Dhru Purohit Show - Why These Top Nutrition Experts Changed Their Minds

Starting point is 00:00:00 One of my absolute all-time favorite topics to cover with guest is the topic of how have you changed your mind. You know, the important thing about this question asking someone how they've changed their mind over the years on important topics is that it gives you an insight into how they think. We should all be changing our minds when presented with new information that gives us a different sense of how we want to show up in our body. and in our health. And on today's compilation episode for you, I'm talking with three different experts on the podcast from previous episodes about how they've changed their mind when presented with new information from the latest science, research, or their own experience. I know I've changed my mind on so many topics. And one of the things that I try to do with my audience here is let you know and have you follow along the way. I used to be very concerned about eating a high

Starting point is 00:00:59 protein diet. When I was presented with new information and the importance of focusing on your lean muscle mass, I completely changed my mind and started prioritizing protein and lean muscle. Like that, there's a whole host of other things that are out there that I've changed my mind on. But today, it's about these three experts that I have on the podcast, Mark Sisson, Cynthia Thurlow, and Thomas Dallauer. Let's start off with Mark Sisson, who shares his evolving perspective on food, exercise, supplementation, and more after his decades-long career in health and fitness. So you're turning 71 in a month. You're very fit, right? We should all be, you know, hopeful that we could be 70 and that's why we have you on this podcast and be as fit as you are. More importantly,

Starting point is 00:01:46 just from seeing your tweets, senior on podcasts, you're extremely happy with your way of life. Yes. Looking from the outside. That doesn't mean that there aren't tough days or challenging days or that everything is green. But in general, you love the life that you've crafted for yourself. And so part of that has been looking from the outside, seeing you talk about what you have chosen to prioritize and what you've chosen to deprioritize. So on this topic of supplementation where, you know, you've called modern biohacking, it's like the modern day day trading approach that people have. Yeah. Where the list of supplements can become endless that's out there. And it leaves people wondering and feeling, am I doing enough?

Starting point is 00:02:22 Should I be doing more? What's right for me? So I'd love to hear your take on why overall, in addition to, you know, outside of like collagen, maybe a couple other things like creatine. Why have you chosen to deprioritize most supplements that are out there? It's been a evolution in my own journey, if you will, where I used to make the world's highest potency multi-v atom, multi-mineral antioxidant supplement. I mean, I made a product that was a packeted 12 capsule a day super supplement.

Starting point is 00:02:47 It replaced 52 different bottles that you would go buy at the health food store. Because I thought in those days, I thought, okay, if people are going to supplement and people are really into supplementation, why not take the best of the best, the greatest hits of all the supplements out there? So not just a multivitaminol, multi-mineral, but I was early in resveratrol and CO-10 and acetyl-sistine and alpha-lopoic acid and grape seed extract and all of these different nutrients that every once in a while seem to show up as this is the new, hot new thing. I'm like, no, I've been doing that for 35 years. A couple of things. First of all, I think a lot of the RDAs, the DVs, the daily value the recommended daily intakes, whatever the latest, you know, Department of Agriculture has to say

Starting point is 00:03:28 about how much you should be taking. These were originally done in the 1940s when much of the U.S. diet, while it was based on whole food, healthy, you know, healthy whole food, a lot of it was still grain-based. So I think a grain-based diet increases one's requirement for a lot of these micronutrients and that if you eliminate grains and process carbs and a lot of sugar from your diet, then your daily requirements, I think, drop tremendously. I think your body has an incredible ability to recycle a lot of these micronutrients, these phytonutrients. Obviously, the body has its own resident antioxidant systems. So we really do have, you know, superoxide, dismutase, catalase, glutathione, are the three primary endogenous antioxidant systems that we have. And we don't really need a lot more from the

Starting point is 00:04:13 outside. So a lot of the work that's been done in antioxidants looking at oxidative damage, for instance. When I was an athlete, and this goes back 20 or 30 years, I took antioxidants because I thought, well, I'm doing this oxidative damage to myself by putting through all this, you know, all of this oxygen through two hours of training hard every day. And that results in reactive oxygen species, the creation of, you know, all of these free radical things that could be damaging to cells. The theory was if you took antioxidants, you could offset some of that damage. Now we cut to recent data in the last five or ten years that shows that. that the reason you trained is to create this oxidative damage, and then your body responds by recovering.

Starting point is 00:04:54 It's the hormetic experience of the workout and the oxidative damage and the inflammation, the short-term inflammation. It prompts these genetic upregulations that build muscle and build your own antioxidant systems, and you bypass or you negate the work that you did by taking an antioxidant. It occurred to me that, okay, if I'm going to work out, I don't want to take an antioxidant. Just like if I'm going to work out hard, I don't want to take a cold plunge. I don't want to decrease inflammation right after a workout. I literally want the inflammation from the workout. This all feeds into my overall strategy of the past couple of decades, which is I'm looking for the minimum effective dose of everything that's onerous in my life.

