Dhru Purohit Show - Weight Loss Expert Shares the Absolute Best Ways (and the worst ways) to Lose Weight Long Term Using Research-Backed Strategies Anyone Can Implement Today with Dr. Allan Bacon

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Bon Charge, and AquaTru. Social media is flooded with weight loss advice, much of which is unhelpful or unsustainable. From crash diets to quick-fix methods that rarely lead to lasting results, it’s hard to cut through the noise and find what truly works. Today’s guest shares expert advice and the proven strategies he uses with his clients to achieve real, lasting results. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with nutritionist and certified personal trainer Dr. Allan Bacon. Dr. Bacon breaks down the best and worst ways to lose weight, the ideal mindset for sustained weight loss, and the harmful advice often targeted at women in perimenopause and menopause. He also shares actionable tips on how often to train and strategies for changing eating habits and behaviors around weight loss. From debunking social media myths to diving deep into the latest research, Dr. Bacon offers expert insights on nutrition and training you won’t want to miss. Dr. Allan Bacon holds a Doctorate in Dental Surgery from the University of Maryland. He is a certified personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a certified nutritionist and physique/bodybuilding coach, a USA Powerlifting coach, and has over 15 years of experience formulating for leading dietary supplement companies. His work has been featured in Muscle & Fitness, Sci-Fit, the Alan Aragon Research Review, and The Personal Trainer Development Center. Dr. Bacon specializes in helping working adults master their physique, performance, mindset, and habits to achieve sustainable, lifelong results. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Bacon dive into: Best and worst ways to lose 10 lbs (00:00:36) Optimal mindset for sustained weight loss (6:46) Why weight loss becomes more challenging as we age (17:28) Damaging advice for women in menopause (24:50) Changing strategies (31:34) The power of resistance training and what the research shows (36:57) Autophagy through exercise, how to get started, and why fasting can be harmful (46:57) Ideal protein intake and the nuances that need to be considered (54:09) Minimum amount of training to build lean muscle (01:01:01) What is resting metabolic rate and the impact on calories (1:09:57) The Twin study and Three Aspects of every habit (1:12:57) Dr. Bacon’s journey and nutrition guidance (1:28:27) How to incorporate movement into your day (1:37:57) Dr. Bacon’s Why (1:43:07) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Allan Bacon’s Nutrition Guide E-book: Learn how to optimize your diet to get stronger, improve your health, build balanced meals, make smart choices at restaurants, stay on track during vacations, and more. For more on Dr. Bacon, follow him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bioptimzers, Bon Charge, and AquaTru.  Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order and free gifts for a limited time. Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Black Friday sale ends December 4th. AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $150 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Allen Bacon, welcome to the podcast. You know, for the last 15 years, you spent an average of three to four hours a day digging into the literature to find out what works and what doesn't work when it comes to weight loss and long-term health. And the inconvenient truth that a lot of people don't know is that it's actually pretty easy to lose weight. Most people will lose weight, but the challenge is that 80% of them will end. up gaining it back. So around this time of year where a lot of people are thinking about this

goal in their life, what would you say are the best ways and the worst ways to lose 10 pounds for the person who's listening today? I mean, the biggest thing that we need to focus on is starting to realize that this is a long-term journey, right? And so if we're looking at this as a very short term, I just need to lose 10 pounds in a couple months, it can be a very difficult thing because one of two things happens. Either you reach that goal and then you lose the drive that you had before because that was your main goal or you don't reach that goal and you feel like a failure. Now, there are a lot of different tactics that we can use to achieve these types of things. But changing mindset around this is probably the first really good choice to make.

Now, there are three main similarities between people that lose weight and keep it off long term. They tend to eat mostly whole, minimally processed food diets. They eat out very little. They don't go to fast food restaurants. They tend to eat lower dietary fat rather than lower carbs. Now, this isn't required because you can have different ratios and it's completely fine, since calories drive weight loss or weight gain. But that's just something that we find tends to work for the large majority of people. The last thing is people who tend to keep off weight, the choices that they make in food have less variety. And this can be surprising for a lot of people. Because people think, well, you know, in my daily life, I want to be able to have a large variety

of different foods, but it unfortunately causes something called the buffet effect. And when the buffet effect is in play, it tends to increase cravings and food drive dramatically and it drives a massive intake of energy essentially. And so if we start to focus on these three things, it gives us a little bit of a guidance of where we should be going, but whether or not they're going to work for you is very person specific. And I think that everybody can benefit from a whole minimally processed food diet. I mean, if we look at the data surrounding it, it's not that ultra processed foods are inherently bad. It kind of depends on how they fit within an overall diet. The problem with them is they definitely contribute to the obesity epidemic that we have. They're hyper-palatable. They have a lot less

nutrients. They have a lot less fiber. They have a lower thermic-effective food. And I think that people understand that they tend to have less nutrients and they tend to have higher calorie levels. But I think that one of the things that they don't realize is that the thermic-effective food aspect is a very real thing. The thermic-effective food is simply the energy that's required to metabolize and absorb the foods that you eat. And on an average person, it can be up to 15% of your total daily energy expenditure. That is a large amount of calories burned. Protein causes the largest increase at 20 to 30%. Fats are 0 to 3% and carbs are 5 to 10%. Now, having said that, the macros and calories alone aren't what tell the whole story. Because when we look at diets that have whole minimally processed

foods at their base, we actually see a 50% greater increase in thermic effective food compared to an ultra-processed food diet. We also see less glucose-induced fat storage. And it's not surprising that because of a lot of these things, we see a 51% greater increase in obesity risk for those that have a mainly ultra-processed food diet. We also see 60% risk for low levels of lean muscle mass for people that have ultra-processed food diets. So these ultra-processed food diets tend to hit us on a bunch of food.

of different levels. Understanding that this is one of the keys to be able to take control of your weight, take control of your health, to control of your longevity and overall life is a really important thing. So then getting down to strategies because we want to know practical strategies that we can bring into play and we have to understand what's happening when we're attempting to lose body fat. And people worry that as they lose body fat, they're going to run into some things called metabolic damage, which is a technical myth, but there is something called metabolic adaptation that does exist. A metabolic adaptation is the process that your body goes through to prevent that weight loss effort. So we know that we should likely be moving more. We know that we should likely be

eating less calories overall. And as we lose weight, our body has a mechanism that it puts into play to prevent that weight loss. Because historically, caveman times, we're thinking, hey, if I'm losing body fat, this is probably a bad thing. Today, it's a little bit different. We have calories that are not in, it's not hard to find. And our body's evolutionary mechanism is simply not caught up. So what it does to stall out weight gain or weight loss is one of two main mechanisms. It increases hunger drive and it lowers our knee levels, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is just a fancy way of saying all of the movement that we do that's not dedicated exercise. And this can account for up to 2,000 extra calories per day. So if you are moving a lot,

particularly in people that have very active jobs, nurses, teachers, agricultural jobs, you could be burning as many calories as a whole other person without even realizing it. And this metabolic adaptation, the way that it can stall out our weight loss efforts and the way that we can get into this weight regain that you were alluding to earlier, that is such a problem, is because as we've lost this weight and the severity or the level of weight loss itself is what really drives these two adaptations, the increased hunger and the lowered meat levels, the total weight loss tends to drive. those. Now, when we monitor these and you can do it as a proxy through step count and figure out,

hey, you know, when I started this fat loss journey, I was at 8,000 steps per day. And now after I've lost 20 pounds, I'm all of a sudden at 6,000 steps per day. That's a lot of extra calories that you're losing and you're burning as the burn during the day. And so what we find a lot of times with this weight regain is because of those increased hunger levels, we start to snack more, which means we are taking in a lot more calories than what we were originally doing. And then we move less. And that extra calorie burn that we lose from this daily activity tends to cause us to creep up and up and up. And so these two mechanisms in combination can be a real pain for people that are trying to keep the weight off.

A lot to unpack there. I'm going to start off with the first ones and so much great information. Let's tease it out because I think you just blew our audience's mind. So we got to make sure we unpack each and every single one. So everybody understands what exactly you meant by every single thing. Let's start off with a mindset piece. You talked about the importance of having the right mindset approach when it comes to embarking on a weight loss, but really what people are looking for is fat loss most of the time on their journey.

Give us a compare and contrast. When you look at your clients who lose fat specifically and keep it off versus the ones who maybe fall off track, and if they're your clients, they probably are not falling off track, but let's say the general population, What's the difference between the mindset of somebody who loses weight and keeps it off and the person who yo-yoes year and year and year again and again? There's two things that come to mind. There is goal setting and then there is a restrictive mindset. And so the people that have issues with maintaining a healthy lifestyle because it really is an entire lifestyle change. The big issue is that people look at this as a diet and a diet seems like it has a time frame or that's something that you do and then give up.

But what we want to do is we want to make this a lifestyle change. If you go into this, viewing it as restriction, you're going to have a real problem. It's going to mentally cause issues. It's going to fight back. So what we want to do is we want to switch things to an abundance mindset or core value eating. Now, core value eating looks at it as rather than saying, I can't have this or I'm not allowed to have this, it's more of a focus on, well, what can I add to my diet to bring benefit to my life and my goals? And so if we switch it from, I can't have chocolate or I can't have popcorn or whatever the food choice is that you're saying you can't have. And switch it to, okay, well, can I have more fruits?

Can I have more, you know, dairy? Can I have more lean unprocessed meats? Can I have more of these other beneficial constituents to my diet? Well, what's great about that is it's both a positive choice that you're making to have those foods. And secondarily, a lot of those foods have a lot of fiber. They're very satiating. They've got a ton of nutrients. And when you're taking in these types of foods, you take in overall less calories throughout the day,

secondarily without even thinking about it. So you're eating less chocolate. You're eating less popcorn chips or whatever it is. You're just trying to move away from. And I want to emphasize, I'm not saying that these foods are good or bad, but there's certainly a continuum of there are more nutritious foods and then there are less nutritious foods. And making the majority of our diet based off of these more nutritious foods comes with a lot of benefits.

And satiety and sustainability are part of that. And then the other part of the equation is switching our goal setting process. And what I've found historically happens with people, especially when they first start out on a fitness journey, is they'll set goals either with time frames or a scale weight or something that they just can't control. When you have goals that are based on outcomes, it becomes very problematic from a longevity perspective and it becomes very problematic from a motivation perspective. If you tell me, hey, I'm 190 pounds and I want to get down to 160 pounds. I'll say, okay, well, what happens on 160 pounds? Like, what's special about that number? The typical response is, well, that's what I weighed in college or that's what I weighed at this point in time.

