Dhru Purohit Show - Evidence-Backed Ways to Burn Fat, Build Muscle, and Stay Healthy Long Term with Layne Norton, PhD

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Lifeforce, and Lumebox.  Amidst the clamor surrounding optimal diets, calorie balance, and weight loss, it’s challenging to discern credible research interpreted by trusted sources. Today’s guest leverages experience and expertise to decipher the science and present factual insights as a trusted source in nutrition and wellness.   Today, on the Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru interviews Dr. Layne Norton, one of the most renowned experts in nutrition, metabolism, muscle gain, and weight loss. Dr. Norton debunks the top myths about weight loss and emphasizes the importance of exercise and sleep as lifestyle habits to maintain optimal weight. He also outlines his approach to coaching clients focused on weight loss, stressing proper accountability and empathy. Additionally, Dr. Norton discusses his mission as a truth seeker, aiming to dispel myths often spread by clickbait headlines. He reflects on how he has adjusted his approach to critiquing practitioners or social media figures, acknowledging that misinterpretation may not always be intentional. Dr. Layne Norton is a renowned fitness coach, bodybuilder, and entrepreneur known for his evidence-based approach to nutrition and training. He earned a Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Illinois and has achieved significant milestones as a competitive bodybuilder and powerlifter, including winning national titles and setting world records. Dr. Norton is also the founder of BioLayne LLC, a fitness and nutrition coaching company that has helped countless individuals achieve their health and fitness goals. He is also a prolific writer, speaker, and social media influencer, using his platforms to debunk fitness myths and promote science-based practices. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Norton dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Top myths about weight loss (00:00:33 / 00:00:33) The importance of exercise for long-term weight loss (12:53 / 9:40) The standard American lifestyle and convenience (29:08 / 25:53) Why some people struggle with appetite control and Ozempic (39:18 / 34:00) Accountability and empathetic approach to weight loss (51:48 / 46:30) Snacking as a hindrance to weight loss (58:18 / 53:00) Monitoring calories as an assessment tool (1:02:04 / 56:46) How sleep can impact calorie intake (1:15:18 / 1:10:00) Themes that warrant criticism (1:23:54 / 1:18:36) Dr. Norton’s daily diet and his thoughts on balance (1:34:18 / 1:29:00) Breaking down the research and interpreting studies (1:40:33 / 1:35:15) Protein, seed oils, and complex biological outcomes (1:58:02 / 1:52:30) Final thoughts (2:16:18 / 2:11:00)  For more on Dr. Norton, follow him on Instagram @biolayne, X/Twitter @biolayne, YouTube @biolayne1, and his website biolayne.com. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Lifeforce, and Lumebox.  Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the purest form of creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order.  Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress; go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device—that's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru to get your Red Light device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone, Drew Brode here. Today, I'm excited for my conversation with Dr. Lane Norton. Lane is known to some people in the wellness and holistic community as a controversial figure, but there's a reason why I wanted him on the podcast. And that is I've learned a lot from Lane over the years. And I've learned two important things from him. Now, before I get into those things, two things that are super important that I think are valuable in my understanding of the space of wellness and even how I approach my own health,

I want to just tell you a little bit about Lane's background. Lane is a renowned fitness coach, bodybuilder, and entrepreneur, and he's known for his evidence-based approach to nutrition and training. He earned his PhD in Nutrition Sciences from the University of Illinois. And actually, his mentor is an individual that's been on this podcast before, Dr. Donald Lehman, who has done some incredible work in the research of protein. and Donald Lehman was also the mentor of Dr. Gabriel Lyon, a repeat guest on this podcast who's impacted the lives of many of you. I know because you've told me and she's impacted my own life.

And shout out to Dr. Gabriel Lyme because she introduced me to Lane and mentioned that he's going to be or that he was in Los Angeles this past week and we got the chance to record together. Now, back to Lane. Lane is also a competitive bodybuilder, powerlifter, and he's achieved significant milestones, including winning national titles and setting world records. He's up to a lot of different things. He has a nutrition company. He has a coaching company that helps work with people on dialing their diet and their fitness.

And he also has a fantastic app called Carbon, which if you're serious about tracking your macros, it's one of the best apps that are out there on the market. Now, even though Lane is known for debunking fitness myths and promoting science-based practices, which sometimes is critical of even people that have been on this podcast and some of their messages. The reason that I wanted to have him on was because the most important thing that I've learned from Lane is that breaking down scientific information is actually very difficult if you don't have a background in it. And just because you're a medical doctor or just because you read a lot, that doesn't mean that you know how to exactly break down a study in detail. And plenty of people can get it wrong or miss out on important things or in the worst case scenario say that a study proves something that it completely didn't.

And Lane and his team, who've had a big influence on individuals that I admire like Peter Atia and Andrew Huberman, they've even showed those folks that breaking down nutritional information is tough. And even though his style is not the style that works for everybody, Lane has done an incredible job of showing people that sometimes they get things wrong. Now, by the way, I talk to him about his style, which I know some people feel is a little harsh and how there's been a shift in the way that he delivers information, even criticism of individuals that he disagrees with. We talk about that on today's episode. The second thing that I've learned from Lane is that

regardless of what your own individual preferences are in wellness, if you're a health communicator, you have to make sure for your audience's sake that you don't have them major in the minors. You know, that's something that you've heard past guests say on this podcast too, like Max Lugavir, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, J.J. Virgin, if we focus too much on the little things, and I'm not saying that the little things may not be important for you or for me, if we focus on getting the right floss or the right toothpaste or, you know, high, you know, high, you know, focusing on microplastics at the expense of reminding the audience what the majors are. And the majors are your cardiovascular fitness, your lean muscle mass, your grip strength,

your overall strength, making sure to keep a healthy weight and not be obese, not having too much visceral fat, making sure that your lab work is in order. Those are examples. Making sure your sleep is in order. Those are the majors. Those are the things that are going to deliver the vast. majority of results when it comes to your investment in health and wellness. And we can't get so distracted by the minors, which are important things to talk about for some people, but we can't

prioritize the minor things above the major things or at the expense of the major things. So having come through and being exposed to Lane's content, as well as some of his peers over the last few years, my own approach to wellness has shifted and how I interview guests, how I ask questions about studies that they might be bringing up, not that I'm qualified to interpret them, but that they at least show their homework and that I ask questions about those studies, what they've shown, what they haven't showed,

how sure they are about the research that they're presenting, as well as doubling down on the most important things, like lean mass, exercise, fitness, sleep, and having a diet that works for you that you could stick to. Those weren't always things that I believed in. And I believe in them more now because I know that if health is going to be accessible for everybody, we have to make it not so complicated that people end up giving up because you give them a list of a hundred different things they have to do to be healthy when really there might only be like

six or seven things. And then there's personalization. I have a lot of personalization in my diet, even if the evidence is conflicting. I know that the evidence on Wi-Fi is conflicting, but yet I still personally prefer to turn my Wi-Fi off at night when I sleep, right? I know the evidence is conflicting on seed oils, but I personally don't feel good on seed oils, and I like to avoid them to the best degree that I can. I know the evidence on other things that I do is mixed, and I'm not telling my audience that that is exactly what everybody else. should do, but I want to go on record and say that I did do that previously. This is all to say that even though I have difference of opinions than Lane on many things,

and he has definitely difference of opinions than I do, I still value his voice and his opinion and his commentary in this space. I'm excited for you to listen to today's conversation. And with that being said, let's jump into our interview with Dr. Lane Norton. Lane, welcome to the podcast and shout out to our mutual friend, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, for introducing us. I'd love to jump right in by starting off with something that I feel that I've really learned from your content that you hammer in all the time. And that idea is that weight loss is actually pretty straightforward. And a lot of people who are overweight actually do over the course of their lifetime end up losing a significant amount of weight.

the problem is that 95% of them will gain it back and sometimes even more. What do you feel, as we start off with? What do you feel are some of the top myths, lies, or mistakes that hold people back from being in that 5%? One of the biggest things is you mentioned that weight loss is very straightforward. And that's true. It's very simple. It is, people don't like to hear this, but it's calories in versus calories out.

So you need to eat less calories than you expend over a period of time. And a lot of people have a problem with that notion. And I think most of those people just don't really understand that equation and the moving parts they're in. And I can get into that. But, you know, just because something simple doesn't make it easy, right? People confuse simple with easy. It's simple, but the execution is not easy. I think I like to make financial examples.

I think I read something the other day, which is 70% of Americans could not write a $5,000 check if they had to. And a lot of people are broke out there, live paycheck to paycheck, can't save money. I think everybody would agree that if you want to save money, that is you need to earn more money than you spend. And those earnings can be your work, your side hustle, interest, all that kind of stuff. But you have to earn it somehow more than you spend. and you can believe that you are earning more than you're spending, but if you're not saving money, you have some expenses somewhere that you're not aware of.

And for the same reason, I think a lot of people don't want to take a really hard look at what they're eating. I think a lot of people don't like taking a really hard look at where they're spending. Because if you look at it, there's that inherent personal responsibility there. And I think people confuse personal responsibility with shame and blame. And I think if people could just pull back and just look at it as data and understand that this stuff is a lot more complicated than just willpower. Because I heard somebody say one time it was like, well, I would never hire a fat person because they're lazy.

And I'm like, are they though? because we have this example of people who have excess body fat, but they're graded a bunch of other things, or they become very successful in other ways. So that doesn't necessarily translate. Just like, for example, I've been very successful, competitive powerlifting. I've won a world championship.

I set a world record in the squat. I've had a very successful entrepreneurial career, very successful academic career, but I've been divorced twice, right? So, like, I've had some struggles in personal relationships, which, okay, I'm not lazy. I'm not stupid, you know, but there are some habits, habits and behaviors that get all wrapped up in this stuff. This isn't just as simple as, okay, well, you have this information, and so now just go do it.

It's not that simple. People like to think they make decisions based on logic, but most of us don't make decisions based on logic. We make decisions based on emotion. Emotion is a lot more powerful for people than logic. And when you can peel back the blame and shame that people place on themselves for whatever that may be not going exactly right in their life, in this case, you know, being overweight, and you can just look at it objectively. I like the quote, which is, people will tie up blame and responsibility. You know, we want, we want to make whoever's fault it is

their responsibility to fix it, right? And you can transfer this across many different things. But the reality is it's always going to be personally responsible for you to fix it. Like, no matter what happened to you, it's going to, because people want to argue, well, it's the food companies, it was the government, it was, it doesn't matter. The government is not going to be able to legislate anything that's going to change your life right now. That's you. So getting back to your original question, when we look at, okay, who are the people who actually lose weight and keep it off?

There are a few different characteristics that pop up very consistently in the literature. The first is they practice some form of cognitive restraint, right? So that can be calorie counting, can be doing low carb, intermittent fasting. You're, you're, you're, you using some form of restraint, you know, basically to help you eat less, right? But what I always tell people is you get to choose whatever form of restraint you like. There's a bunch of different methods out there. And so you get to choose what fuels the least restrictive for you, which I think is important. Because, I mean, we've all heard people say, well, you know, I did intermittent fasting, didn't even feel like I was dieting.

Or I did low-carp. Didn't feel like I was dieting. For me, I do flexible dieting, which is I just track my intake. and I allow myself to eat foods I like, as long as I get enough fiber and those sorts of things. And for me, that's easy. But not everybody's different. And if you look at the literature,

no one consistent diet stands out as better than any other in long-term weight loss. They all are kind of equally bad. But when they stratify them for adherence, meaning regardless of type of diet, least adherent to most adherent, it's a linear effect of weight loss. So basically the best diet is the one you can stick to, right, and be adherent to consistently.

So therefore, would the opposite be true, the more complicated you make your diet, the more rules that you have, the more likely you are not to be able to follow that over the long term. And if your goal is sustained weight loss, you're setting yourself up for failure. Yeah, I mean, I always tell people, think about like, the way you're eating now, can you see yourself doing that two years in the future, five years in the future? Because if not, you probably need to rethink your plan, right? Because the research says you're going to put it back on. Like, you have to maintain those habits and behaviors. I'm not saying you have to eat like in a calorie deficit. Like you may be able to raise your calories more, but you have to develop certain habits and behaviors. And getting back to that like 95%,

the other thing to point out is none of the diets come out better in adherence either. In fact, there was a recent study because a lot of people who are in intermittent fasting they'll say, well, it's just easier to stick to. Not according to the research, at least not on average. Now, it may be easier for you as an individual, right? Just like for me, calorie macro counting is easier for me as an individual. But that doesn't mean it's easier for Susie, right? Or Bob.

Like, that's a very individual thing of what people take. tend to be able to adhere to better. So there's cognitive restraint. They're self-monitoring, meaning these people tend to kind of keep track of their body weights more often. Some people will say, well, the scale doesn't matter. It does. I mean, it is the most objective marker we have.

Like, obviously, if you're losing fat mass, that is the most important thing. But if you're losing fat mass over time, the scale is going to change. Now, I do understand that the scale can be triggering for some people. Let's kind of leave those sorts of things out. The point is that if you're self-monitoring, it's kind of self-correcting, right? Like, let's say you're trying to save money. Well, if you're monitoring your expenses and if you're monitoring how much you're saving,

and you see you're not saving your target, you can adjust your behavior, right? That's, you can, if you monitor it, you can change it. But I think a lot of people like to sit in this space of la, la, la, la, la, la, la. and just kind of like throw Hail Marys and hope something sticks, right? And every once in a while you get lucky, but for the most part, like nobody changed their life just kind of haphazardly just tossing out things and seeing what stock. So you got cognitive restraint, self-modering, exercise. That's one that probably is pretty obvious for most people.