Starting point is 00:05:26 And I put that little caveat there. So what's the minimum effective dose of exercise that I can do? Build or maintain muscle, build or maintain VO2 max, improve performance, reduce times, whatever the metric is I'm looking for. What's the minimum effective dose of that? Whereas in the old days, I would literally go, what's the most amount of work I can do? Because more must be better. Like, you know, no pain, no gain, trade harder, outwork. my competition, that was the old sort of mantra in athletics.

Starting point is 00:05:53 And now it's trained smarter, not harder. And with that comes what's the minimum effective dose of each of these forms of exercise that I do? What's the minimum effective dose of supplements that I can take to where I'm not creating an artificial requirement to need more to offset some imbalance that I've created by only taking a handful of these supplements when I should have been taking a wide range of them? I think you find people in the biohacking space who are taking 150 capsules a day because on the one hand, they don't want to leave any stone unturned. I think on the other hand, they're trying to balance one against the other against the other. And they hear all of these things. Well, if you have this much magnesium, then you have to offset it with this much calcium and this much potassium. And I think you wind up getting into this situation where you're like, I'm taking all these pills.

Starting point is 00:06:34 I don't feel any different. And maybe if I skip three or four days, I feel because I've built up this tolerance in my body that now expects this high, high, high level of regular. daily input. I mean, my first experience with this was vitamin C. I was an early adopter of Linus Polling's theory about vitamin C. And it goes back to the late 70s for me in the early 80s. And I was, I worked my way up to, they used to talk about taking vitamin C ascorbic acid or calcium escoribate or whatever the form it was, the sodium escorabate, they're all different forms to what they call bowel tolerance, right? Take as much as you could until you had the flying you know, that he had diarrhea. And that was one theory. And I was taking 25 grams of C a day.

Starting point is 00:07:16 Well, then I'd get sick a lot. And it turns out that between my high carb diet, which glucose occupies some of the same receptor sites that vitamin C does, my high vitamin C, if I skip the day or two, my body would just go, what the hell? You know, you built us up to this expectation every day, and now you missed a day, and now we're just going to go into this trough. My first experience was like, this way too much vitamin C, I shouldn't be doing this, and it's only one vitamin. And there are all these other micronutrients that not only I don't know about, but the world doesn't know about. You know, cut to now, it's like, what's the least amount of supplementation I can get away of? Like, I do take vitamin D once in a while. And even though I'm out in the sun a lot, I live in Miami Beach, I take

Starting point is 00:07:56 vitamin D. I'm not a good converter of it, according to my DNA analysis, which I'm not even sure I agree with necessarily, but, you know, it's a very simple, cheap supplement to take once in a while. I don't take it on a daily basis. To help you get your levels to about, what? What do you like to see? I mean, I like to see a minimum of 50 on my, on my vitamin D. I've been up as high as 80. And there are people, again, in the, in the biohacking community, will say, you know, if you're below 80, you're, again, you're leaving chips on the table. I'm not sure I agree with that. And it's, you know, we're all a complex equation with a lot of different variables in vitamin D. And our immune system is just one small aspect of that large variable equation. Then we get to food. I've always,

Starting point is 00:08:32 in the last 10 years, I've looked at what's the minimum effective dose of food that I can get away with? And people have had a problem with that. Tweeted about it the other day. Because I used to eat 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day as an athlete, I never gained weight. I could get away with it. It doesn't mean it was good for me. I could get away with eating that amount of calories. Probably what was going on. My body was figuring out a weight up my metabolism and burn it off.

Starting point is 00:08:52 A body likes to store calories as fat. But if you're not one who's good at storing fat, the body goes, this is excess calories. This is revving at a high, at too high a level. I've been looking at ways in which I could cut my calories back to an effective dose, a minimum effective dose, which for me is, you know, it's 120 grams max of protein a day. I look at my daily intake. Most days I don't even get 120. And again, I don't want to make too big a deal of this because when I'm talking about minimum effective dose. Yeah, I can eat 160 grams of protein a day. I could for a while. I couldn't sustain that. I mean, I went to lunch the other day with my team and I'm like,

Starting point is 00:09:25 okay, watch what I eat because I'm going to, you know, I'm going to have a full lunch. I don't eat breakfast. A full lunch. And it was a salad and a piece of salmon. And I'm like, you tell me how much this is. Mark, that's like 680 calories total. Okay, and it's maybe 40 grams of protein on the salmon. Probably not. Probably less. My son got married last night. We had a little banquet at the house. And I, you know, a bunch of steak and some steamed vegetables, some broccoli and a couple of sweet potatoes. Guarantee you, I didn't have 80 grams of protein in that meal. So I didn't have 120 grams of protein yesterday, even though I was over, not it wasn't overful, but it was a big, a decent-sized lunch and I feel great and I, this is what I do on a daily basis. So what's the least amount of food