And I'll say, okay, well, if we're going to be bringing in, you know, weight training as we should be since all the benefits of lean muscle, if we're, you know, looking for the best health, injury reduction risk and everything that we can, if you add some lean muscle, wouldn't you conceivably be heavy? at similar body fat levels and look better overall, but the weight wouldn't align with what you originally thought was the right answer to the question. And then they say, oh, yeah, well, you know, I guess the weight itself isn't exactly what I want, but, you know, I want to have this done in like four months. Well, can you control how much weight that you lose over that time period? And so we run into all of these issues if we set outcome-based goals that we can't control. It doesn't foster the right way of reinforcing habits or routines. And it sets you up for fail. because it's something that you definitely can't control and something that can become a distraction for you.

So instead of using outcome-based goals, I think using something like a habit-based or routine-based goal becomes a very, very beneficial thing for people that want to do this right and continue to be able to do this long-term. And by a habit or routine-based goal, I mean, pick things that you can't control that will start to move you towards what you're trying to achieve. can you eat whole minimally processed foods for 80% of the meals that you have? Can you eat or can you walk eight to 10,000 steps per day? Can you get eight hours of sleep per night? I know that's a huge ask in today's society, but is this something that you can set? Because we have largely control over these things.

Can you drink 100 ounces of water per day? Use these as your signs of success. If you continue to take the things that you can control, such as nutrition, activity through movements, sleep, the stress management techniques that you use, you know, put those into play multiple times per week and set it in your calendar like you would a job. If you start to do these things, those habits and routines will start to build and it'll start to change your identity. And changing your identity from the person that you were to the person that you want to become is a very, very powerful thing. And it's essentially, take it until you become it

if you don't truly believe it. And one of the simplest things that I recommend to my clients, I recommend to everybody that asks these questions, is if you have anxiety about what you should do, ask yourself, what would a healthy person do in my situation? And I say that because I think that most everybody generally knows what they should be doing. And so if you're out at a restaurant and you don't know what to get, what would a healthy person get in my situation? If you have some anxiety about going to the gym or you just don't feel like going today. And, you know, you're really trying to build that habit of going two or three times per week. Ask yourself what a gym rat would do. The fact that we're asking ourselves these questions allows us to cut

through the noise because if we don't think about this from what would somebody that has those values do, we will often procrastinate. And the most important thing is taking that first step. So by pretending that you are that person or putting yourself in the mindset of that person, it helps you become that. And it really helps with long-term sustainability. You know, a lot of our audience, feels that, hey, I've never really had a challenge maintaining a healthy weight when I was in my 20s or maybe early 30s. And then something shifted. In your experience from especially working with a lot of people that are in the 40 to 60 demographic, both men and women, but particularly women, what do you think is the driver of that? What's true based on the evidence and what's also

not false, but maybe something that people are not aware of that could be responsible for this feeling that they have. This is a great question because it's one of those things that I think becomes a hang-up for a lot of people because they don't know what's going on and that makes them feel powerless. So by educating people in this realm, we can actually give them the ability to make the choices that can actually get them through this. And so the first thing that ends up happening, this is for some reason it's always your 30s. It's like I turned 30 and then this happened and now all of a sudden I've gained 10 pounds.

And I don't know what, you know, where did I go? Where did I go wrong during this period? When we look at the research, there was a researcher called Ponzer and his colleagues did a very well run study, very large sample. I think it was 6,400 people, men and women looking at wrestling metabolic rates over time. And they checked ages everywhere from 18 to about 80, I believe. Don't quote me on the exact ages, but it's somewhere within there. They found from 20 to 60, resting metabolic rate does not change. Flat out doesn't change as long as we account for lean muscle mass, activity levels,

all those types of things. If those hold steady, resting metabolic rate never changes. Is that the same as this idea that people say, oh, I have a fast metabolism, I used to have a fast metabolism, now have a slow metabolism, or is this a different idea? That's a little bit different. Having a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism is resting metabolic rate in general, although it could be the neat that we talked about earlier because a lot of times when someone says I've got a fast metabolism, it's because they're constantly moving. And if you twitch and move

around and you've got really active lifestyle, if you talk with your hands like I tend to do, you know, I'm keeping it under wraps because there's a microphone in front of me. But I, but you know, when you're animated like that, you burn a lot more calories throughout the day just naturally without thinking about it. And I want to come back on that. We're going to talk a bunch about that. But sorry, I distracted you from what you were talking about. You were sharing about this study and you were you were saying that is super fascinating. Your metabolism is the same. basically from 30 to 60 or 20 to 60, there's no big changes that are there based on this study. So we know that the resting metabolic rate is not the reason that you're having these issues.

So if you didn't have the issues before and then all of a sudden you're starting to notice a big difference in your 30s or 40s or whatever it is, we know that it's not your resting metabolic rate. So great. Well, what is it? This is where we start to have a lot of complicating life factors that come into play. You know, you've just started having kids. You're getting a job that's much more stressful. You're sleeping a lot less. You're reaching for more fast food because you're so busy and you're having these problems.

And, you know, without even thinking about it, you're going to the gym a lot less. You're going out with your friends a lot less. You're no longer doing that YMCA basketball league that you used to do in your 20s. And so this combination of moving less and eating more, I mean, just like with metabolic adaptation, has started to take its toll on your body composition and health. And so the next question that comes into play for women is, well, what happens, you know, in the perimenopause period? because this certainly starts to kick in in many women starting in their 40s. And there's a lot of misinformation out there about this.

And if you make sure to continue to exercise, if you make sure to continue to eat correctly, we don't seem to see a difference regardless of menopause status as long as age is taken into account. Now, we do see a shift to central adiposity. That means that women, once they've gone through menopause, will gain body fat more in their stomach than they ever have before. So that's true.

That's true. There will be a redistribution of where that fat shows up. So when you hear some experts saying, hey, there's some truth to perimenopause, menopause, and you getting belly fat, there is evidence to support that. That's 100% true. It's 100% true, but it is not the cause of fat gain. It is a redistribution of where your fat goes. And this is a controversial topic, but if you look at the research and if anybody is interested

in it, they can always send me a DM on Instagram afterwards. I'm happy to back it up. But when you look at the research and you actually control for weight training, you actually control for diet, it seems to work out just fine and it just seems to be age that causes some of the differences, regardless of gender itself. Now, this isn't to say that women don't have extra challenges because they certainly do. And what I mean by that is if you're going through parimenopause, you're going through all of these different changes that you've never had before.

having hot flashes, you're not sleeping well. I mean, that's probably going to affect your willpower to get into the gym. It's probably going to affect the types of foods that you're choosing. You're going to crave more. You're going to have more cravings, yes. So it's not that the experience isn't valid because the experience is certainly valid that women have. And they say, man, this is very different than what it was before. But if we know that we're not doomed because of hormonal shifts, if we know that we can take control of the situation, then we can make choices to alleviate it or avoid the problems entirely. And I think that having this conversation is really important because we don't want to

inadvertently send the message, hey, you're broken, which I think is what a lot of people are doing when they're saying, hey, when you go through menopause, shit happens. And if we can point out, hey, it does. And it's a bigger challenge than what men go through. You know, men are very lucky in that respect. but if you understand that if you push through where you can, if you keep doing the best that you can, you're going to get through and you're going to be just fine. I think that that's the right message to send. And again, this is not to say that, you know, there aren't benefits to hormone replacement therapy for a lot of different things. You know, if it's necessary, particularly with like joint health, sexual health, those types of things. But knowing that it doesn't doom you to a life of, I'm just going to get fat and lose all my muscle and have osteoporosis. is a very powerful message. It's a reminder that you are in,

that you have autonomy in your life. And yes, everything is tough to make progress towards, especially if somebody's struggling with a lot of weight that they want to reduce and enter into a healthy body composition. But if you think you're broken, a lot of people end up with the feeling of,

well, why even try? It's a nocebo effect, essentially. you know and then the uh the you believe that something bad's going to happen or something negative's going to happen and then because of that like you said your drive to make changes goes down your drive to do what you were even doing before goes down and that's where that habit and that routine work starts to fall off and then we see the changes that we see you know one of the things you're known for is making these really great videos on social media where you take advice from a lot of people online and you will go through and say well does the evidence actually support this And you do it sometimes in a very humorous way. One of the things that your answer to this last question brought up for me is that when anybody feels broken in any aspect of life, like somebody's trying to convince you that you're broken, you become a lot more susceptible to quick fixes, silver bullet bullets, or magic wand type situations.

That could be a crash diet, that could be a supplement, that could be this, that. So for that individual, let's talk about this audience here because this is obviously a lot attention is being placed on this particular demographic of individuals going through perimenopause, menopause, who feel that they're left with the advice that they're broken. What are some of the most damaging things that you see out there that people are trying to sell, offer, convince this demographic to do as a solution to weight loss? There are specific diets that people try to push out for menopause. There are specific training routines that people try to push out. There are specific supplements that people try to push out. It's innumerable how many there are. And unfortunately,

that like you said, people are inundated with these solutions. Knowing that there is no special solution is the real answer here. And so I can't think of anything that's very specific. You know, you have to do exactly this. I've seen differences as far as, okay, during this part of menstrual phase, you should be doing this, this part you should be doing this. I've seen you should be doing different types of cardio training depending on where you are in your menopause status. But none of these things seem to pan out when we actually look at the outcome data. And the way that a lot of people are presenting this, you know, one of the examples is people will say, okay, well, if you're past menopause, you shouldn't do zone two cardio anymore

or medium intensity continuous cardio anymore because it raises cortisol. And what they'll do is they'll show research that shows when you do medium intensity cardio, cortisol levels are slightly higher. So what? Just because it's higher doesn't mean that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. Exercise does cause a cortisol spike. And typically, if you're an otherwise healthy person, it's a beneficial spike. And we see this vilification all over the place in social media where hormones specifically seem to be ones that really get this bad rap, cortisol or insulin, you know, and they're not necessarily the enemies. They're not always bad. But they've always been positive as if they're just a negative thing. And so cortisol saying,

hey, look, your cortisol is a little bit higher when you do this medium intensity cardio, and this is what you should avoid after menopause because of that, is disingenuous because there's no data out there suggesting it causes any negative health problems. And so just by showing things like, hey, look, this is higher and cortisol is bad, we scare people into thinking, okay, well, now they have to buy my high intensity interval training circuits or whatever it is that a person's trying to sell or their, you know, their cortisol controlling supplements or, you know, the like. And unfortunately, it's being panned off because they're taking information that is valid. Cortisol is slightly higher because of this. And they're taking leaps then that because

of this, there's a negative health outcome, which isn't shown. And so for people that are hearing this information, the most important thing is to be critical of what the information is that's being presented and then saying, hey, can you show me that this actually causes a problem? I know that you're showing me that this happens, but can you show me that this causes a problem? Because using the same kind of essentially spurious thinking, I could point out, okay, well, cortisol, when it's in the presence of a calorie surplus, can cause a release of lipoprotein lipase, which is an enzyme that causes fat storage. When it's in the presence of a calorie deficit, it will cause the release of hormone.