So of people who lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time, 70% of them exercise, over 70%. Now, the reason. exercise is important for long-term weight loss is probably actually less about the calories you burn during exercise, which really, unless you're doing like hours and hours of exercise, it's hard to burn enough to really make a big difference in weight loss. But the differences are you retain more lean mass. And even if you're like resistance training obviously is primo for that. Like if you resistance train, you're going to retain a lot more lean mass when you're dieting. But

even just regular like yoga, walking compared to sedentary, cardiovascular stuff, that will still maintain more lean mass than somebody who doesn't exercise at all. And lean mass is important because typically when people diet, you end up losing, if you don't resistance train or exercise, people lose anywhere from like 20 to 40 percent of their mass that they lose from lean mass. lean mass is your metabolically active tissue. And if you lose it, one, you're going to reduce your total energy expenditure, so you burn less calories throughout the day. But also, there could be effects on longevity.

There's a lot of very strong data suggesting that past, you know, age like, I think, 60, your lean mass is very highly correlated to how much longer you live. So there's that, but also there's some evidence that your lean mass has an appetite regulation effect. There was some refeating studies, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that was done during World War II, which for those are familiar, they took conscientious. There's no way this would get past an IRB now, but they took conscientious objectors from World War II and basically starved them for six months. I think they had the meat like, it was like around 1,000 calories a day, right? And these people, so people who say calorie deficits don't work, there was no people who did not lose weight in this experiment.

We're talking about a lot of guys and they all lost weight and they all lost about what you'd expect. So when you control what people eat, they lose weight. And then they refed them. And then they looked at like what happened to their physiology. And one of the things that was interesting is they noted that when they allowed them to start eating again, they had this hyperphagic response, meaning they just, they ate way more than they needed, right? And they gained body fat really quickly. And their hyperphagic response continued even once

they got back to their original body weight. It didn't stop until their return to their original lean mass. So as they're refeating, their lean mass is coming back that they lost. Their body fat's coming back, but the body fat comes back on quicker. So they hit their original body weight and a lower lean mass, higher fat mass than original. And they didn't stop overeating until they got back to their original lean

body mass. So there's kind of this hypothesis slash theory out there that maybe you have what are called protein stats, which is essentially like part of your nervous system, your brain appetite regulation that senses how much lean

mass you have and tries to maintain that as well. So that's another reason exercise may be helpful. And the final reason is, actually, exercise helps with appetite regulation. There's actually a lot more data on this than people think. So there was a very classic study in Bengali workers in like the 1950s. And they had them, they just tracked their intake and looked at their activity level. So they had sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, heavily active, heavily active, like heavy labor job, right? And what they saw is from lightly active to heavily active, they just perfectly compensated their energy intake. They basically just ate more calories to compensate for the energy they were expending.

And they maintained healthy body weight. Sedentary ate more than lightly active. And I think I want to say more than the moderately active group. I'd have to go back and look at the study exactly. So it was like this J-shaped curve, right? So when you're sedentary, it actually disregulates your appetite. but when you're active, you become more sensitive to satiety signals. And people will say, well, don't exercise too much because it increases your appetite.

Again, there's outliers, but on average in the research studies, if you exercise, yes, you do increase your appetite, but it doesn't compensate for the exercise you did. So, for example, if you exercise 100 calories worth of energy expenditure, you might compensate by eating another 30 or 40 calories. but you're still netting out, you know, a deficit out of that, right? So even though you're maybe increasing your energy expenditure by a couple hundred calories per day, your brain doesn't tell you you need to eat more calories if you're going from sedentary to active. So that's one of the biggest reasons that I think exercise is so helpful for weight loss is its effects on appetite, not regulation, not because you burn a bunch of calories.

Like, that's another benefit. But I think the appetite side is much more powerful. And that's what we're finding now with these GLP-1 memetics as well, is because for, you know, four decades, science focused on how do we increase metabolic rate? And we got nowhere. And then they focused on appetite. And then in five years, the entire game changed, right? Because appetite is by far the bigger regulator of body composition than energy expenditure is.

To connect those things together, you got a social media post. I think it was from your diet app carbon that helps people track macros and calories and other things. It says 30% of fat loss is activity, right? 70% is nutrition. This is what you're talking about. Appetite being a big driver. And then tying it back to the opening question, 100% of long-term results is staying consistent with all those things. Yep.

Consistency. I always tell people the quote I read one time and I forget where I read it, the magic you were looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid. Everybody wants a hack, they want a trick, they want something quick or something that feels easy. And I tell people, if you took all the time and energy, you spent looking for a shortcut and just did the work. You'd be shocked at how far you got. and this leads to my final point about the 9th of the 5% who keep it off and I was reading a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers it was uh I was out of uh Oxford by a gal named Marie Shrekley and so they interviewed they didn't just do a quantitative analysis

they did a qualitative analysis as well and interviewed a lot of people who lost weight and kept it off and something that popped up that I hadn't seen before was most of these people said they felt like they had to form a new identity. And I thought about that for a while. And then I texted Ethan Supley. Do you know, Ethan? I didn't know about him, but only because I've seen some of your content. Yeah.

So Ethan was a Hollywood actor who lost 300 pounds. And he was like, he was always just kind of the fat guy in movies, right? Like he was in Remember the Titans. He was in, My Name is Earl. And now he looks like, you know, a special forces, you know, actor, basically. But whenever he puts up his exercise, like he'll put up posts of him exercising. And he'll say, I killed my clone today. And I text him, I was like, is this what you mean?

Like, you had to form a new identity. And he said, that is exactly what I mean. He said, because that person was inside of me and I had to kill that person. I had to be somebody else. And I think so many of us and this, I mean, I'm guilty of this. this in other areas of my life. It's it's like we want our outcome to change but we don't want to change the input. We want to get the result we want, but we want to do it while we drag all our old bad habits and behaviors behind us and no, you have to jettison those things. Like you have

to change. And it's like take an alcoholic, right? If they get sober or a drug addict, they get clean. You have to change everything. Your whole lifestyle. is going to change. You can't hang out with the same people. You can't go to the same places. I mean, and in this systematic review, they actually identified that their friend circle changed. And I think some people will see that and think, oh, well, you know, they lost body fat. Now they think they're too good for everybody. No. But if you're, here's, it goes both ways. So somebody is in a group of friends and they start trying to better themselves. They start losing weight. Now it activates the the insecurities in that group and other people go,

oh, why are you doing that? Or can't you just enjoy this? I remember when I got into bodybuilding, even though I was already in pretty good shape, when I was, you know, bringing my food somewhere, even though I'd still go hang out with friends. They'd like, well, is this really going to hurt you? Is this really going to do it?

And it was like, why do you guys care? Like, I'm still here having fun. You know, why is, why is this, why does this bother you guys? Right? And the lady you realize, oh, it's because they, it makes them feel bad about themselves. Same reason that, you know, when people go out and they drink alcohol, they're like, oh, you can have a drink or you can have a drink? But if they're drinking by, like, they won't have one when they're drinking by themselves, you know, or a lot of people won't. And it's funny because I, like, I do enjoy, like, alcohol in moderation. And I'll tell people like, I don't,

like, if I want a beer, I have a beer. I don't care of somebody else is drinking. If they don't want to drink, I don't have a good time with them. You know what I mean? Like, why do you need somebody else to be doing the thing that you do? And I think a lot of it, you know, boils down to our own inner insecurities. And so you get that. But then also, if you're going and you're spending your time, you're exercising, you're getting consistent with your diet,

you're just not going to have as much in common with the people you used to be around anymore. Like, and I think it's just going to be a natural kind of why your friend's circle changes. And so I heard this, this quote, I think it was Robert Downey Jr. And I think he was on Oprah. And I've only heard this segment. So I might butcher it a little bit. But he was talking about his drug addiction. And he said, it is not that difficult to get past these seemingly ghastly problems.

And Oprah was like, wait, you're saying it's not difficult? He goes, no. What's hard is to decide. and that really stuck with me because I think a lot of people once they flip the switch they go man it really wasn't that bad it really wasn't as bad as I thought

Ethan says it he said you know I did a I was talking to him on the phone he's like I did a ruck yesterday with a 50 pound rucksack and that was really hard for like two hours and then I think I used to wear six of those every day 24 hours a day so no matter how hard that two hour ruck is

or no matter how hard my exercise session is, it's nothing compared to how hard my entire life used to be. And again, you can, when I talked to him about it, like what changed? He goes, I just got sick and tired of the way my life was. My brother was addicted to meth. A lot of people don't even know I have a brother because he was not on social media.

But, you know, he's doing much better now. But he went to jail. And I asked him one day, probably about a year ago, I said, what was the, like what changed for you? You know, like what, what happened? And I said, was it, was it going to jail? He goes, no. He goes, I just woke up one day and I realize, I lose everything.

I get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a relationship and I lose it. And I just got sick and tired of losing. And I really do think at some point, if you're approaching this as well, I just want to lose a few pounds. oh, well, I'd like to get in shape. It has to become, it really does have to kind of boil down to,

this is too painful for me to stay this way. And no matter how uncomfortable this is, it is more comfortable than staying here. But I think a lot of people, it's like, man, I wish I could show people the comparison. like Ethan was saying, let me put you in this body for 24 hours and let you feel how that feels

compared to how you feel right now. And you would be probably tripping over yourself to do the work it takes to get there. But I think a lot of people don't trust the process. And I talk about this with entrepreneurship, but it really applies to anything. The difficulty, I think, one of the main difficulties of being an entrepreneur

is you can do all the work, you can do everything you're supposed to do, and you may still not get the outcome you want, right? So you put in work with no guaranteed outcome. Now, a lot of people are willing to put in the work when they have, well, I do the work, I get my paycheck every two weeks, and I'm good, right? The reality is they can be fired at any time, and, you know, but, but it feels safe. People have a hard time, a lot of people have a hard time doing the work when there's no guaranteed outcome. And I think that's how a lot of people feel with weight loss and that's what's hard to get them to start. And I think social media has also made it more difficult because we don't normalize setbacks. We don't normalize, hey, there's going to be times when it sucks. Hey, there's

going to be times when you screw up. That's normal. Like I, you know, not the same thing, but I talk about and powerlifting with injuries and pain that I've been through when I, when I'm having a bad, you know, week or month of training. I'm like, yeah, this week sucked. Here's what's going on. And I've had so many people say, man, thank you so much.

Like, I just, you know, I see all these accounts and all they're doing. It's just, like, it just seems like they crush it all the time. I'm like, nobody crush it all the time. Like, and nobody has it all, has it together all the time either. Like, I promise you, the person who you think has a, the most together in the entire world who you look up to,

they have times where they feel like they're a hot mess. And I just think if more people understood that and allowed themselves to balance personal responsibility without shaming themselves, the game would change. And for me, like I said, I can only provide my own personal anecdote, which never really struggled with weight, but I have struggled with personal relationships and like I'm neurodivergent.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was six. My therapist who I've worked with for eight years with a PhD in psychology, she is very certain that I'm on the spectrum. And so there are certain things in personal relationships that have been really, really tough for me. And again, it was funny

because I kept trying to like hack my way around stuff, right? Change the outcome without changing the input. And once finally, my therapist got me to start doing the hard stuff, which wasn't even the hard, it was just journaling, right? And then doing little things like, hey, when somebody says something that is, you know, hurt your feel like it's okay to tell them or it's okay to ask for what you need in a relationship or like it's okay to have boundaries. Like when I actually started implementing these things, yeah, it was hard, but it was way,

easier than dealing with the downstream ramifications of not doing any of that stuff. And so for me, again, staying the same got more uncomfortable than actually making those changes. And I think that is at the core of a lot of this stuff. I realize I just dumped a lot on you. No, it's all great stuff. Yeah. I'm going to pull on a few threads that you talked about. The first one that I want to pull on is I want to zoom out for a second. You mentioned that with willpower, it's not so straightforward. There's a lot of of nuances that are there. I think a lot of my audience in particular, they're used to hearing people come on this podcast and say things like, yes, calories matter and you're going to lose weight when you're the amount of calories you burn or the amount of calories you eat is less than what

you burn. So they've heard that. But they've also heard a lot of those same people say it is more complicated because there are things that are going on in our environment that play a role in why people more than other countries uniquely gain a lot more weight here in America. And I want to get your thoughts on that. You know, you mentioned, you know, the government can't come in here and like do something and solve your problems when it comes to like weight loss or other things. And in a compassionate way, I'm asking on behalf of myself and my audience, they're looking

around the rest of the world and saying, it seems like America is uniquely. complicated in a way that maybe other companies don't, countries, sorry, have to struggle the way that we struggle to not get severely obese. What are your thoughts on that? I think there's a lot of things that play into that. I mean, America is very much the like, we make it bigger, we make it better, we make it more fun, right? And that goes for food too, right? Like, we're, we love big portion sizes, you know, when I, so zooming out, we live in a society where we have free access to very inexpensive, very tasty, very calorie-dense foods. It's really that simple. And we don't have to do a lot of energy to get it. Okay. People don't like the simplicity of that, but it really

is that simple. Well, our brains are hardwired for appetite regulation. from tens of thousands of years ago. They're not hardwired for free access to very energy-dense, very hyper-palatable foods. And let me just give you an example. We had ultra-processed foods 50, 60, 70 years ago, but people weren't obese. Why?

