the only way that people in India got away with the vegetarian diet is that they had so much dairy. That's right. And they were getting such high quality calories, protein, other things.

There's not really examples of people in around the world. world being vegetarian without dairy. Right. Everybody was consuming. Right. Dairy. There's no examples of people long term being vegan that I understand. No.

No. Right. So again, I'm not telling other people to do that. I eat all other food groups sort of there. I just don't know why. I just don't do as well with dairy and I break out and it's more of a cosmetic thing that's there for me. Right.

But anyways, nonetheless, the point that I was going into is outside of maybe a few instances that might be there. I'm guessing it's the way because there is some published data on way and skin conditions. So it exists. Yeah. Yeah. And it also could be, I've heard some gut microbiologists say that because you also cut out dairy very early, because you were having this issue. I had terrible acne all throughout high school. I got, I cut out dairy. Yeah. Mostly because I kind of bought into the animal rights component at that time. Yeah. But I also, So I'd heard somebody say that, hey, sometimes it can improve skin and that sort of thing. I did it and I thought I found the miracle.

Right. Because in one and a half month, my acne went completely away and I had four years of pimples and dating girls and prom photos with pimples. You bet if somebody told me that not drinking water would have done it and it worked, I would have done that. And you think that the acne went away because you removed dairy. I mean, that's the only thing that I removed at the time. I was still eating Taco Bell. It could have been it. Yeah.

Yeah. And there is some aspects about puberty and timing and timing and other stuff. You know the story of the woman who brings her daughter to the doctor? And the doctor's like, gosh, she's sick. She needs to go in antibiotics for a week. And the mom's like, I don't know, antibiotics. Well, what if we don't put her in antibiotics? The doctor's like, well, she'll be better in seven days.

And so not to minimize. No, not at all. I want to give people the whole aspect. And what the microbiologist was saying is that, look, maybe there was something that was there. And again, the maybe could have been. timing could have been you are reactive could have been this could have been that who knows we it wasn't a study yeah we don't know but because you also didn't have dairy for so many years after that right you could have developed a gut microbiome that now sees dairy as a little bit of an invader right

and is that causing some sort of response in your system and and there's no way to exactly know but could that be the reason that you're saying that you eat dairy and the next day you have a pimple yeah right either way I wish I could eat dairy yeah And I'll probably continue to try to incorporate it through different experiments. Your ancestors will be, you know, really upset about this. Yeah, they'll be very upset about this. Nowhere cows are treated better than that. We were going back to the carb hierarchy.

Yes. And how your family chooses. And then I asked you about gluten, we got on this tangent. So how does your family choose using this hierarchy, best, moderate, least often when it comes to the topic of bread? Because a lot of people enjoy bread. When it comes to bread, we like to get our bread from a farmer. market when possible. We make our own bread when possible. And so really you're looking for something that is, looks pretty crunchy granola. You can see some of the grains still in there. It's not

as processed as a wonder bread. There's some sharp edges sometimes in there. So you have some whole grains still in the bread. Fermented. Fermented. Fermented is a really long fermented. The better. We like a sourdough tends to be a really nice bread. Sourdough is very fermented. There's a great studies looking at consumption of sourdough and impact on blood sugar levels compared to other sorts of breads. And so their sourdough is pretty great. I think whenever possible, I try and select a bread when it's storebought as being less than 100 calories per slice when possible.

Okay. Less than 100 calories per slice. Yeah. When possible, at least three grams of fiber per those 100 calories when possible. Yeah. And people realize that if you're just shopping at a regular grocery store, that can sometimes you've got to look a little bit because a lot of breads have no fiber. And this is the reason why, regardless of what diet people follow, if you're following a little bit of the standard

American diet, we know that your diet is basically devoid in fiber. I think the average person is getting less than 15 grams of fiber a day. Yeah, exactly. Yep. And they're supposed to be getting over 30 grams a day. Yeah. And then, you know, if a bread does not have a lot of fiber, what I'll do sometimes for the kids is sometimes I'll give them what's the third category in my hierarchy, which would be fun bread. So cuisans or brosches or hollows or things like that. And for that, I'll generally do something to make it healthier. So I might make them French toast in the morning. Maybe I'll use a brooch sometimes. But then I'll take a bunch of blackberries and raspberries and I'll put them in a pot, warm them up with some monk fruit. And on top, there's this beautiful berry compote, adding fiber

and adding nutrients to that decadent bread. So I balance it out. But at the end of the day, like I said, there's no bad ingredient. Just bad diet. Yeah, that's great. What are some other areas over years? I think it's always useful for our audience to kind of hear this. Where have you changed your mind over the years that has arrived you at where you're at? You talked about you kind of fell into the snack wells thing. That was what everybody was talking about then. A lot of people did, hey, just eat this cookie and that's a great way.