sensitive lipase, which actually increases fat burning. So if you're in a calorie deficit and you do medium intensity cardio and you cause a bigger release of hormone sensitive lipase, then you're going to lose more body fat. I can say that because I could show them that this enzyme is released more with cortisol in a calorie deficit, but that's just as disingenuous. But it's the same way of using information to trick somebody into thinking that there's going to be an outcome that there isn't necessarily going to be. And so we have to be conscious of the fact that information out there is being massaged in a lot of ways to essentially sell you on something because usually the person that's pushing that has a solution. You know, you're a coach and you've worked with hundreds,

maybe thousands of people at this point in time in your career. Tell me in our audience the foundations of what a sustainable plan for weight loss has to have. So the first piece that we already addressed a little bit was the mindset piece, that you're going to be entering into something that's a long-term lifestyle change. You're fundamentally changing your identity in the way that you show up in the world rather than looking for something quickly to slap something on. There's always that example that people share on the podcast, which is you want to lose 10, 15, 20 pounds? Great. Chop off your right arm. You know, you'll lose weight right away. Yeah. But that's obviously something that's not good and nobody wants that. So you've talked about this mindset piece, which is you're shifting your mindset, that this is now a

lifestyle. What else is there that's part of a successful long-term approach when it comes to all the other major quadrants that somebody has to be thinking about? First, I want to bring up the idea of, is 100% weight loss the right way to go at least initially? And I bring that up because we have an epidemic in society where we are very undermuscled. And so, potentially outside of obesity cases, it might make sense for us to start thinking about, well, even if my goal is to get that athletic toned look, which I think is what the majority of people are going for, right? Nobody wants to be a bodybuilder in general. It's, you know, it's that athletic tone look. I want to look good on the beach. And so how do I get there? I think that switching

the mentality from the perpetual diet is going to be a very good thing. Yes, if you have obesity in play, losing body fat is probably the right move. If you are significantly over 20% body fat for a man, if you're significantly over 30% body fat for a female, absolutely lose body fat. And the health benefits from losing excess body fat are going to be beyond anything else. You can technically build lean muscle and lose body fat at the same time. The rates at which it happens just tend to be very underwhelming, unless you're in one of four categories. If you're brand new to weight training within your first year or so. If you are obese, if you are coming back from a long layoff for whatever reason, or if you're on physique enhancing drugs,

if you're in one of these four situations, then doing both at the same time can be a good idea because you can have that rate happen significantly. If you are not in those ranges, if you're between 10 to 20% body fat for men or so, 20 to 30% body fat for women or so, I would recommend the idea of considering focusing on building lean muscle and strength first before really focusing on, hey, I need to lose as much body fat as possible. I know that this isn't what people want to hear, but I think a lot of times this is what people need to hear because there's a reason that we're on that diet roller coaster all the time.

And by getting into this change of mindset, we can avoid a bunch of real problems. People will usually think, if I just lose 10, more pounds or if I just get abs, I'll finally be happy without realizing that it's not very easy and sustainable if you don't have larger levels of lean muscle mass to make it as easy as possible. You may not have the shape that you want by the end of that phase because people who just try to lose body fat and don't focus on anything else will oftentimes end up looking gaunt or malnourished. Or maybe even have that skinny fat phenotype. and it's probably difficult from a sustainability and longevity standpoint.

So what I'll normally tell people is maybe switching the mentality to, hey, if I can get to 10 to 20% body fat for a man, 20 to 30% for a woman, this is a good range to be in for building lean muscle and sustainability. I can start to work on those habits and routines that we talked about earlier. Maybe I can start to find some joy in the gym itself and go from there, build some lean muscle and strength for a couple years before. where you really focus on completely losing the body fat that you want to get that body that you thought that you wanted. And I think that this can be really beneficial because we used to have this ideal of an aesthetic in the 80s and 90s where I like to term it as the crack model booty. Whereas now we're working more towards a peach booty, which is a wonderful change in our mentality from a health physique, you know, an aesthetic standpoint. Our society has taken hold of this.

and we like that idea, which is wonderful. The problem is we haven't switched our mentality on how we get there yet. And we're still using the strategies from the 80s and 90s to get there. We're still trying to cut out as much food as we possibly can. We're still trying to do cardio as much as we possibly can to get down there. And obviously, there are health benefits to cardio. But using these two things as the main strategies to get there can be very problematic. Because like I said, we get into a situation where if we do get down there,

we might find we end up looking gone and don't have that that shape that we thought that we wanted. We might look skinny fat. And then our only recourse is, okay, switch directions, add calories back in, start to build that lean muscle that I should have been building to begin with to get the shape that I wanted. And now you're adding the body fat back on that you just lost. And so it can be very discouraging for some people to go into this direction and then get really frustrated because they feel like they messed up. So I want to head off this issue before we really get there and get people to change their mindset to be able to get them there.

And I think that there are misgivings I've heard about the message sometimes. And people will say, well, if you tell people this, then you're not listening to what they say that they want. And I would argue that you're not only listening to what they say that they want. You're giving them the answer to actually get there. And it may just not be what they think that they needed. it might be what they actually need to get there. And so focusing on building some lean muscle can be a very, very powerful thing because it can raise your resting metabolic rate without even trying. You burn more calories when you're actually working out. It increases injury reduction. It decreases

immobility. It increases longevity. It makes you more metabolically thrifty. There are so many benefits to having it that I think that we overlook. And I think it's because we simply don't understand all of the benefits that it brings. And so, you know, when we resistance train, a bunch of really beneficial things happen. We release proteins from our muscles called myokines that increase mood, cardiovascular health, brain health. They help with the aging process. When we resistance train, we release extracellular vesicles that cause a release of a genetic material called MRI1. When MRI1 is in skeletal muscle tissue, it hinders muscle growth. However, when you exercise, when you resistance train, it releases it from that skeletal muscle, it unlocks your ability to build lean muscle,

and then it does a really cool thing. It travels to adjacent adipose tissue, gets absorbed into the fat tissue itself, and increases lapolysis. So not only are you allowing your body to build more muscle, you are burning more fat at the same time. And then, of course, skeletal muscle tissue is the largest metabolic tissue in the body. And it essentially acts as a metabolic sink. When we take in glucose one of three things happens. We either use the glucose at that point to function as energy, which is great. We stored in skeletal muscle tissue or we stored in adipose tissue. Having more muscle means it acts like a sponge and can soak up some excess blood glucose and stored into skeletal muscle where it can be used later for our benefit rather than into adipose tissue where we may not

want it to go. And so this is why you see these things where there's a lot of times you'll see a skinny fat person and they'll have issues with pre-diabetes or diabetes. And it's because they don't have the lean muscle levels necessary to protect them from that, to make them metabolically stable. Even one year of strength training confers benefits that lasts up to three years after cessation of training. I went through this myself. I don't want to derail you, but I'll share my story a little later on. Well, first of all, credit to Dr. Gabriel Lyne, who introduced us. And also, she's been a big part of the message shift for our audience and this larger audience, she came on our show before her book. It was like two years before her book came out when she was really on this

before it was called Forever Strong Message. And she came on our show right at a time where so much of the sort of wellness world was talking about mTOR, too much protein, be careful, centenarians, which we can chat about that a little later on. And you're like, all right, These seem to be some of the top researchers, and they're all saying that fasting, oh, mad, longevity, you know, these are all the keys to longevity. And she came on our podcast, and this was, I want to say, probably like right as the pandemic was kind of getting started. Yeah. Right around there.

And she completely blew our audience's mind. And I don't know if it was how we chopped it up or titled it, but that podcast went viral, like beyond our normal scope that was there. I think we had a couple of reels with her. one hit 20 million on Instagram, another one hit 15 million. It was the right place and right time for a lot of people that they were finally hearing that like actually lean muscle mass and building lean muscle mass is the key for so many of the things that they're looking for. And a lot of what you've been told differently may not actually shake out to be true. So she inspired me to go on my journey.

And I definitely was in that quadrant of skinny fat. I grew up Indian vegetarian under eating on protein. And obviously people can get protein from a vegetarian vegan diet. It's a lot more work and you end up eating a lot more carbs. Difficult. It's difficult. Difficult. It's difficult.

Like you said, it's doable. But it's certainly, you need a lot more nutrition knowledge. And so for the average person, that can become very limiting. Yeah. And so I had stopped being vegetarian. But I always got this thing in the back of my head that when I was younger in sort of my peak age of 18, 20 when I was a vegetarian, I would go to the gym and I'd work out for hard bouts of maybe six, eight weeks. And I wasn't expecting miracles, but I would look at my friends who would work out

and they're immediately seeing muscle growth. And I'm over here and I'm like, nothing's happening. So I'm like, okay, I guess I'm just one of those people maybe genetically that is not going to make progress in the gym because you don't have access to the right education at that stage. finally around 26 I started eating protein but even though I was eating protein I was not used to eating enough protein inside of the diet and I tended to overeat on fats yes healthy fats but still overeating on fats so I naturally become and stay a skinny fat individual into my 30s and then late 30s and then when I turned 40 I had this aha moment in having this conversation and in one year of a strength training protocol where I'm working out three to four

times a week, you know, and my protein consumption goes up to the recommendations of a gram per, you know, your target or ideal body weight that you're sort of shooting for. Not only was I eating more carbohydrates than I had ever eaten because I tended to shift more low carb in my diet, but I was eating more carbohydrates, but my average fasting insulin went down. My blood sugar through measuring, measuring through a CGM, which I liked wearing, was much more stabilized. And it all came from adding about 8.3 to about 9 pounds of lean muscle mass over the course of that year. Exactly.