Well, you still had people who were doing pretty active jobs, you know, at least if it wasn't heavy labor, they were still, like, standing or moving around quite a bit, right? you didn't have Zoom you know you didn't have you couldn't just sit at the desk all day and also if you wanted a hyper palatable food cakes cookies ice cream you had to go to a specific place to get it

you couldn't just like oh you're filling up your car with gas oh just pop in grab a bag of M&Ms no you didn't have that option right like you had to walk down to the bakery you're to drive down to the bakery there was physical limits to your access to these things now there are no physical limits because you don't have to leave your house. Look, you literally don't have to leave your house.

You can just, if you work online, you can sit at your desk all day. You can DoorDash, Amazon, you know, all your food, Uber eats. And you can have whatever you want. All the tasty, hyperbottable food that you want. And you don't have to work for it at all in terms of like actual physical energy. and our brains just aren't, but they're not evolved to be able to handle something like that.

And so even if you look at Europe, right, honestly, what it takes to get ourselves back in the line with appetite regulation is not that much. It's really not, because in Europe, what do people have to do more of? People don't drive as much. They walk to places.

They take the train. you know, they like to go down to cafes. Portion sizes are much smaller. And so just those small barriers right there drastically reduces the incidence of obesity. Now, again, that's partly a cultural thing, right? Like if you've gone to Europe and you've eaten at a restaurant, you don't get real big portion sizes, right?

Like I was in Greece last year. And I never like, you know, the portion sizes were very reasonable what they bring over there. But you go to America and this is kind of a, I always tell people like eventually the responsibility falls at your feet. You have to take responsibility for it. Because people will go, well, couldn't we get the government to legislate, you know, portion sizes or whatever it is? Yeah, I guess you could. But then how do, what's your hard limits to that? Like, because, you know, a little small thing, a cheese.

is more calories than a bigger plate of pasta. So how are you going to like regulate that? It's going to be a certain amount of calories per meal. Who's going to enforce it? You're going to have to create a government entity to regulate it. It's like one of my favorite quotes is there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. So let's say even today you can take a magic one.

I'm going to take all the, we're just going to ban ultra-process food, right? We're going to put hundreds of thousands of people out of work. what about them right so what i tell people is like listen it's kind of hard to put the bullet back in the gun once it's been shot you know what we need to do is teach people better ways of being able to live with this stuff try to lower the barrier to entry because i think a lot of the the hand ringing about even starting a program is one people have paralysis by analysis because there's so many conflicting opinions out there because it's a lot easy easier to make money when you overcomplicate this stuff.

Buy my program, do my course. Right, right. The three foods, the three foods making you fat, avoid this ingredient. Like, those are all, like, it's just,

like I said, people like sound bites, but it doesn't do a whole lot for changing people's lives. That's much more complicated in implementation. So I tell people, one, embracing the personal responsibility aspect, of it, which is, it may not be your fault, and it probably isn't totally your fault,

but it is going to be your responsibility to start making some different decisions. Now, people will say to me, well, it doesn't, don't these new weight loss drugs kind of, like, reduce that? Yeah, they're great appetite regulators. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm very balanced on this, this thing. Like, I, I, I think, I have a very balanced view of this. Because a lot of people in the fitness industry are very, very anti-weight loss drugs. And I'm like, wait. So you're anti-weight loss drug, but you have a link to a fat burner that doesn't really work in your bio for 10% off.

Please explain to me how this math works internally in your mind. Okay. So basically, for those people who aren't familiar, GLP1 is a hormone that is secreted by the gut, that is a powerful regulator of appetite. Now, the problem with GLP1 itself is it has a half-life of a couple minutes. And so things like simiglutide,

which the brand name is Ozimic, they, Mangorno, they modify the GLP1 protein so that it stays around much longer. So I think like the injections are like weekly or something like that. So it's a very, very powerful appetite suppressant, very powerful because in research studies,

I mean, on average people are losing 15, 20% to their body weight. That's very, very powerful. And I think what I've said to people is, I think that is great for helping people who have really struggled to make these lifestyle changes because it's kind of forcing a lifestyle change. You're eating less. And again, people who want to deny calories in versus calories out, they say, well, I couldn't lose weight, but then I started taking an olympic and my metabolism was slow. Well, JLP1 doesn't act on your metabolism. It doesn't increase your metabolism. It acts on your appetite. So calories do matter. This is not magic. It's making you eat less. Now, I think where the blame from fitness culture and

whatnot comes in is, well, you could just eat less not taking this. Sure, but this makes it easier to eat less. And I think my concern is that if you go from a crappy diet to eating a smaller amount of a crappy diet. If you're not prioritizing protein, fiber, those sorts of things, then sure, you'll lose weight, but you're not getting all the health benefits that you could possibly be getting. And if you're going to, you're going to have to stay on these things indefinitely because if you stop taking them and you don't change your habits in terms of like your food selection and whatnot, you'll go right back to being how you were before.

I know there's a lot of like worries about, well, causes people to lose lean body mass. I don't really think that's the case. The research studies shows a similar amount of lean mass loss with using these drugs compared to people who just diet but don't exercise. My guess is if you add exercise to it, it's going to have a similar effect. So really, like I said, you lose 25 to 40 percent of weight from lean mass if you diet and don't exercise. the studies you lose about 30, 40% of your body mass from lean mass if you don't exercise using GLP1 medics.

So I think on balance, they're a positive, but I would just encourage people to not just take the drugs, but also work on changing their lifestyle. And I see this as like, here's some training wheels so that you can ride a bike one day, right? So that because a lot of these people, especially if they've tried a bunch of different diets and they seem to maybe lose it for a little bit, but then they put it back on. If they have some consistent results for a time, then you can get some buy-in, right?

And maybe it helps them long term. Any thoughts as to why some people have good levels of appetite control in relationship to, let's say, like their production of GLP1? and for some people it genuinely maybe seems broken, missing or out of whack. I don't know what the proper term is. Yeah. But seems to be for some people,

I don't know, there's been people that have been on this podcast that have said maybe they're not making as much. Maybe there's a functional deficiency. Any thoughts on that? So I took a course specifically on appetite in graduate school. And I left that course going, we know nothing.

It is incredibly complex. There's probably more than a dozen different hormones at play, multiple neural inputs. There's cross talk between adipose tissue and the brain and the brain to adipose tissue. There's, you know, this hormone makes a difference, but only when this hormone is present. And if it's too high, then it doesn't make a different. like it is very, very complicated. And what causes that dysregulation, I'm a big fan of the biopsychosocial model

of most things. And I think we have really focused on the biology of stuff and haven't focused as much on the psychology and sociology of this problem as well. So hunger makes a difference, yes. But also some people don't lose weight. using GLP1 memetics. Some people don't.

People eat for a lot more reasons than just hunger. Like think about, do you think about the last time you were actually really hungry, right? I think I was really hungry yesterday when I was on the plane and I was waiting to land. But before that, it's probably been weeks since I actually like felt real physical hunger, right? Because we eat for different, well, it's breakfast time.

It's lunchtime. It's dinner. time or, well, I'm in a group setting. When was the last time you went to a social event that didn't have food? You probably can't remember, right? Dinner plates in the 1800s, like that big. Now, that big. Clean your plate.

Finish food. There's starving children in Africa. People who have trauma in their background. There was a study looking at obese women. They had a 50% higher rate of having. sexual assault trauma in their background than normal weight women. People who are obese have a higher 10 to, on average, get a higher reward from food than people who are not obese.

So this is a very complicated issue that I really, I think what bothers me is when people go, well, it's this one thing. that you don't you're eating the wrong breakfast or you're you know it's this one hormone no it's a lot of stuff i don't so i don't i don't know this specifically but i would doubt that obese people have lower levels of g lp1 on average i think that these drugs are so powerful that it really overrides it's able to override a lot of that circuitry essentially like um kind of drown it out. And what, um, well, a few people I've talked to anecdotally have said to me when they took, uh, GLP1 momentics as they said, it stopped the food noise in my brain or it, calm down the food

noise. I stopped thinking about food so much. Like for me, I don't usually get excited about food. Like I like food like anybody else, but I'm not like somebody. I mean, I know people who were like, oh man we're like if we're going to like we're going to la we got to go to this place and we got to go to this place we go like i'm like oh okay where's close for lunch hour i go here right like i'm not like that but some people they have a very that food noise is screaming in their brain all the time and is that caused by a hormone is that caused by the way they were raised is that caused by trauma response all the above and it's probably a different milu for each person. And so, again, I'm going to use an Ethan Supley quote. He goes, we have spent a lot

of time worrying about who started the fire in the house instead of just getting the hell out of the house. Like, there's all that we can figure out who started it later. But like if the house is on fire, get out of the house. Like, just start making some positive changes. And again, I know there's, and one of the reasons I do all the content I do is because I, there is a lot of confusion out there. People feel like, well, you know, this documentary said that these foods are bad, but then this documentary said these foods are bad. They're all compelling and I don't know who to believe. Okay, but if I put down a plate of burgers and fries and cheesecake and then I put down another plate with fruits, vegetables, and lean meats, you know which one is more conducive

to weight loss or maintaining a healthy food. body weight you like you know so maybe you don't have the perfect plan you haven't got it all figured out start honestly like that's if people were just willing to what was the quote weighed into uncertainty if people were willing to wade into uncertainty and I'm sure again as an entrepreneur a self-described serial entrepreneur you If I'm wrong, please tell me. But the people who make it an entrepreneurship are not the people who plan, plan, plan, plan. Yeah, like have a plan, but at a certain point, you just got to go.

Like, you just got to go. Because there's going to be things that you can never foresee, no matter how much you plan. They're going to pop up and smack you in the face. And you have to deal with them when they come. But that's how you learn. That's how you get better. That's how you grow. That's how you actually make something awesome.

I think I heard our interview from Mark Zuckerberg who said they asked him what mistakes entrepreneurs should avoid. And he said, don't even bother trying. Just be ready to learn from them when they happen. And I would say the same thing with weight loss in your health journey. Like just go and start making some choices. Like you know some of the stuff to do. Start doing it.

Stop waiting for the plan to be perfect and go as imperfect as you are. And when things come up, you learn. I mean, a lot of what we do with our team biolane one-on-one coaching clients is we always say like coaching is good coaching. You have to have accountability and empathy. They need to be both, both hand, right? Because if it's just accountability, you know, if you're like the, if you're the drill sergeant, just like, well, you were supposed to do this and you did this. Well, what happens? Well, people, they feel ashamed.

And so then they stop being honest with their coach because they don't want to get upset. They get them in trouble. but if you're just empathetic, so well, you know, I understand it. So there's no empathetic for change, right? So what you need is somebody who says to you and I had this conversation. I only have like four or five clients

who I've had for a long time now. But I had this conversation with a client the other day. I'm like, because they missed a couple workouts. And I say, hey, listen, totally get it. But you have said, this is a really important goal for you. This is a big priority for you.

And so, if you decided to skip those workouts because you decided, you know what, that actually has more priority for me right now. Like, I don't know what it was, but I'm like, but, you know, it comes to the cost. And you have to decide, like, you know, it's not my job to tell you what you should do with your life or what should make you happy. But it is my job to reflect back to you the goals that you have told me or are important. important and then make sure that your behaviors are in alignment with those goals. So if you're saying that this isn't a big goal for you anymore, that's fine. We can pivot, you know, but if this is a big goal for you, then you have to prioritize accordingly, right? And maybe that means we need to think of some new ways. Maybe we need to, you know, look at where we can save you some time, whatever. And so I'm holding

him accountable, right, for the workouts he missed. But I'm not saying he's lazy. I'm not shaming him. I'm saying, okay, so we had this thing happen. How do we learn from it? How do we make it so that we can get you back into alignment with those goals? And one of our coaches had a great line. She said, if your behaviors are consistently not in alignment with your goals, you need to change the behaviors or change the goal, one of the two. And I think there's not as much honest conversation around that as there probably should be.

So pulling on that thread a little bit more, a statement that I'm sure you've heard many times. Maybe your coaches have heard this, I'm sure too, is, Lane, I've tried so many different things. And I've tried the eating less thing. And it just doesn't work. I'm not losing weight or maybe I'm gaining weight. If you took that approach, the empathetic and the accountable approach for that individual, what would you tell them to try or think about, especially somebody that has not really worked with a coach

or done tracking or done somebody's other tools before? Somebody has to be coachable, first of all. And I say that as somebody who like for the first probably two years, again, I'm using my personal relationship experience and my struggles I've had with that. the first two, three years of therapy, I just basically wasted my time because I was just venting the whole time, right?

And then finally, again, I had a great therapist who said, Lane, do you just want to vent or do you actually want to get better? I was like, you know, but it really woke me up as to, okay, I'm not actually being coachable if I'm not actually making changes, right?

And so I think if somebody is not willing to accept personal responsibility for what they can do, it's going to be really hard to produce a different outcome, right? And so I say that because I've been around a lot of people who say, I can't lose weight. I've eaten 1,000 calories per day, et cetera, et cetera. Listen, there are outliers, but I will tell you that based on the scientific research, for example, the greatest decrease is. in metabolic rate we see, uh, from like, for example,

hypothyroidism is about a 25% decrease in BMR, which would make it more challenging to lose weight, but you're talking about a couple hundred calories per day. Okay. Again, more challenging, right? But not impossible.

And you can get treatment for that. Right? Like you can, you can get that back into alignment. And so, so many of the people, who say that they've tried low calories. I know I'm going to get some comments on this.