Starting point is 00:10:10 I can eat, maintain or build muscle mass, have all the energy I want, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And if I can do this without being hungry, that's the key. If I'm never craving and never, like, oh my God, I'm sacrificing, I should be eating, I feel hungry, but I'm going to fight through it. No, that's not my life. My life is, oh, it's time to eat. And don't get me wrong, I love food. I love every bite of food I put in my mouth, but I know when to finish. I know when it's time to stop. I know when that's enough, body's satisfied, there's more if I need it later on. And this is what I try to teach people, which is this intuitive ability to go through life

Starting point is 00:10:43 and not have to count macros and not have to count calories and figure in all of these different pills and how they interact with each other. I'm just like, enjoy your life. Enjoy the meals. Enjoy every bite of food you eat. Know when it's time to finish. Enjoy every workout you do. Don't grind out, you know, other than a couple of, you know, the occasional MRF or some,

Starting point is 00:11:02 you know, high intensity thing. For the most part, try to have fun in your workouts, try to find ways to play. Training for the sake of training, I did that when I was younger. You know, I overtrained every day of my life because it seemed like the badge of courage. It seemed like the thing you did

Starting point is 00:11:15 to prove you were tougher than your competitors. I'm not there anymore. It's like when I go to the gym, it's like, what's the least amount of work I can do in this gym workout and feel like I got a pump, I left adequately tired, but not overtired, not to the point where I need to take a nap

Starting point is 00:11:32 in the afternoon. And then to the extent that I can come back and do something else tomorrow. Not the same thing, but some other type of work tomorrow. Finding that minimum effective dose of supplements, food, of protein, of working out in your life, to me, seems like the ideal, and we're doing it with footwear now. What's the minimum effective dose of a shoe? What's the least amount of shoe you can wear? And optimize foot health, right? So that's kind of my new lens of looking at things. And it certainly has an evolutionary history to it. I've been doing this, my whole career is looking at through the lens of evolution at how we evolved to get to this point.

Starting point is 00:12:07 But now it's like superimposed on a, on a modern society that's completely built on excess. What's the minimum amount of housing you need to over your head, roof over your head? What's the minimum amount of television you can watch? What's the least amount of social media you can participate in a day? Not what's the most, but what's the least and still, you know, feel fulfilled and thrive and and do all of the things that we want. Well, let's pivot into walking and continue down this theme of minimum viable dose, minimum dosage, optimal dosage that's there, how to get the most set of life to live a long

Starting point is 00:12:45 and healthy life. And on the topic of walking, we'll get to shoes here in a second, walking is one of those things that you've said that as you've gotten older, now about to turn 71, when's your birthday? July 14. Okay. Happy early birthday to you. You've doubled down.

Starting point is 00:13:02 maybe triple down on walking. Why is that? Well, it's available still to me. And one of the things that you face as you get older is your pending mortality. And depending mortality is often very dependent on mobility. Like when you stop moving is when you start dying. That's the stark truth for most people. The day or the minute you stop moving

Starting point is 00:13:26 is the day you start dying. That's why you see people in other countries, particularly Asian nations 80, 90 years old. They're out doing tight, They're not doing ballistic. They're not jogging and they're not, you know, running sprints and they're not pole vault. And they're doing movement, easy, you know, hand-waving movement and bending their knees and rotating and going through different ranges of motion and planes of motion. Movement. So for humans, walking is a quintessential human movement. I mean, we populated the face of the earth by walking. We didn't jog from Africa to, you know, northern Europe. We walked.

Starting point is 00:14:03 We didn't sprint to some other part of the world. We walked. And we even the notion that were persistence hunters, right, that we were born to run. We weren't born to run. We were born to be able to run because we walk so much and because we sprint a little bit. The quintessential human gate is walking.

Starting point is 00:14:22 It's heel toe, heel toe walking. You try to do that heel toe running and you'll get hurt. And most runners today are heel-striking runners. And the reason they don't get hurt immediately, is because they wear these thick, thick, thick, cushioned, stupid shoes. I digress. So walking is something that everyone can do.

Starting point is 00:14:39 It's a legitimate form of aerobic activity, of cardioactivity. It's a zone two type activity. Most people who run aren't very good runners. Like, of the millions of people in the country who claim to be runners and run marathons, a few percentage should be running. The rest should be walking. And my point is, if the average finishing time for a marathon is four hours and 30 minutes, It's like 10.5 minute miles.

Starting point is 00:15:03 I mean, you can walk 14 minute miles. The fact you can't run twice as fast as you can walk, why don't you just get out and walk more? And walking is anabolic. It builds muscle. Running is catabolic. I ran 100 miles a week for seven years. I lifted weights the whole time.

Starting point is 00:15:21 I could not put on muscle. I lifted weights and I ate 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 calories a day. And I couldn't put muscle on because running is catabolic. It tears up muscle tissue. So now you see people my age, people from my generation of runners who were 60, 70 years old, and they still run. Now they need hip replacements and knee replacements. And they almost all have heart issues from running too much from over training. And they don't have much muscle mass because they didn't do the muscle training.

