Mark Bell's Power Project - Can Obesity Be A Chronic Medical Condition? - Sam Miller || MBPP Ep. 1046

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

In episode 1046, Sam Miller, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza discuss whether or not Obesity can be labelled as a medical condition. Follow Sam Miller on IG: https://www.instagram.com/sammillerscience/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/untapped ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

More than 2 billion adults are overweight or obese. And already, we're already close to 80% or more are metabolically unhealthy. Obesity kills more people than malnutrition. This isn't just solely a weight loss issue. This is a conversation around cardiovascular disease. Can you define for us obesity is a disease? There's still a disease component in that the body is dysfunctional. We need to be so careful that when that label is applied,

someone doesn't just kind of put on this veil of brokenness. There's not real evidence of people being addicted to food, is there? They will feel like you are addicted. Do we know anything about like the momentary dopamine release when it comes to hyperpalatable foods? 100%, there are studies that will show that you can do certain things to the profile of a food, increase enjoyment, sensations, desire to overeat that food and consume it regularly. All right, man. Well, it's great to have you on

the show today, Sam. I think it'd be good to kind of dive into what everyone's talking about, which is these GLP-1 inhibitors. People might know it as Manjarno or there's a bunch of other Ozampic, a bunch of other names. So I think it would be cool to kind of kick things off with some of this. Yeah, for sure, man. Thoughts on it. So GLP-1s or GLP-1 agonists are popular weight loss medication. If you've heard of some of Glutide, Ozempic, that's really the class that we're talking about in category. And we've seen it initially, you know, while it was promoted for folks who are overweight and obese, we were even talking earlier this

morning about how now it's being recommended by the American Association of Pediatrics, even for childhood obesity and children who are overweight. So something that could potentially be powerful for folks who are either pre-diabetic or have significant metabolic issues, but it's grown so much in popularity. We're even seeing mainstream publications and news media outlets talking about it and not really showcasing some of the side effects or dangers of medications, which anytime we're adding something to our body or considering adding an exogenous compound, really need to consider, okay, there are some positives potentially, but what are the implications of long-term use? And I don't know that we have the full picture of that yet based on the research that we have and how we're kind of seeing this play out in real time. Anyway, we have Oprah Winfrey on the show here today. So Andrew, if you can sync up her mic

so she can give us her view. I have her via satellite. Yeah, thanks, Oprah. Appreciate it. All right, Oprah, don't be shy. I know you all have been seeing the headlines and it's blowing up your social media feeds. The new weight loss drugs. Everybody's talking about Ozempic, Wigovi, Manjaro.

Will they change the game on the health battle? Hundreds of millions are fighting every day. More than two billion adults, two billion adults, that's one quarter of the world's population, are overweight or obese. And it's estimated that by 2035, that number is going to reach more than half the world's population are overweight or obese. And it's estimated that by 2035, that number is going to reach more than half the world. Yes. Today, in most countries, y'all. Pause. What brings you so much excitement about this, Doc?

I was like, this is great. We're winning. Yeah. Everybody's getting fat. It's not just America anymore. We get blamed for everything. What do you think? Right now, it's like, what, 68% of the United States, right?

Something like that, yeah. What do you think it'll now it's like what, 68% of the United States, right? Something like that, yeah. What do you think it'll be by then, like 80%? Oh my gosh. And already we're already close to 80% or more are metabolically unhealthy. So even if you're not obese, we still have individuals who may not appear to be physically obese or excessively overweight. But if you were actually to look at their internal health markers and look at their labs. Like if you were to look at markers of fasting insulin, different markers of prediabetes, A1C, their lipid profile, potentially check their blood pressure, someone may have some sort of indicator that they are

in a declining state of metabolic health. So that number, definitely true from an obesity perspective, but just because you're not obese doesn't mean you don't have internal health issues. And that's a big consideration as well. I didn't know this until preparing for this show. Obesity kills more people than malnutrition. That was a while ago too. So in 2020, I actually had a tweet about this, guys, during COVID, which was basically the statistics around obesity and then the fact that our solution to it is to come out with a new flavor of Doritos. So, you know, we look at this and it's like, this is something that's also what flavor was it? You remember? Probably Cool Ranch.

Oh, that one's really good, though. Classic, classic. So weird, we're all fat. So classic, classic. So when we have this- So weird, we're all fat. So we have this conversation realizing, yes, that is an obesity statistic, but how is this impacting things like our immune system

and our overall health and what's happened, you know, in recent or last three to five years, really, right? So I think these statistics are important, but also understand when we're listing this information, number one, you may not fall into the obesity statistic yet. That doesn't mean you're in a good state of health. We've still got problems that need to be addressed and need to be fixed. Number two, this isn't just solely a weight

loss issue. This is a conversation around cardiovascular disease, this conversation around longevity, lifespan, healthspan, and what we were talking about with children too. And right now, all of this, the conversation we're having around GLP-1s, we have so much funding being shifted towards this pharmaceutical conversation, not realizing or not accounting for really what needs to be done

from a nutrition and fitness perspective too. Yeah, I buy some stock in some of these things. I mean, look, the numbers are in your favor. Might as well buy some stock in it, right? Keep it rolling. So you all know I've been on this journey for most of my life. My highest weight was 237 pounds. I don't know if there is another public person whose weight struggle

has been exploited as much as mine over the years. So I am ready for this conversation. With me, our top expert, and this audience has some interesting questions and opinions. And I know many of you watching have on your mind as well. So questions like, is being overweight a lack of willpower or is obesity a medically treatable disease? Are these new drugs a miracle cure, a silver bullet for weight loss? Can anybody take them? Are they safe?

Can you pause for a moment? 237 pounds, I'm not aware of like her height, but like what does get somebody in the category of being obese? So usually it's a combination of, we're typically looking at body composition and then overall chart like relative to um You know both body weight height. Sometimes we're still using bmi Um in the fitness industry, obviously we talk about things like body fat or you'll go get a dexascanner you have skin calipers

Typically when we're talking about someone being overweight or obese, it is just uh, pretty much their weight at a given height for the most part. But then when it comes to this conversation where we really have to go beyond just words like being overweight or obese is the conversation around metabolic syndrome. And really what we're saying is the percentage of the world and the United States that is metabolically unhealthy. And that's where we bring in these other more precise measurements. And these aren't just necessarily internal health or lab readings either. This is, you know, even looking at your waist circumference, you know, you can get your blood pressure tested. It can be very, very simple, just blood pressure cuff. That is an accessible biometric that does not necessarily require this, you know, sort of super

advanced testing or anything like that. So, um, obesity is largely a conversation around scale weights. However, what we need to understand is what's happening in someone's progression when they're adding that scale weight, what, how the body is adapting to the accumulation of fat and adipose tissue. Because, you know, for, for, um, I don't know if you're trying to go by like definitions or something, right. Let's just, let's hypothetically say that 237 pounds does put you in that category. And that does deem that you're obese. It's like, well, how much weight do I need to lose to get out of this category? And for Oprah, I would imagine it would have probably been around 30 pounds, um, which probably wouldn't take that long a time. And it could be challenging. If she's about average height, I would say Oprah spent more time in what was probably the overweight

category than obese. And then looking at it, right, we don't have body fat percentage statistics around Oprah. But even when I think about that, you know, it's like the change from one spot to another for most people, I'm not talking about like morbidly obese and stuff like that. The change for most people, we're talking about probably just a small percentage of your body weight, like maybe 10%, which may not be a small percentage. Do you want to pull up like two different definitions? It's just interesting. I guess what I'm thinking in my head is that the 20 or 30 pounds of weight loss that you may have acquired may not be all that much healthier, but in the long run, it will be. So it's like, you don't need to just lose the

weight. We need a strategy so that you can kind of keep it off. Right. And that's where I think people start to have the conversation around willpower and also where the medications come in, in terms of keeping it off is if you are down-regulating those hunger cues and you're able to regulate your cravings, then therefore we're consuming less calories and that's going to help sustain the weight loss. So we still have to account for our total daily energy expenditure, energy intake. And what's challenging for these overweight individuals is we have a lot of energy availability on our body. So when we store body fat or adipose tissue, we are storing calories. And that plays into our, typically what

happens as we become increasingly insulin resistant, we have leptin resistance, we have a lower than predicted TDEE or a lower than predicted total daily energy expenditure, which is the calories that you're burning from daily movements. So where this may come into play is if we have a lower than predicted TDE, it is helping people get to that lower calorie intake where their expenditure can actually get in excess of that for weight loss purposes. But again, we have to weigh sustainability when we have the conversation around side effects versus just the sustainability around regulating your hunger. It will make weight loss more sustainable from the fact that you will not be hungry, which is going to help you lose weight. Now, is that something you should do long-term? That's probably more of a personal decision and you have to take into account your

health history and also how the side effects are impacting you as well. And I think that's a mistake we've been making is we've been, there are a lot of people have been losing weight and maybe losing weight kind of quickly and losing weight aggressively. And then you're in this constant state of like, what happens if you, if you get into an accident, you know, you, you twist your ankle, you fall down, something happens. And now your energy output is diminished quite a bit. And you still never really learned how to actually control your food. And you still never actually learned how to react to your hunger signals and so on. Yeah, that's why people say it's very hard to out-exercise

like really poor nutrition. But in those, kind of in those examples, when we're thinking about yo-yo dieting, for example, a lot of people will say, we don't have a weight loss problem, we have a weight regain problem. And some of that has to do with the sustainability of the nutrition or the diet, which is, I've kind of this saying, which is your diet either needs a level of sustainability where we don't need an exit strategy or we need an exit strategy.

So let's say if you were trying to meet for powerlifting, or if you were in a weight restricted MMA class of some kind, you would have your plan to cut weight. And then we'd have to have an exit strategy after that, to be able to get back to a better place for health and training performance. So we do this in athletics and we do this when, uh, from a coaching perspective, having some seasonality or nutritional periodization, almost like periodizing or training, having a plan for things. But when we don't have that plan, the problem is people get to a place where their calories are

super low. They have a hard time increasing energy expenditure, you know, as a result of being largely at this very restrictive place with their calories. And they have this, the question is, where do I go from here? Because they've gotten the weight off, they've kind of raced to the bottom with their calories. And then it's, you And then it's natural to want to eat more food to just kind of sustain that, but people don't. What happens is they end up eating more food and they gain weight and then they think they need to hop on the next diet and so on and so forth. And then every time we're yo-yo dieting, a lot of times we're creating metabolic adaptations that make it a little bit more challenging to lose weight and keep it off again in the future. So definitely can be challenging from, we do have a yo-yo dieting

issue for sure, and a sustainability problem when it comes to the fitness industry as a whole. So happy to have you all here. So happy to be here. Okay, let's start with this. 10 years ago, the American Medical Association declared obesity a chronic disease. Now, a lot of us miss that, but many people can't wrap their brain around what that really means. So, Dr. Fatima, I read that you played a central role in that designation a decade ago. Can you define for us what it means that obesity is a disease? Absolutely. Why do we call obesity a disease? We call it a disease because there is malfunction in how the body is operating. And there's two primary pathways of the brain that actually regulate weight.