But it's okay. You know, I have this problem where I've got to tell people the truth, no matter how much they hate it. So if we look at some very classic studies in nutrition, I'm thinking of a study from 1992, where they recruited people who said they could not lose weight, eating 1,200 calories a day. They specifically looked for people

who said they couldn't do that. They put them in a metabolic ward and they tracked everything they consumed. And they tracked their physical activity and their energy expenditure, right? Which is their amount of calories they burn per day because they can directly measure this in a metabolic chamber. They track their BMR.

Like they tracked so many things. The average underreporting in the study was 53%. People were eating 53% more than they reported. and the largest variance in their metabolic rate, I think, was 30 calories. In terms of their metabolic rate was 30 calories higher or lower than predicted. Actually, I think it was higher. So, like, if people say, like, hey, I have a slow metabolism or a fast metabolism, there wasn't that much difference in this study.

No. And if you look at, like, large population. samples of metabolic rate when they do like BMR studies. Your your amount of lean mass explains about, I think about 80% of the variance in your metabolic rate. Like it's mostly your amount of lean mass you have. Some people have slower metabolic rates. Some people have faster metabolic rates.

But again, the biggest variance we see is like maybe 100 calories, maybe 200 calories, like some of the biggest outliers. There's not one person that's burning a thousand more calories. or a thousand less calories that's out there on average. Not metabolic rate-wise, not BMR-wise. And so it's important to distinguish BMR from total daily energy expenditure. So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on, right? Like it's how much energy you burn at rest, okay?

Because then you also burn energy from physical activity, obviously. But that physical activity can fall into two buckets, purposeful and non-purposeful, right? So, like, I'm kind of a fidgety person. person, and I tend to pace a lot. Like, if I'm on the phone, I'm never sitting down. I'm usually walking around. I'm not thinking about doing that. That just happens spontaneously.

Like, or if I'm, like, putting up a post for social media, I'm always, like, pacing back and forth while I'm doing it on my phone. And so they've actually shown that people like that tend to be more obese resistant. So they haven't, they, if they eat more, they tend to spontaneously increase their energy expenditure without even realizing it. Okay. people who are obese resistant or people who are obese prone

tend to not compensate their energy expenditure by moving more spontaneously. So people here move more and they get like upset because they say, well, I exercise so much or I do an hour. This is not something you can consciously control. This is, in fact, this appears to be the biggest, in terms of calories burned.

This is like the biggest lever that changes between obese and not obese. So another classic study by Levine, I think in 1995, New England Journal of Medicine. They overfed, so I may butcher the details of the study, but the overall message is correct. So I believe they overfed people by 1,000 calories per day for, I want to say, six or eight weeks. And they looked at how much body fat they gained. And the spread was something like, the average was something like, I want to say, like five or six kilograms, but the spread was 0.0.8 kilograms to like eight kilograms.

Okay. The person who gained 0.8, even though like if you did the calories above their maintenance, they should have gained like four or five kilos of fat mass. They spontaneously increased their physical activity so much and almost completely offset what they were eating. So that would be an example of an obese-resistant phenotype that we talk about. Again, tend to be pretty fidgety. They tend to pace a lot. And what's interesting, too, is if you diet and lose weight, your body compensates by really reducing your spontaneous physical activity. In fact, a lot of, you said your demographic a lot was like women in their 40s and 50s. And a lot of people will say, well, after menopause, My metabolism slowed down.

The studies don't really show that. Your metabolic rate, days pretty consistent based on your lean mass. What probably happened was you're sleeping less. You don't feel as energetic because of these hormonal shifts. And without even realizing it, you became spontaneously less active without even realizing it. And because you're sleeping less,

maybe you're hungrier the next day and you're overeating calories. Yep. And here's the other thing. So one thing I didn't bring up from the successful weight loss maintainers that I thought that I think is important to point out, they don't really snack. People who successfully lose weight, they don't snack much.

And here's why. People remember their meals. They don't remember their snacks. That is a pretty consistent effect in the literature that people who snack have a hard time losing weight. It's not from anything metabolic or anything like that. It's just snacking tends to be an unmindful behavior. you're grabbing a handful of chips,

you're grabbing a handful of nuts, you're, you know, whatever, you're watching a show and like kind of snacking throughout. Whereas a meal, you're sitting down for a fine period of time, you're focusing on that.

They've actually done studies to show that if you focus on the food you're eating, think about it while you chew it, it actually has a better satiety effect than it feel like watching TV or something while you do it. And so that mindfulness is very important. And so I think all this stuff,

is so interconnected and difficult. But if we look at the research studies, the idea that we could explain this stuff from slow metabolism, maybe you have a slow metabolism. It's possible, but you'd be an outlier. It doesn't explain the obesity epidemic. It doesn't, not even close. Because when they look at obese people

and whether it's type 2 diabetic or non-type 2 diabetic, all of them have a greater metabolic rate than people who are normal weight. But they also tend to have more lean mass. And so if you adjust for their lean mass, basically most of the studies say they either have the same total daily energy expenditure and metabolic rate as normal weight or maybe just a little bit more. So this is the opposite of what researchers thought they were going to find in the 90s when they started measuring this stuff.

They thought they were going to find, okay, obese people were going to have, you know, much slower metabolic rates. and they found the opposite thing. And so, again, it's the appetite side of things, which sounds, again, people don't like hearing that because what they hear when they hear calories in calories out, they hear, you're lazy, you're a glutton, you're a sloth, but that's not, it's certainly not what I'm saying.

What it's saying is for your given level of total daily energy expenditure, you consumed more calories than you were expending. And so you gained weight. But why that happened can be very complex, as we've just discussed. And so again, I'm more like, okay, let's focus on getting out of the house and figuring out how the house fire started. Right. And so I'm looking at, okay, where can we start to make some small changes to really get you more aware? And one of the things I do sometimes is, hey, listen, I don't think everybody should track their calories. I don't. And I think for a lot of people, it's not a sustainable way of doing things. But just like if you've, if you've been having a hard time saving money, if you sit down and you really go through your expenses,

it is a very educational experience. And you go, whoa, I didn't realize I was spending that much money on that. And I thought I canceled that subscription. And oh, there's, but a lot of, lot of people don't want to do it. I've been guilty of that. I'm like, you know, I don't want to see what I'm spending money on because then, you know, we tend to like beat ourselves up and shame ourselves. And if you can just pull back from that and go, okay, I wasn't aware of these things, now I am and now I can make different decisions rather than beating yourself up over what you did. I think so many people, myself included, have a hard time balancing, taking responsibility without beating ourselves up. And if you can walk that line, it really is.

a game changer in behavior change. And so I tell people, I'm like, hey, listen, I don't want you to change anything. Do exactly what you've been doing. But for one week, if a piece of food goes in your mouth, I want you to put it on the scale, I want you to weigh it. Now, what almost always happens is they lose like two pounds that week. Because when you monitor things, it changes behavior. and that goes right down to physics. I mean, we know if you monitor particles, they change the way they behave. I believe it's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle

that kind of like show that. And so, of course, when you monitor humans, they change their behavior. When you monitor yourself, you change your behavior. It's the same thing if you were tracking your expenses and all of a sudden you're like, do I really want to spend $4 at that Coke at the airport?

You know what I mean? I'll just go to the water fountain, right? And so people usually come back and say that, or they come back and they say, oh my God, I can't believe, I thought I wasn't eating that much. But like when I actually put out, like, how much salad dressing I was using, how much oil I was putting on the food I was cooking. Like how many, when I grabbed a handful of chips, how many calories are in that? I always tell people, people confuse, I don't eat that much of the visual of their food with the caloric density. You're confusing the volume

For the calories Exactly If you want to be depressed Go way out a serving of ice cream It barely occupies the volume It probably doesn't even occupy the volume of this water here Okay, it's like a scoop, right? A small scoop

Right If you have a bowl of ice cream You're having probably three to four servings of ice cream A bowl of cereal Like if you have one of your like pretty big bowls, it barely covers the bottom of the bowl, right? A serving of peanut butter.

You know, well, I do, I've had, so I had one guy, I remember this, she messaged me on Instagram. Never forget this conversation. She's like, I'm eating 600 calories day and I can't lose weight. I said, okay, well, we talked a little bit. It turns out she was doing volume measurements

for her food. So she would, you know, do it, okay, quarter cup of oatmeal, grab a quarter cup, right, or do a tablespoon of peanut butter, tablespoon, right? I said, okay, I want you to do exactly what you've been doing. I just want you to weigh it now. He was like, oh my God, I'm eating 2,700 calories.

After one day she came back. And I'm like, there you go. But, but if you actually do it and you don't beat yourself up over it, it's kind of relieving because you go, oh, I'm not broken. I just, I wasn't aware, you know. A lot of people don't even know, like alcohol. has calories, right? Like, they go, well, you know, I'm drink, you know, I'm just doing shots of vodka. Okay, well, a shot of vodka has 60, 70 calories in it. Okay. You know, a glass of wine only has,

you know, my favorite is people go, well, this, I drink McOctra only has two and a half grams of carbs. Okay, but it still has 95 calories. Now, do the math. Well, one and a half times four is 10. So what do the other 80 calories, 85 calories come from? Well, they come from alcohol, because alcohol, ethanol, is seven calories per gram. And a lot of people aren't aware of that. Also, again, like boiling down to people pour a glass of wine, do you know what the difference when one of those big wine glasses of a five-ounce glass of wine versus like a 12-ounce glass of wine looks like?

You can't even hardly visually tell the difference. And so, again, when you put all this stuff together, when I really get down to the nitty-gritty, the vast majority, I don't want to say all, but the vast majority of people who are saying that they have slow metabolisms or saying they can't lose weight, the reality is they're probably getting calories somewhere

that they just aren't aware of. And then on the other side of that, that same study from 1992 I was talking about, they found that those people overreported their physical activity by about 47%. So you're underreporting your calorie intake by 53%, overreporting physical activity by 47%. But people do the same thing with debt.

I think the statistic was the average American underreports their debt by like 150%. Just to be clear, you said debt? Debt, yeah, financial debt. Because we always look at things through a rose-colored glasses and we're always the hero of our own story, right? So just to say it like pure and simply,

there is, if you're a person that's out there, that is gaining weight, there's no way to gain weight without consuming more than what you burned. Is that accurate? I mean, there's ways that you can gain it in the short term that aren't from Cal, like, for example, if you eat a really high salt meal or something, the next day you might be up on the scale, right?

Because you're retaining more water? Yeah, but if we're talking about like... Over the long haul. So, for example, our app, one of the things we do is we use like rolling averages of body weights. We don't just use like isolated data points. We ask people to like weigh in every day if they can. Because if you've ever weighed in every day,

you know like your weight fluctuates. Even if you're doing it first thing in the morning after go to the bathroom, like it bounces all over the place. You know, I know my body weight will, I can fluctuate easily within a five pound range, even weighing in the same time every day, eating similar foods.

And so a lot of, people don't realize that. And so that's another thing where they say, well, I ate in a calorie deficit, didn't lose weight. Well, no, you weighed yourself on a Sunday when you were really light for whatever reason. And then a week later, you weighed in again, maybe after you had a big meal the night before at a random time of the day and you were up two pounds when if you'd been tracking like your body weight throughout the course of the week, your average was probably down. Right. But since you waited at this random time, like I've had people, like they don't realize that like, yeah, when you eat during the day, you gain body weight over the course of the day.

Like some people don't realize that. And weight fluctuations actually in that systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers, weight fluctuations were actually a big, what did they call it, kind of a roadblock for people. So they would get frustrated and quit because of weight fluctuations. And so what I tell people is if you weigh in every day, at first it may seem like really frustrating, but over time, if you're taking the average week over week, your averages from week to week are much more reflective of actual changes in body mass than day to day. Day to day is much

more driven by fluid dynamics, but week to week month to month is much more driven by actual changes in body mass. And so... So if I would restate that statement, on average, let's say over the course of the year, you look back on the last year and you're like, you know what, I gained 12. 20 pounds. And I didn't want to gain that weight. There's no way to gain weight without consuming more calories than you burn. Now unless you got really big implants, muscle or otherwise, you know. The secondary component that I feel, I would like to say a statement and get your sort of opinion on this, you're also saying that there can be a lot of things that can impact hunger. Like you mentioned that people could not be sleeping well.

I had a friend that had sleep apnea for years that was untreated and finally got on a CPAP machine and noticed that he dropped in that month like 10 pounds because he's sleeping better. But that's ultimately whether it's somebody doing something with their hormones or they're sleeping better or they're optimizing some other area of their life, changing their friend circle. whatever it is, those things can impact hunger, but ultimately they all come back down to you're eating less calories over the long haul than what you're burning. So is that accurate? Yes.

So when we talk about calories, it's important to understand calories is truly a measurement of energy. Okay. So you're talking about the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food. All right. And the process of metabolism helps liberate that energy and allows your body to capture it and use it in chemical reactions in your body that drive everything in our body. Right. So these, you know, what we take in on a daily basis are mostly carbons, hydrogen, oxygen, and our macronutrients, carbons, hydrogen, oxygen, and in the case of protein nitrogen's, but the nitrogen is either used for protein synthesis or it's excreted in urea. So really what I tell people is like, okay, you have these chains of carbons. Your body does something with them. Okay.