Starting point is 00:15:48 And now it's more and more difficult. And as you get older, lean muscle is the driving force, right? Lean muscle is back to our conversation about protein and working out. You want lean muscle mass. So walking is at least anti-catabolic. Running is catabolic. So I say, why run when you can walk and get better benefits? You can improve your fat-burning capacity, your maximum aerobic function.

Starting point is 00:16:17 You will not get injured walking. When you get injured running, what do you do to recover? You walk, right? So it's like walking is just the quintessential human movement. and the more we can do it, the better. Do you have targets that you share for people when it comes to, again, minimum viable dose, but also enough strain that you're getting

Starting point is 00:16:40 some of these benefits that are there? One of the things about steady-state cardio, which was, you know, for the longest time, steady-state cardio was sort of the, that was it, man, that was what you needed to develop VO-2 max. Now it turns out that things like high-intensity interval training, short bouts of sprints, do more to improve V0-2s.

Starting point is 00:16:58 O2 max, then grinding it out on a six-mile jog at 10-minute mile pace, and all you're doing is jiggling your fat tissue and cannibalizing muscle tissue and burning through glycogen, which makes you hungrier, then it makes you hungry for more calories than you burned during the run. Running is a horrible way to try and lose weight. It's just, it's antithetical. The people who say they've lost weight by running are people who are able to overcome the natural tendency to overeat from having gone out and done a run. And I suspect many people are also shifting their diet around to getting rid of carbs and more protein-centric, more of the

Starting point is 00:17:40 healthy food choices in the first place, more nutrient-dent foods. So yeah, I just, you know, I think from day one into Primal Blueprint, I said, move around a lot at a very low level of aerobic output, find ways to move. Doesn't have to be walking. Could be easy swimming, could be just walking on a phone, pacing around the room, but find ways to be moving as much as you can throughout the day. Twice a week, lift heavy things. Twice a week, go to the gym and lift heavy. And then sprint once a week. And by sprinting, I mean give a max effort for anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute, four or five times in a workout. Those are the minutes. Those are the minimum effective doses. I just gave them to you. So it's walk as much as you can, lift twice a

Starting point is 00:18:29 week, minimum effective dose, and then sprint once a week, minimum effective dose. And if you look at those together, anybody who does that will get to within 85 to 90 percent of their potential maximum output. The rest is going to take way too much struggling and suffering and effort. Now, if you want to be a competitive athlete, we're talking about something else. But most people should not be competing. I mean, if you're, you know, hoping to finish a marathon in under three hours and 45 minutes, fine. You're not a runner. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:19:07 You're a jogger. And, you know, that's a great lifetime achievement to finish a marathon. But why would you do six of them a year at the same pace? Like, you're not getting any better. And all you're doing is chewing up muscle tissue and, you know, agonizing over the days you miss running or the days you are injured because your form is improper, find a fun way to access good health and fitness, you know, and find, people say, oh, but Mark, running is fun.

Starting point is 00:19:34 No, I love running. You don't love running. You love having run. You love finishing running. You love how you feel after you get in the house. But I guarantee you why you're out there running and try running. And if you're one of those people who runs with, you know, I listen to music will I run? That's great.

Starting point is 00:19:51 You're listening to music. You're not running. You're listening to music. Try running without listening to music and see how that. It's a weird dynamic. I have a new book coming out in the fall. It's called Born to Walk. And I'm really excited about what we're going to talk about in this book

Starting point is 00:20:05 because it really lays it out how walking is like, this is the real key to longevity and happiness and health in conjunction with spending time in the gym and doing the hard work once in a while with high-intensity training. But walking is sort of the foundation of all of this. I love it. I'm super excited to feature this next expert, Cynthia Thurlow, who's a friend of mine, and was somebody that was known as the champion of intermittent fasting.

Starting point is 00:20:35 It was something that radically helped her turn her life around. And as you'll hear in this upcoming segment, Cynthia Thurlow talks about how she went from being intermittent fasting is the best thing. Everybody has to do it at all times to a much more nuanced approach. based on people's unique situation and goals. Let's jump into this clip with Cynthia Thurlow, where she talks about how she guides patients differently at different life phases when it comes to intermittent fasting.

Starting point is 00:21:07 So when I talk about fasting and really leaning into bioindividuality, it's asking yourself all of those questions, sleep, stress, life circumstances, where you are in your menstrual cycle, where you are life stage, and understanding it is okay to adjust. have to be rigid. That's one thing about fasting that I always like to emphasize is how important it is to not be rigid. One of the key proponents of fasting from my perspective is flexibility.

Starting point is 00:21:36 So you may fast five days out of the week and say on the weekends, I don't want to fast, and that's okay. Or you may fast two weeks out of your menstrual cycle and say, I don't want to fast the last two weeks of my menstrual cycle. Or a male could say, I don't want to fast on the days I'm lifting really heavy. And that's okay. But I think, think the gold standard should really be, can you get enough protein into your feeding window, where are you life stage, and what is your lifestyle like at that given point in time? All of those things can really impact the success that you embrace with fasting. Well, I love about your message and how you break things down is, number one, you're a great

Starting point is 00:22:11 storyteller, and I just want to acknowledge you for that. You really help people kind of connect the dots and see what was happening in the past versus now. Another thing that you do that I think is very needed in today's world of health and wellness is that you hear a few different things when it comes to this topic of you were just chatting about breakfast, right? So on one side, let's call it the traditional TV advertising, the old model. It's like breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And within that context, it's you need to have your cereal. You need to have your donut, bagel, whatever.