And I saw firsthand. And a lot of my ideas and my, I was questioning a lot of the vice. My audience knows that I'm not the subject matter expertise on here. But I can be swayed by what's out there in the world, just like we all can. Yeah. And being an untrained individual. I sort of thought, you know, muscle mass and protein should be deprioritized. Right. I just need to lose weight. I mean, I didn't even really need to lose weight. I needed

to probably gain weight in my instance because I was skinny fat. You'd look at me and you're like, hey, he needs to gain some weight actually. When you go through it firsthand, you're like, my entire life and my confidence completely changes by adding a little bit of lean muscle mass to my life. It's incredible. And I mean, this is exactly why when you brought up fat loss, I was like, okay, I kind of want to shift this a little bit. And it's not that I don't value when people say that they want to lose body fat, because that's the ultimate goal. But we're probably going about the wrong way to get there. I mean, if you look at having more muscle mass and strength, it is inversely and independently associated with all cause mortality. Longivity is much better with more muscle mass.

And this is irrespective of cardio-respatory fitness. If you take out factors such as body fat, age and smoking status, it still is in play. The muscle mass index is one of the most important ratings that we have of longevity and health. It's even more accurate than BMI that we've used for decades. And this is not to get down on BMI because it's a perfectly good screening tool for the general population. General population doesn't have a whole lot of muscle. So if we start to shift our mentality to maybe we should build some more muscle and maybe that'll solve a lot of these problems. And I think secondarily, that whole, I wanted to lose some body fat. is going to start to come into play as well.

Because like I said, you become more metabolically thrifty. You start to burn more calories. Your metabolism technically goes up. You become more confident. You start to love going to the gym more. You start to enjoy doing activities more that you might not have done before. I mean, the injury reduction benefits and the mobility benefits from strength training is far more than anything else. If you look at research, if I was to ask a general population person, what do you think that

you should do to reduce your injury risk and improve your mobility for the rest of your life. What do you think the answer would be? They probably say like stretching. That's exactly, exactly the answer that I wanted to get from you. They would say stretching. There are at least three major systemic reviews that have looked at this. Stretching reduces injury risk everywhere from zero to four percent. Strength training reduces injury risk up to 69 percent and it's irrespective of body fat levels.

it is a major difference in longevity and quality of life. If you want to be able to pick your kid up, want to pick your grand kid up, great grand kid up, you want to start weight training because it's going to prevent massive amounts of loss over life. It's going to give you the life that you want. And I mean, there's that saying muscle brings life to your years,

not just years to your life. On average, starting in your 40s, we lose 0.5% of our muscle mass annually. It ramps up to 1 to 2% in our 50s. It reaches a staggering 3% in our 60s. Sarkopheny rates are so high, they're about 10% on average, but they are so high that they can reach 51% in certain subpopulations. And the strength losses that we see are even more dramatic than the lean muscle losses themselves. And so really pushing this idea of having lean muscle and strength is extremely important.

And one of the kickbacks that I always get from the stretching and mobility crowd, and I'm not against stretching. I think that if it can kickstart your flexibility journey and if it is emotionally beneficial for you, because I think a lot of people use it as kind of like a meditation time, that's perfectly fine. There's benefits to that. But one of the drawbacks that people present to me is that, you know, I really want to be spending a good bit of my time with stretching because I want to be flexible. Well, the research also backs strength training for that. If you take resistance training to end ranges of motion, it improves flexibility to the same. rate as a static stretching routine does. So we're spending so much time on these ancillaries

when we could be experiencing all of the benefits by maybe focusing a little bit more in on what really, really works. And when you brought up, you know, longevity, I need to be doing fasting. I need to have the autophagy really kick in. That's another area that has been so convoluted and so misrepresented, it is amazing. Autophagy can be turned on by exercise itself alone. Fasting itself does not actually cause autophagy. And you might have had your conversation with Gabrielle in like 2019, based on what you were saying, 2020 around that area.

And this information hadn't come out at that point. Right. But more recently, within the past two years or so, we've had multiple studies that have come out and suggest that fasting itself is not what is increasing. the autophagy. It is the calorie deficit that is created. So if you take a continuous calorie deficit and equate calories over time with what you would have done in that fasting experience, you get the same levels of autophagy. And so we're doing these strategies that short-term fasting,

if you want to do something like an intermittent 16-8 fast where you know you don't eat until noon and then you eat until 8 p.m. And then, you know, you go on your merry way afterwards. That can be fine if it's a way that can control calorie intake for you because, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to be calories and calories out for weight loss. It works. The real problem comes into play when we see the 72 hour, 96 hour, all these other like really long fasts. Because not only are you not really beneficially increasing autophagy in the way that you thought that you would, when you could have been doing exercise and just losing excess body fat, you're also causing problems with you're going to be malnutrition and you're going to have major drops in IGF1, you're going to have major issues

with potentially losing lean muscle mass. And what have we just been talking about this entire time? How valuable lean muscle mass is? And so in this attempt to get to that ideal that we thought that we had, we're one, going to end up getting that 1980s crack model booty. But we're also going to be causing all of these health issues. And when you lose lean muscle mass, it's much harder to put lean muscle mass back on than it is to lose a little bit of body fat. So do this in a sustainable smart manner. You don't have to regret this two or three years down the road and you'll actually finally be where you want to be. I love it. One clarification. When you say crack model booty, you mean like a flat booty, right? And I mean those runway booties that you used to see in the 1980s.

Yeah, exactly. And I like to point it out that way because I think that it gives that very real, Oh, I kind of know what he's talking about there. And when people think I just need to lose fat and I just need to get down and weight, they don't really realize that you have to have that lean muscle. I mean, you need to build your glutes or your legs. And we're specifically talking about that because that's an easy example to give. But it works for men too. And that's where we get into that skinny fat phenotype.

Totally. It's a good mental picture because you understand that both the person that has the completely flat booty and the person that might have a peach booty could both be at low levels of body fat, but their bodies look very different. And it's because they took completely different paths to get there. So before we were recording today, you were saying, you know, I really want to leave your audience and share with your audience ideas around building muscle. You've given us the why. You've talked about why it's important. You've talked about what it means for your longevity. You've talked about what happens when you don't prioritize it. Give us a little bit of the basics of

the how for the person who's listening today and is like, I want that. Not only do I want that peach booty. But how do I do it? Right. And even guys want a strong butt, right? Everybody wants a strong glutes. I want to have that longevity component that comes with it, that protective element. And also, too, as many people have shared, and I've shared my own journey on this podcast,

you'll see that when you increase your lean muscle mass, sometimes irrespective of the diet that you're eating at that time, your metabolic health numbers will improve. Life becomes easier. Life becomes easier. Life becomes easier and on top of that, the bonuses that you feel confident, you feel happier, etc. So what is the how component, right? And I'll let you take it in whatever way. It could be how to approach it on the fundamentals. It could be advice and evidence that shows what really works versus what doesn't. I'll hand it over to you and you can chat about that. Before we laid the groundwork with you want to be into about 10 to 20% body fat for men, 20 to 30% body fat for women.

I want to emphasize that because, again, even if muscle building is our goal, if you're over those, significantly over those numbers, losing excess body fat is going to be better for your health than anything else. And like I said, with the simultaneously building lean muscle and losing body fat, you can do that in accelerated rates when there's obesity in play. So if you're obese, immediately go into that. If you are not obese, we want to optimize essentially our nutrition, our training, and our sleep to be able to get there. And sleep's a little bit more straightforward. And for people that are

active individuals, particularly those that are weight training regularly, the literature suggests eight to nine hours a night of sleep is what we should be shooting for, not that seven that we typically talk about. I know that that's a big ask. And if you can't do it, don't get frustrated. I bring it up because this is what the literature shows. And at least if we know it, maybe we can make some time management changes to do a little bit better than what we've done before. And I say that because calories in calories out is true. Whether you are in a calorie surplus or a calorie deficit is going to affect weight loss or weight gain. It doesn't tell you what you lose, what you gain, or overall health.

So there is nuance there. And I think that people misconstrue this message of if I just hit my macros and I just hit my calories, it's all going to work out. But no, there's other parts of this equation. And one of them is sleep. You're going to gain and lose the same amount of weight, depending on what you're trying to do and depending on where your calories are. But when you have more sleep in play, hormones are going to be better. You're going to gain more lean muscle or at least prevent more lean muscle loss. And you're going to lose more body fat.

Essentially, body composition is better with more sleep. And the way that I really drive this home for my male clients is if you are in a sleep deprivation, situation if you're sleep deprived. If you're getting between four and six hours of sleep, you can have 35% less testosterone. So I really hit men where it counts and that's all of a sudden they start paying attention there. So that's a really easy thing to do. So sleep is a really important thing to take into account first. Then we want to maximize our nutrition. I realize that weighing food and counting calories for everybody is not, it's not something that everybody wants to do, right? But I do recommend it at least for three to four months because we need to really understand what we're

taking in, what proper meals look like, what the types of foods that we're ingesting, what they contain. Because I think that if you've never done it before, having a spoonful of peanut butter becomes very illuminating when you start to realize exactly what's, you know, the amount of calories that are in one spoonful to the next. And so by doing this, we can also start to lay down some guidelines on how to build as much lean muscle as possible to get us to where we want to be. And one of the things that you had said earlier was one gram of protein daily per pound of ideal body weight. I think that that's a great recommendation. It works across a large group of populations.

It works even in the obese. I mean, you can do that or one gram of protein per centimeter of body height. They're both really good recommendations for a large majority of people. If you want to get into the nuance, there is a more nuanced answer. And this is actually what we were talking about off air where Gabrielle and Alan Aragon and I did a post about. protein intakes, we actually go into this. If you want the nuanced answer and you're not obese, it's between 0.72 and 1.5 grams of protein daily per pound of body weight. And this varies. And it varies because of current body composition, your goals, your personal preferences, how much lean muscle

you have, whether you're in a calorie deficit or a calorie surplus. And so there is nuance to the entire situation. If you're somebody who's just trying to get into this and say, hey, I need this as simple as possible. One gram per pound of ideal body weight is perfectly fine. It's a great general recommendation and it's easy to use. And people recommend that because it's easy to remember. And so any professional that says that, I fully support them in doing that. With the more nuanced answer, the reason that it's more nuanced is because all of those different factors that I just mentioned actually can influence the level of results that we get back. And so if you are leaner or you have more muscle mass or you're in a calorie deficit,

you could potentially be above that one gram per pound because when we're in a calorie deficit and the leaner that we are, the more of a chance that you have to lose lean muscle in that calorie deficit. And so by adding in some more protein, we can counterbalance some of those losses of lean muscle and potentially have better body composition. If you take the calorie amounts above that one gram for somebody who's not in a calorie deficit maintenance or above, it's not going to cause you to build any more lean muscle, but you could have slightly better body composition. You might have a little bit less body fat because of that. If you're older, we have anabolic resistance that comes into play.