So if you ingest these carbons, they don't flitter off into oblivion. Your body does something with them, right? And by the same token, if you, your body is not going to just create carbons out of nothing. It had to get it from somewhere. So this notion that you can, like starvation movement, well, if you eat too little, your metabolic rate slows down so much and you actually gain weight. I'm not, like, not to sound trite, but I'm not aware of any concentration camps that are allied soldiers visited where they found obese concentration camp victims. because at the end of the day, if you are eating less carbons than you are using,

than you are excreting, you lose weight. And so like the end products of metabolism, people ask, well, how do you lose fat? Well, oddly enough, CO2 and H2O. That's the end products of fat metabolism. How beautiful metabolism, too, that comes out like that. So you're expiring carbons in your breath and oxygens and getting rid of hydrogens and oxygens in your urine.

And so if you lose weight over time, it's because more is coming out and is going in. It's really that simple. Now, how you get there is very complicated and difficult for many people. But at the end of the day, the mechanics of it is quite simple, just like the mechanics of saving money are quite simple. simple, but just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. And people will say, well, you know, well, you know, if somebody makes not very much money, it's hard to save money, for sure. But there's also people who make six, seven figures who are dirt broke. And because this stuff is tied up in habits and behaviors, it is not just a simple, don't do that. Like, we don't have a knowledge problem.

What we have is an execution problem. People, for the most, part, they know the things they could do to change things for the better in many areas. But change feels very uncomfortable for people. And execution feels scary. I mean, I've talked to so many people like, I'm just so afraid to start. What if it doesn't work or even entrepreneurship, right? Like, what if I fail? It's going to happen 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. You start something. You're going to fail at some point. Yeah. but like you get to learn from it. That's the beautiful part of it. And if you start a diet, you're going to fail at some point.

You're going to have something that happens. You're going to mess up, whatever. It's okay. It's fine. Get back on the horse and figure out how to do it better. Figure out how to happen. Figure out how to. So I like you're a friend, right?

A lot of people say, oh, well, you know, sleep, it must impact your metabolic rate, whatever. Small amount. But here's what happened. It does impact your body composition. So sleeping less means you lose more weight from lean, or you lose more lean mass, gain more fat mass. Sleeping less means you gain more.

Say that one more time? So there was a, let me be specific. So there was a study where they had people diet and a calorie deficit, either with sleep restriction, I think less than five hours a day, or like more than eight hours a day. And they saw that the people who got plenty of sleep lost most of their mass from fat mass. The people who were sleep restricted lost like 50-50.

So then when you consider there's also studies showing that one night of sleep restrictions spontaneously caused people to increase their calorie intake by almost 500 calories in a day. Okay. Then you couple that with the fact that when you don't sleep well or you're tired, what happens to your spontaneous physical activity to you think? You become much more stationary without even realizing it, right? So it's not one thing. It's both and, right?

Like all these things come together. It doesn't have to impact your metabolic rate because it's impacting your subconscious physical activity, your energy intake, and the composition of the weight that you gain or lose. So when it comes to that stuff, like another example. So really like a problem solving area of, you know, okay, he had sleep apnea, got it fixed, boom, all of a sudden things start clicking, right?

I had a client who, he was a head, he's a hedge fund manager, so he has a very stressful job. And he was, at this point, he was binge eating pretty much like every single day. And he was really hard on himself. Like, he would be like, man, I'm such crap. I was like, first of all, you're going to stop talking about yourself that way, because it's not helpful. All right? It's not helpful. we were going to look at this as okay we are a battering we got struck out in a curveball so we're going to figure out how to hit a curve ball right we're not going to say I'm a piece of crap we're going to figure out how to hit curve balls and so for him he found that when he got

home from work and he did a stressful day if there was anything at home that kind of set them off kids acting out whatever he ended up you know kind of overeating on stuff said, okay, so we're going to do some simple actions. First thing is, if you've got a stressful day at work when you're on your way home in the car, I want you to say it out loud. I want you to say it, like verbally out loud to yourself. I've had a rough day. This is when I usually binge eat.

So just call it out. Because again, monitoring changes behavior, right? So he did that. So, okay, let's make sure we got him getting a meal service, right? So this guy had done very well for himself. So we got him first doing frozen meals and then he actually had a chef come in and make meals. I'm like, we're going to have meals ready

so that you, and you are feeling like eating, but you are hungry. You have some options that are ready to go that are much more conducive to your goals. Right? We did that. Then what were you getting into?

Okay, the kid's food, right? All right. Let's just put that stuff in the, I'm like, do you have a pantry that's like a walk in? He's like, yes. Like, can you put a lot? lock, do you have a lock on it? Like, yes. Like, just lock it. Because you, it's just one barrier. It doesn't stop you from getting into it. But now you got to go, actually go get the key and open it. Right.

And when you put those like little tiny psychological barriers, we talked about ultra-processed food was available back in the 50s, which had to walk to the bakery to get it, right? Bakery might have been five minutes away. But, so it's a, it's a barrier. And there was one bakery in town, not 15. Right. But it's, it's just creating those small barriers. And I'm like, and so you also had trouble with eating at night. Like you'd wake up and go eat. I'm like, okay, lock the door to your bedroom on the inside.

So you've got to unlock it when you get up. And just put a little post it on the fridge and just say, am I really hungry or am I just coping or something of that nature? And over the course of six months, so again, like there's no shame here. I'm not beating him up about it. I'm saying, okay, you know, we'd hit a stumbling block and then we'd figure, like these tools we developed were over the course of, you know, several months. This wasn't just all at once.

He lost over the course of a year, he lost like almost 40 pounds, I want to say. And he got to the point where he might have had a binge session like once every couple weeks, right? And he one day he was still big, being really hard himself. And I'm like, hey man. if I showed you where you're at now compared to where you were nine months ago, would you take that? He's like, oh, yeah, I take that all day every day. I'm like, so I get that you don't like it when this happens.

But like, dude, be proud of yourself, man. Like, you come a long way. I think a lot of people, when they have those, what they feel like shameful behaviors and like binge eating is one of like people feel so ashamed. about that. They just feel out of control, no control over their body. The idea that you're going to be able to take something that becomes so hardwired and just flip a switch and it goes away. You know, when it comes to like alcoholism or drug addiction, you can kind of cut gambling, you can kind of cut those things out of your life. Pornography, you can cut those things. There's ways you can put actual hard barriers against those things.

food you can't really put a hard barrier against because you got to eat right so imagine it's not the same thing but imagine being an alcoholic saying well you know i want you to drink too much but you got to drink like three times a day you know or one or two times a day or whatever it is that's pretty tough right because in some ways abstinence is easier than dealing with moderation right and so i told them i'm like hey listen what we're looking for here is consistent improvement, which you've done, okay? The idea that something that became so hardwired for you for so many years that you're just going to flip a switch and it's going to stop, human brains don't work that way.

Okay? Maybe at some point you get to the point where you don't do it anymore, but I bet you will still have that compulsion every once in a while to do it. You're just going to get better at managing it, right? And so I say that because I think it's really important for people. understand to normalize like, hey, these feelings are normal. This stuff, this, these things you struggle with are normal. I bet every single person, if we broke them down psychologically, has some sort of, I don't want to say addiction, but compulsive like behavior that they struggle

with, you know? And so the idea that you can just get rid of that, I don't know if that's the case, but you can get better at managing it and get it to the point where it doesn't, you know, control your life. And so what I'll tell people is like, don't let the idea of perfection be the enemy of really good. And I see so much of that. Just like don't let perfection be the enemy of good.

I want to pivot for a second. You know, I think for a lot of our listeners who might have seen some of your content online, especially on social media, because social media is the stuff that typically goes more viral. and gets reshared. They've seen you be critical of even some individuals that have been on this podcast before

and have your interpretation of what you feel that they got right or mostly what they got wrong. And they're listening to you right now and they're hearing you say a lot of words that show a deep level of empathy, understanding, not beating yourself up. Going back to my original question about this idea of what are some of the common things

that trip people up. If you would summarize in sort of totality, the people that you've been critical of or the statements you've been critical of, what are some consistent themes of that content that you've seen out there and why you've made the videos that you've made? I think one of the big themes is kind of like

the inclination to offload personal responsibility. it's the government made you fat or the food companies did this or it's your metabolism or it's this toxin in the food supply or whatever it is right that may feel good ego wise in the short term but it's very disempowering in the long term because if you weren't in control of the bad thing that happened to you then you aren't in control of fixing the bad thing that happened to you right but if you can really embrace the idea, I think Jaka Willing says, responsibility is freedom.

And it is because you have, this is what my, my therapist had said to me about some of the sort of more toxic behaviors that I had adopted in friendships and romantic relationships was, he was like, yes, this is your responsibility to

accept your role in these things. but it also means you have the power to change it. Like you can change these things. And I think that's where I want people to really listen to. And again, the reason I've been so passionate about calling out misinformation is I do feel like, one, the disempowering part of it. Two, people, when there's so much, misinformation always has unintended consequences. So, for example, I'll give you a great example, right? Somebody might say, don't eat, don't drink cola because it has high fructose corn syrup.

Fruit dose increases de novo phynovo lipogenesis and liver. It's going to give you liver disease, and it's going to, you know, it's going to, like, cause you to be fat, you know, independent of calories. and it's like, do I think drinking cola is a good idea? No, I don't because it's very non-satiating. It's very calorie-dense and, you know, it's a large component of calories in the American diet. So no, I don't think it's a good idea. But when you say things like fructose is toxic to the liver, now people stop eating fruit. So because how can you say fructose from cold? Cola is different than fruit dose from fruit because it's not, it's not different. I mean, there's fiber and fruit, which is a benefit.

And so you have to be careful about how you couch this stuff. Like, I think it's important to give the appropriate context and nuance. Like, hey, cola isn't good for you, but it's not because of like de novo lipogen. It's because it's calorie tense and it doesn't activate any sort of satiety in your brain. Like liquids aren't satiating. They've shown this repeatedly. And so, you know, what people will say to me is, well, well, isn't their message fine as long as it gets people to stop eating ultra-processed foods? Or I'm like, yeah, I get what you're coming from.

It's like, okay, kind of a Machiavellian, the ends justify the means. But that's not what people necessarily internalize out of that message. Or another one is, you know, I make a lot of content, dispelling myths or my artificial sweeteners. and, you know, diet soda. And I'll give that data. And they'll say, well, you know, people should just drink water. Like, isn't, like, they're just trying to encourage people to drink water. Yeah, but what you actually do is you raise the barrier to entry for some of these people, right?

Some people go, man, I can't ever imagine not drinking soda. And if diet soda is just as bad as regular soda, I'd rather just have regular soda. So again, going back to this earlier idea, the more complicated and the more rules you add to yourself, the less likely you're going to be consistent over time. So you feel that these individuals are stacking up more rules. Yes. And now people just throw up their hands and they say they're going to... Higher barrier to entry.

And here's the thing I tell people. Have guidelines don't have rules. So, for example, a rule of I don't eat sugar. Okay. That might seem like a good rule. But then again, what are you going to do about fruit? Because fruit has sugar in it. But every study we have on fruit intake shows positive metabolic health benefits,

positive on body composition, positive on longevity. You can't reconcile those two things, right? But if you have a guideline of, well, I try to limit my added sugar intake. That's different, right? Because you're limiting calories. And you're holding open the idea of, well, not all sugar. like not all sources of sugar are the same, right? A guideline or a rule might be,

I don't eat processed foods. That probably sounds like a good guide. Probably sounds like a good rule. But then you consider something like, well, weight protein is processed. And there's a bunch of studies showing that way protein can help with body composition, lean mass, inflammation,

metabolic health, even antioxidant status. If you're talking about weight protein concentrate, and so it's like okay well maybe the guideline is you know in general i try to avoid processed foods but let's not make it a rule because if it's a rule it causes people to when it's a rule when it's a rule people do weird stuff when it's a guideline it's different right and so i mean i even have even put this in you know i do this for people right like people i go into business with or even like right down to like somebody might go on a date with.

You know, I'm like, okay, well, I don't know. For example, like, they're on their Instagram and they're taking a lot of selfies in a certain kind of way or whatever. Okay, I don't want to make a rule that like, I don't date people who do this kind of thing. Because people are more complicated than just one thing, right? But a guideline of, well, people who do this behavior usually have these other behaviors but let's peel back the onion and see. You know what I'm saying?

Well, same thing here. Okay, well, while, yes, in general, eating less processed foods is probably a good guideline. Maybe there are situations where it doesn't warrant that, right? And so, yeah, I just think when people make up too many rules, and again, like, if you watched every Netflix documentary on food, You're left with basically like licking ice cubes and trying to photosynthesize. You know, like, so I just feel like the barriers to health feel very high to people when in reality, they're actually pretty low in terms of what you've got to do.

You know, I tell people like, you can boil it down until like kind of six things. I think that you would get like most drastically most of the benefits. Like maintain a normal body, normal lean body weight, exercise, um, limit alcohol. Don't do hard drugs.

Um, don't smoke. Get enough sleep and manage your psychological stress and mental health. And like if you did those six things and I'm not talking about perfectly, I'm just talking about like, you know, 95% of the time. I'll give you an example, speaking of the sleep thing.

So I talk a lot about sleep and the risk of injury. So there was actually a study done looking at like four hours sleep versus eight hours sleep and showed a 240% increase in the risk of acute injury in people who were sleep deprived. I'd somebody say, well, I slept bad last night. Should I skip my workout?

I go, well, how do you usually sleep? Like, well, I usually sleep like eight or nine hours. They go, you're fine. Like, it's more about what are you doing overall, right? Like, what is your overall lifestyle and recovery? Ben Carpenter actually had a great, a great example of this. So he had two jars of marbles, each of a different color. He goes, this is a diet of mostly whole food, high quality, you know, very little processed food.

this is a diet of junk food and, you know, nonsense, right? If I take one of these marbles from this healthy diet, and I put it in here, how much did it change? Not very much. But people act like if you take one of these from the junk food and put it over in the healthy thing, that you just blew everything. No.