One pathway is our anorexigenic pathway. When we hear anorexigenic, what do we hear? We have less food intake and less food storage. Now, we have a different pathway of the brain. And when patients have overweight and obesity, they're typically upregulating the orexigenic pathway of the brain. Orexigenic is the opposite of anorexigenic. That pathway supports storage of adipose. Adipose is a fancy word for fat. And I just threw out a lot of vocabulary there. Yeah. But that tells us that there is dysfunction

in how the body is regulating weight. And it's good. The question, even though there are pathways for all of this, I wonder if she's going to bring in the idea that there's still a choice in, you know, what these people make because, or what people make, because we are very hungry individuals. We love food, but we still sometimes make certain choices to put ourselves in good positions. Like they're still dependent on the choice you make. You did this on a recent show, didn't you? You were talking about how you would just crush

like a whole sleeve of Oreos. I can, yeah. You can, yeah, you could, but you choose to keep it away. You know, choose not to buy it. Choose not to buy it, right? So that is part of the conversation that I think we need to acknowledge is that there are folks who have pursued healthier living, despite the fact that

they do still want to eat some of those things and, or have a desire to kind of, you know, I'd love to, you would love to, right. It would be my pleasure. So, you know, you have, have this conversation. I think you make a really good point around that is that there's still a choice now where we have to be very careful with labeling and things like disease is this idea of it can create a very fixed mindset in individuals where you're like, I have a disease, I'm broken. I have this label. I'm seeing this a lot in not only the fitness industry, medical community, and every sort of area and intersection point and corner across those two industries. It's, we give someone a label, they feel broken. Then we sell them a solution to

their brokenness and around and around and around we go. And we continue to look outside of ourselves for these answers when in reality it takes power away from the individual. And when we do that, we're basically pointing blame over here, saying, here's this problem, you have this disease. And as a result of that, it's a very challenging conversation around personal responsibility.

Because if you accept personal responsibility, you now have the freedom that you acknowledge that every choice that you make for the rest of your life plays into this conversation. However, it's also incredibly scary because it means that you got yourself into the situation, but it's empowering because it means you can get yourself out. So it's terrifying and it's hard, but it's also very freeing in a way too. So we can confront this conversation. And that is really the harsh truth. And that friction point is being able to face that and say, okay, the way I've lived my life for the last 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years has gotten me to where I am now.

Now, I don't need to spend 10 years, 20 years, or even 30 years getting my health back on track. It could happen in a fraction of the time. And there is a choice that plays into it. Now, in terms of her depiction of what's going on in terms of the different pathways, it's also sometimes referred to as we have the homeostatic and hedonic eating system. So when someone gains adipose tissue or fat tissue, sometimes we have a hard time with that. So typically we have both hormonal or physiological signals that help to regulate digestion and also just mechanical. So chewing, chewing your food longer, the actual environment

in which you eat your meal, and then the actual expansion of your stomach. Those are mechanical aspects of digestion that help with those feelings of fullness, which is here's where the choice part plays in. If I choose to eat nutrient dense food, that's relatively filling and low calorie, I'm working with that mechanical component of digestion. I may also have some dysregulation from the hedonic eating perspective, right? But I still played a role in getting there too, right? So it is a challenging conversation and I'm not, this isn't here to, there's still a disease component in that the body is dysfunctional, right? We need to be so careful that when that label is applied, someone doesn't just kind of put on this veil of brokenness and then refuse to take

action in terms of their own life. I think it really starts, it almost becomes a cultural conversation of us becoming, you know, kind of a victim in our own lives where, you know, with this, how can we have the conversation around, Yes, obesity does lead to health complications and there is dysfunction and therefore it is labeled as a disease, but you, the individual still have the ability to change and make, you make a difference in your own life. Now, whether you choose to do that with medication or without medication should be your own choice and you should have the ability to make informed consent. And the issue is, I don't know that people are reaching a state of informed consent because they don't have all the information around medication. They don't have all the information around, I mean, there's a lot of information available on social media

about nutrition and training and things like that. It's not all good information, but I do want people to get to a place where they can make an informed choice about their health that works best for them while also understanding that we still played a role in getting to where we are currently in terms of that status quo. It's so multi-layered. It's super multi-layered. And then it becomes this, that's why it's, it's a conversation around physiology. It's a conversation around psychology. It's a cultural conversation. It's, uh, you know, for some people too, it was, it's how you were raised. It was what your parents fed you. It was what it was available as a child environment. What about what your mother ate when you were raised. It was what your parents fed you. It was what was available as a child environment.

What about what your mother ate when you were developing? Yeah, what your mother ate. Yeah, I mean, we see this on both sides. We know this with crack babies. You know, you know this with drugs, right? That the child's addicted to the drug. I mean, we don't know that much down the road of like what a baby is connected to. But I would imagine what the mom eats probably is a huge...

I think ultimately what needs to be recognized is a huge, I think, I think ultimately what needs to be recognized in all of this is that we're not eating food is the biggest problem. We're most of the time when people get themselves in these compromised positions, in my opinion, it's because they want to induce some self-harm. I don't know why, I don't know what it is. Maybe they don't look at it that way. But in a lot of cases, I think it has to do with trauma and people are making a choice to bury themselves in pizza because it feels better. Like I love pizza. I would love, I would love to do that, but I choose not to do it too often because I know, I know what it does to me. I know the other, the other side of it. And I think we need to get to some of the, we got to get to some of the root

cause of some of these things. And I don't think, I understand why they're trying to label it as a disease or not a disease or it's an addiction or it's not an addiction. But it really doesn't matter. I think people are making these poor choices and they need to figure out why. Yeah. Yeah. And then have, and this is where there's that fine line of, we need to take enough ownership to feel empowered to make a change in our life and understand that we have a level of responsibility in terms of our own health, but also your loved ones around you and your community and people who count on you to show up as a healthy person. But, you know, there is that conversation around parenting, what you were fed, how you were raised. You know, we have a generation of kids where it's like, your mom thought slim fast was healthy. And

you know, even looking at like my, my childhood, right. It was like, well, you can have this box of cereal, but you can't have this one. Right. But it was completely like looking back on it, like makes no sense. Right. It's like, okay, you can have Cheerios and frosted mini wheats, or you can have this, but you can't have apple jack, but then you turn it around and it's like the frosted Cheerios and the Apple Jacks are basically like very similar macronutrient profile, right? So just understanding that, yes, part of this was you may have been misled by people you loved or people who thought they were doing what was best for you, but they actually were not because of the information that was available to them or what was passed down generationally.

I do also think people turn to food. It can be a mechanism for dealing with life's challenge or thinking that we're sort of dealing with life's challenges. I'm not necessarily an expert on that by any means to understand how, you know, individually, I'm sure this is where we have to look at health from a more holistic perspective. As much as that word gets thrown around a lot. Yes, your mental health is going to be impacted by your physical health and your physical health is going to be impacted by your mental health. We can't really separate those entirely. So if you do have something in your life that you haven't been able to work through and that's impacting your relationship with food and impact with the relationship with

exercise, that's important. That's why even very early on when trying to convey this concept to clients and other coaches, I kind of talk about, okay, we have our daily practices, things like, okay, how we exercise, how we eat, do we go for a walk? Do we get enough sleep? We have our perceptions, which is like how I view exercise, how I view food, how I view the world, my mindset about things, my attitude, how I experience life. And then that's going to impact my physiology, which is basically my internal health or metabolic status quo, if you will, because it's a by-product of those two things. Now, some people have very skewed relationships with food. They have a skewed relationship with exercise. And we see this on the other end of the

spectrum too, with chronic dieting. There are women who've been told since they were seven years old that they need to be on a diet. And so they're constantly restricting food. It's not the obesity conversation, right? Doesn't get that type of attention, but there are people who have had equally as bad advice, but it's led to a lifetime of restriction and exercise is this sadistic thing, or like almost like it's a very vicious pattern of engaging. And like, I need to, you know, I have to train every single day. I can't take a day off or I need to, I can only eat 1200 calories. And that's also coming from a place of

how did your parents talk to you about food and exercise? How did you, did you learn to prepare meals at home? But I do agree there's earlier on in your comment, before we talked about the childhood component, you mentioned we're not eating real food. And so people are blaming like steak and eggs and fruit for issues caused by frappuccinos and things you'll get in the middle of the grocery store that are, you know, kind of prepackaged, hypercaloric, not very high micronutrient density.

They're very tasty, very easy to overeat and have large quantities without even really thinking about it doesn't really help in terms of any type of feelings of fullness or satiety. So that's definitely playing into it too, is how people are getting there. And it's, we're certainly not, most people are not overeating or overindulging in single ingredient whole foods that are filled with protein and overeating fruits and vegetables or having single ingredient carbohydrate sources even too. Before we actually continue on this clip, I am curious on what you think about the idea of demonizing foods, because I understand why people are against demonizing food. You know what I mean? Like we will sometimes eat junk food, but we're in full understanding

that it's not going to send us the signals of feeling full, that these are foods that were made so that you would easily be able to overeat them. So when we do speak about these foods to most people, we're not trying to make them sound like you can eat them just like you can eat a potato or steak or eggs or rice. Because if you don't handle these foods responsibly, you can be in a very bad situation. If you don't understand that, like, like what they, so what are your thoughts on the idea of demonizing junk food? That whole statement is just like user discretion is advised. You know, it's like, but, but it's true though, right? We have a level of, if we are going to, part of it is knowing yourself and having a level of self-awareness to understand, how does this food make me feel? Am I very likely to overeat it? Do I need to take some sort of

precaution in terms of moderating my intake or consumption, whether it's buying a different size bag of the food, or maybe you get like a single serving instead of buying the family pack, right? So I don't necessarily like to demonize foods. I like for people to make informed decisions around nutrition, where it's foods exist on the spectrum of relative macro and micronutrient density. We have foods that are super high in calories

and macronutrients that are very low in micronutrients. So that could be something, like if you were to plow through that sleeve of Oreos, right, we're going to consume a fair amount of calories without a ton of vitamins and minerals. You're not getting a ton of protein or fiber or anything like that. We have to understand what that food is coming with. And it's basically prepackaged instructions for my metabolism.