So by having a little bit more protein in our daily intakes, we can counterbalance some of that antibiotic resistance and maybe build some more lean muscle that we otherwise wouldn't have as we age. So there is nuance to this. And I want to emphasize that total daily intake is far more important than anything else. But if you are able to hit your daily intakes rather regularly, you're like, you know what, I want those extra few percent to really round this out. and I'm willing and I'm motivated to do this, sure, you can go up to the top end of the

recommendation that I have there as long as you're not missing out on nutrients in your diet that you would otherwise need. And usually when I bring up the fact that you can go up to, in my general recommendation, 1.5 grams per pound, you'll hear a lot of times the concern that higher protein intakes may be problematic for health. In an otherwise healthy person, there is no concern with this. In fact, there's been studies by Antonio and colleagues out of the ISSN, and they've done double what I've recommended here for over a year with no negative health consequences whatsoever. I mean, everything improves.

Bone health, body composition, you know, kidney health, all these different things. But what we will typically hear is that, hey, don't eat that much protein because it could damage your kidneys. There's a little bit of truth to this, but it's kind of a distortion of the truth. and I think it's a misinterpretation that people are making. Either a person had a family member or themselves and they had kidney disease and they went to a nephrologist. And the nephrologist told them, hey, I want you to be on a low protein diet because amino acids can be problematic in situations where your kidneys aren't filtering right. And that's true. In the presence of kidney disease, we need to watch our amino acid intakes.

So either you've heard this from a friend and you are misconstruing what was being said and you're saying, oh, well, they said that high protein intakes are bad for kidneys without realizing that it's not for you. It's not for the general population. And it's particularly not for people that weight train. Either that happens or a doctor that went to med school was taught this in a nephrology course and just didn't realize that there's a difference between a healthy population and somebody that has kidney disease.

I mean, there's been doctors even on this podcast that have come in and hadn't gotten the message yet at the time that they were on the podcast. And they would just say, oh, yeah, you don't want to be eating that much protein. It's bad for your kidneys. And I would ask a follow-up question like, can you explain a little bit more? And, you know, they wouldn't really kind of go into it too much. But why is it bad for the kidneys? Yeah, exactly.

It's, again, it's a situation-specific thing. And I understand why there's confusion there. Yeah. Because it makes sense. I mean, if you're taught in school and you've got so many things to learn, maybe you're not a nephrologist, maybe the doctor that came in, this is not their specialty. No. It's true. When you take in larger amino acids, I mean, creatine does this.

Protein can do this. You can have blood values in a blood draw. it's slightly elevated. Now, it's a non-pathologic rise, like something like bun content can go up or with creatine, creatine can go up. But it's a non-pathologic rise in an otherwise healthy person. And so for a primary care physician who this isn't their specialty and they see this go up and they say, oh, well, it's outside of the reference range. Maybe I should send you to a nephrologist. And that's the last that they see of that patient. But they, you know, in their mind, they did the right thing because they sent the person off to get checked. Yeah, because someone was flagged.

And that is the right move if you don't know exactly what the answer is. I mean, that's the sign of a good doctor. When you don't know, refer out to somebody that knows. But we see these issues because of the misinterpretation that's going around. And then you hear it second hand and third hand and it kind of gets passed around. It's like a lot of things. Yeah. And so I want to emphasize to people that, you know, these high protein intakes, if you start to do it because you're really being sold on the message of I need to build some lean muscle.

Drew's story has, you know, inspired you to start to build some lean muscle of your own. Don't get overly concerned about protein, especially in the ranges that we've recommended here today, because unless you have a current pathology that would cause problems, there's no research out there that suggests that this is going to be an issue. So a lot of people have also learned from some of the interviews we've done with people like Dr. Donald Lehman, Gabriel Lyons mentor, that protein is part of the equation. maybe like 25%, and there's this other part, which is this resistance training. So for a lot of our audience, who's now starting to get into that world, maybe looking for a trainer,

they've started working with a trainer, they're taking it seriously. A question that often comes up is, what's the minimum amount needed to be able to preserve muscle in terms of strength training? And then what's the minimum amount needed to actually have stimulus to gain muscle? if somebody was eating the appropriate amount of protein? I have answers to this, and I'm trying to think about how I want to determine this, because when I have this conversation with a person,

if somebody comes up to me and they say, what's the minimum amount that I can do to building muscle? My first response is typically not the road answer. It's, what are you willing to do right now to get into the gym and actually do this weekly? And I think that that's probably a more productive way to look at it, because even if you just get in for two days a week, 45 minutes, you start to build that habit. You will get stronger.

I mean, if you do literally anything as a person that's never done it before, you're going to start to get a little bit stronger. Now, is that going to max out and you're not going to continue after a certain point, probably? But I think that for a person that really wants to start their journey, the right answer is, what am I willing to do right now? What fits within my schedule? And what can I sustain for at least a certain period of time? And then start to work from there. the technical answer is at least somewhere around four working sets taking close to failure

in a muscle group should be able to build lean muscle if you're looking for the bare minimum. So that's in the second category, that's the building muscle. That's the building muscle. If you want to maintain muscle, it's typically one-ninth of your previous training volume. One-ninth. And what if somebody's like, hey, I don't really have a training volume? I wasn't really going to the gym. Then you're maintaining just by doing your daily life because you didn't build anything beyond that anyway.

But, okay, so maybe I'm confused about this. You were saying that if people, typically, you were saying that individuals lose about 1%. If they're not training and eating the right amount of protein, et cetera, and they're going to... Well, you're going to fall. If you typically stick to what you're just doing, you're going to fall into that age-related decline. Yeah. So if you just do what you're normally doing, but you're not going out of your way to eat the appropriate amount of protein, you're not doing resistance training. You're going to, on average, is it around 1% a year?

of muscle mass people lose? It is 0.5% in your 40s, 1 to 2% in your 50s, and then 3% 60 onward. Got it. So there's going to be that age-related decline that's there. So for somebody who's, let's say, been on that course because they're like, hey, nobody gave me the memo. My doctor wasn't talking about it. Everybody's talking about protein.

So I've been focusing on my protein. And now I'm trying to figure out sort of the resistance piece enough to at least maintain what I have. Is there any recommendations that are there? I mean, that's where I would really start to go for that four sets, taking close to failure per muscle group per week. Okay. So when you talk about retaining muscle and I was talking about the one-ninth

of the original training volume, that's if you build some muscle, you've had some weight training experience and you want to prevent decline. Say that you, you know, you get a really busy time period. It's tax season and you're an accountant and all of a sudden you can't get into the gym anymore. Well, that's where that one-ninth really helps you retain what you've built up. If you're somebody that's starting from brand new that has never really trained before, that four sets taking close to failure is probably a really good starting point and a good goal to aim for for building muscle and maybe retaining muscle from preventing you from those age-related declines. Could you share what that looks like in like a typical week?

You know, people might think, okay, Monday through Friday, you know, and I'm going to work out and I'm going to maybe go out of my way and I'm going to use some money I've saved up. I'm going to work with the trainer because I've heard how important it is. So what would that look like if they were going to put together sort of a workout routine? I mean, the workout routine is going to be really dependent on, again, how many days the person has. Let's say they have three days. What their goals are. If you're going to set up a three-day routine, I would look to something like a full-body routine, which means every day you're going to be hitting muscle groups from all over and you're going to be likely using majority compound lifts to be able to do that.

You're going to be doing a lot of barbell work. And the reason that you do that is if you've got. a minimum amount of time to put in, you want to get the most return possible. So you're going to be doing a lot of the bread and butter exercises. You're going to be squatting. You're going to be doing, you know, bench presses. You're going to be doing a hinge movement of some kind, like a deadlift, some version of that. You're going to be doing an overhead press.

Now, can you do this with dumbbells? Yeah, you absolutely can. And if that's what you have at home, absolutely do it because anything is better than nothing. But you want to set up a routine that allows you to hit your largest muscle groups. in general, multiple times per week, because what it's going to allow you to do with these compound movements is you're going to get some secondary influence on some of the smaller muscle groups. And what I mean by that is if we tell a person, hey, we're going to build your routine on three days off of big compound movements.

One of them's going to be bench press, right? So, yeah, you're working your chest. You're working your shoulders. You're working your triceps. You don't necessarily have to spend all of your minute time, focus on the way. entirely on triceps to hit these minimums, but you are getting some work in play to help prevent lean muscle loss and actually build some muscle, particularly if you're a beginner. So you're going to want to focus on those big lifts.

It's not going to be the Instagram, you know, circus type lifts that people do to get reels and to set up reels and get views. But it's going to be the things that are the tried and true. So when you go to a trainer and they set you up with things that you've probably heard before, That's probably a good sign that you're in the right path. I want to add to this, you know, my mom's just at the beginning of this journey. You know, she just turned 70. She's never really been an individual that has ever gone to the gym.

I think at one point in time there was that women's gym that was everywhere curves. Yeah. So I think she like briefly did a time period at that. But she's never really done like resistance training. If it's been anything, it's been the YMCA and treadmills and other things like that. Maybe some swimming that's there. and my older sister, Herschel, who hosts me with my podcast and her husband, Dr. Neil Patel, they have been getting my mom into the gym with a trainer.

And initially when my mom would hear things like bench press, deadlifts, other stuff, you know, you see these images in your head and you think these bodybuilders doing these activities and exercises and you think, how that I'm going to do any of that? Yeah. But she's literally starting from the basics. She's in her 70s and she's bench pressing. You know, she's on the Smith machine and she's starting off with just the bar. You can regress these too.

You know, if somebody goes in and they're like, I'm really uncomfortable with squat, well, do some air squats. Right. You know, right. There's so many different ways to get started, especially have a, you know, a trainer who can, you know, personalize some of these things for you, which I think is one of the best investments you can make. Absolutely. I also think that it's a really good choice that people can make is if you feel intimidated about getting in and lifting some of these heavy weights and some of these traditional movements, sign up for one of those group classes that they have that actually uses some way. You know, is it as optimal as setting up a proper routine with, you know, the free weights and machines that we might be using if we just set up something for optimization's sake? Probably not.