Like, I tell people, I eat ice cream. I have a beer. I, you know, have process, but I, but I do it in a way that it's like, it's moderate and I'm very consistent. I am brutally, absurdly consistent with how I am with my calories

and my fiber intake, my protein intake. And that's why I'm, you know, 42 years old and I'm still in like really good shape, pretty much as good as I was back in my 20s, you know? If somebody looked from your, looked at your diet and what you eat from the outside, would they largely see that the vast majority of your calories are from whole foods?

And then, again, because you don't restrict yourself and you practice flexible eating, flexible dieting, you track your macros over a period of time, make sure you hit your protein, your fiber, et cetera, watching your total calories,

would they largely see that you're not really eating a lot of ultra-processed food? in the way that we typically think of fast food and pizza and other stuff in terms of your total calorie intake. Would they look at that and see that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the thing to keep in mind, so a lot of people say, well, I do like 80, 20, right? Like 80%. It's whole foods, whatever, and then 20% is kind of like fun foods or whatnot. I'm probably closer to 7030, but keep in mind, I, like my training for powerlifting is usually five days a week, two or three hours a session. Like I burn a lot and actually I just don't have a big appetite. So I get my protein in. I make

sure I eat enough fiber. But for me to get enough calories to actually maintain my body weight, I actually kind of have to, I don't have to, but it's easier for me to include some sort of energy dense foods to meet my energy goals. So I actually don't lose weight and don't lose lean mass. But I tell people, so comparable is, you know, sports car is a bad investment. Right. Like it's not investment. Well, some people want to argue like collector sports cars or whatever, but let's just take like a regular old like Corvant off the line, right? Bad investment. Not going to make you money back or anything like that. But, hey, if you make a million bucks a year and you can still pay your mortgage, you can put money away for retirement, you can put money away for your kids, you can meet all your

responsibilities and you have money left over and you really like a nice car, is that okay to go do it? I don't think there's a financial advisor in the world that would say, no, don't do that. you should be saving all that money, right? Because they know, like, oh, by having that, by allowing yourself that thing that you like, it's like that care at the end of the stick that kind of motivates you to keep going, right, to enjoy some of it. But if you make $50,000 a year, is that probably a good idea? Let's just take, like, debt out of it, right? But is that a good idea? If it means you can't pay your mortgage and you can't save money, no, it's not a good idea. That's a horrible idea, right?

So really a lot of it boils down to like how big is your budget, right? So if you're a small woman and you're trying to calorically restrict, if you're a woman who doesn't have much lean mass, I mean, your budget's going to be pretty small. And yeah, well, theoretically, you could have some ultra-processed food and fit it into your calories. It may not be practically doable because you'll be so hungry from not having enough, like, volume of food.

And so I think, you know, a lot of, but take somebody like an Olympic athlete, like a Michael Phelps, who has a huge budget, and now they say he ate 10,000 calories a day, I don't actually believe that. But he probably was eating five, six, seven thousand calories a day. Like, I would be more inclined to believe that. But he's in the pool also like five, six hours a day. And so you have one, now your food window that you have to eat is actually shrunk down because you're exercising so much of that. time, there's no way somebody like that is going to get that from like clean sources of food. Like you have to, to get that much energy in, you're going to have to use some ultra-processed foods. And so that's where I think like the context is very important, right? And I think, I was talking to my friend Brian about this last night, people like things to be black and white because they like to put them in boxes and be able to check them off.

and that's just not how the real world works typically. Like it's very hard to like look at something and say, like even like a buying a sports car, right? I'm not a car guy. But I might look at that and say, well, that's a dumb way to spend $100,000 because you could have invested that. True.

But if that person never enjoys the money that they made, will they have the same motivation to keep doing it and being consistent, right? Or maybe they want to take a vacation or whatever it is, right? Like you can go down that rabbit hole of basically, well, like, again, financial example. Well, what you should do, really, do the best financial thing is you should live in a very, very modest like place that so you can bank even more money, right? And then invest all that money. And then all the money you make them invest that money.

and you should live like a pauper so you can just keep piling up money. That's best investment thing you can do, right? Making your money work for you. But then what's the point of having all that? Right? Like you want to enjoy some of it. And by the way, somebody doing that probably burns out pretty quick, right? But when you run the marathon, right, and you allow yourself to be able to enjoy things more. And I look at the same thing with diet. Like, hey, I'm not telling you you can never have a piece of cheesecake again. I'm not going to tell somebody they can never have a soda again. I'm not going to tell somebody they can never have a glass of wine again because most people are going to, if they hear stuff like that, they're just going to, here's all the things you got to cut out. They're just

going to go, well, I can't do that. So I try. And I want to lower that barrier to entry for folks. Now, I do want to make it very apparent. Hey, yeah, if you're making a large portion of your diet, cheesecake and wine, yeah, it's not going to go well. But you don't have to completely eliminate either. Like there, there is a middle ground here. You know, I was talking earlier about the themes that you've talked about, especially on your social media content. You have these series. It's called what the health? What the fitness. What the fitness. What the fitness. I think one of the areas that you've been very impactful in my life as somebody who doesn't have a degree in any of this stuff, I don't have a PhD like you do. I'm just trying to figure it out for

myself, I have trying to ask interesting questions to the people that come on my podcast, is I've learned through your breakdown of studies that when you hear somebody, especially on social media or in a podcast, talk about a study and break down their interpretation of what it means, you really have to understand that breaking down a scientific study and going into the deep nuances to come out with recommendations is a lot tougher, even for the people who have some little bit of training in it. And there's a lot of people that are maybe a medical doctor that actually don't have a lot of formal training in it.

What public service announcement would you want to say on that topic to our audience that's listening today? I guess the first thing I would say is when it comes to people citing scientific research, search. I don't believe any citations I hear from people until I actually go and read the citation myself. And I realize like not everybody's equipped to do that, which is why I do some of the stuff that I do. But it happens all the time. I don't, I don't even necessarily think it's somebody who is trying to purposely deceive people. A lot of times I think, especially when it comes to like doctors or people who are perceived as experts who say things that

were just outright wrong. They heard it from somebody they trusted. They never fact checked it. And I just know, I mean, again, I give a lot of credit to my PhD advisor, Dr. Donald Lehman. You know, the first, I told the story last night, the first talk I ever gave at a scientific conference, it was a 10-minute talk, and then I did five minutes of answering questions. and one of the people who I didn't know

but was one of the foremost experts in amino acid metabolism dressed me down in front of 300 other scientists like pretty, pretty rough and I got off stage and my advisor said you know, you did well typically you're not supposed to go that hard on a graduate student

I think he was a little bit hard on you but he's like, but this will be good for you And it was. Like I realized that I did not have as deep enough understanding as I thought I did. And it actually drove me to really learn more to understand not just the studies, not just the results, but the methods, how the data is collected with the limitations of those methods are. And to really dig deep.

And to this day, I mean, I was reviewing a study the other day. And they had a, they had a measurement on it of, they called it I want to say like quadricep contraction strength or something like that and I called my friend Bill Campbell

because I am very competent in exercise physiology but I didn't know this particular apparatus or how they measured this. So I call Bill. Bill explains to me how this measurement's taken all this kind of stuff. I could have just jumped on and said

hey this showed this but I'm like I want to understand how this measurement is taken. So I understand what is the actual relevance for your everyday person, right? And so people will say all the time, well, you, you're just an ivory tower and you, do you really think somebody needs a PhD to be able to understand research? No, but you would have to do enough reading, enough background, enough, like, you might as well go and get a PhD if you're willing to do that much work to really understand it. And I think one of the issues is people will,

like, for example, the study I said earlier, I said, I may butcher the details of this, but the overall message will be correct. That's me knowing no one has the wherewithal to remember exact details from every study they ever read and just wanting to be like, hey I might get it a little bit wrong okay and so I've just seen people I was listening to a podcast and a gal who was a PhD in neuroscience who like a absolutely an expert who has great credentials all that kind of stuff and she said there was a study where they just had people think about lifting weights and they grew their muscles grew 13% in two weeks and I'm like I just know so much physiology about muscle growth. I'm like, no, I don't believe it. Right. So I went and tried to

find the study and I found a study where they showed, I think it was eight or 12 weeks. I can't remember exactly the exact age. So it wasn't two. And it was measuring finger adduction strength. Thinking about doing that and they saw a 13% increase in strength. So they probably heard it from somebody who read it and didn't have the wherewithal to interpret the results properly and took it out of context and they just recited it. Right. And then there was another time where somebody said, well, there was a study in Copenhagen where they gave a liter of cola, a leader of diet cola, a leader of a liter of fat milk, a liter of water for six months and they saw people who drank cola gained 10 kilos, people who drank diet cola, gained two kilos. And I went and looked at the study

and the results were basically there was no difference between any other groups. The cola group gained like a kilo and a half and the Diet cola group actually gained the least, basically gained nothing in the lowest absolute amount out of all the groups. But there was no statistical differences between any of them. I'm like, man, and that's a person who has, who's a physician,

and again, probably heard it from somebody they trusted. But it's like, you know, you heard the whole, Well, somebody told the story, then they told a story. By the time it gets to the fifth person, it's a completely different story. Right. And so it's so tough because I think people are just looking for, I just want to be able to turn my brain off. I just want to be able to listen to this one person

and know that everything that, I'm sorry, I've got bad news for you. Everybody is a flawed human who has their own biases, their own personal beliefs, me included. I try to be honest about those biases. I try to point them out whenever I'm doing a piece of content. Like I did something on a protein study, like about six months ago where I said, hey, just so you know, my bias is actually kind of opposite to the results they found in the study. I just want to get that out front.

And then I proceeded to discuss the study, right? And I just wish people could do more of that because I think it's actually, I don't know, if I hear somebody like just kind of like point out a flaw of theirs or you know, something like that, it actually makes me trust them more. But I think one thing I heard that I thought was a very poignant observation was that

if two people are talking, like if we're talking about a subject, it becomes pretty quickly apparent who is more knowledgeable of the two of us on a subject. right? But if we're watching two people, both of whom who are more knowledgeable than us, disagree about a subject, we are not equipped to determine who is more knowledgeable of the two, and we just end up defaulting to who aligns with our personal beliefs more and who do we just like better, right? And so I've had people say, you know, I just love your content because I know I can

just, you know, I trust you 100% and I'm like, don't do that. But yes, I'd like to think I'm trustworthy, but again, I am a flawed, imperfect human. Science is perfect, but it's done by humans and humans are not perfect. And so I think listen to the way people talk more than what they say. What I mean is, I try to be very careful in the language I use in terms of, I say things like, likely, probably, you know, I'm not planting my flag real strong, which I also tell people, if you see me plant my flag real strong, like you should probably pay attention. I don't do it very often. Because real experts don't usually use words like best, worst, never, always.

In fact, real experts, a lot of times if you ask them a question, they'll ask you a couple questions back to get the appropriate context and nuance. Or they'll give a really long-winded answer discussing all the potential caveats, and a lot of times they'll give you the devil's advocate argument. I'll do that a lot of times. I'll say, well, here's the argument for this, but here's why I think my argument is better, right? And unfortunately, I think now with how social media is and sound bites and everything, nuance

sounds like confusion to people. and absolute statements sound like certainty. And certainty sounds like truth. And the reality is truth, truth is very complicated. And it depends on the new ones. And again, people don't, for the most part, people don't read scientific citations. And I get this all the time. People say, well, this person cited all these studies.

I'm like, did you look at the studies? did you like there was a podcast where somebody said well they fed these animals uh aspartame and they they fed these subjects they said subjects by the way somebody says subjects that's usually a dead giveaway it was in animals um so they they fed these subjects aspartame and they gained body fat so i went and they were this person was dumb enough to say the pub med ID because i'm going to go look it up and they actually showed the exact opposite that the animals that got fed aspartame actually lost more body fat than animals that weren't. But if that person, just to jump in there to come back to your point, sorry to cut you off.

It was okay. But in that moment, you know, looking through your lens of, you know, empathy for human beings, which you obviously have, your general feeling is that it's not that this person knew the answer and is lying. It's that, hey, they either heard from somebody and are just repeating something or they took a quick glance of somebody writing about it, interpret it, didn't actually have the training to go into it and just decided that this is going to be good content. So I have changed my view quite a bit on people who spread misinformation. And I used to very much think, well, they're just

greedy and they're just going to make money and whatever. I think very few people do the wrong thing believing they are doing the wrong thing because we are not wired to be able to do that for the most part unless you're a sociopath if you're a sociopath you just don't care um most people when they do the wrong thing convince themselves through their story in their mind that it's the right thing and i think most of the people who misquote studies who say things aren't supported by they believe they're doing the right thing and they find a way to justify it to themselves. Because like I said, it's very hard psychologically to do the wrong thing knowing you're doing the wrong thing.

And I just think about the times in my life when I've done the wrong thing. And I've talked about this before. Like my first marriage, I had an affair. The only time I've ever done something like that, despicable, horrible. But at the time, trust me, I justified it to myself, right? even though looking back there's no justification for that right but it's very hard for us to do the wrong thing knowing we are doing the wrong thing and so I think it is much more common for people to find a way to justify what they're saying in their minds again like maybe somebody

might make up some misinformation about processed food right but they justify well you know I'm just getting people to eat less processed food. So the ends justify the meat. Or I just want people to drink more water. So I'm saying diet cola is as bad as regular cola. Or maybe they truly believe it. But I'm always tell people, I'm like, well, you know, not all studies are created equal. You can always find a study to support whatever narrative you want to push, right?