That is a very different set of instructions than, okay, you know, Mark had some filet and it was eight ounces of steak is going to provide a certain amount of protein or I ate three whole eggs, right? I'm getting the essential fatty acids, the protein, choline, other micronutrients as well. So instead of demonizing or having this black or white viewpoint or a on off switch of yes, no, good, bad, it's really this gradient spectrum dimmer dial or almost like a radio that we can kind of turn up in the direction of our goals or what it is that we're trying to do. If you were swimming like Michael Phelps and consume, you need to eat eight, you know, six to 8,000 calories a day or something. Maybe some foods that are more calorically dense could

be aligned with what you're currently doing. And you can get away with it so long as you still have a foundation of single ingredient, whole foods. I want to say for most of y'all, this isn't you. For most of you, this is not you. People are like, yeah, yeah. It's not you, dog. Yeah. So for most people, we need that foundation of single ingredient, whole foods is just an easy way to think about it, right? So you're consuming enough protein to help to, I kind of talk about the five M's when it comes to nutrition metabolism. So we want to, you know, we need to manage appetite. We have to maximize adherence. We need to maximize our digestion or absorption of that food, which is our gut health. So we have to have a conversation around that. We want to be mindful of micronutrient

density. And then the last M is just to mitigate metabolic adaptation. So that's the chronic dieting, or when we talked about like your wife under eating or potentially not fueling for performance. So those five M's, we can make individual decisions around our goals. So let's say you guys were talking about resilient jujitsu earlier, probably not the time

if we're trying to achieve optimal performance with training and we're also expending a ton of calories with BJJ, maybe that's not the best time to be incredibly restrictive with our calories. So we kind of use these as guidelines or a guiding framework to making decisions about our nutrition that work best for us as people. So I take, I view a lot of things on kind of a spectrum. Even this conversation around obesity is disease, right? We have our status quo. We have optimal health over here. That's a preventive

lifestyle medicine stuff. That's health optimization. That's a conversation we have sometimes about like Merrick health and everything, right? That's like moving from okay to optimal is on one side of the spectrum. Then we have from the status quo, you can move to like dysfunction or maladaptation. And then we can progress towards disease when we continue to make those bad choices. With food, we have essentially this, you know, you start each day, you have this slate of decisions that you make. Each food decision you make is going to impact your food decisions at future meals. You talk about this a lot in terms of how you try to get in a lot of protein earlier in the day and minimize

calories, but basically like more protein leverage, right? You've talked about that concept a lot. So for you, you're using that. So let's like kind of refer back to them, using that to maximize your adherence, you're managing your appetite, and you're also using it to make better food choices at future meals. Because we sometimes look at dieting and eating in isolation, like, oh, I'm just eating this thing right now. Well, no, that thing is going to impact your next meal that you eat and your hunger, like how hungry are you going into that meal? How do you feel going into that meal? What's your energy level like? What's your blood sugar like? Each meal decision impacts subsequent meal decisions. And that's why sometimes when we look at just, you know, we demonize the food. It's like, okay, you labeled

this as bad, but do we, do we understand how this is actually playing out in real time in someone's life? The reason you think it's bad is, okay, it's higher calorie, it's impacting your blood sugar, and it's playing into your ability to make good food choices at your next meal. Because now you just want to, if you open the thing of Oreos or Doritos or Pop-Tarts or whatever, you just want to keep eating that thing. You're not like, oh yeah, I definitely want to go meal prep at home now and consume this like super balanced portion. That's usually not how it works for most people. It's like almost like food, that packaged food is like that gateway drug to more

of that food or bad decisions at future or less favorable decisions at future meals when it comes to their nutrition. So I'm glad you mentioned that. I don't know that there's a right answer for that. I just think people are already super confused as it is, but labeling something as bad, especially if they have this kind of weird relationship with it in the first place, like from a psychological perspective, I'm not sure that that's great, but we do need to understand that like, this is not the best choice, obviously. Right. I think here in the United States, you know, they're going to put as much information and as much research as possible in proving that obesity is whatever, like fill in the blank. They'll prove it's a disease just so they can westernize it with medicine.

Right. Like that's the way I look at it. And I just, we're just in an unfortunate situation. You have to be your own doctor. Well, think about it for a minute. Let's take a little segue from, because I totally, I agree with some aspects of that is if we look at it, what has happened as these numbers are climbing from a, you know, whether you're overweight, whether you're obese, have metabolic dysfunction, we have created one of the largest from a business

perspective. So one of the largest total addressable markets. So if you were an angel investor, your private equity, you're going to look at something from, okay, what is the potential total addressable market for this product? You know, how, what is the desire for that product or demand? So supply and demand conversation around economics. While we have super high supply of individuals who are unhealthy, you know, metabolically unhealthy, overweight, and obese. We have a lot of people who, you know, would want to use either their own financial resources or insurance for a quick fix to make this better or easier. We have a ton of money being poured in from a marketing perspective to also increase that demand. And you have this

massive supply of humans who will use the product continuously over a period of time. And what else helps with a product, right? Is when it's not like it's consumable, it's not a single use item. This is a recurring transaction that's going to happen over a long period of time. So what have we just created? That's like a massive business conversation of a total addressable market of a lot of people who are metabolically unhealthy, overweight and obese. You have a lot of money being pumped into awareness or marketing behind these given drugs with less attention being paid to other solutions that don't cost that much, mind you. Like I can't charge you to go for a walk outside, you know, like you're

going to have, what are you going to have like a easy pass or toll thing attached to you that when you go for a walk, they just scan you and you're like, okay, you paid your toll. Don't do that, they're going to charge for the medication. And what happens when you put someone on a statin drug at age 40 and they take it until they live to be 88 or 92 years old? You've had someone who's been a customer for half their life. When you have GLP-1, you put someone on it, like the 12-year-old we referenced earlier. Okay, well, if the American Association of Pediatrics has people starting at a young age, what have you just done? Talk about lifetime customer value. That's insane. So it's not that we can't, and I want to make it very clear for

the listener. Like I am not anti novel intervention, like novel science, novel research interventions using Western medicine for acute care or life-saving scenarios. There are going to be times where you're going to be really glad if you live in a first world country, you can go to an emergency room, or you're going to be glad that you can get that surgery, or if you need certain life-saving medications, that's true. And there may even be instances beyond the scope of what we're talking about in today's podcast to where this might be the most appropriate thing for someone to do. And as long as they're making an informed choice about it and they know the consequences, they need to do what's best for them. And I totally support that.

But the problem becomes when we make it such this mainstream thing and there's this widespread uptake, an ignorant uptake in many cases, people are naive. They don't understand the long-term side effects or consequences. And where I really get kind of pissed about is when you're involving kids. It's one thing for an adult to make a choice for themselves, but how many people are going to, you know, take their kids to a pediatrician or take their kids to a doctor and the kid's not making an informed, they don't necessarily understand the science behind this. And so we have a, there's like a ethical conversation around this to integrity conversation from a, you know, one of the oaths of Western medicine is to do no harm, right? But I don't, I don't know that we can be in good faith really doing that when we're starting to bring this, the pharmaceutical

conversation, like permeating these younger age groups is really of greater concern to me. So if you're 47 years old and you're, you've been overweight your entire life, and this is going to be the thing that gets you started, you you started and keeps you eating healthy and exercising, and you use this for a short period of time while doing some of these other lifestyle behaviors, cool. That's not my place to place any judgment on that whatsoever. But it's when we're taking it out of that context and someone who's not a hundred pounds overweight, or you just have seven pounds to lose and you want to get this injection. That's where we're on a very slippery slope. That's all I'm trying to convey is just, it's a slippery slope. It's hard to draw the line.

And there are people who are not making informed choices around it. So that's just, just, just to create a little bit of broader perspective. So it doesn't seem like I'm the guy just like demonizing everything that's, that's out there aside from, from training and nutrition. I understand that it's difficult for people and some people may make the choice to use this. But the kids thing really kind of sets me off. Yeah. I think this medication is great. But yeah, it does raise a lot of questions.

And it is important that people understand, you know, what's happening. It sounds like some people, it sounds like their digestion is getting like paralyzed. Yeah. So it slows GLP-1. So this wouldn't happen necessarily with your body's normal feedback mechanisms, but when you add exogenous GLP-1 or semaglutide ozempic, whatever brand name it is that you're taking, we are slowing motility. When we slow motility, and you'll see this with individuals who are like hypothyroid, for example, or people who are struggling with constipation and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

The problem with slowed motility is, so things are not supposed to stay in your gut. They should leave your gut and we need appropriate transit time. When we don't have that appropriate transit time and motility, things begin to sit there that shouldn't be sitting there and you end up with bacterial overgrowths

that can be problematic in terms of then compounding some of these metabolic health concerns that we have. So if you are in a place with slowed motility, you're constipated. Now, all of a sudden, that constipation is going to increase your risk for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or having certain things. We basically in our gut have commensal or good bacteria. We have opportunistic bacteria, sometimes referred to as more like bad bugs. And that can start to lead to unfavorable symptoms and side effects.

Like you mentioned, some people struggling with bloating or distension or they're having gas or other digestive side effects. It can certainly be a problem that happens when you're dealing with slowed motility and the potential for gut dysbiosis over the long haul, which then it will increase. If you have that dysbiotic gut environment, it is going to increase systemic inflammation in the body too, and impact signaling to your brain in other ways, because we're not, you know, weight loss and this conversation around this medication doesn't exist in isolation from other conversations around our health. Just to put things in perspective, because you were talking about having a customer for life

and just how lucrative this stuff can actually be. I have a relative that was prescribed, I believe Ozempic with insurance. It was like two or 300 bucks a month. Not that bad. But then after a certain amount of time, the insurance stopped paying. And so it was going to be $7,000 a month for him to continue with the same prescription. So it was like, well, obviously he can't continue on with that. So like, I have to keep checking up and making sure that he's okay. But I was like, holy shit. Like, of course they're going to want to be pushing this if it costs that much. Obviously, yes, insurance is covering, you know, majority of that when he had it covered, but someone's still getting paid. And that's just wild to me to think that something that can cost that much, like just for weight loss. You know what I mean?

Wild. Power Project Family, foot health is something that we talk about all the time on the podcast. And that's why we love Vivo Barefoot Shoes. But we love them not just because they are flat, flexible, and wide, but also they don't look bad. They look actually really, really good. These are their new boots. These are their Modus trainers for in the gym. These are some of their casual shoes. But when you look at a lot of barefoot shoes, some people get turned

off because they don't want to wear those shoes outside. And that's understandable. That's very understandable. But with Vivo, these shoes look so good and they're so good for your feet that they're almost a no-brainer. So, well, they are a no-brainer. Andrew, how can they get some of these kicks? Yes, you guys got to head over to vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject, and you guys will receive 15% off your order. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Going on in our brains, and it's influenced by the world around us.

Our genetics, development, environment, behavior all play a role in our body's dysfunction or dysregulation of our adipose, that organ that is fat. So what I'm hearing is that it's a brain thing. Yes. And this is a question. I remember many years... Can you pause for a second? So it is a brain thing, but it's also... So your fat doesn't just sit dormant on your body. So the chemical signals that come from muscle tissue is very different than what comes from fat tissue. So I just want the audience to be aware. Yes, there is, your brain is very much involved here, but part of it is there's signaling coming. Like we have a very, very different chemical messengers. Like, so if on your phone, you've got

text, Facebook message, Instagram messenger, maybe you've got something else you use like WhatsApp or whatever each. So these are different signals or different messages that are coming through, almost like a different channel, if you will. It is a lot more metabolically beneficial and metabolically healthy to have that muscle tissue that is going to impact the signaling that's going on across your body versus fat tissue. So yes, it is your brain, but part of the equation is where's the signal coming from? Your fat tissue also has those, it is your brain, but part of the, part of the equation is where's the signal coming from? Your fat tissue also has those chemical messages coming off of it as well. Where does a GLP-1 come from? So GLP-1, sorry, I'm gonna have to pause for a second.