But, again, we're going to start to build that routine. We get a person in and that community that can help foster can make people feel really good. Yeah. My only note on that is that a lot of the group classes tend to skew younger. And I've seen sometimes my older demographic that's in the audience, right? Just when I say younger, like you see a lot of 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds. year olds in these things like a F-45. Yeah.

And then so my audience is like, okay, great, there's a group class and they might be more in there. They're just older than that demographic. They're not old. They're in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and you feel like you need to keep up with the pace with them. That might be the person who needs to go work with the trainer. Yeah, that's a challenge.

So there are different levels of classes, but you're certainly right with like the CrossFit or the F-45 or the Orange Theory. Those can be challenging for a lot of people. Right. You know, look at what availability that you have at your local gym or your local area and see what would be the right fit for you because I think that just getting started is the hardest part. And so if you can get in, you can do something. I mean, that will put you on the right path to really make it happen. And then maybe you make that step up to maybe you invest in a more advanced coach and maybe you start to find joy in the process itself.

And then you really are off to the races there. You know, I heard you mention something pretty mind-blowing previously in another conversation, and you were talking about that while your resting metabolic rate generally has the potential and is the same between this age group. Did I get that right? Yeah, between 20 and 60. 20 and 60. You do see individual variance between people that their resting metabolic rates can sometimes

vary by 800 calories, is what I heard you share. in a conversation. Help us understand what is responsible for that variation, that one person, their resting metabolic rate, which you might have to redefine just for anybody who may not know what that is, how one person is burning resting metabolic rate, you know, 500 calories more than the person's sitting next to them, or one person's burning 800 calories more than the person next to them. Let's go into that a little bit. So resting metabolic rate is the energy burn that your body does just to maintain homeostasis. It's literally just you living.

There's a little bit of a difference between basal metabolic rate and resting metabolic rate, but for all intents and purposes, when you hear the two in regular conversations, it's the same thing. So this is discounting the other influences on energy burn,

the energy expenditure, which are the thermic effect of food, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis, that meat that we talked about earlier, and then eat the exercise activity, thermogenesis. So those three things are not counted in resting metabolic rate. So resting metabolic rate varies between people based off of genetics and the amount of lean muscle mass that you have. And so lean muscle mass, every pound of lean muscle mass that you have adds 10 calories per day as an

extra calorie burn, which doesn't seem like a whole lot. But, you know, if you go from somebody that has very, very small amounts of muscle mass, then you add on 30 pounds of muscle, all of a sudden you've got 300 extra calories that you can work with each day. You know, so it adds up over time. And that genetic component is certainly one that is in play. And it's unfortunately something that you can't influence. So when we talk about resting metabolic rate, I usually like to tell people to really focus on those things that they can control. You know, you can control what you put in your mouth.

So you can have some effect on thermic effective food. You can certainly control your need. You can control your exercise activity thermogenesis. So when we talk about the resting metabolic rate being different upwards of about 800 calories, yes, that's true. And so it can put people at a disadvantage when compared to somebody else as far as how many calories they're going to burn naturally throughout the day. But the only things that you can really do is adjust your activity levels and the amount of food that you take in to account for those differences. One conclusion out of that is that adding lean muscle mass is one of the best ways to have an ongoing thing on your body that's burning more calories. We keep talking about all these different benefits from having lean muscle mass.

And it's cool because every different topic that you bring up, we can say, hey, look, here's another reason to do this. And hopefully we start to sell people on this idea that maybe that's the answer that I haven't had all along. Switching topics, but kind of adjacent is I also heard you talk about this. twin study. That was pretty crazy. The Hurling colleague's study about emotional eating and grabbing? Yes. And I want to pivot to this topic of emotional eating, if that's okay. But I want to start off with this twin study. Tell us what was the study and what were some of the findings that were taken away from it that apply to this conversation that we're having today? This is a very powerful study. I really love the way that they set this up. And so they took identical twins and they looked at

histories that they had and they looked at habits that they had and investigated how their experiences and their genetics affected cravings and emotional eating. And what they found was that life experiences accounted for nearly all the variance in a person's reaction to emotional eating. So if you get stressed, the way that you react to that stress with regards to food is apparently a learned trait. Now, what's really interesting about that and what's great about that is if it's learned, it can be unlearned or you can relearn a different response to that habit. And so for people that are struggling with cravings and are struggling with emotional eating, you know, you get stressed out and all of a sudden the first thing that you do is you reach for Oreos at home.

You can realize that you're not doomed. It's not a genetic thing. It's actually driven by the way that you were raised or life experiences that you've had. And this can be an avenue that you can start to look towards to really change up the path that your health journey takes. Would you say that one of, would it be fair to say that for most people, again, on this idea that a lot of times when we're at our lowest low, or we feel like we're not having momentum in the right direction, the natural conclusion in any category of life, but especially in health, is this idea that people come to, which is, well, there just must be something broken about me. And so would it be fair to say for a lot of people that if you do feel broken, actually by developing

some new learned responses when it comes to emotional eating, you can make changes faster than you imagine possible. Absolutely. And I think that this is a really good thing to point out. I mean, when you're trying to make these changes, the first thing to realize is that, have you ever heard the phrase, it takes 30 days to change a habit or to make a habit? 21 days, 30 days, all these different things that people say. So when we actually look at it, it's between 18 and 256 days.

And I want to bring this up because if we know that emotional eating or the way that we respond to stress and foods is a habit and we're trying to change it, that doesn't mean that you give up after 30 days or whatever you heard was the standard because it could be a lot longer. The other important thing about that is you realize that according to the same research, if you make a mistake and you feel like you screwed up, hey, I did. I didn't want to eat those Oreos, but I did anyways. And now I'm in that mentality because that's that thing that people get into. Okay, well, I've screwed up once. And so now I'm just going to go off the deep end. As long as you get back on track, it's your very next chance. It does not impair that habit formation process.

So we have this habit that we want to change and we have the idea that it's going to take some time. And it's going to be okay to screw up. because if we just get back on track, we can actually fix that. So how do we do this? We have three different aspects to every habit. Everything both good and bad follows the same train. It is reminder, routine, and reward. We are reminded of something.

We have a routine as the response to that reminder, and then that achieves a reward of some kind. This can be good or bad, and that's what's really important to understand. And so if our stressor, whatever it is, you know, Deborah from work yelled at you, that could be a reminder. The routine could be, well, every time she yells at me, I go to the break room and I grab some Snickers or whatever sitting in the break room because there's always candy in the break room. And the reward is actually being able to eat it. Now, this could be viewed as a negative habit loop because this isn't a conscious choice to have that Snickers. it's something that I'm doing because I'm having an emotional crisis and this is my response to it.

So if you want to change these bad habits that you have, and now that we know that these bad habits are learned, we know that we can change them, we start to focus on that second R, the routine. You're not going to be able to cut out the fact that stress is going to happen in your life. Deborah from HR is always going to be there. And so you change your routine up. And the longer that you change this routine up, the more it will influence the reward that happens. So you can either not go to the break room because that's where the food is or you could substitute a food substitution there in place and say, okay, every time this happens and I've been monitoring my response to this. And I realize that this is what I do every time this happens. Instead of reaching for the Snickers, what I'm going to do is reach for a non-fat.

Greek yogurt or I'm going to reach for an apple or I'm going to reach for a chocolate flavored protein shake because maybe it will provide something a little bit more nutritious for me. Maybe it'll help me more towards my goals and maybe it will feel more in control. And so over time, the longer that you do that, the more of a chance that you'll have to actually reinforce and instill that habit and make that the response that you have to those stresses that you have in life. And yes, it does seem very daunting because it is. But the reality is you can take control. And by switching up your habits, you can have a very real strategy to make that happen.

That in the other strategy that I really like, particularly on this conversation of finding foods and cravings a problem. If you know that you have what's essentially a trigger food, a food that you feel like you're not having in a controlled manner, you know, if you're choosing to have a Snickers bar and you're saying, hey, this is a conscious choice. I'm happy when I have it. I don't feel guilt afterwards. I fully support you in doing that. That's not what we're talking about when we talk about cravings and having issues with them. If it feels like it's an emotional response and it's something that you can't control, you can work on both changing those habits through a substitution of that routine,

or you can adjust your food environment itself. Let's take ice cream. That's a common one that I often hear from my audience. Sure. So the approach for ice cream would be the same as what we just talked about. You know, you can change out a routine. And that routine could either be a substitute food, Apple. I mean, that's not going to feel great.

Fruit. Yeah, I mean, any kind of fruit would work. You know, high fiber, high nutrient type foods, leaner proteins are always really good choices there. The other thing that you can do for a routine change is you could substitute a meaningful activity. Now, it doesn't have to be fun or enjoyable. It can be, and that's great if it is. It has to be meaningful to you in some way, and it has to be readily available. And I usually recommend that people write a list of about five things.

You know, what do you like to do? Do you enjoy reading a book? Do you like calling a friend? Do you like playing video games? Can you do laundry that you needed to do? Like I said, it doesn't have to be fun. But at least if it's something that gets something done in your life, you're cutting out stress that you would have had later because you were procrastinating on doing laundry.

So this is the way that we make some of the adjustments to the routines to change habits to give us a more productive life. The other thing that you can do that I really like is adjusting your food environment. And you brought up the idea of ice cream. So why don't if we find that ice cream is a problem and we're saying, hey, we're really not doing this in a controlled manner. I feel like I don't want to eat this, but I am. Okay. Get it out of your house.

You don't have to have it in there. Now, I'm not saying that you can't ever have ice cream. But what I'm saying is create some barriers to acquiring that to allow you to have the ability to use your willpower to avoid some of these things that you don't want to do. When we talk about fat loss, there is this dichotomy that we see with professionals. And some say, oh, you just need to have willpower. Just don't do it. If it really matters to you, you're not going to eat it. Then there are other people that say that willpower doesn't matter at all.

And the reality is it's a little bit in the middle. willpower certainly matters. So what we want to do is we want to set up situations to allow us to have to use as little willpower as possible to allow us to succeed. So if having the ice cream in our house is a real problem, just say, okay, well, I'm not going to have the ice cream in my house. You can have ice cream, but then you're going to have to make the active choice to go out and buy it whenever you want to have it. And when you go out and buy it, get a single serving. enjoy it because you've taken the time to think about it. You've made the effort to go out and get it.