Like, what's a great example of this? I could create a narrative to make you think. think smoking is good for you. Watch. So, um, there's actually like two studies that show smoking not only doesn't increase the risk of adenocarsinoma. It actually slightly decreases the risk of endocercernoma. And smoking is actually associated with a consistent 30 to 40% reduction in the risk of Parkinson's, right? I can create a narrative around, but so those two studies on of denocarsenoma, they weren't statistically significant. And of a meta-analysis looking at over 50 studies on smoking adenocarcinoma, the overall increase in risk from smoking on adenocarsenoma

is about 300 to 400 percent, right? But I can find two studies, they're outliers, to cite as evidence, right? And then couple that with, well, look at this study on, you know, these studies on Parkinson's, whatever. And I can create it, I can do that for literally anything. I can can make anything seem like the greatest thing ever, or I can make anything seem like the most terrible thing ever. If I cherry pick and isolate mechanisms, I can make anything fit a narrative that I want. And that's why it's important to look at what is the highest quality of evidence say,

which is human randomized control trials. Is there a consistency amongst that data? Not every single study has to line up, but overall, what does it say? right and that's where I start and I think a lot of people again there's um you know um like some of the carnivore crowd who tries to make out vegetables to be bad for you like oh well look there's this chemical compound and broccoli that's going to uh great example isosyothanates um Paul salt you know had a video on this and he said well you know broccoli has isosyothanates in it which can bind to iodine

that's going to reduce the amount of iodine you absorb. It's going to impair your thyroid function, and it can cause you to slow down your metabolism and gain weight. So what he did was, it's true they have isosyothanates. It's true they can bind to iodine. But is it actually in a dosage that actually makes a difference in those outcomes when we measure it? And if we look at, again, human studies

where they look at cruciferous vegetable intake, there's no impact on thyroid function. there's no impact on metabolic rate. And if anything, people tend to lose more weight when they eat more cruciferous vegetables, not because there's a fat burning effect, but because they're satiating, right? And so it's like, you can construct that narrative

and he cited studies, but some of them were like, again, using like, high doses of isosyothanates, and I think, like, I want to say like pigs, I might have gotten that wrong, but I'm like, okay, so what do we care more about? Like, feeding a high amount of this isolated compound to animals

and seeing what happens or like what actually happens when humans consume this in whole food? Like these are not the same things. I'd love to share like a real world example that I think was a trajectory that a lot of my podcast listeners went on. I had on some of the sort of I call it like longevity 1.0 people on my podcast. And a lot of the narrative at that time, this was like go back like four years ago, a lot of the narrative at the time was like, hey, be very mindful about eating a high protein diet because high protein and mTOR and then one day i came across a clip from a conversation that you

had with peter attia and you guys were breaking down the research in the space and talking about why looking at an uptick in mTOR in a very acute setting is not the same thing as translating that a long-term you know, higher protein diet that leads to maintaining or maybe even increasingly muscle mass is a bad thing. Can you just talk about that for a second? Absolutely. So if you could just, and sorry to cut you off, just give us a little of the backstory of like, why was that being said and why was that being repeated by so many people? And then what did the research show and what it did not show. So the argument is, so mTOR, which is the, which stands for mammalian target of rapamycin, rapamycin is a cancer drug, or anti-cancer drug. And so this idea is that mTOR

is very elevated in a lot of cancers. So mTOR is a complex that the phosphorylation or activation of which is involved in protein synthesis. Okay. So the idea of the idea of, was, and they took, they kind of like took this mechanism, extrapolated it to an outcome and said, well, we do see mTOR's overactive in some of these cancers. And then there's also like the IGF1 piece. People, you know, IGF1 is tumorogenic. If you like have high levels of it for a long period of time or, you know, may enhance cancer proliferation or progression. And I'm not a cancer expert, but I have talked about this with my friend, Joseph Zundel, who is a cancer biologist. We've been on this podcast before.

Yeah, he was a great guy. Again, like when you hear somebody like that talk and you really get into how complicated this stuff is you realize how much nuance there is. But I'm like, okay, so one of my things I'm big on is we have to apply logic symmetrically. And most people apply logic asymmetrically, which means if, okay, you say you're worried about mTOR

and longevity because eating protein activates mTOR. then don't we have to apply that same logic to other foods as well? Okay. So if acute mTOR stimulation is bad for longevity, well, what happens when glucose is elevated long term of the bloodstream? It's called type 2 diabetes.

Okay, so can't eat any carbohydrates then. It's going to raise insulin, raise glucose. Those are elevated for long periods of time. That's negative. Oh, also eating carbohydrate short term raises inflammatory markers as well. Okay, so protein and carbs out. I guess we're left with fat. Well, fat impedes flow-mediated dilation after a meal,

which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. So what are we left with then? And I think the point is if we look at acute, right, you know what's a much more powerful activator of mTOR? Resistance training. Where are all these people getting muscle sarcomas and falling over dead of cancer who resistants? train. They're not. In fact,

resistance training decreases the risk of cancer incidence. And if I told you, hey, I'm going to have you do something, like, let's assume you don't know I'm talking about exercise. I'm telling you, I'll tell you, I'm going to have you do something that raises your heart rate, raises your blood pressure, raises your inflammatory markers, raises your active oxygen species production, and raises your cortisol, and increases your mTOR activation. You would say what? I'm not doing that.

Right? Well, that's what that's what exercise does. So obviously what happens acutely is not predictive of long-term outcomes. And there are so many people, even scientists who don't understand this. And I think it also points to just like how complex biological systems are. Okay. So for example, this pulls down to outcomes versus mechanisms. Okay. So an outcome is like weight law. body fat loss, building muscle, insulin sensitivity, cancer incidence, cardiovascular disease, these are outcomes, right? So these are hard outcomes. If you have an outcome, there will always be a mechanism, okay, meaning if something happens, there's a biochemical explanation for why it happened. There might be a few of them, right? But just because a biochemical mechanism exist does not mean you will get an outcome. Okay. This is like, so for example, I'll give you a great example of this. You know aspirin is an anticoagulant, right? So people, if you have a lot of people who are at risk for heart attacks, they tell them take a baby aspirin, then it's the blood. But did you know that

aspirin also activates procoagulant pathways? But the overall outcome is obviously the signal for anticoagulation is greater than the signal for procoagulation, right? everything you eat probably activates positive and negative pathways. The question is not, does it activate these things? The question is, what is the overall outcome? This is the great example of seed oils, which I know, like, people will lose their minds because that is the most, like, outspoken crowd right now. But I'm like, hey, look at the actual outcome data.

Okay, so you've got data in animals where if you over feed omega-6s, some negative outcome. happen or you see lipid proxidation or whatever it is. But what are we seeing people who eat more polyunsaturated fats in place of saturated fat? They have lower rates of cardiovascular disease. It has a neutral or positive effect on inflammation and neutral, maybe slightly positive effect on cancer incidents based on the meta-analyses. So you have this mechanism, which is, oh, well, these polyunsaturated fats, you can oxidize the double bond.

And when those get in your system, it's going to be able to be. going to cause oxidation and inflammation. You're making leaps of logic based on a biochemical mechanism to an outcome, and you can't do that because biological systems are not one pathway. An outcome is the summation of hundreds, if not, thousands of biochemical pathways, summing up to one signal. And I'll give you a, I thought about this for years of like, how can I explain this with an analogy? And the best one I've come up with so far is it's like looking at single stocks versus mutual funds. Okay.

So, Drew, if I was like, hey, you don't want to invest in this mutual fund. Look at these two stocks in the mutual fund that are down 50% this year. And I didn't tell you that overall the mutual fund's up 20%. What would you care more about? The two stocks that are underperforming or the fact that the mutual fund overall is killing it? you care about the fact that it's killing it because it's impossible to have a mutual fund where every single stock always goes up like that just doesn't exist right um and so that's these biochemical pathways so on that note for somebody like myself who generally i try to avoid seed oils

and i know the data that's out there after digging into it i used to feel like hey the data is being suppressed because i had people on this podcast that would say that we're not talking about the truth of it or you're you know you're being oxidized etc now that i've gone down the rabbit hole heard from a lot of different people including yourself i understand that hey the data around seed oils largely shows that they're beneficial there's peep or neutral and it's a very complicated processee that that goes involved into it and most people get their exposure to seed oils through more ultra-processed foods. Bingo.

It's a proxy for ultra-processed foods is the problem. And generally, I want me and I think it's beneficial for a lot of people to minimize their exposure, not be radical about it. I in particular have always had this thing that I feel like if I have a lot of seed oils or if I have something cooked in some type of seed oil, I just don't feel good. Maybe that's my own bias that's there that's influencing it. Like I say that I don't feel good, right? but I feel like my throat scratches up a little bit.

So a better way to say it is that, hey, look, seed oils largely have been shown to either be positive or neutral, but I choose to avoid them because I don't feel good. And you wouldn't have any problem with that statement at all. I don't have a problem with that. Because I'm not making any claims. No, you're saying about what you feel like. And I'm talking about what I feel. And a lot of people would probably end up not being featured on your content if they

simply said, hey, the data is. mixed or hey, this works for me and I'm not saying it works for you or, hey, I feel good when I do this. I have no idea if this is going to work for you or hey, I am out of my wheelhouse, but here's what I think this thing said. Is that accurate? Yeah, but that doesn't produce great sound bites, you know. I'll give you a perfect example of this. It's something that like when people ask me like how I eat and like if we like kind of do a deep dive and people, like ask like how do you set up your food your nutrition this and that um and i'll i'll tell people for example um well you know i usually have like more of my carbohydrate intake before and after

training the research really hasn't shown that to be beneficial but i grew up in the air where muscle magazines told you you had to eat a big meal before and after you trained and so i just got used to doing that became part of my habit i feel good doing that i feel better it's probably 99% placebo, maybe 100% placebo. But I like it. So I do it. And so what's the problem with saying that? But if somebody else says, well, I don't like to really eat a big meal before I go

in a train. Okay. I think a lot of it honestly stems from insecurity of people feel like they have to recruit people to do what they're doing because they feel insecure about it. And my whole thing is like, I don't have like macro tracking guru in my bio. Like I don't want to be tied to a certain style. of doing things. Like, this is what I do. If you like it, cool. If not, hey, I just want to help you find tools and help you manage things best you can. That's low-carved, intermittent fasting, whatever.

Like, all that stuff's cool for me. Like, I'm not going to do it. But I have no problem with you doing it. When I do have a problem is people saying crazy shit about why they do what they do, right? And it's like, it's not good enough for people to say, well, this is my preference. It's why I like it. It's like, I have to retroactively explain why it's the best thing ever and better than what everybody else is doing. And like, we could go on forever because I could get into like why people are so tribal about this stuff and get so ferocious about this stuff. But just what you said, I get people who send me clips all the time where it's somebody

going, oh, I do this and this is what, but they're saying like as an opinion and I go, I'm not going to do content on this. This is fine. Like they said it's an opinion. You're allowed to have an opinion. I mean, I would disagree with it. But they're not generalizing to the vast public. They're saying, for me, this is how I feel.

Okay, cool. I got no problems with that. Like, that's fine. It's fine to say that. The same reason why I'll say things like, you know, the research thus far has not shown that, like, for example, for lower body training, that higher frequency produces better results for muscle growth and strength.

But I've done it both ways, and I got better results with higher frequency. Now, you could argue that, I was just doing more overall volume. Okay, maybe it is that. But if that's the case, it's a better tool for me to distribute that volume over a few sessions than try to cram it all into one session. So either way, I like it better that way, right? But if somebody said, well, another great example.

I used to go do massage therapy and my massage therapist would do cupping. Now, there's really no good data on cupping. Sorry to everybody who's going to get mad at me. There's not really good data on this stuff. Um, but she did it. I like the way it felt. I felt loose afterwards. And I'm like, okay.

But I would like, I posted an update picture one time. You could see the cupping marks and people were getting mad at me. And they're like, that is an evidence base. And I go, I know. I just like how it feels. People were like shocked at. I'm like, yeah, I can do stuff just because I want to. Not because it has data behind it necessarily.

Where in the wheelhouse of evidence base does. somebody's like a practitioner or a clinician. Where does clinical experience of that individual? Where does that fall in the wheelhouse of evidence base? I mean, I think experience is huge. I mean, I worked with about 2,000 people over like a 15-year period, one-on-one coaching. And, man, I learned so much from that experience.

But honestly, a lot of it, I walked away going, I should have done a PhD in psychology instead of nutrition because the X's and O's are pretty simple, to be honest. Like, I can describe to you like a bunch of different biochemical pathways. It sounds cool, but it doesn't change anybody's life. You know people to change behaviors, what changes life. But I was lucky enough that I observed my clients and I was able to do a lot of evidence-based things

without realizing I was doing it when it came to behavior change because I just observed what work and what didn't work and I adjusted my methodology based on that. I would say for clinicians, you have to be careful because there's what's called selection bias, right? So, for example, when I was very big on flexible dieting

and I was talking about it a lot because of how it had worked for me, I had all these people coming to me for flexible dieting coaching and getting good results. And I'm like, this is it. You know, at first I'm like, this is the solution.

Well, no, They're coming to, I always tell, I'm like, no, dumb, dumb. They're coming to you because you talk about this thing all the time. They're already sold on what you're doing. And so, of course, they're more likely to get better results doing this. They've already bought into it. Like, you're not having to convince them. It's like people will say, well, I've treated 4,000 people with low-carb diets and they get great results.