Starting point is 00:22:41 They're just looking at it from a standpoint of calories in, calories out, get that external energy that's there. Then you have another side of, let's call it, you know, some of the health trends that we've been seeing where people are like, skip breakfast. It's completely unnecessary, just fast and go right into whatever you need to do for the day. And, you know, there's no reason to, you know, to have that component, which, okay, there might be a lot of individuality and sometimes that works great for individuals, especially when they've tapped into metabolic flexibility. But there's other area that you kind of highlight in the middle, which is that it's not that

Starting point is 00:23:15 breakfast is bad or good. The question is, what are you fueling yourself with and how does that set the tone? for what's going on, especially when you're in this transitionary phase of getting your body from not metabolically flexible to more metabolically flexible. So that often means, you know, do you have a really tough workout the day before? Do you have a lot of cognitive activities? You know, there's a lot of layers that you're balancing out. We don't want to just rule things out completely. Well, we know that that traditional story that we see on TV, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so just eat as much as sugar and carbs as you want. We know that that's not true because we can,

Starting point is 00:23:52 to just look around and see that it's not working. But there's these other sides where people can have a little bit of variation. So help us unpack that variation. And is there any variation specifically on the topic of breakfast that you teach your clients and that your coaches teach the people that they're working with? It's such a good way to think about this. And I'm going to disclose this to you at front. So today is one of those very busy days.

Starting point is 00:24:17 I had a very heavy leg day yesterday. I woke up this morning and I was hungry. My day is so busy that I knew I was not going to have an opportunity to eat in between all the things that I'm doing. And so I got up this morning and I ate breakfast. And I think most people would be surprised to know that. But I think that when you get to a point, when you acknowledge where you are in time and space, when you look at your schedule and you say to yourself, I would rather sit down and have a real nutrient dense Whole Foods diet meal than fast,

Starting point is 00:24:50 really long today because I can tell you right now, like when I'm that hungry when I wake up, I know it's that my body is looking for. For me personally, I need to eat. I'm going to get that protein bulletin and then I will make it through all of my things I need to do on my calendar. But when I'm working with women in particular, if I'm working with my coaches, I always tell them, you know, first of all, our bodies, if we lean into our intuitive side of our bodies, and for many people, if you're not metabolically healthy, that's challenging. So let me just preface that. But when you're in a point where you are metabolically flexible, I think those cues, sometimes you don't sleep well, sometimes you have a really tough workout, maybe you're stressed,

Starting point is 00:25:27 maybe you didn't eat enough the day before because you just had a busy day. And that does happen. It really genuinely happens, not to my teenagers, but it does happen to me on occasion. That might be a day where you're not going to fast as long. You may get up in the morning and say, I've done a 15-hour fast already, I'm ready to eat. And you need to intuitively lean into what your body is trying to share with you. I think on the other end, we have to acknowledge that we as women, and we're still getting menstrual cycles, there are going to be times during our cycles, when we're going to have greater success with fasting than in others. I think it's important to acknowledge that if you're not sleeping, that's not a time to fast. I'm sure you probably

Starting point is 00:26:06 have had other guests on that have talked about hormesis and hermetic stress and how this is so important, beneficial stress in the right amount at the right time. Intermittent fasting is a type of hormesis. And so it might be you have too much on your plate. And that is okay. So what I always say is a gold standard for everyone, unless you are growing like you are a teenager, like my teenagers don't fast. Pregnant people, breastfeeding people should not fast. But one thing I like to emphasize is that everyone can benefit from 12 hours of not eating, really and truly. Like that should be the gold standard for everyone. And I don't consider that per se fasting, but that's 12 hours of digestive breast, which has incredible health benefits. And that should be the gold standard.

Starting point is 00:26:46 that we're teaching our patients and we're talking to people about. I would lastly say that irrespective of life stage, if you're still getting a menstrual cycle, understanding there's a time in your menstrual cycle too fast and a time that you should not. And that's something that I think is woefully not discussed enough. Women are not many men. And we shouldn't feel like we have to apologize for a physiology.

Starting point is 00:27:06 We should actually embrace it and not feel bad or guilty or any of those things. Just understand our bodies are so delicate in terms of our hormone, physiology, how the hormones change or sex hormones change week to week day to day throughout our cycle until women go into menopause. And so I think that that makes really makes a great deal of sense. I always say perimenopause buffers these two time periods, but I do find many women can do really well with fasting in perimenopause and menopause. But I'm very conservative with younger women because I want to protect their fertility.