And you can kind of, you know, get through life on this ultra low fat diet. What else have you changed your mind on? I used to try and find ways to make decadent foods healthier versions. specifically dessert. And I've come to the conclusion that you should never compromise on decadence. And things that really bring you joy, you should find the best of that, the ones where you take a bite and afterwards like that was worth every single bite. There's not many things we can say that about, right?

So when it comes to cookies, for example, I used to do all these different healthy cookies and it's not to say I don't still do those for my kids. And those are meals for my kids. Those aren't desserts. Like I can do, you know, healthy apple pie cookies, oatmeal cookies for my kids. and they'll have it as breakfast with a glass of milk and have a great meal. But if I want a treat and I want chocolate, I'm not going to have 95% dark chocolate because it's low in sugar, hell no.

And anyone who claims that that's their favorite chocolate in the world is brainwashed. I promise you, there's no way when you're having that bitter of a chocolate is not as great as other chocolates. If I want to have dessert, I'm going to have the best dessert I possibly can and have a small amount and don't do it too often. And for me, that's really important. And if you want to eat well your whole life, that's where my daily chocolate chip cookie comes. for me, that's my thing. You can find whatever your thing is. But I strength train, I walk, I sleep well, I have a great diet.

I wouldn't be able to keep that up for more than a month if I didn't have a pressure valve, if I didn't have a stress release, if I didn't have something where I can say, oh, God, that was so good. And for me, that's my chocolate chip cookie. Yeah. That's what I do. And I'll never compromise on it. So that's one thing I've changed, definitely.

If I could tee you up for something, the sort of opposite of that for many years that people were talking about was you had a few different versions. One we already talked about, which was be super strict. If you're not strict on this diet, it's a moral failing. And that could fall into any of the trends we've seen. Raw food, you know, vegan for maybe health reasons specifically could be there. Extreme dieting in any other category that might be there. The other version of that that was out there was, okay, do a cheat day.

Right. Right. Yeah. Hey, be strict the entire week. Right. whether it's every other week or once a week, have a cheat day. Why does that approach not often work for me? So, again, I came from the bodybuilding background.

In the early 90s, I was a bodybuilder, and we had cheat days. And that was just something that was, we did it because Arnold did it. You mean, that was sort of, there was no science or rhyme or reason to it, but that was something we did. And what I found was, and I can think of an example, I was training an actor on a movie years ago called Cold Creek Manor. And the lead of the actor, he was awesome. and I had to train him to look like he had been in prison for many years, working out every day to come out and get his revenge to kill someone, kill Sharon Stone or someone.

And so I had a meeting so clean. I mean, every down to the ounce he was so clean. And his workouts, in his cardio and everything was just on point. And I had him do the bodybuilder thing where I said, okay, we're going to do a cheat day once a week. And we would pick a different city. And we would spend all week researching that city. So, okay, this Sunday, we're going to New York.

We're flying to New York for the day. and we're going to hit this Carnegie Deli and then we're going to hit this pizza place and then we're and we were so nauseous and sick by 11 a.m. already. I mean, we couldn't breathe. We were sick to our stomachs. And it wasn't a positive thing. I started to dread these days. We did it to Philly. Where's the best cheesecake? We did it to, we went to all these places and it was kind of fun at the beginning and then we stopped doing it and I said, I have an idea. Instead of us doing this cheat day, we're almost forcing ourselves. We have a heavy brunch and then we force ourselves. to have a heavy lunch.

And we don't even want to eat anymore, but we got to have it. It's cheat dinner. Instead of doing that, I go, let's split it up. It's my birthday this Wednesday. Okay? I don't want to have a cheat day this Wednesday,

but I want to have cake on my birthday. And then this Saturday, it's my best friend's wedding anniversary. So why don't we have two cheat meals? And I don't use the word cheat, because that also connotates guilt or negativity. Two free meals a week. They're two free meals.

They're free to do what you want. If you don't want to be indulgent, don't. If you want to drink alcohol with your meal, and that's the thing and have a healthy meal, then do that. Do whatever you want. There's no rules. It's free.