Yeah, because they came to you wanting that. Like, they were already sold on it, right? And plus, like, to be honest, the people who don't get results, you're not going to post up about them. Or you may not even hear from them. Exactly. It's like, so there's this huge selection by, so that's what I would say to clinicians is like, hey, if you like a certain tool, that's fine. But one of the things I would say is an evolution of my coaching and the way our team coaches

in the last, you know, five to ten years is we really just kind of look at things as like, all these things are tools in a tool belt. And maybe I use my screwdriver a lot more than my jackhammer. But I've still got my jackhammer. hammer if I need it. I'm not just going to set it to the side just because we don't use it very often, right? Like we keep all the tools available to us. And I just think if people looked at things more that way than trying to do, well, I'm a hammer, so everything is a nail. And like the solution to everything means that's also another big red flag. If you know,

if somebody's promoting a certain diet style and it's just the best thing for everything, I mean, you know, I'll tell people like in general, we know, but like a healthy, the eating pattern looks like, you know, like, and this transfers across different diet types as well. But like the likelihood that there's going to be like, like that low carb is best for cardiovascular disease, cancer, Parkinson's, like every single like disease. Like, I think that's pretty unlike. You know, like, that's not how stuff really works. Again, one of my favorite quotes is, there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs. And you can apply that to almost everything.

And I think just, you know, I tell people, focus on being consistent. That is the hack. That is the great secret. That is what is going to produce results. And I'm sure I don't know about your whole entrepreneurial journey, but I'm sure if we sat down and talked about it, if I asked you, what would you rather have? Somebody who just goes out and consistently executes day after day,

even if they make some poor decisions versus an overplanter, you take the executor all day every day. Because eventually you learn. Like you bang your head into a wall enough, you learn, right? But you can't do that if you're not out there trying and failing. Like it's actually a great dichotomy of existence is we have to fail to learn most of us. I mean, I think, you know, what's the quote, smart people learn from their mistakes. Truly wise people learn from the mistakes of others, you know.

I would like to say I'm truly wise, but my life history has shown me that I'm just smart, hopefully, because I've had to learn from my own mistakes. but yeah, I guess if I'd have one takeaway, it's like just focus on getting consistent. Don't try to be perfect. It's not going to happen. Just focus on action and executing consistently. And be open to the fact that you're going to make mistakes and you're going to fail. And that's okay.

It's not really failure unless you just stop showing up. And if you do that long enough, it's hard to not get results, to be honest. I'll give you one more analogy. If I said, Drew, I want you to become the best three-point shooter you can possibly be. Okay? You can't get any coaching. You can't do any online tutorials, nothing.

But if all you did for 10 years was go outside and shoot three-pointers for two, three hours a day, at the end of that 10 years, you probably wouldn't go to the NBA, But my guess is you'd probably be pretty damn good at shooting three-pointers. Why? Because consistent action trumps everything else. And that would be the one takeaway I'd really want people to go home with. Lane, this has been great. As we conclude here, you know, you have this phrase, which is you want people to major in the majors.

Just remind us again in the conclusion this interview, the majors that will significantly lead to results in their health, maybe even their longevity in life, but definitely their health span and their journey of maintaining a healthy weight. What are those majors? Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, you know, we talk about maintaining a healthy body weight. Whatever gets you there in terms of, you know, getting into alignment with your energy expenditure and your energy intake, if that It's low carb, if it's intermittent fasting, if it's tracking calories, if it's getting a little help with GLP1 of medics, getting an exercise program, all those things can help, right? Part one. Exercise. I don't care if you're a healthy body weight. I don't care if you're overweight. If you exercise, independent of your body weight, exercise reduces the risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. So exercise, move your body.

Human bodies are meant to move. And by the way, there is so much evidence coming out now on exercise and the cross-talk between depression and cognitive function. Now, we didn't even get into this, but like really quickly, what happens in the mind affects the body, what happens in the body affects the mind. We see this with the pain literature as well. Psychological stress drastically increases your sensitivity to pain. Like it's a measurable outcome, not as in like, oh, I feel.

like I feel more, no, no, you actually feel more pain when you're stressed, when you get less sleep. What happens in the mind affects the body. What happens in the body affects the mind. There was a recent study looking at men who were diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder. And they had them go, they were sedentary. They had them exercise resistance strain two times per week for 25 minutes for, I want to say eight weeks. the total amount of time they spent exercising over eight weeks, I think was like six hours and 42 minutes. I want to say, or six hours and 40 minutes based on, I think, the calculations.

Six hours and 40 minutes over eight weeks. Now there's this thing called an effect size in research, which basically says you can have significance. Significance just means it's unlikely that the results were due to random chance, right? That's significance. But you can have significance that's a small difference, a small effect, right? if you have enough data. An effect size is like, how much did this actually matter?

Like, what was the actual, how powerful was it? How much did it move the needle? Right. So if we look at SSRIs, SSRIs on average, have an effect size of like 0.3 to like 0.5. And I think the best they see when all things go well is like a 0.8, which, so a 0.2 and under is a small effect size, 0.5 is considered modest and anything above 0.8 is considered large. The effect size of this resistance training program was 1.7. That is a massive effect size and better than pretty much anything we see with SSRIs.

Now, again, I'm not saying don't get medical intervention if you have depression or anything like that. Both things can be true. Exercise can help and SSRIs can help. I'm not against medication if people need it. But what that says is what happens in the body affects the mind. So exercise. Move your body. It's good for your mind.

And on that note, manage your psychological stress. If you look at, are you familiar with the ACEs score? Adverse childhood events. Yep. So experiences. Zero is basically you were loved. Love was given freely. You never felt scared for your safety.

You know, you had loving parents. You had a loving family. Things were provided for you. you had a very healthy upbringing. A 10 is you were basically abused, right? Like you were abused, you never felt safe, you didn't have autonomy over your body, you know, that sort of thing.

Basically, there's a linear association between ACEs score and all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. So when you are spun up all the time, when you're in fire-flight mode all the time, it affects your longevity. And one of the things I say to people is the amount of stress you're spending over all these small details

might be killing you faster than getting those details wrong. And that is, I think, one of the major things I point out to people where they're like, well, you know, like this thing that's in this food and this thing. I'm like, hey, man, relax, relax. Like a lot of people have gotten healthy, a lot of different ways. But if you're spun up all the time, all this stuff might be for not. And if you, like, we could go into a whole thing. Like, if you look at the ideology of a lot of autoimmune diseases, a lot of them have very strong ties to psychological stress.

Like you look at IBS. IBS, very strong connection with psychiatric disorders going both ways. So, and even like pain we were talking about, right? People with chronic fatigue syndrome, people with fibromyalgia, much higher association. with psychological stress. This is the silent killer that a lot of people are talking about. I just know, again, in my own personal anecdote,

I was somebody who dealt with really bad lower back pain and hip pain for years with powerlifting that happened to coincide with the most stressful period of my life. And in the last two years, I've actually gotten back to like the strongest I've ever been. And it's been because I've been able to train consistently because I'm not in pain all the time.

And the single biggest thing that made the difference was learning how to manage my psychological stress better and not getting so spun up all the time. And when I do get spun up, almost like clockwork, I'll start getting lower back pain again.

It drastically increases your sensitivity of these things. So again, what happens in the mind affects the body, what happens in the body affects the mind and we used to try to separate these things. Well, that's all just woo-woo, psychological babble. No, no, that stuff matters. It all matters.

So that obviously like limiting smoke, like don't smoke, limit your drinking, don't do hard drugs, get enough sleep, and social connection. My friend John Deloney talks about this a lot. He has a great podcast. We've had him on. Great guy. Yeah, John's one of my closest friends. And he talked about mental health in terms of you, it is hard to feel bad about life. when you have a lot of really good people in it.

You know, you're, and what I loved about John's podcast that got me thinking this way of what happens in the mind affects the body, when people would call in and talk about things, he would go, where do you feel that? How does it, how does it make your body feel? Or you talk about how somebody's body felt. And I never put that together. And then when I left, a couple years ago, I left a really bad relationship and bad for her too. Like I, we just weren't good together. Within two weeks, I was physically stronger in the

gym and I was actually even sleeping less. And I'm like, I don't even know how to explain this. And I'm thinking, oh, this makes sense. My body isn't like vibrating all the time. I can actually recover from these sessions because it's not trying to, you know, I'm not spun up all the time and it's spending all this energy fighting ghosts. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, I've just become so big on psychological stress management. And I think, again, part of that is like, let's not get focused on the minors, man. Let's focus on the big stuff because most people don't even get the big stuff. No.

It's such an important message. And as we wrap up here, I just want to give you some acknowledgement and some gratitude. You know, I mentioned that many of the guests that I've had on here, you've had critical thoughts about things that they've said. And my favorite guests, by the way, are the ones that engage in that criticism. You guys actually end up becoming friends. Yeah, it's happened with a lot of people. It's happening a lot of people. And I learned through that interaction that they say, hey, I got this wrong.

And maybe I believe that thing that they said before. I'm not trained in this area. I just believed it because I thought they were an expert. And they leaned it and said, you know what? Here's what I got right and here's what I got wrong. And they evolved, which we all get things wrong. For sure. And it's good to evolve.

It's good to lean into that and say, oh, wow, you know what? I actually didn't know or I was only looking at this one particular area. And seeing you interact with those individuals and show your homework, so to speak, of why you believe the way that you do, it has evolved my thinking. I definitely throughout a lot of my life in the world of wellness, just as a human being trying to make the right choices, getting advice to friends, about what worked or didn't work for me. I focused on a lot of minor stuff. Now, some of that stuff genuinely made a difference in my life, but I extrapolated too far,

and I told people that it would work for them. And even if I did truly believe it, because I thought it would work for them, I forgot to double down on the majors that would actually significantly move the needle forward with them. And I wouldn't have got there as early as I did without seeing your content. I know a lot of people have commentary on your style.

And I want to say, actually, I think you have even slightly from the outside looking in. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. I know we're running out of time here. But it's good. I've seen you even become nicer in how you put the information out, even if you're critical of people. I've seen you take people's content in a very critical lens and say, look, I don't know this person.

they may be a nice guy. In fact, they probably are a nice guy or a nice gal. But here's why they're wrong. I've seen that incorporated in. I don't know if that's conscious, if that's not conscious. Yeah, it's conscious. It's conscious. And going back to you saying people's motivation and shifting how you look at that,

you previously thought that they were just trying to get a one over on people or get quick, you know, get rich quick scheme. But now you understand that they may actually just not know, Are they just repeating from somebody else? And they, it might be an emperor has no clothes situation, that there's nobody close to them that has told them that, hey, do you really know this information? So bringing it back down to me, I've majored in the minors.

I have given people advice that is incorrect because I thought that I was doing the right thing or that it worked for me. And again, I want to acknowledge you because I think that your voice and some of other people that are in your world, that are bringing a check and balance to this, you're telling people that,

hey, it's okay to say that you don't know. And it's okay to also understand that the more rules you place on people, the more you are going to take them awry. Yep. And so I just want to say, I appreciate you,

and I'm so grateful that we've had a chance to have this conversation in person. Listen, I think I have a lot of admirable. and give a lot of grace to people who are willing to say, oh, I might have gotten that wrong. Like, that's actually how Ed Huberman and I first engaged was I actually called him out on something and explained. I'm like, well, you know, here's what you said, but here's what these human randomized control trials say. You know, you're talking about a mechanism and here's what the outcome

say. And he was like, well, I wasn't aware of that data. Thank you for showing it to me. And then, you know, we started engaging from there. And Thomas DeLauer. Like I honestly, some of my first debunk videos of Thomas were, we're pretty rough. Like, I was pretty hard on him. Um,

but over time, he evolved his thinking and he was always cordial. And, you know, I just, I still don't agree with everything like people, like him say. But I give a lot of grace now because I'm like,

oh, you know what? Actually are trying to help. They just, they don't have the background I had, which was being wrong a lot in grad school and getting my ideas crushed over and over and just being cool with being wrong, you know?

And I even had it, what I will say to those people out there is if you can admit that you were wrong about something, your audience, people will see you as an actual genuine human. It's not going to be a bad. Yeah, there are going to be some people

who take shots to you, whatever. But, like, if you can just wholeheartedly own it, you look better. Like I had, I put up a quote or, put up something a few months ago and I said, well, the average dietary fiber intake in the U.S. is six grams per day. And I did a whole take down on that,

a whole thing on that. And a dietitian in the comment said, I don't know where you got that six gram number from Lane. So again, I heard it from somewhere in grad school and I just kept repeating it, right? So again, fallible human. they go, here's the USDA data. It's 13 grams per day.

Went, looked at the data. She was absolutely right. So I pinned her comment. I said, you're right. Thank you for correcting me. Like, yeah, did a part of my ego go, you know? Yeah, because nobody likes to be wrong. But I care more about getting the right answer than I do about being right. Because I don't want to be out here misleading people

and saying the wrong thing. And so, yeah, I think that if more people could just embrace that and realize like, hey, it's okay to be wrong. We get a lot further in life and in our kind of social media sphere. But I mean, a lot of people really tie their identity up in this stuff. And once you make it an identity, it's hard to walk that back. Lane, thank you again for having this conversation. Super appreciate you. I appreciate you.

Thank you, Drew. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening.

Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. 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 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 that's called Try This, or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T.com and click on the tab that says, try this.