Gotta look it up. It probably comes, I was going to say it probably comes from the gut, right? So you actually have a combination of... Your gut controls your brain in my opinion, because if all of us were starving, we would probably try to kill each other for food. So I got so far into the drug conversation that I'm pretty sure it's between the gut and the liver. Yeah, basically you have intestinal epithelial endocrine cells that create pro-glucaucagon like peptide.

Now you need to just answer it like that. Yeah, for sure. Ready? Go for it. Yeah. So GLP-1 in your body endogenously is a peptide hormone basically coming from your intestinal tract. So a lot of this signaling when we're talking about hormones is going to be like a gut liver connection, but we also have the gut brain connection as well. But the difference in this conversation is we're kind of overriding that intestinal production or the intestinal epithelial cells with what's coming from this injectable from the pharmaceutical. It's unbelievable technology, really. But just to your point, it's not just the brain. There's a lot of other things in action. And the gut is one of them.

Years ago on the Oprah show, I don't know, decades ago now, when I was first having this conversation trying to explain to the public why alcoholism was a disease. And many people did not believe that alcoholism was a disease. They just thought people over drink and that why don't you just put the bottle down? So how is this somehow relatable to that? Because is every, is every alcohol. Now there's not any reported cases of people like, there's not real evidence of people being addicted to food, is there? This is where there's a lot of arguments, right? And you could, you could pull research to support either side, I think, because if you talk about the physiological ramifications of gaining that weight over time and eating food, uh, there's definitely, so also, you know, one of my best friends, you know, has talked about this food addiction conversation.

He was addicted to heroin for like eight years and he definitely makes like, it draws a strong line, has kind of lived to tell the tale. So I think we need to be careful when we start comparing food to drugs and alcohol, number one, so kind of separate conversations. Now, the hormonal cascade that's happening

and what's going on in terms of your physiology, high blood sugar, we're in this hyperglycemic environment all the time, inability to regulate our cravings. It will feel, probably if you were living in that body, in that life- It feels like you have no control. It will feel like you have less control and it will feel like you are addicted. Now, the actual mechanisms by which this is happening, very different than say an opiate or alcohol. But yeah, you could not eat for seven days and not die.

Correct. Right. Whereas with an opioid or alcohol, you could die. Yeah. From overdose you're saying? No, not from overdose, from stopping. Oh. There's like only a couple of drugs in the world that if you stop taking them. You mean like severe withdrawal symptoms,

basically if someone going through that. You don't have like withdrawals from food necessarily, but you might have, I mean, it might have some weird impact with, you know, I guess sugar and things like that. People might have changes in terms of like, if they were to completely withdraw, like if it was a more extreme case and they were just eating a lot of these prepackaged hyperpalatable foods. I feel like people have even started to demonize like in our kind of fitness industry, people are like, well, you can't call food process because even oatmeal is processed. Right. It's like, okay. So if we're talking about, yeah, we're talking about a food that has a laundry list of ingredients, probably even some

things are harder to pronounce. It's fairly high in calories. It's not very micronutrient dense. We're not getting a ton of antioxidants, low in protein. There's my definition for your processed food. It's like, if you were to remove someone from that intake, they will physically and mentally feel it, right? So to them, it will feel like a type of withdrawal. Now, I don't think that's a fair, I just, maybe this is just personal preference or conversation way that I educate around nutrition and food. I try to keep that conversation separate from drugs and alcohol. I believe that all of them deserve their appropriate attention, but I have yet to see someone who's really an expert in all three weaving them together. Most people who specialize in addiction and treatment in this one arena are not nutrition experts. And a lot of

people who are great with nutrition are not exactly the person that you would go to for like opiate education, right? So I think we need to respect that both conversations are serious and someone may go through a level of physical changes or what feels like withdrawals and that there are certain things about food that make them hyper palatable in a way to where they feel addicting. But I think to give appropriate weight to each of these topics, it's like, I think it gets a little messy when we try to mix them together. Does that make sense? It does. And I think exactly what you're saying makes a lot of sense. And with food, it's these habitual habits that someone is, you know, tied to their video games or tied to their

TV or tied to watching the Super Bowl and eating buffalo wings. It's like these... There's triggers. A lot of association to a party, birthday party, Christmas, so on. Yeah, there's a compounding effect that happens from decisions that we make every day in our life. I think that's very different. So I remember even hearing my friend's story, you know, how he kind of ended up on that path was just a result of pain medication. Right. And so that's, that's what set him on that path. Most people for

food, it's not the single event where he can remember the interaction with the person. And all of a sudden it happens. It's probably a slow build for most people. I'm just saying that for the vast majority of people, whether it's lifestyle factors or, you know, you're eating, you know, I remember eating 3D Doritos sitting in a beanbag chair playing Madden as like the husky kid, the chubby kid, right? But we have the ability to change that and steer towards different choices over time. So where I would say the difference is, is that usually the progression with food and obesity and lack of exercise, it's this progressive conversation. This is like, instead of progressive overload the right way in the gym, we're doing it

like with negative lifestyle behaviors. And it's just day after day after day. I don't think most people are, you know, waking up one day and then all of a sudden there's this, what feels like an addiction. It's because you've been doing it for years and years and years of your life. And so now there's this weight of, you've created this weighted average of behaviors that you've repeatedly engaged in over the course of your life. And now the fat tissue and hormonal dysregulation is making it harder to change that behavior. So it's still, this is where the disease conversation comes in and where people are beginning to label it. The accrual of that fat tissue will make it harder to change the behaviors. I don't think anyone should be arguing that. The constant thing that's been beneficial for

all of our health has been intaking enough protein, but also intaking quality protein. And that's why we've been partnering with Good Life Proteins for years now. Good Life not only sells Piedmontese beef, which is our favorite beef, and the main reason why it's our favorite is because they have cuts of meat that have higher fat content, like their ribeyes and their chuck eyes, but they also have cuts of meat like their flat iron. Andrew, what's the macros on the flat iron? Yeah, dude. So the flat iron has 23 grams of protein, only two grams of fat, but check this out. Their grass fed sirloin essentially has no fat and 27 grams of protein. There we go.

So whether you're dieting and you want lower fat cuts or higher fat cuts, that's there. But you can also get yourself chicken. You can get yourself fish. You can get yourself scallops. You can get yourself all types of different meats. And I really suggest going to Good Life and venturing in and maybe playing around with your proteins. I mean, going back to the red meat, there's picanha.

All kinds of stuff. There's chorizo sausage. There's maple bacon. That stuff's incredible. The maple bacon is so good. The maple bacon is really good. Yo, my girl put those in these bell peppers with steak and chicken. Oh my God.

It was so good. But either way, guys, protein is essential. And Good Life is the place where you can get all of your high-quality proteins. So, Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you can head over to goodlifeproteins.com and enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I have a question real quick on that.

Yeah, of course. Do we know anything about the momentary dopamine release when it comes to hyperpalatable foods? You know, like those. There's definitely people from a food scientist or from like a food science perspective that will study what's happening at like more of a brain chemical level. I won't say that that's my specialty. I'm really more of like a physiology endocrine nutrition guy, but there's definitely going to be a reaction. And I'm sure if you were to you could find studies to support that like people are having reactions.

Like for example, why people like soft drinks, sugar, caffeine, there's properties to it that make people want to consume that over time. There is a neurological component to it as well. And that certainly will play into it. But most of these people are doing both, right? They're eating the prepackaged foods with a lot of ingredients.

They're also consuming sodas with caffeine and a lot of calories. It's a multi-layered conversation that's also bleeding into lifestyle. And then it's making it harder to do some of these other things too, like exercise, preparing your meals. It's a snowball effect, right? It's really more of that snowball effect where I think some of the other compounds we're talking to, or even when they're referencing drug addiction, to me, yes, there is a snowball effect, but there's a lot more of that rapid addictive response and just a level of severity. I don't know. Maybe it's just, I went to too many dare classes as a kid, but like the level of severity of that conversation to me is just a little bit different than the repeated consumption of food, high calorie drinks,

beverages, you know, over time. Yeah, I do believe there are some studies relating dopamine to particular foods. And I think it goes beyond just the food being like flavorful. It has to do with the chewiness, the mouthfeel of everything. And there are food additives that will make something more palatable for sure. So yeah, there's studies, maybe I didn't specifically address that enough. 100%, there are studies that will show that you can do certain things to the profile of a food. You make it more hyperpalatable, increase enjoyment, sensations,

desire to overeat that food and consume it regularly. And I think that's what's going on in our society today. I think we're desensitized, and it probably doesn't matter a ton on whether it actually is an addiction or isn't an addiction. We still need to figure out how do we help these people. But the way I see it, like,

and probably because I turned into a halfway of a crazy person of studying this stuff for so long, I kind of see it like people are doing lines all over their house. You know, I kind of look at it like Wolf of Wall Street, like every meal, everything you do for some reason has to be so over the top. Everything you do has to be so hyper palatable to fill in whatever.

I don't know what people are trying to fill in necessarily, but it's not good. And they're overdoing it. Those foods are not giving you the signals that you need, as you were mentioning many times. They're not giving you the signals that you need to learn to stop. The unfortunate aspect also is it always feels good. It feels incredible. many times, they're not giving you the signals that you need to learn to stop. Right. The unfortunate aspect also is that it always feels good. It feels incredible. That's a good point.

You know what I mean? It works. Think about, because we've had conversations with different individuals who have talked about part of the reason why they're overweight is because when they have different emotional type of triggers, the thing that makes them feel good is opening up that fucking Ben and Jerry's and having, you know, the whole thing or quite a bit. And then they'll open it up later on too because it constantly feels good. Why only have one? Get two different flavors.

Why don't you get some cookies with that shit? You know what I mean? But the thing is, it constantly feels It's, everybody's eating all the time. Eating is normal, right? And you can constantly have this thing that makes you feel good, makes you feel happy, makes you feel warm inside. I know that the food addiction thing isn't something that we can say,

but the thing is, again, the percentage of people who are overweight or obese is consistently going up, and the food that they're eating, it's fucking amazing. We might as well just say it's addicting since everyone struggles with it, even us, right? And that's the thing is that you could, so what I was saying is you could make arguments in either direction, meaning there's research to support the notion

that you could go online and say, hey, this is like super addictive. So we definitely have study support, the role of like dopamine and food reward and reinforcement. Like there's research there. I think where the arguments happen is when people make the drug and alcohol comparison. And regardless of the science, like this is where it's like, I feel like sometimes we've got to separate the coaching from the research. And I do like when we find new information and stuff, if someone feels like it is,

or their reality is like, hey, this is addictive for me, or it feels really good, or if it feels really good, I mean, like you said, it feels good. People are repeatedly engaging in this. It tastes good. It feels good. It's easy to do, right? So it's cheap. It's cheap. You know, it's cheap. You know, I think there was actually from one of the other clips that we were referencing

earlier, there was an excerpt that like most of food stamp money, I think goes towards liquid beverages like soda. So a lot of the program for, the program for basically helping people to be able to buy their groceries here in the States is going towards things that are actually promoting, or they are a little bit more obesogenic in nature because they are so easy to over-consume, hyper-palatable, high calorie, not very nutrient dense. And that disproportionately affects folks who are at lower socioeconomic status. So that's a conversation here too. A whole nother conversation.