And so it gives you the flexibility to do something, and you could every three days have a free meal and still be okay if you're doing everything else well. Yeah, I love that approach. The first time I had heard somebody in the sort of health space talk about that in a way that just felt super reasonable was Marxist. Do you know Mark Sisson? Yeah, sure.

Yeah, he's known as, primal. Yeah, primal, kind of the godfather of the paleo movement. I was at an event at this group called Summianian. series many years ago. Right from. Yeah. Great group of guys that started and everything. Elliot and, uh,

Jeremy. Yep, Jeremy. All really good guys. I've been involved with that community for years. And they had an event up at their Utah place. And we were inviting and we were having like a health weekend. And I, we reached out to him and said, I was curating it. I was help curating the people.

We said, why don't you come through? And he came through. And you know, from the outside, people think of him as like hardcore paleo. You got to eat like our ancestors. But really, when you get into his material, he's actually a very, like, flexible guy, wants people to do what they want to do, does believe that the more that we live in alignment with sort of how our circadian biology was designed to be that our life is going to be easier and we're probably going to have less disease. And that naturally, if we're eating healthy, we're going to just have less cravings for other stuff that's out there. And then fine, you want to eat other things, fine. I can remember somebody in the audience said, what is your approach to dessert?

and the other reason that I love Mark is not only is he married. Yeah. And, you know, no knock on people that are not. Right. But I think when you have health advice, when you're married, and also you have kids and you have a good relationship with your kids, that's a whole other thing that comes. I often, when I take advice from people or hear people giving advice,

I'll do a little gut check inside and say, okay, is this guy have a sound life? Is this the type of life that I want to have inside as well? Yeah. He said, listen, I, tonight, they'll have dessert. Yeah. I think actually they legitimately were making a cookie that night from one of the chefs that were there as part of summit. He said, I'll see that.

And because I don't ever restrict myself, I'll say, great, I'll have of it. And I'm in a place in my life where, great, that's a few bites for me. I might even finish the whole cookie, unless if it's really good. And then I get the point and I move on with my life. But I never am in a situation where I'm like, you shouldn't do that. It's a moral failing to have that dessert. You're a bad person if you eat it. It's like, okay, I got the point.

That's great. Wow, that was a good cookie. Let me get the recipe. Maybe we'll make it on a special occasion at home. And he has the same approach in this day and age. I know this is a big topic and you have thoughts on this. He has that same approach where everybody, including myself, has pretty much cut out alcohol and a lot of people talking about all the reasons why it's not helpful, et cetera.

I have my own reasons. I'll talk about that in a second. he's like, look, a glass of wine that at night from the vineyards that he likes, the whole dry farm, you know, less glyphosate and other stuff inside of it, that gives me so much joy. I'm not abusing it. And I haven't seen anything where that's taking away any aspect of my longevity. So I always appreciate that approach. Yeah. And I kind of adopted that approach of, hey, if I want to have this thing, I'll have it.

it. I don't, I'm not a regular dessert type of guy. I'd actually prefer like just a bowl of berries and some chocolate that's there. But I'm not a big cake person or other things. But if somebody is understanding that continuously using all this effort and energy throughout the day to willpower and never have it versus having a few bites or having a piece and then feeling like you can move on with your life and never feel like you are in denial of stuff. Let's take it back to the book. Yes, yes, yes. Tell us that. title the carb reset and it's a return to carbohydrates to not just lose weight but to keep it off forever and I think that's something that we we've struggled with we've always looked for these

quick fixes of eliminating food groups and I'm coming and I'm doing the opposite in a world of low carb I'm actually having you add back in a food group yeah and I feel like one of the most important tools we have to manage our weight to be healthy and to keep it off and be happy is to reintroduce carbohydrates in a way that's responsible, healthy, fun, so that you never feel like you're in a diet prison. You gave a ton of practical tips. We went through your path framework. We talked about good, best, moderate, least often.

Anything else that you feel will help people embody this message that you're putting out there with your book. I think you mentioned it before. I'm a husband. I'm a dad. I brought up you kids. And your perspective does change. I mean, I've always been somewhat of a moderate. I'm not from the United States.

I'm from Canada. Canada is the only country in the world that has 100% socialized medicine. It's nonprofit in medicine in Canada. If you're a billionaire or a homeless person, you see the same doctor. And so because of that, my perspective on health is very different. You know, in the U.S., when I talk about someone, they're like, oh, you know, big farmer or government this or government that. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm from Canada.