And so it's a conscious choice. This removes the idea that the food is illegal or forbidden in some way. But it does create a barrier to where you have to go out and you have to actually do it. And in many cases, what you'll find is people will be like, I don't want to drive 10 minutes to get ice cream. Okay, well, that's great. You just showed yourself that it wasn't that important to you. and you can start to wean yourself away of, you know, from these problematic foods in that manner. And just because you've said, okay, well, I'm going to, I'm going to take Allen's advice and I'm going to adjust my food environment.

I'm going to take this ice cream or cookies or whatever it is out of my house for a time. That doesn't mean that it has to be forever. Start to use this. And you can set it up where you have four, six, eight weeks down the road, put something in your calendar as an alarm. have it go off, have it have a message to re-evaluate your relationship with food. If you think, hey, you know, after four or six weeks, I just don't really need it anymore. It's been fine. And I find this a lot of times with my clients.

And they say, you know what? I don't feel that draw that I used to have from it. Okay, great. That's a personal choice. And now all of a sudden, you've taken control and you're making that conscious choice that you just don't want to have it and it no longer has power over you. You might say, after four to six weeks, you know, I do feel like I'm in a lot more control. I want to bring it back into play, but I want to do this in a manner that doesn't seem scary to me. Okay, we'll get a small serving, get a single serving of ice cream, put it in your fridge, see how you do.

Allow yourself to have a certain amount every day that fits within your calorie goals and your other nutrient goals. And see if that allows you to bring it back in piecemeal. There are different ways to bring this back in, but if we do this in a progressive manner, it can be a very powerful thing that can work. But we have to set ourselves up with some of these strategies to be able to give ourselves guidance, particularly when we feel like we're jumping in the deep end without a life preserver. So these are different ways that you can do that. And even the simplest one beyond just adjusting your habits, the substitutions, the adjusting your food environments. literally the number one thing that everybody can go for, when you have a food craving, set your watch alarm to 20 minutes. Do not give into a food craving within 20 minutes.

Most of the times, that will subside. And if that's the case, great. It just worked itself out. If after 20 minutes, you still want to have that food, well, then you can have that conversation. And again, at least it's a conscious choice that you're making and it's not being driven by this emotional need. giving into the emotional need is the problem that's happening because we're reinforcing that bad reminder routine coupling that you don't want to reinforce. Any thoughts as to what is the main driver of that emotional need for people?

I'm not sure if this is your full area of expertise or what you've seen from your clients, but what would you, even if you had to kind of think about it a little bit, what is the biggest driver that has some people really feel that they need to have that emotional need met through food. Is it again, the learned behavior? It's simply because they grew up in an environment or they were exposed to an environment where other people dealt with stress,

but that stress was sort of numbed or dealt with food? We people who have the good responses have typically figured out how to mitigate this in a different manner. It's usually in people that have the positive or beneficial responses, they've learned to mitigate it in a different manner. What this is...

Because they've had good examples. Either they've been. taught or they've been self-taught and they've learned it in some way. And usually this is from parents. You know, unfortunately, that's where it tends to come. So much comes back to parent. Yeah. Unfortunately, it tends to come back to parents. But it's a response to a negative emotion. And one of the biggest misconceptions about emotional eating is it's, I'm bored. And it doesn't tend to happen to boredom. I really like this take that you had because I had heard a lot of people say before that, hey, people eat for reasons of boredom, I'm not going to steal your thunder.

I'll let you explain it, but I really, really appreciated this take. And I want everybody to listen to it because this is, this is I thought like a different way of thinking about this. People will often blame boredom for the reasons they've reached for certain food. But if you're bored, you find something to occupy your time that's enjoyable. You don't really reach for food. Bortem is not typically the reason that we have these emotional responses. We have these emotional responses because we have feelings of inadequacy or we're feeling like we can't control the situation. I mean, we talk about control so much in this conversation that we've had, but we talk about control because it's a very real driver of everything that we do. If you feel competent

in a situation, if you feel like you're in control of the situation, you're one more likely to do something and you're too, much less likely to have guilt afterwards. And so boredom is generally not or reason why people eat. They eat because it's part of a social situation that they're in. They eat because of feelings of inadequacy. They eat because they're feeling sad. They eat because they're being overwhelmed with stress. And that five to 10 minute dopamine release that they get from eating a hyper-palatable food

tends to essentially numb that pain a little bit. And one of the things that I've talked about before and you've probably heard is I like to bring up an idea called the Apple test because there's a difference between hedonic hunger or emotionally driven hunger and physical hunger. If you're in one of these situations and you've waited 20 minutes and you still want to have whatever it is that you want to have, you can ask yourself, you know, would an apple solve this craving? Then if your answer is, hell no, I don't want to eat an apple. I want to eat a donut. Well, there you go. You know that you're not hungry. That's not a physical hunger issue. It's an emotional hunger issue. And that doesn't mean that this is a

fail-safe answer of how to treat the problem, but it educates you and it gives you an idea and insight into what you're dealing with. And that can give you the choice on how to respond to it. You have a background in dentistry. You're an oral surgeon. And now you're an individual who's out there on social media, sharing the best of what we know in the evidence space of what actually leads to long-term health, sustainable weight loss, how to build muscle, and many other things that we've been talking about over here. Talk to us about how you ended up being one of the go-to coaches for people looking to make this a lifestyle and feel like they truly have stepped into lasting change. Yeah, I mean, this was always a passion for me. And it was something that

even in all my downtime throughout growing up and schooling and everything, I was I was always trying to absorb as much information about fitness and nutrition and health as I possibly could. And, you know, I was sold on it early. I got those, that addiction to working out and the enjoyment out of it, you know, early. I kind of heard a little bit in your story. You were a tall skinny kid. I was about 170 pounds at 6 foot 1. Okay. So that's not a, that's not, it's not, it's not too skinny. But, you know, when you're playing sports, competitive sports, you can be tossed around a little bit. Totally. And so that's what got me into it at 17 years of ages, started lifting.

And so that has kept up throughout the years and has been a wonderful thing. The switch to dentistry was great, and I practiced for 10 years. And towards the end, my father, who had been a dentist for 35 years, ended up getting throat cancer. He ended up getting esophageal cancer. And I had conversations with him throughout the last years of his. life. And one of the discussions that I had with him was, if you had the ability to do this over, what would you do differently? And his answer to me was he wished that he would have spent more time with family and he wish he would have taken care of his health a little bit more.

Because throughout the years, I'd always been like, hey, do you want to go to the gym with me? Do you want to do some of these things? And he's like, no, you know, I'm too busy. I've got work. And he was a sole practitioner. He was the only, you know, he had his own practice. He was the only person running it. And so he always felt like he had to be there. And he was great with his patience. He was always spending time with them if they would call in, you know, after hours, he'd be like, I'll meet you in there. I'll take care of you. But it didn't create the health, life, work balance that I think that he really needed. And so that messaging really hit home for me. And having been in fitness and nutrition and helping out friends with, you know, their programming and in both of those for long

periods of time. I felt like I had something that I was able to give to people. And I turned to my wife, who was also really into fitness. She was at 2019 Worlds for Olympic Weightlifting. She was an American record holder in Olympic Weightlifting Snatch. And so I brought up the idea to her of starting Maui Athletics, our fitness and nutrition consulting company. And she was like, yeah, let's go for it. You know, at least we can do this on the side. It can be something that's fun. And, you know, maybe we can pay for groceries with some of the money that we make from it and really be able to help people. And after a few years, it ended up taking off and it was nice enough to be able to run as a sole business. And so I retired from dentistry and worked directly and coaching solely. And, you know,

it's a major shift in what I was doing before. But I really like to look at it as it's both forms of really improving people's health. And at this stage, with fitness and coaching, I can do it in a way that's preventative. You know, and I can prevent people from getting to these levels of immobility, these these metabolic disturbances, these, you know, issues with injuries that they can potentially have over time. And it's incredibly rewarding when you can help a person change their entire life and move into something that they've never had before, feel better than they've ever felt before

and feel more accomplished than they've ever felt before. When you work with people, are you end-to-end helping them craft training programs, you know, helping them learn how to like audit their calories and track their calories and then also giving them guidance on like some of the things we talked about here, like tools and tips, coaching approaches to emotional eating? Is it the whole gamut? It's everything. And it's extensive.

And it's, let me not say extensive. Let me say comprehensive. And I like to say comprehensive because we like to say comprehensive because we're, When I onboard new clients, they get a list. I have all these documents that I'll send them and it's broken down so you can figure out where things are. I give an entire ebook on nutrition. I give what to expect in a fat loss journey.

I get frequently asked questions. I give just expectations, all these different things. And we start from the beginning by setting proper expectations, proper goals. And then from scratch, I'll set up a fitness and nutrition program that's tailored directly to them. And I like to do this. I like to explain this to people in the way that we set this up in a manner that's not similar to the 1990s bodybuilder diets where it's like, hey, look, here's some boiled chicken and broccoli in joy because that's not sustainable for a person long term. People can do anything for two to three months.

But if they're not willing to do something and have at least a little bit of joy along the way, it's not going to last. And so what I like to do with setting up nutrition is I have a comprehensive intake form on my website that they get their own passworded name into the client portal. They fill it out and there's a checklist. And it goes over all these different protein options, carb options, fat options. Then they tell me how they like to eat typically throughout a day. And I'll give them examples of based on your goals and based on how you eat, this is the type of meals that I would be setting up. And it's essentially an entire skeletal framework for them to see the amounts that they should be eating, the types of meals that they should be eating based off of foods that they actually enjoy that can be in a sustainable diet. And so we talk about all of the different mindset stuff that we've talked about today.

We talk about sustainability. And then at the end, we set up a comprehensive fitness program so they can progress with all the different things that you need to know to make that the most reliable thing possible. and then unlimited email access to me. And that's usually something that I regret for the first four weeks as I get 300 emails in this first, you know, beginning time period. But I love it. And I think that the people that really take the time to be active and invested in their journey or the people that tend to be really successful long term. And so it's funny. I will point out to people, I'm like, look, you're going to send me a lot of emails here in the beginning.

But that's typically a good sign for the fact that you're really engaged and you really care about what's going to happen. And then over time, you start to take on more autonomy yourself. And then you only reach out to me whenever you have, you know, really distinct, big questions that you don't typically find the answers to. And then other than that, we meet up every two weeks. We do our check-ins. We make any adjustments that are necessary to keep them going. And they progress rather well. That's amazing.