A whole nother conversation. The guy next door being obese could have a negative impact on you in some ways because of healthcare and the stress that it puts on our economic and things like that. Like it just gets to be a massive story. It's super multilayered for sure. Wild. Just more stuff to throw on that fire um because we were talking about like whether someone's addicted or not um let's say that they potentially are but they're like in denial we'll just go there with it um how do we change the mindset of that person

that said that has like almost a self-entitlement of like oh but i deserve to have this i deserve cake on my birthday i deserve deserve to go out Friday night and have a beer. Like, how do we change that? Because right. Like it's not illegal. Um, it's a thing that everybody's doing, but we're up here saying like, well, but if you change your, your habits, you're going to get healthier. But they're like, but I deserve to eat this way. Cause it's my choice. That's the push that just doesn't want to change though. So is that what it is? It's a slippery slope. It's like, I'm not saying that you can't ever enjoy like it's your four-year-old's birthday party and you're going to occasionally do something like you

guys have said, occasional deviations, but it's like you made an informed choice that you were going to do it. You knew the consequence of it. And you said, Hey, I like this. Like I still eat this from time to time. The problem is, is if you've been doing that for decades, right, where are we going to start? Like, where do we draw the line? And I think my perspective is a little bit different in that I follow a lot of folks and like more of the personal development community, a little bit more intense stance on just like food, drinking, exercise, like any pick, like anyone who's going to yell at you here on like this platform, then all the way to like, I would say almost like too much of like a fitness sensitivity

conversation around, uh, or like, we're not really, uh, blaming people for, for where they currently are. We're having a lot of forgiveness and we're going to bubble wrap people with everything. It's like, I think we need to find a middle ground as a society where it's like, I'm not going to bubble wrap you and say that this is okay to do every day for the rest of your life. I'm also not going to necessarily scream at you and say that you can't ever do this like on your birthday or that you can't go on vacation or you can't enjoy something that you like. Maybe there's a, because with food, there's also a community component, right? There's a, you know, we, we look at the actual environmental context

of the meal. I do not have a problem with someone sitting with their family and having something, maybe there's a recipe that your grandma used to make. You make it from home and you enjoy that with people that you love and you're sitting down and tentatively eating. That's different. Like this is a very different conversation. Yeah. That may be a high calorie food that may have sugar in it. That is not the same thing. This is where I think sometimes even in research, right, we lose context for the real world. If I had a client who is like, hey, my great grandma has this recipe for birthday cake, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, this is this tradition and we always do this in my family.

That is different than you going through a drive-through and eating something in the afterschool pickup line while you wait to get your kids on Tuesday at 2 45 PM. That's not the same. Like they're very different things. And I think we need to also help educate people that like, because we are, our metabolism is adaptive and it is malleable and can shift over time, but it does kind of respond to this weighted average of our behaviors and the lifestyle that we live. So if you're always doing that, if you're always eating these snack foods in the car, and then when you get home from work, or you're going to the cafeteria at your workplace and, oh, you know, Sally brought donuts today, it becomes an everyday thing and we never break that cycle. So it's not the once in a time that's

the problem. It's that the once became once a day, which became, you know, once an hour. And now you're just doing it all day long. So, and I don't know that I have all the answers on this, but I think part of it is being able to have some difficult conversations, but also giving people some grace and also not like being a total asshole about it.

But there is a middle ground between bubble wrapping people and being like, oh, this is okay, you can continue to do this. It's like, I'm letting you slowly kill yourself. And then on the other end of the spectrum, someone who has lived that more disciplined lifestyle and has come to appreciate that discipline from repeatedly engaging in their behaviors

and has reaped the rewards of repeatedly making those choices, they have such a different perspective of how it has enhanced their life that they cannot fathom and understand why someone is still in that place. Or maybe they've never even been in that place to begin with. So there's these two polar extremes

when I'm just like, we still need to get these people healthier or we're gonna continue to have these conversations that we're reacting to with Oprah right now, right? Yeah. Yeah, thanks for your time, Oprah. Was she giving away a car today? I hope so.

Oh, man. Banks is not an alcoholic. Every person that overeats is not necessarily have obesity as a disease. Can you explain that? Why for some, they're just overeaters and some it's a disease because of the brain thing, right? Absolutely. Well, it's about how much we take in and how much we store. So we all have those friends. My husband is here in the audience. He's this friend of mine who can eat whatever he wants and he doesn't really store that. And you're like,

how is that even possible? And then we have those people that look at pizza and they're like, my gosh, I just looked at it and I feel like I stored it. Sam, I feel like I can feel heat coming from the table right now. There's definitely something to be said. There's emerging research about different phenotypes. We have basically thrifty or spendthrift phenotypes. different phenotypes. We have basically thrifty or spendthrift phenotypes, and there's certainly a component of what you've done throughout your life, your environment, and some hereditary factors that may play into your energy expenditure metabolic rate. But we're missing the fact that in this particular conversation that's being had, again, there's no conversation around what is

contributing to total daily energy expenditure. How many of those factors are in your control, right? So when we look at energy expenditure, we have basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate, non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. So even you fidgeting with that pen right now, you're burning energy, right? May not be as much as if you were going and dragging the sled in the gym, but you're burning energy. So fidgeting, you know, even if I'm blinking during this podcast, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and we also have the thermic effect of feeding. So when we eat protein, we consume a portion or we're essentially burning, not consuming, excuse me. We're essentially going to have a higher percentage of that calorie amount that we're consuming is burned off in the process.

Now, in addition to thermic effect of food, we have exercise activity as well. Now in this conversation of looking at pizza, no one has mentioned components of energy expenditure or moderating the pizza intake, right? There's a difference between, did we have a slice of pizza? Do we have three slices? Did we eat the whole thing by ourselves? Very different conversation. And I think it's fine to use some of these mainstream expressions or colloquial phrases

like, oh, I looked at that food and I gain weight. But like, no, you didn't. Like you, you ate the food and based on that serving that you had along with the rest of your lifestyle, you gained weight. So I think it's a little misleading when we have that conversation. There still is a little bit of play within the genetics and the framework of somebody having X amount of muscle mass and so on. So I also think sometimes hereditary factors are blown out of proportion. I think you have a baseline view, view your hereditary factors and genetics as a baseline to work with. There, there's a small percentage of the population where there are going to be certain instances that do significantly impact someone's ability to be physically active. This is not a conversation

that is not sensitive of that. I do understand that. But there are a lot of people, able-bodied people who have influenced their metabolic rate and energy expenditure through their repeated habits and behaviors over their lifetime. And they've also eaten food in such a way that they've created a metabolic environment that is not as conducive to regulating their hunger and cravings and is not as conducive to optimal energy expenditure and regulating their weight, right? Which is why they have a harder time. Some of these things, many of these things we control. And so if you think of it, we have this baseline, we have our environments, how we were parented, what we ate as kids, how active we were. We have our choices as an adult. All of these things are leading to the expression of that baseline or essentially epigenetics.

And that's a huge part of the conversation. So yes, to your family or your genes or your hereditary factors, we're learning more about that. We're testing for certain things. There are going to be things that you can optimize through understanding your genetics. So for example, let's say for methylation, maybe you need certain micronutrients that are going to optimize that. I think genetics play a large role in certain genetic predispositions, whether it's

cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, maybe optimizing things earlier in life or taking a preventive approach to healthcare. I think you can look at genes and have a conversation around that. Again, what I worry about when people blame just genes or blame their DNA, it's the labeling again, right? It's the same issue with labeling when we say, okay, obesity is this disease and you have it. It's like, you know, you caught it or, you know, you developed it. They do that a lot with heart disease. And they're like, well... And again, I do understand that genetics can be a big factor in a lot of things.

In the makeup of someone's muscle tissue, in the makeup of the cells, in the makeup of so many things. It can be a factor. But a lot of times, I think what people don't realize is that your parents... You get your genetics through your parents, not necessarily from your parents. So you're only a tiny portion of your actual parents because it has so much more to do with like your hereditary. But then as you mentioned, epigenetics, like what you're doing while you're here on this planet is probably the biggest factor. So your entire family could have all died from heart attacks year after year after year

for a century. But you can change that. And we don't need to be geneticists to understand, and you guys have seen this play out in real time and fitness and in coaching and folks that maybe you've trained with in the gym. There are people that make the most out of the potential they have. Like if you view genetics and hereditary factors as like your baseline or almost like potential that we could achieve, or from a disease mitigation perspective or lifespan and longevity conversation, we could look at it as to what percentage can I reduce my risk factors for this thing? So if I know I have something, engaging in the appropriate nutritional practices, training, like regular exercise, getting outside, walking, sleep, all of those things can help reduce some of my overall risk.

Because we're really talking about a percentage conversation. This is, again, coming back to so much in fitness, so much in health. We have this light switch mentality, this on-off, you're going to get this or you're not, or you have this or you don't. this on off, you're going to get this or you're not, or you have this or you don't. It's really more of a percentage risk reduction conversation through, you can do a lot by changing your nutrition. You can do a lot by exercising. And those are the only, we have to bring it back to our locus of control, which is what can I actually do to change my circumstances right now? Like you can't necessarily control that baseline and what was passed through your parents, but you can reduce your risk and what the rest of your life is going to look like

based on your current behaviors and choices. So I'm all for, if you want to use preventive health screenings or genetic considerations, and you want to use that to optimize your health or from a preventive stance, I think that's great. And there's even things that you can identify, you know, through basic lab testing. So like some people don't realize this and you guys have your friends at Merrick where it's like maybe they didn't realize they weren't methylating properly. They add a couple supplements from that perspective and they're able to really optimize that process in their body simply by looking at things that they wouldn't know. Maybe their homocysteine, maybe certain micronutrients that you can see in your overall serum labs. So there are things that we can do

to take a forward-looking approach versus using genetics as a scapegoat, right? I'm very wary of any time that we're using those labels, we're using these things as a scapegoat, we're inherently disempowering ourselves. And we're like, I don't, what I do doesn't really matter. This thing is holding, like, I am the puppet, like to, to, you know, in the middle of this operation, which I think is, again, this is like a, that's a very dangerous place to be because now you're, you're not even the main character in your own life. Right. So. It's interesting when it's like with the statement she just said,

like, oh, someone who can just look at pizza, right? And not gain any weight. If somebody says that, it's like the reason why that person probably eat pizza and not gain any weight is like you said, what are they doing outside of eating the pizza? Maybe there's someone that does move around quite a bit.