And so when I talk about health, I'm talking about from a country where we don't really have those things. And we do what's good for the whole of the population. And Scandinavian countries and other, Australia, New Zealand. And so I kind of align really with the medical and health knowledge espoused by countries with socialized medicine because it's a very different thing. So I've always been of moderation. But when I had kids that really changed. And so anytime a client asks me about a cleanse, a fast, of this, a that, of all those things, I always say, you know, if you have kids, if you have nieces or nephews,

if your best friend has kids, would you give this advice to them? Would you tell your six-year-old niece, I don't want you to eat a thing 16 hours a day? Would you tell them don't have carbs? Would you tell them broccoli is bad for you? I mean, there's a guy, Gundry. I have to mention him. Again, one of the biggest, I'm sure he's a good person. professionally he's a buffoon.

Every one of his messaging is so dangerous and so bad and so not founded in actual science. I know he sells supplements and pills and powders and potions and all the other stuff. You know, he tells you, I think I'm nightshade vegetables are designed to kill you. I mean, it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. At a certain point, people are trying to scare us too much. There's another podcast where he did a whole thing on how toothpaste is going to kill you. And if you have toothpaste, you're going to get heart disease and you're going to die. and he's looking for clickbait.

And so I'm sort of a... What's in toothpaste? What is he saying? What's the argument? I don't even... I tuned out. But I'm sort of an anomaly in that I am really a voice of moderation. I haven't ebbed and flowed with the different trends and fads.

I'm really, really conservative. Everything I'm telling people is what I would tell my kids. It's what I would tell my family. And the message doesn't change day to day. I'm not selling you a pill or a potion or a powder. There's nothing. All I'm doing is educating people. and and hopefully they connect with this because they're like,

yeah, that makes sense. It's not going to be the sexiest thing in the world, but it's going to work. It's going to work the best and it's going to work the longest. There's a bunch of recipes in the book. Just give us a couple of your favorites. You know, for those of you. And is there one that we can link to on social media

so people can check it out. You make a bunch of them on Instagram. Amazing stuff, sweet potatoes. So instead of like tuna melts, I do, I use a sweet potato for those things. So I can do a tuna melt and a sweet potato. I do this. Great, like, mex, text mix.

ingredients inside of a baked sweet potato. I have my smoothie recipes in there for my body reset diet book. I have some great soups in there. I love soups. I had this viral post on Instagram six months ago of a green soup that I did in the body reset diet. I mean, I post, I don't know how many things, thousands of things and it does it. I don't know where this green soup, six million people engaged with it for some reason. I don't know why, but I think people resonate with the fact that something is easy to

make in a blender, there's only a few ingredients and it's green. And so if it's green for some reason, people think it's healthy. So that's in there as well. I love it. Yeah. Question on kids, because that's one of the things, you know, my wife and I got married a few years ago. Kids is on our future path. I'm excited to have kids. I think it'll be a great dad. I think my wife will be a great mom. Yeah. I've seen this thing that when people also have kids and they're aware of health stuff, yeah, right? The science that's out there right now is the body of science and research that's there. and then science is continuing to evolve. It's there.

One thing I've seen for a lot of my friends is they become just more aware that there might be certain toxins or toxic exposure that's out there. Is that something that you and your wife at all went through? Yes and no. I think, again,

because most people get their health information today from social media, clickbait is king. And so if you say something that sounds scary and different and new, people want to hear about it, they want to know about it. I think we care about those things,

but we do it in a very logical, moderate way. We don't freak out about things. You take a look and see, okay, what are the main factors associated with the mortality and morbidity in the United States? What's the number one reason people die? And what are they doing in their life to cause that? And I would think about that even for my kids. And so obesity.

Obesity is the number one lifestyle factor associated with living a shorter life or a worse life. And so that's because you eat too much or you don't move enough. Okay, so that's something I think about with my kids. kids. People are going to hate me for saying this, but every one of my kids has their own treadmill. I have cheap treadmills. And if they want to look at screens, they can only look at a screen on the treadmill. So they each have an iPad. It's on their treadmill. You want to watch cartoons go on walk on the treadmill to watch them. So for me, I've associated moving for them with entertainment. So they never have to use their treadmill. But if they want to look at screen times and

zone out, they got to walk. Some people might listen to that and like, wow, that doesn't sound moderate, but that works for you guys. Well, but it's not something they have to do. It's something that I said, listen, I know screen time is not good for you. I know screen time is not good for you. We're in a new era right now. That also has a lot of debate around it, right? Yes.