We'll have the link in the show notes, but just for somebody who's listening while they're like working out or anything is like that. Where do they go to the website? Mauiathletics.com. Maui just like the Hawaii Island where I'm from. Or you can reach out to me on Instagram at at Dr. Allen Bacon. That's D-R-A-L-L-A-N. Unfortunately, I've got a strangely spelled first name. So if you miss that, you won't find me. But if you do, you know, certainly reach out, say hi. And I'm very happy to help you out and direct message if you have any questions about what we talked about today. Okay, great. And we'll have all those links in the show notes. And definitely if you're

somebody who's looking for support, please reach out to you. And do you also work with a team, like if you're booked up at the moment, is there a team that's available for you? My wife and I work together. Okay, great. And so she's on the team as well. And in 2025, we're actually just dropping a new group fitness coaching options for people. So it will, what we wanted to do is the comprehensive coaching that I talked about before, I mean, it's very comprehensive. Like, I put a lot of time and effort into that because I want to be able to help people as much as possible.

And I realize that the more that you coach, the more that you find that it's very, you're very, psychological. And so working through that psychology takes a lot of time and, you know, nuance. I wanted to be able to give a more cost-effective option for people that just wanted to get started, wanted to have top-tier coaching options available and be able to succeed. And so this group coaching option will be fitness-focused in general. It won't have a nutrition component, but it will allow you to have those three and four day workout splits set up. It will have alternatives based on what you have available. We'll have unlimited form checks for you so you know that you're doing it right.

And we're going to do it in a way that we set up an entire private community that you can be in. So you're on a journey with other people that are experiencing the same thing. That's awesome. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. If that has a special link, give it to us. If it doesn't, they'll just find it from your website.

It's not set up yet because we haven't dropped the entire thing. But good news is I got the entire. website, URL set up for the, for the sign up for this. It just hasn't gone live yet. But you will be able to find it under the coaching tab

at Mauiathletics.com. Okay. Amazing. Amazing. All right. A couple more questions here as we wind down today's podcast.

When we started off the podcast, you were talking about neat and how some people use this way of being spontaneously more active throughout the day. You gave the example

of you talk a lot with your hands. You're not doing it as much right now because you're on a podcast. You're being mindful of the mic. Is there any solid strategies that you've seen where you can teach people who are not as spontaneously active throughout the day, fidgeters, whatever you have? I definitely am one of those people. I'm always naturally sort of moving my legs. I'm always kind of stretching things. And is there any way for somebody who's not that to become that that you've seen? You mean the lucky people that don't deal with anxiety 24-7? The people that don't deal with anxiety 24-7, the people that are actually calm and can sit still.

I feel pretty calm and I also don't sit still. So there are very good strategies to be able to do this. And there are a couple that I really like. And certainly this is one of those things that we deal with often. I mean, because when I first start working with clients, I will tell you that I'll typically see people will have between three and six thousand steps per day. Short-term goals that I would set up for somebody, shoot for 8,000 steps per day. we see in the literature benefits from about 8,000 steps to about 20,000 steps per day.

I don't even get 20,000 steps per day. I would never expect a client of mine to be able to get 20,000 steps per day. If you can do it, it's usually a one-off because you decided to go on a really long hike or whatever it is. My dad gets consistently 18 to 20,000. It's usually three long walks throughout the day plus his normal sort of standard stuff. That's impressive. Yeah, and he has a walking group that he does it with. Okay.

So the community aspect. It's a community aspect. So I will tell people go for 8,000 steps per day as your start, your start goal, and then work yourself up to about 10,000. And usually if you're about there, that's when you really start to worry more about nutrition, sleep, weight training, that type of thing. There are a couple strategies that you can use to make this easier on you because you probably don't have the habits built in. Obviously, you don't have the habits built in if you're a person that doesn't really move that often. One of the ones that I really like is set an alarm for every hour to get up and walk for five minutes. If you do that technically, I think I did the math, by the end of the day, you get 10,000 steps if you were doing that every hour.

But it's a really easy way to up that step count. And if you have that reminder in your phone calendar, an alarm to go off, it's going to be much more likely that you're going to do it. Spending five minutes every hour, it's not too bad. I mean, you can work that in within your day, even your work day. And so not only are you getting that mental break and making yourself better at work, you're actually getting those steps in that you want to be doing anyways. other things that you can do. Concurrent movement is a really good way to handle this. And by concurrent movement, I mean getting steps in when you're doing other things.

Brush your teeth, pace around. When you're talking on the phone at work, pace around. This is where those things like step pads for when you work, you can put it under a desk and be working at your desk and walking two, three miles per hour can really add up. And you can get step pads now on Amazon for like 150. 50 bucks. Is a step pad the same as like a walking treadmill? Yeah. It's it's it's a walking treadmill and they don't tend to have the same cost as a as a real treadmill because they're not meant to go fast. No. They can only go up to about 3.5 or so miles per hour, but that's exactly what we want. Yeah. We want you to be

able to continue working. We want you to be able to continue doing what you're doing in a smaller package for less money to just make this accessible. And so those things can be very, very beneficial for people. Like I said, Amazon has a variety of really good ones there. And the other thing that I would look into doing is make some modifications to how you live your daily life. When you go to the grocery store, park at the farthest spot, take the stairs instead of the elevator. You know, if you've got to pick something up, go to the mall where you can walk around the mall a little bit. Yes, mall still exist. And you can take advantage of that.

And so we have all of these different things that people. people can do to start to up the step count, but it's really figuring out ways to make it happen. And that's where I think that taking advantage of these schedulers, these phone calendars, can be very beneficial. And I'm a big fan of doing this for a lot of different habits that you want to use. Because if we have that reminder and we set it in our calendar like we would a job or any other priority that we have in our life, it's much more likely that you're going to do it. Whether it's getting up every hour to do our steps or whether it's getting into the gym, three times a week or whether it's meal prepping.

You know, and when we talk about meal prepping, people will often say, you know, I like to make most of my meals the second that I'm going to eat them. That's great. But I would still recommend bulk prepping a couple options. So when life happens and life will happen, you have the ability to resort to these foods that you've pre-prepared to make your life easier. You know, bulk prep chicken, ground beef, potatoes, rice, instant pots. are your friend and they can make life very easy.

Last question here, you know, at the beginning of the podcast, you talked about why it's so important for people to figure out there why. Not just with their weight loss journey, which is really again, we want that to be a fat loss building lean muscle mass journey, but just with their health journey alone, you chatted a little bit about how your dad's story

of him essentially being on his deathbed or very close to his deathbed and bestowing upon you what he wish he would have done better inspired your why in business, you know, going from dentistry and oral surgery to being a coach and really making a difference in people's lives. What's the why that has you continue to invest in your health today for you? Why is that so important for you? There are different forms of motivation, right?

And there are, there, there's a spectrum and it goes from a more external form of motivation to a more internal form of motivation. My why originally was, first off, I was 17, so please forgive me. I wanted to look more aesthetic. Nobody needs to forgive me, right? That's like, that's natural. Everybody's been 17 before. Right.

They want to look good for the opposite sex. Right. And I don't think that anybody should feel bad for wanting to look good in a bathing suit or wanting to look good naked. And it doesn't matter what age you are. And that's certainly a motivation for a lot of people. It doesn't have to be the sole motivation. But it can certainly be a motivation that gets you started. And so that was a motivation that got me started.

And it continues these days because I have responsibility from coaching. And I want to be that example to show, hey, you know, this is what I stand for. And if I'm asking this of you, I need to ask this of myself. It brings fulfillment to my life from accomplishment. It brings fulfillment to my life from health and quality of life standpoint. point. What I was getting at with the motivation aspect is over time, that Y is extremely important, particularly in the beginning. As you do this longer and longer, you will often see a shift in motivation to more internal forms and building identity around, hey, I'm a healthy athletic person

is a very, very powerful thing. Because a lot of times, I don't even have to bring up my Y or ask, you know, what am I doing? This is just what I do. It's inherent. It's inherent. This is what I do. And there are different forms of that motivation. The form that's right next to completely intrinsic motivation is viewing your identity as that is what it is. I am an athlete. I am a healthy. Ultimately, we would love to get to an intrinsic form of motivation where we say, it's not just that I'm healthy and that I'm an athlete. It's that I actually enjoy doing it. I enjoy getting into the gym. I enjoy eating all minimally processed foods. I enjoy eating fruits and vegetables.

I enjoy eating eating eating eating steak. I enjoy eating eggs, all these types of things that are really beneficial for us. That is the ultimate goal and hopefully we get there. Not everybody does. The form right before that is identity. And identity can be a very powerful form. And I like to say, hey, if you don't feel like you'll ever love lifting weights. And there's a lot of people that say, I'm never going to love doing that.

And that's okay. You can still be just as successful as somebody that does if you can start to build your identity around it. And so I think that it can be very powerful to understand too that, you know, everybody talks about, oh, I love, you know, you talk to these people that have these great bodies and look like they're really motivational for who they are. And they're like, I love working out. And this is just my life and I really enjoy it. And I think that that can be really overwhelming for some people. But realizing that you don't have to get there is a good thing. Realizing that it can build to that. is a good thing and realizing that you just have to remind yourself why it's important to you beyond the, I just want to lose weight or I just want to gain some weight because it's not losing

the weight that is why you're doing it. You want to lose body fat because it'll make you feel more confident because you're going to feel like you're going to please your partner more. You're going to feel like you're healthier. There's a ton of reasons why you would, but it's beyond that typical reason that we give when we haven't had that introspection to really identify what's going on there. I want to lose weight. Why do I want to do this? Because I want to lose weight? That's never the answer.

So figure out if you're a person that's starting on this journey what your actual why is. And it will obviously be different for a per person. And there will obviously be likely more than one Y per person. And there's nothing wrong with that because the more that you can lean on, the better it can be. And I always love pointing out, if you're a parent, you've got kids. What better why can you have than your kids? You are going to have a longer life. You're going to have a better life.

You're going to be an example for them. And if doing it for yourself is not worth it? Is it worth it doing it for your kids? Because if your kids grow up, seeing you as a person that's healthy, learning from your example, and seeing that it's possible, even if you start out as an obese person, that can be incredibly powerful because they see that they can overcome it too. So this is where I want people to start to shift. And if we can start doing it in a way where we start to build some lean muscle, maybe we'll

make a dent on some of these health epidemics we have. Incredible. Dr. Alan Bacon, thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been a true pleasure to host you today. Thanks so much, Drew. I really appreciate the opportunity. 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 on 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-H-I-T-com and click on the tab that says, try this. this.