Maybe there's someone who does exercise. Maybe they have all these other things in check. So when they eat pizza, it's a non-factor, right? Whereas you don't do shit. Like you sit around potentially, you're probably potentially sedentary. Maybe you don't exercise much. Maybe when you indulge in pizza, it just ends up being excess calories. So what can you do to change that? You can potentially start exercising. You can do all these things that are within your control, not just your genetics.

Yeah, and we're talking about this conversation with men and women. Well, what if, so what's interesting is, so in this conversation, we're talking about weight loss. Haven't talked that much about Weight Watchers, but it's famous that Oprah's gone on very many calorie-restricted diets in her battle to try to keep weight off over the years.

If I have someone who's repeatedly restricted calories and they've gone through some metabolic adaptation, what tends to happen is as we diet for a long period of time, our body naturally becomes more frugal with its energy expenditure through down-regulating things like our thyroid hormone, we may see lower testosterone, we're going to up-regulate our adrenal axis. This is just a natural thing that our body does as a survival mechanism, as part of our adaptive physiology, basically meaning what's going on metabolically will change and shift as a result of stimulus. That stimulus metabolically is usually energy, a form of calories. What does that energy availability look like in terms of our environment

and stress? So stress is not just perceived stress, but we also have maybe some internal health issues and things as well. That's really how I just try to get people to understand metabolism to begin with is it's a conversation around stress and energy, which I almost wish I would have like gone back to the beginning. Can we like Tarantino this podcast?

So with metabolism, we have to look at stress and energy. So what she's talking about here in this pizza conversation, so pizza would be part of energy intake. What you're mentioning is energy expenditure, which impacts our net in terms of what's happening. But if someone's repeatedly dieted and she's talking about,

well, if I look at pizza, I gain weight. My husband can eat all of this. Well, maybe you've consistently been eating 1,100 calories and now that pizza put you in a place where on that day you consumed a you know, a significant more calories, yeah, more calories, but you're also doing that multiple times a week over time. And so you have now consumed energy in excess of what you are burning. And this is where the law of thermodynamics plays in. And we see arguments between different camps on social media. There's like the, uh, the

folks who are all about hormones, holistic health, like balance things out. Like they talk about metabolism, they talk about gut health, and you have to do these things to lose weight. And then you have people who are just strictly energy in, energy out, calories in, calories out, but they both impact each other. So when I restrict calories for a long period of time, I impact what's going on with my metabolism, my hormones. Or if I eat in excess for a long period of time, that is going to impact what's going on metabolically and with my hormones. So in this conversation, one of the biggest problems is we lack context. And so then we're going on national television and telling people, I look at pizza and I gain

weight. And how many women are watching this, raising their hand, being like, oh, me too, girl, me too. And then, you know, then the husband is like to get it. Oprah. And the husband is like to get it. Oprah. So then the husband, you know, maybe he's resistance training. Maybe he consistently can maintain his body weight on 3,200 calories a day or something. Right. Maybe he's a larger individual already. If you're, you know, six, three, 230 pounds and you exercise regularly, you have a little

bit more wiggle room in terms of your intake before you are going to see the detriments of that pizza, right? And so it's understanding the nutrition is, needs to be individualized in a way. There are general broad sweeping recommendations we can make like, hey, you should probably eat adequate protein, right? There are broad general recommendations we can make, but the specifics of nutrition need to be applied within the context of a person's life. And that's why we have so many conversations around the lack of sustainability with nutrition is we're taking this mainstream media topic or conversation and applying it to someone in their life, but it doesn't work for them and their lifestyle. And they're like, well, I've tried keto and intermittent fasting and all

these different things. And that didn't work for me. Okay. So it's, it's applying principles from nutrition within the context of someone's life. And that's how we actually achieve that sustainable success. So you're saying we should be eating pizza. Let's pause for a second. I got to take a pee. If you're someone that's taking supplements or vitamins or anything to help move the needle in terms of your health, how do you know you really need them? And the reason why I'm asking you how do you know is because many people don't know their levels of their testosterone, their vitamin D, all these other labs like their thyroid. And they're taking these supplements to help them function at peak performance. performance. But that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health for such a long time now, because you can get yourself different lab panels like the Power Project panel,

which is a comprehensive set of labs to help you figure out what your different levels are. And when you do figure out what your levels are, you'll be able to work with a patient care coordinator that will give you suggestions as far as nutrition optimization, supplementation, or if you're someone who's a candidate and it's necessary, hormonal optimization to help move you in the right direction so you're not playing guesswork with your body. Also, if you've already gotten your lab work done, but you just want to get a checkup, we also have a checkup panel that's made so that you can check up and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction if you've already gotten comprehensive lab work done. This is something super important that I've done for myself.

I've had my mom work with Merrick. We've all worked with Merrick. Just to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction and we're not playing guesswork with our body. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at merrickhealth.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 10% off any one of these panels

or any lab on the entire website. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You know, I don't like a lot of marinara sauce on my pizza. I don't know about you guys. It's got to be not too sweet. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's sweet. Yeah.

And like, why? Why don't you guys like sweet marinara sauce on your pizza? I don't know. It doesn't, I don't know. Like it's like American. Childhood trauma. Hmm? Childhood trauma. sweet. Yeah. And like, why? Why don't you guys like sweet marinara sauce on your pizza? I don't know. It doesn't. I don't know. Like, it's like American. Hmm? Childhood trauma.

Probably. Yeah. Probably. Childhood trauma. What, uh. I'm guessing you both probably like coconut candy. Oh, we're just going to hit play again probably in a second. Yeah.

Yeah. But I was kind of digging that. Woodstock's is a little too sweet. They can be a little. But I really like Woodstock pizza. Is Woodstock pizza still open? Yes. And we're going to go there every day at the new spot.

Are they right next to us? We're not that close, but I'm still going to go there. Dude, what was the name of that pizza place that was close to here? Remember? And they shut down. Smokey, what was it? It made no sense. This pizza place, luckily for us, they closed down before we actually moved in this facility

because we would all be like 900 pounds right now. They had a pulled pork. Yeah. They had pulled pork pizza. It had like a weird like, it was like a barbecue sounding name, but it was pizza. And there was no one in there. It was like Wild West something. Yeah, that's what it was.

And it had like, it looked like it was like for little kids or something because it had like, I don't know, a big playroom in there and shit like that. But then there was never any kids in there. There was nobody ever in there. That place was weird. It was like some sort of front or something. They completely missed the park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very questionable.

Cool. We'll just start off here, then. All right. Hit play. You guys ready? Yep. Where are you, husband? Husband is in the back corner over there.

Yeah. Husband has a name thank you cory oh thank you cory can eat apple pie at 11 o'clock at night and he's able to do this his body defends a very lean set point he's able to eat what he wants and his body just defends that again we need to be careful with body fat set points the whole concept of um you of somatotypes and all these different things. You're continuing to have a conversation that is basically in training for folks that there's this extra friction, extra resistance, you're stuck the way you are, you have this label. And again, that's not super helpful from a health behavior change perspective because people need to

understand just how adaptable they are. Again, and if you look at him too, like he seems like a decently fit guy, may or may not resistance trainer, do some form of exercise. So, I mean, again, cool. You had Corey stand up in the background, but like he's special and can eat, you know, pie at 11 PM. Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's another thing too, is now, now we're bringing in like nighttime meeting conversations around this and like, it's just kind of perpetuates a lot of the same myths and miseducation that are so common when it comes to the mainstream fitness and nutrition conversation. It's just really difficult for people to break some of these habits. You

know, I think that, you know, probably after around 7 p.m. for most people is where the danger comes in. And it's probably where most of the calories are consumed, probably where most of the sugar is consumed. Not that people don't wake up and have a donut and people don't wake up and have a bagel and some of these other things. But, you know, I think in comparison, like their food throughout the day is probably like kind of modest and they probably are getting like to almost like a caloric maintenance. But at night, I think is where people are doing the most damage. What are your kind of modest and they probably are getting like to almost like a caloric maintenance. But at night I think is where people are doing the most damage. What are your kind of thoughts on that? To be honest, I've seen, I've seen it really run the gamut. So people with conventional nine

to fives, you know, sometimes it is what happens after five and they go home and you know, that's, that's where they're consuming calories. Other times it's, oh, we have a work lunch today and we're going out to XYZ restaurant. We're consuming this meal or, oh, so-and-so brought cupcakes. So I think sometimes in-person work environments can impact calorie consumption. Usually I would say it is a little bit less common,

especially when people have kids and they're getting out the door. People aren't having these massive breakfasts necessarily, but I do see a lot of folks who will go through a drive-through or grab a coffee that actually has a ton of extra calories added to it with different sweeteners and things that's contributing to it, or it's got full cream and the works. And, you know, so using, think like a Frappuccino, for example. So basically they're consuming that higher calorie beverage. That's not going to fill them up or anything. Not going to fill them up or anything like that. And then it leads to, again, rather than just saying this

timeframe is the issue. I do agree with you for the most part that many people come home from work and because they're bored or they're sitting around or they're watching TV or Netflix, people will mindlessly eat while consuming various meat, whether it's social media, watching Netflix, there's a lack of attentive consumption of food. So that is part of it. But there are other people where the day just starts off on a slippery slope and we've already consumed upwards of 500 calories in not very filling foods or drinks that then create, okay, at the next meal, well, I'm already hungry a little bit before lunch, so I'm going to grab this other thing.

And then I'm hungry again, or I grab this because it's convenient or I'm on the go. And we continue to live our lives in a way that perpetuate our existing metabolic health. But for a lot of people, there's definitely a tendency to overeat at night, but I would say it depends. I mean, some people, you know, there's also people who go to the gym after work or they're at their kids' soccer practices and they're staying out of the house. But for the person who is in the house

and keeps bad food in the house, see, I'm guilty of just slipping right there. I think it's easier. For me personally, it's easier for me to just kind of say, like, some of these things are bad. Yeah. I think there's like bad words. You know, there's words that I just won't say anymore because I'm like, those seem bad. They offend

people. They hurt people. I don't want to be on that side of things. I'm just not going to say them. And then in terms of bad food, it's not like I'll never eat them again, but it's just easier for me to kind of put them in that category for, again, for me personally. Yeah. And just say like, those are foods that I don't want within arm's reach because I'm probably going to eat them. Let me add on to what you mentioned there too. I totally get, because people always mention the relationship with food and people's relationship and I get it. Psychologically, you don't want people demonizing food and giving it a sort of power because when some people do that, it just tends not to go well. But yeah, the reason why I don't necessarily

care about saying that this food is bad because nutritionally, it's actually not that great for you. If we're going to compare it with a whole food, Doritos are not good for you. They're not healthy for you. Maybe they can be somewhat good for your mental health. If you have a little bit of Doritos and you portion it out, it makes you feel good and you manage it well, that's good. Because we can all do that and we all do that. But that doesn't change the fact that that food isn't a health food. It doesn't have micronutrients.

It's just macronutrients. It's highly palatable. It is not good. It's not good. Not even really food. And again, that's different to say, I think, you know, and really where I would probably err on that is just being like, that is not a healthy choice.