Like social media, I think there's a lot of concern with that, especially young girls. But the data on video games is sort of mixed. The grade on television is a little bit mixed. I don't mean that the video games is bad for their mental health. I'm saying they tend to replace physical activity with stationary screen time. Yeah. And so being stationary. Yeah.

Kids today are more stationary than they were when you and I grew up and we'd go out and play outside, play outside at lunch, play outside all the time. They come home and they go right to a screen. So for me, it's really about how do we bring back physical activity where it's being replaced by screens? That's all. Yeah. So are there treadmills next to each other?

Like is it three treadmills next to each other? Do they have to watch the same thing or they have their own individual iPads? And by the way, these are cheap treadmills. This is not an elitist thing. This is inexpensive. But it's something that for me was important. I think so and the second thing is, okay, so I don't want them to be, I want to do what I can to make sure my kids aren't obese to the extent that we have control over that, to the extent.

The second thing is what are the other leading causes of death, mental health. So I try and do whatever I can to make sure we have kids that we listen to, we care about their happiness and we try and do things to make them happier. And obviously one of them is keeping them away for social media. So suicide, that's a big thing. Accidents, that's another big thing. So I'm trying to make sure my kids aren't paragliding and doing super high risk things. And that they're not texting and driving.

That's one of the things that you talk about. That's a massive one. By the way, that's a huge thing. It's a huge thing. So if you, if you, and they don't smoke. So if they're not obese and they're not smoking and they're not texting while

they're driving or playing with handguns in the house, you know, and we try and do what we can to give them a loving environment. So to the extent that we have control over it, their mental health is in check. That's 95% of every reason that they would die prematurely or have bad health. It's not everything. But it's most of the things. So am I, do I care about? a color of a dye in a cherry, a maritino cherry. Okay. I mean, how many barricino cherries do my kids eat?

Not so many. Do I care about a dye in skittles? Not really. My kids don't eat skittles every day. I don't know if they've ever had skittles, but if they do, they're not going to have enough where it's toxic and a concern of mine. So, sure, some people can focus on those, but I really think that those are distractions from the key things. And if your your kids really are, as you're, your kids really are, active as they should be, and if they really are eating as well as they should be, or in the right amounts, if they really are, you're giving them a nourishing environment to be happy and healthy, then and only then, should you really be spending time worrying about those potential toxins that may or may not have an impact on their health, especially given how much they're using them?

Taking you back to the book, when this podcast comes out, I believe the book is on pre-order. Okay, yes. People can get it online. We'll link to your social media. Great. And I'll close off on this and kind of give you any final thoughts that are there. You know, I've made definitely mistakes of being too restrictive. And I've chatted about that to the ends of the earth with my podcast audience and I like to fill them in.

I'm not the subject matter expertise. Here's why I believe that. Here was some of the truth that was with it. Here's the areas that I got wrong. Here's how I changed my mind. Here's how I have documented that I've changed my mind. So hopefully people can understand and learn. And one of the areas that definitely has brought me a lot more joy and that my health has continued to improve.

is becoming more flexible on carbs and incorporating them in a way that works for me. Yep. And I feel like that's my hope and wish for everybody, especially if they've been people that have been very restrictive. And as soon as you combine that with things like strength training and increasing activity, I think you'll genuinely start to feel that you'll get a lot more joy out of life and hopefully your health improves at the same time too. What do you want to conclude on?

I want to conclude on the fact that life is a marathon, not a sprint. And when you approach anything, whether it be food, fitness, sleep, exercise, ask yourself, is this something that I can keep up in doing on a long term basis? Does it feel like a punishment? Is it enjoyable? You know, you have to ask yourself these questions because you can enjoy yourself and be healthy. You can enjoy diet and lose weight.

You can enjoy exercise and not have to do an ultramarathon or, you know, I don't know if CrossFit's still around or CrossFit, whatever those things may be. So I think listen to people who sound really logical to you, who are not scaring you off of things, who've been doing it for a long time, and hopefully who spent the time to study the field that they're trying to teach you in. If you want to know about dentistry,

I would probably ask a dentist. Do you want to know about neurology? I was asking a neurologist, and if you want to know about nutrition, hopefully you'll be asking someone who went to school to study nutrition and who's worked with patients for many years, so they understand that, you know, things come in many days. different shape, sizes.

Great. I love it. This has been fantastic. Is there a website for the book or people just go to your website? Go to my website. Yep, Harley, Pastor, Nakt. Awesome. Harley, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me.

And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is, share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so. so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes

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