Starting point is 00:27:42 And frankly, the degree of hormesis that many women want to Like, you know, like I said, if a little bit of fasting is good, they want to do a lot more, could potentially, you know, set them up for having some fertility problems later in their lives. And I certainly don't want that for them. Yeah. It's all part of the evolution of wellness where things are more personalized. There's more context. There's more nuance.

Starting point is 00:28:05 And then you can still get the benefits from it. We don't want to fully make our entire life about some modality because that modality is just one thing. And at the same time, we don't want to fully write off. something because of the benefits that are there that are clearly present and available people. And that's the, you know, wellness in a way is growing up. It's getting more sophisticated, like everything, right? Politics is, this, is that. You know, there's a brighter side within all of this.

Starting point is 00:28:31 You know, people talk about our world being more polarized than ever in every category, diet, fitness, politics, this. I think the silver lining that many people are missing is that there's voices that are coming to the surface that are saying, hey, guys, like, here. Here's a little bit about how you kind of both see the sides right. And here's also where you might be a little bit wrong. And let's like have an honest human to human conversation about how we can take advantage of the things that work well, leave the things that don't, and then also personalize

Starting point is 00:29:00 it in context. And I really see your work doing that for especially women, but obviously it's attributable to men too when it comes to the topic of fasting. So thank you for that. Thank you for being a voice of reason in this world that either wants to fully embrace things or wants to completely write them off. I really appreciate it. Thank you. No, I like being existing in the gray. And I have a child who's very, everything is very black and white in his world. And I have to remind him, I think many years of clinical experience and just life experience, I realize we're missing opportunities to connect with people if we don't acknowledge our bio-individuality. We don't acknowledge where we are in time and space.

Starting point is 00:29:35 You mentioned you recently turned 50. I think you said last year was a big birthday year for you. And it was. And talk to us about for you, especially somebody who, if I'm hearing correctly, was active previously, but strength training in whatever capacity that you do it now, wasn't really part of the routine, right? It wasn't maybe, if I understand that correctly. And then you prioritize it and made it a part of the routine as you started to understand more how crucial it was.

Starting point is 00:30:02 So how does that show up for you now in terms of protocol and cadence in your life? something that might give our listeners inspiration of how they could, whether they're 40, 30, 20, 60, 70, 80, there's no wrong time to start incorporating into your life. So it might give them some inspiration of how they can do it for themselves. Yeah, that's a great question. I have always been physically active. I lifted weights probably not heavy enough and I probably did a way more cardio.

Starting point is 00:30:33 I was one of those people that was still doing really intense strength and conditioning classes in my early 40s. which, remember what I said earlier, Hormesis, right amount of stress at the right time, and I was probably overdoing it. So I think for me, the last three to four years have really been focused on strength training. Like I prioritize that over everything else. I don't work. I don't lift more than two to three days a week because it's just, it's too, it's trying to figure out too many things on the calendar.

Starting point is 00:31:01 I love Pilates. I do Pilates once or twice a week. And I walk a lot. I have two dogs. We live in a beautiful neighborhood that, you know, We have lots of trees and lots of beautiful skies. And so connection with nature, I get anywhere from 10 to 15,000 steps a day. And that's a priority.

Starting point is 00:31:17 And I really do enjoy walking with my husband in the morning with our dogs. We go to work from home. Same thing in the evening. And then I think on a lot of different levels, you know, my physical activity metrics, I become more focused, more conscientious about consistency. I think when I was younger, I probably didn't really think much. about what things were going to be like when I got older now that I'm in that stage and I have the ability I have the privilege of being able to work with so many people of different age groups.

Starting point is 00:31:48 The people that that do the best as they are getting older are the ones that are leaning into, you know, things that kind of support the autonomic nervous system. So parasympathetic nervous system, rest and repose. So whether it's meditation, I have an aura ring. I'm kind of a gadget person, admittedly. I have all these things that help me kind of stay centered. I now have a, it looks like a bean. It's called somnox.

Starting point is 00:32:14 It's actually something that you sleep with. And I only set mine for about 30 minutes, but it actually adapts to your breathing cycle, and it's actually supporting the autonomic nervous system. And then it turns off and then I push it out of bed. But that has actually doubled my deep sleep. And for me, like sleep is an art form. So really leaning into that,

Starting point is 00:32:35 parasympathetic, very firm boundaries. I have never been more clear about the people I want in my life and the people that bring me joy and the people that I enjoy being around and I really lean into that. I think that's super important. But I would say without question, the biggest changes I've made over the last few years have been more protein, you know, tracking macros occasionally, you know, looking at CGM data. So looking at the continuous glucose monitor to see what impacts some of the dietary choices that I make. And then the protein piece, which, I mean, now it isn't such a big deal, but I remember in the beginning, it seemed very overwhelming to largely double, you know, the amount of protein that I was consuming.