Or like, that's not the healthy thing to do. One of my friends, who I was very fortunate to spend time with earlier on in the industry kind of refers to it as, his name's Jade. So Jade refers to it as kind of like buffer and- Data? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So Jade kind of, and he gets like a lot of shit online sometimes, but I do think there's certain things that Jade has done that I really like his terminology around. He's articulate in the way he shares things. So kind of the idea of a buffer would be something that helps you feel more full and less likely to overeat versus certain things, maybe triggers for people. So like, if you're going to go eat the whole jar of peanut butter, you took something that, yeah, you could have

consumed it in a moderate amount or even almond. There are things that are marketed as health foods like granola that are still easy to over-consume, right? You could are marketed as health foods like granola that are still easy to over-consume, right? You could over-consume calories in granola and almond butter. And you could go to, you could go to Whole Foods or something and it's paleo and whatever, but you can still eat a lot of it and it's still really tasty. So I think it's, again, what is the context? Because there's still some people where if they've been super restrictive their whole life or you know the last 10 years there are also men and women where they were eating 900 calories and now maybe taking the bite of a donut is like a big step for them in getting out of some of these restrictive tendencies but then there are other people where it's like all right we've been we've

been doing this every day like this is not not contributing to our, like this is not a good choice, right? And being able to be honest about that. So I'm 100% on the same page. And that's where I do like the language around, is this preventing me from overeating or overeating in the future in terms of calories? Or is this something that's actually helping me to moderate my intake and making good choices overall?

So I don't know. I think at the end of the day, it does become a little bit of like dancing around internet trolls and social media opinions and other coaches who have their preferred vernacular versus just being able to say what something is. But again, I still come back to kind of that context too. And I agree with you a hundred percent, like Doritos are not going to be the healthy thing, but then there are even foods that are labeled as healthy. Like when you go into, or you go to a health food store, you're going to sprouts or whole foods. And there's still things that you could very easily overeat

and get a crap ton of calories in a really short amount of time in a short stint because they're still very palatable. They taste really good. And it's still very, very energy dense food, right? So that's where I think it's like you could have that conversation all day long. But I think one way to kind of look at it sometimes

is with these foods, like my favorite is a peanut butter cup. I love peanut butter cups. But anytime I've ever eaten peanut butter cups, I've never eaten them and been like, that was really satisfying. Wow, that was incredible.

And why I say that is because all it led me to want is more peanut butter cups. I mean, you eat one and you're already thinking about the next one. I mean, I've even had it to where I'm like chewing on one and I have another one in my hand and I'm like, how did this happen? I turned into like a monster, you know? I'm like chewing on one and I have another one in my hand. And I'm like, how did this happen? I turned into like a monster, you know, turns like an animal going through these foods.

And so for me, you know, I kind of recognize some of that in myself. And so it's really a good idea for me to limit those things. And if I am going to eat those things, I need a little bit of an exit strategy away from it. I need to think about how much of this am I going to buy, you know, and like what's the reason. So for some people, though, like my wife is a crazy person because she can eat. She can like eat a cookie and eat it over the course of like an hour.

One cookie? Yeah. How big is this cookie? Just like a normal-sized cookie. It's like it's not a cookie cake? Yeah, it's not a cookie cake. What's a cookie cake? I want one it's not a cookie cake yeah what's a cookie cake yeah i want one yeah cookie cake sounds amazing but yeah she could like nibble on it and like leave it there

and then like i don't know it's crazy i'm like how do you do that but she doesn't have the same so i think knowing yourself is a really important thing but i think for some people that have had trouble some people that have been overweight or struggle with their diet, I think you have to kind of look at some of these foods, these hyper palatable foods as a little bit of a trick. Yes, it's gonna do all these things for you. Yes, it's probably hitting your dopamine receptors. There's probably a party going on in your head and probably it feels absolutely incredible,

but it's really not gonna lead to what you want it to lead to. It's not gonna make you feel full. And that's just a bigger conversation around self-awareness. And so for you, like that's the case. For your wife, not as much. And I've seen this a lot too in my own life. I have family members or friends or in relationships where it's like,

you can have a bite of this and walk away. Not everybody has the ability to successfully do that, right? And so that's why I think the exit strategy is big or just understanding yourself enough to know what puts you in a little bit of that precarious situation where you got the peanut butter cup in one hand and then the other hand or we're sitting in front of the cookie.

And like, for me, that probably- I get super excited. And I think of all the different ways I can combine it with other stuff. I'm like, oh, I think there's some ice cream in the freezer. I take the ice cream and then like, I think there's whipped cream still. So really this episode is just about how fitness

is like, we're all really just have this like inner trouble. There's a fat kid inside of us. There's a guy, you know, there's a 12 year old from the Husky section who still wants to eat. Just crying in the corner, eating. But I think, and that's important though, because when you know yourself, you can begin to, like, you can't make the best choice for you until you know how, like, you have to have lived some life and been through that situation and come out on the other side successfully or unsuccessfully to begin to approach that

like as, you know, in a more graceful capacity, right? Versus your wife who can sit there and eat a cookie for an hour. I probably couldn't do that, but I know myself enough to know, okay, so if I were to have that food, what does that need to look like for me to where I don't feel like crap or I upset my stomach or I eat too much, or I'm doing something that's not aligned with what my goals are. Right. So even just beginning to do that as a, as a sign of maturity around food and even in your life. Right. But there's that, the same thing could be said for, um, there are other behaviors that are also a slippery slope that are not food. Um, and we still need to have that self-awareness.

So I think the biggest thing to draw from, you know, Mark's commentary there is just really around adopting the strategy that's going to work best for your life. And that's why we have to be less dogmatic about certain diets, certain foods, and really understanding if this enables you to achieve your goals, whatever those goals are,

then like, cool, try it on for size. And so much, we lose like this experiential component of nutrition and fitness. And we see this with training modalities too. Like people basically, people like to argue about training on the internet also, but it's like, try something on for size. If it works for you, cool, do it.

That doesn't mean you need to coach everybody else to do that too, but it's knowing yourself to say, hey, I tried this and this, I've tried this thing. I tried this other approach and this one actually worked best for me. So I'm going to stick with it. So for you, you came across like, I'm going to eat a lot of protein and lower calories earlier in the day. And that works for you. Some people prefer they skip breakfast and they're able to do that. And then we can get into the arguments or this research says this, because there's a different conversation around what's optimal versus getting someone out of this place where they're watching Oprah talk about someone being 100 pounds overweight or the conversation that we had

about GLP-1 agonists earlier, right? It's being able to kind of separate that. I think we have to isolate it in order to be able to have an effective conversation. And I'll say this, what's optimal right now isn't something that's going to be optimal forever. Because I remember when I was in my early twenties, like I decided, okay, I'm not going to have any of this shit in the house because I have a tendency of overeating certain things. It's got older. I found certain things that like I could eat some of it. It is junkie type food, but I didn't feel the need to eat a lot of it.

So I brought those things around, but there's still just certain things I don't keep at arm's reach. So it's not like you have to, once you do something, it's what you have to do forever. But for some people, for some people who are in a situation

where they are very overweight, they do feel drawn to eat certain things a lot. You might want to distance yourself from something for a period of time. Because I think it might be confusing for people where they hear some people say, there's nothing wrong with this stuff. You could have it in moderation, et cetera.

They try to have it in moderation. It never sticks. And then they feel like, I need to be able to have it in moderation if I'm going to be able to be successful with this. You may need to go a period of time without it. It's like, you know, you're abstaining from that thing and that's okay. And if that, but there's also different personalities too, right? Like what, if you

were growing up and there was a side of, like, if you had some friends who lived on a certain side of town and every time you hung out with those friends, you got in trouble, your parents or your grandparents or whoever raised you would probably be like, Hey, you know, maybe we're actually going to go do this thing after school, or you're going to go to, uh, you know, afterschool activities or extended day or basketball, or you're going to go play on this playground or, Hey, maybe don't go over there for a little while. Right. You kind of lay low and that's what you would do. But when it comes to, we, we like psych ourselves out with this food conversation versus looking at other common sense principles in life and just being able to do that. Now, maybe you're also, maybe you were super influential in your friend group and you didn't have to completely stay away and you were able to

go hang out with those friends and you're like, hey guys, actually like, let's not cause trouble today. Let's go play basketball instead. Or let's go, let's go to this field over here and we're going to do this thing over here. Maybe you convince them to go to the gym or something. There are some people that can do that. And there are other people where it is a better idea to just like stay a little bit out of trouble for a while and revisit it later on. And like you said, what works now may not work forever.

And if something's not working now, it doesn't mean that it wouldn't work in the future. And, you know, I say I'm even probably an example of that. What you mentioned in your twenties, I had I'm even probably an example of that. What you mentioned in your 20s, I had to do that for a period of time too, but now definitely been able to do it. And something to be said about the more time you spend in the industry and the longer you've

trained, the more experience you have around food and nutrition. It's even like people who have tracked their macros previously who don't currently because they have a much greater, now are they eating intuitively? I don't know. Maybe they're just, they know the portions for their body that actually work and they've measured their food enough times to know that this is a serving size. I don't know that that's fully intuitive eating, right? So it's, it's understanding how to try things on for size, see if it works just like you probably, you know, even back more so with powerlifting, trying certain approaches, uh what worked and then saying, hey, this is working for me. I'm going to stick with it versus I'm going to adjust as we go.

And so much of training and nutrition, it's the iterations. It's the fine tuning. It's the adjustments. It's not, I have a perfect plan on paper and this is going to work forever. And that's, that just gets lost sometimes on social media. Yeah. What's changed for me is like, I can have, you know, we have other food in the house. We have like other options. There's other people in the house. They don't all want to eat the exact same way that I do. And so there's

other food in the house, but like, I'm not enticed by that food. Like I'm not, you know, we usually have ice cream in the freezer. I love ice cream, but I've got myself to a point where it's like, I'm used to eating steak. I'm used to eating eggs, various forms of meat, fruit. I feel satiated and satisfied from a lot of the foods that I eat. And I think ultimately it'd be great for a lot of people to be able to get themselves to a point where their diet just feels like it's just part of their lifestyle. Maybe much like something else that they do during the day that doesn't seem so cumbersome, you know, but it's hard to get to that point when you're all the way on the other side. And then something else that gets lost, if somebody who regularly watches TV like this,

they don't understand that there is a bit of an agenda and there are some theatrics behind all this. Because how we started talking about this, Oprah referenced, I forgot the guy's name, but like, oh, he can eat pie at 11 o'clock at night. Does he actually do that? We don't know. But they're saying that and they're now pushing that. And so people watching are like, damn, he can do that and not gain weight. Like, oh, obviously he has something that I don't have. I can't wait to hear what they say is like the cure for whatever the heck I'm struggling with. But it's like, okay, but they are, it's a show, right?