Starting point is 00:33:16 But now it allows for a degree of satiety that I can comfortably step away from the table. I'm not tempted by I'm not, I've never been much of a sweet cedar, but I do enjoy dark chocolate. But has allowed me and has afforded me the opportunity to to really have my metabolic health optimized. and that I'm really grateful about. But for anyone that's listening and sometimes it's just taking one change, I didn't do all these things at once, but one change can have a really large net impact

Starting point is 00:33:45 and pick one thing at a time. Don't feel like you have to change everything. That's overwhelming and that definitely sometimes leads to a degree of this all or nothing. I'm either all in or I'm all out. And so I always say focus on one thing at a time, whether you're going to decide to fast or you decide to lift consistently

Starting point is 00:34:01 or maybe you decide to track your food just to see where your macros are and make adjustments from there. All right, sticking with the topic of intermittent fasting, I want to dive deep into this by featuring my interview with Thomas DeLauer on this exact topic. Thomas is great. If you aren't following his YouTube channel, check it out because Thomas regularly asked guests how they've changed their mind.

Starting point is 00:34:27 So I thought I'd flip that on him and ask him how he's changed his mind over the years, in particular when it comes to his own incredible weight, journey and how he used intermittent fasting and how he now recommends or doesn't recommend intermittent fasting for various goals that people have in their life. Let's jump into this fantastic segment with Thomas DeLauer. You lost 110 pounds and intermittent fasting was one of the key things. One, we'll get to some of the other ones. But you're also really good at helping people understand where it may be overrated in some certain aspects. So I'd love to start there. give us a sense of, in your experience now, what has been a decade of intermittent fasting

Starting point is 00:35:12 almost, where do you see intermittent fasting as being overrated in people's journey, but more importantly, underrated that could be a powerful tool to help people transform their bodies and their lives? Yeah. I'll start with the underrated piece. I think that it's vastly, vastly underrated the fact that intermittent fasting gives people an element of mastery with the control in their diet. And I think that we live in a world where we don't have a lot of control. We might feel like we have a lot of control over what we eat,

Starting point is 00:35:46 but let's be really real here. We have tons of hyper-palatable foods that are lighting our brains up like Christmas trees all the time. That's not control. Like the food controls us. And we may not want to admit it. It may sound kind of weird and almost woo-woo witch doctor to say that. But it kind of does. You know, we have, I'm not even trying to sound crazy conspiracy here, but we've got food marketers that know what they're doing. Food tastes dang good. It lights our brains up and it makes us want more. With fasting, the underrated component of it is just that simple element of mastery and being able to abstain. Like abstinence from food is a powerful thing. Like we're exposed to food all the time. The ability to be able to just say no and have complete control is freaking powerful.

Starting point is 00:36:29 as all heck. And that is the piece that is underrated because everyone wants to focus on these overrated nuanced pieces that are still important. But, you know, we talk about things like autophagy, which is great. Fasting absolutely induces autophagy, but exercise also induces autophagy. Fasting is a means of activating a lot of different cellular processes that would ordinarily be activated through other processes like exercise or caloric restriction. It just works better for some people because their minds work that way. For example, I could have easily just restricted calories when I lost 110 pounds. No denying that that could have worked. But did it mentally work for me? No, it didn't. I tried. And I felt like a slave to food. I felt like a slave

Starting point is 00:37:15 to the scale. I felt like a slave to tracking. It ruined my life. It was terrible. Whereas fasting gave me peace and gave me like a lot of flexibility. And it was still putting me in that same box. was I accomplishing the same things that I would have accomplished with caloric restriction? Yeah, but arguably faster, arguably in a more defined way, arguably in a way that jived with my personality better. And so it's not to say that things like intermittent fasting don't induce these amazing things like autophagy, but what I'm trying to say is that to say that fasting is the only way that does that is also factually incorrect. It's just one of many ways to get there.

Starting point is 00:37:52 And that's just one that I talk about a lot because I'm guilty of talking about autophagy and sort of embellishing how cool it is because it's to drive home a point of how cool this cellular process is. But a lot of people that try intermittent fasting are also people that are very overweight or metabolically dysfunctional and don't have the ability to really exercise

Starting point is 00:38:11 with any intensity just yet. You know, you mentioned a key word there, which was flexibility, and I've heard you say in previous interviews, that the level of flexibility that you feel because you have intermittent fasting as a tool in your toolbox, like, that's the number one benefit to you. What's an example of that flexibility that shows up on a daily or weekly basis that allows

Starting point is 00:38:37 for more freedom in your life? Maybe I want to have a chicken nugget with my kids, you know, not from, you know, McDonald's or anything, but maybe like, you know, gluten-free chicken nugget or something, right? Like maybe I want to be able to have some flexibility. Maybe I want to go have some ice cream with my kids now and then let them be kids and not have dad be a robot, right? maybe I want them to experience food in a way where they can establish control and establish their own

Starting point is 00:39:01 boundaries. And if I am constantly having my guard up and not touching these foods, I'm risking giving my kids eating disorders, right? So I need to make sure that they can experience foods themselves and see dad experience these foods, but also see dad put up the guardrails and he needs to put up the guardrails and get his life on track. But also being able to just enjoy food. I'm a foodie. Like I am. I always have been. I mean, hence I was 300 pounds before I. clearly like food. There's no denying that. So being able to enjoy food, but being able to have a strong understanding of when it's time to stop, but have a very clear black and white picture of, okay, I'm eating now. I'm not eating now. And when I first went through my weight loss journey,

Starting point is 00:39:41 like the first couple of months when I lost, I lost like 50 pounds in the first three and a half months or so, that was all being very flexible. That was just with intermittent fasting, still eating the foods that I liked, but just putting them into a compressed eating window. So yeah, I was probably restricting calories, but dude, I was still able to eat pizza. I was still able to eat burgers. I was still able to eat the foods that I wanted to. I just was eating a significantly less amount of them. I'd love to pivot to overrated, but also based off of your life experiences, after having done intermittent fasting and it being a part of your life now, and we'll talk about how you go about it now compared to previously, what have you found that you modified it or maybe

Starting point is 00:40:20 you changed your mind or your recommendations on your YouTube page? A lot of people watch your that like you're thinking evolved over a period of time based on some of the more overrated factors of intermittent fasting yeah i mean for one just diving more into research too and and seeing more and more and understanding the nuance but what really started to get me to say okay i need to take a look at this is how things started to change after i lost weight because intermittent fasting works super super super well when you were at a metabolic disadvantage when you are metabolically unhealthy when you have mitochondrial dysfunction, when your energy systems aren't working well, when you're overweight, when you have metabolic syndrome, syndrome X, like there's no denying that, and the research

Starting point is 00:41:02 is very clear. But once I got to a point where, okay, well, now I'm maintaining weight, things are different. If I fast too much, it's actually not good for me. I'm trying to just maintain now. I don't have any more to really lose. I'm trying to just stay lean. So I need to pivot my way of thinking while also making sure that when I'm talking to my audience, I'm understanding that I have, you know, a split demographic of people that are already lean and people that are just coming to my channel that are like, man, I'm looking for help. So I have to make sure that I navigate that very, very carefully to not discourage people. And a perfect example is I used to fast every day. You know, I used to fast every day because I thought that that was the way to do it because it just

Starting point is 00:41:43 made sense. I was skipping breakfast. It would, it works. It got the weight off of me. But if I did that now at my current body weight, I think that it would probably be problematic. So, like, I've adjusted my fasting to be more three days a week per se and maybe increase the length of my fast, so it's more of a, you know, a shock. Also, just seeing as intermittent fasting grew in popularity again over the last, you know, like, I don't know, five, six years ago when it really started the hockey stick up again. Of course, you've got social media, so you've got influencers to hop on the bandwagon, and they start talking about it, but there may be embellishing things that maybe shouldn't be

Starting point is 00:42:22 embellished. And it was starting to give the intermittent fasting crowd a bad name. And that was frustrating for me because I'm someone that like, I literally owe my life to intermittent fasting. I don't know if I would be here today if it wasn't for it because I was so unhealthy. So that was frustrating to me to see like, guys, I know you're excited about intermittent fasting, but you got to check yourself a little bit with some of the claims you're making because it's those claims that are triggering so many people to come and attack intermittent fasting that have really big audiences. And now you're going to completely squelch the benefits of it because people are going to listen to the people that are squelching intermittent fasting versus the people that are really getting benefit from it.

Starting point is 00:43:01 So I'm like, you know what? I need to be the guy that actually splits the lane here. I need to be the guy that helps people understand that. But yes, you know what? It's okay to get on your high horse about fasting. It's okay, but you got to be real. You know, we can't just say it's magic all the time, even though it feels like it is. It felt like magic to me.

Starting point is 00:43:19 And I'm guilty of probably shouting from the rooftops. Like it was magic because, dude, I mean, this was the only thing that worked for me. So, I mean, I get that. But it was so was at that point where I'm like, I need to start putting some, some bumpers up on how I talk about it. We live in a world that loves to push definitive messages and black and white thinking. And not only does it love to highlight that, you're actually rewarded for not changing your mind on social media and coming out with very extreme statements. And this is true. nowhere else more so when it comes to health and wellness. Do this, don't do that. But the truth is,

Starting point is 00:43:54 there's always nuance and new information that's revealed. And as we get this new information and we learn from other people, it's okay. And in fact, we should celebrate the idea of changing our mind and changing our practices. In fact, if we haven't changed our mind about something over the years, chances are we're stuck in some sort of dogmatic thinking. I hope you enjoyed this compilation episode. And just remember, health is a journey, not a destination. Being willing and open to changing your mind is truly a superpower. Celebrate the people who talk openly and show their homework about how they've changed your mind and be willing to embrace it yourself on your health journey. Thanks for tuning into this week's compilation episode. We'll see you later on this week on the

Starting point is 00:44:35 Drew Prod Show with a brand new podcast interview episode.

Dhru Purohit Show - Why These Top Nutrition Experts Changed Their Minds

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