They are trying to create entertainment and stuff. And it sucks that people can't think for themselves to realize that or understand like, oh, wait, I wonder what it is exactly that they're like pushing here. And even media figures and celebrities who have been in this situation or kind of paired themselves with organizations and talked about their journey, whether it's about health or anything else, there is a strong financial tie or compensation to, you know, their affiliation with these different products or organizations. So sometimes when you are seeing this stuff on news media, understanding like what's driving this and why is this their message, I think is super important too. So we were talking about pharmaceuticals earlier, but it could be the same thing for various programs, products, supplements, like the list goes on.

And so it's important to know kind of like you're saying, Andrew, where you get your information from and why might they be presenting it in that way? Let's keep it rolling. Lean set point. If I were to do the exact same behaviors, I would store more excess adipose. My body is more predisposed to storing more fat. Damn sure mine is.

Is that the word I've been looking for? Adipose. I'm an adipose storer. Okay. All right. All right. So that is a scientific fact. That's a scientific fact.

That some people's bodies operate differently than others. We can accept. You agree with that? I would say some people's bodies operate differently than others, but we do play a role in the operation of our bodies. So think about it. If I get adequate sleep tonight, my body will operate differently tomorrow than if I don't get adequate sleep. So this is where it's hard.

It's really, really challenging to separate. Yes, you have some baseline metabolic function and sort of maybe predispositions that you're working with. But at the same time, I could make a choice today, right now, and also five hours from now, 10 hours from now, that will impact how my body behaves tomorrow. Resistance training is going to impact my insulin sensitivity at future meals. So I do agree with some of this. Also, there was a point before they shifted back to Oprah where she said, I'm an adipose storer. Well, technically we all could be adipose storers if we consume excess calories relative to our overall expenditure. And you might send that signal to the body so much that you do become proficient at it. Right. Again, this is

kind of a compound effect of repeatedly consuming those calories over time. Now, one thing she did say is if I do the same behaviors, but what's the difference between Corey? Well, Corey looked like a guy who's like six, two, maybe 200 pounds. Um, her husband is larger than her. You do need to equate for the differences in someone's size and physical activity level is very, very important as part of this conversation. So even, and you'll even see this, like sometimes when people get married and initially put on some weight, it's, it's, we can't necessarily do the same behaviors as the person next to us. We do need to figure out what works for us. And just because he ate three slices of pizza, it doesn't

mean you should eat three slices of pizza. It's finding that there's an individual dose response. Um, and just like, yeah. Why can a young kid, like a kid when they're 13, 14, and they're growing, you start to see them eat like shockingly, uh, enormous amounts of food. But at that point in their life, a lot of times there's a lot of activity going on as well. amounts of food. But at that point in their life, a lot of times there's a lot of activity going on as well. A lot of activity, they're growing, you know, but I can't just because maybe my nephews are doing that. It doesn't mean I can do that while we're related. We have similar genetics or something, right? But no, I can't, you know, I can't necessarily do that. So there are a couple of things. There's the behavior aspect, the adipose storage aspect. Technically we would all,

if we changed our lifestyle, like the three of us having this conversation, if we changed our lifestyle, you know, we would potentially make ourselves more likely to store adipose tissue. Let me say this real quick, man. If I ate the way that I want to eat, I would be, dude, dude, dude, I'd be 280 in like two months. Like if I ate the way I truly just want to eat. I just want to see it. I know. I'm just saying. I want to see how you eat.

The thing that I think is somewhat unfortunate about like she said it as a joke, I'm an adipose store. But you saw the response of the audience. You saw everyone's like, I relate to it. And even in my head, I'm like, if I ate the way I just wanted to eat all the time, I'd be like, I'm an adipose store too. Because it's like, but that's the thing. You can't always just eat what you want to eat all the time, I'd be like, I'm an Adipose store too. Because it's like, but that's the thing. You can't always just eat what you want to eat. And don't get me wrong. I enjoy what I eat. I enjoy the food I eat. It's a personal choice. It's a decision. And it's not difficult for me to eat the food I eat. It's not like I'm fighting something.

You saw what I weighed. If I really wanted to eat what I wanted to eat, bro, I'd be so fucking heavy. So it's not like you're special. She's not special in any way. It's just, again, I think for a lot of people, I won't say everybody, for a lot of people, it does come down to the decisions that you make.

And that is in your control. A lot of these statements, it's unfortunate. These statements are out of my control. It's all, I don't have control over this. It's being done to me and it's because of who I, it's because of what I am and like what I'm dealing with,

not because of the choices I make. You also can't replace, that makes it hard. You also can't replace what somebody has done like over a lifetime. So maybe in this guy's case or in Seema's case,

like you played soccer when you were young and we've talked about on the show before, you never really got fat. Like you gained some body fat, you didn't feel good. You're, you had an injury, a couple of things like that, but you never, you never wasn't fat fat. I was 275, but no, I wasn't as big as you. Yeah. Right. Right. And, and no one would ever say that you're fat. Cause you, when you were doing that,

you were power lifting and you were just massive. Yeah. But the point being is that there's some people that, um, they never fat, like throughout their entire life. But it's not just because of food choices. It's also because of movement. And it's not because they were gifted something. In some cases, some people might have more of a propensity to be thinner than another person. We already know that. But there's also activity. And usually the thinner person,

the person that maybe started out a little thinner or had better options at home, maybe mom or dad was paying attention to the foods that they ate. Your kid at six, seven years old is probably going to want to play sport because they're probably driven to want to move around because they feel really good. Whereas the other child maybe, you know, already gained some body fat and they're a little bit behind. So there's definitely different situations and different scenarios. But I think when I think of like, I can think of some kids that I went to school with and they were, they were like ripped and I'm probably exaggerating my head how ripped, but I remember one kid in particular, him and his brother, they were like kind of shredded.

But, you know, I used to, I used to see those kids all the time, played football with them, a bunch of stuff, super athletic. And those two together would always, not really exercise together, but they'd always challenge each other. And both of them wrestled and they would wrestle each other. And they're always doing like pull-ups and push-ups and arm wrestling. They were just both super active. So I think that we have a tendency to not think about what was someone's upbringing. You know, if someone did sports most of their life and they never gained body fat in the first place, their body, even as they're older, might utilize food and might utilize energy slightly differently than somebody else. And especially if those actions are continued. Yeah. And when she said the Adipose store thing, and I do agree that with the context of your lifestyle growing up and how your parents feed

you and how active you are, and if you're self-confident, you get in sports, stuff like that. But let's think about if we were to go back a thousand years or beyond, like before we had the wide availability of you can literally pick up a smartphone and you have the ability to order, whether it's Uber Eats, Instacart, like especially if you're here in the United States, if you're listening abroad,

there's still a high amount of convenience to food. Not only is it convenient and quickly accessible, but there are foods that we would not have had access to that in terms of the calorie density of those foods and the fact that we do not have to work to consume any of it. So adipose storage conventionally from a basic physiology perspective is storing energy. It's actually not disadvantageous to survival. The problem of when it became, when we became so dysfunctional is the overabundance and ease of consumption and convenience, as well as just the fact that certain foods exist now that did not exist hundreds of years ago. So yes, there's the

movement part. Yes, there's the nutrition part, how we were raised, but there are also societal changes that have happened and cultural changes that have happened that have led to the increased availability of these foods. Then combine that with ease of consumption, accessibility, and they taste really good. And this is where it kind of supercharges the issue overall. But a long time ago, if you happen to be foraging and coming across some food, storing some energy wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The reason it became a bad thing is it's now so easy. And at least if you had to do that thousands of years ago, there was a level of activity that happened to at least go get the food. And then we wouldn't eat for a period of time to where the overall average of caloric consumption would have changed. So that's more of like the evolutionary anthropology stance on some of the issues related to nutrition and metabolism. And then people will

argue that as well, but there's certainly some differences just in, Hey, like we didn't have Uber Eats before or Instacart. Like you could Instacart, you know, you were talking about sleep of warriors earlier, a cookie or whatever. You could Instacart that right now and have it within a very short period of time, consume those calories, no problem. All the while you're totally sedated with your TV on, ordering off your phone with your laptop open. Right, it's like people aren't even going to the store

to walk the aisles to get the food. It's like, that's even a difference in energy expenditure. Small, right? They just start feeding it to you. Yeah, it's like compounded over time. So the Adipose story thing, like, okay, I understand where she's coming from there. She's had her personal health

journey. She's had some challenges related to weight loss. It may feel like you are, that is your end of one experience. That is how you feel. That is your reality. But I do think it's dangerous like when you're a celebrity or you're someone who has a lot of influence and people want to relate to you. They want to be, Oprah is a very relatable character. Part of what made her such a celebrity figure in the first place, she's very relatable. And so people who aspire or find her to be this inspirational character and like, Oh, Oprah's got the same struggles and challenges that I do. It's a, that is a lot of influence, right? Over someone's health, fitness, and nutrition. So that's where we got to lot of influence right over someone's health fitness and nutrition so that's

where we got to be careful yep let's finish it out is that right we can see that absolutely and for those of us who are adipose stores no matter how many times because you all have watched me diet and diet and diet and diet it's a recurring thing because my body always seems to want to go back to a certain... I don't mean to nitpick every single thing that she says, but you've seen me diet, diet, diet, and diet, right? What does that mean? Yo-yo? Yeah.

Not sustainable? Well, yeah, and it means she was off a diet. But what did that look like when she was off? When she was off, she was probably eating crappy food. And there's a difference between perpetually pursuing a deficit or like trying to diet versus actually a lot of people feel like they are dieting and they are exerting effort towards a certain nutritional strategy. Now, whether you are successfully dieting is a different thing, right? So if she was dieting for the purposes of weight loss, she was probably trying to restrict her calories. There are many people, countless people,

I see this online all the time, who feel like they are always dieting or in a diet phase, but they are not successfully losing weight. So they are being restrictive to a certain degree, but what is the outcome of that strategy? And then she's basically dieting, stopping, dieting, stopping. Well, what are you doing again in that season when you're not dieting? Is that intake moderated or did you go off the rails because you were restricted before and it lacks sustainability? So now when you weren't dieting, you're in this period of overconsumption. I think that was a great point. And that is a tough thing because a majority of these celebrities, when they do go on these weight loss diets, they're typically crash diets.

They're typically done so that they lose weight very, very quickly. She'd been part of like big campaigns where she's, you know, lost 50 pounds and did it in front of the whole world. In X amount of weeks though. It's not lost 50 pounds in a year. It's lost 50 pounds in eight weeks, 12 weeks, et cetera. Then what happens when you've crashed your calories so low that you lose that amount of weight, then you start eating the amount of food or close the amount of food you're eating. And this is where it's more broadly applicable to, I think your listener base is like, I would say that there's obviously a lot of folks who listen to this are interested in health, fitness and exercise. They haven't necessarily, there are probably many listeners who are not

overweight or obese themselves. And so the, where this conversation applies either for them or someone they care about or a friend is we have a lot of people in the fitness industry or followers of the fitness space and social media space who are doing still crash dieting, following fad diets, hopping from the latest trend to the next thing and not understanding the consequence of what happens metabolically when we do that and how metabolic adaptation plays into that long-term success and people not correcting that. So yeah, Oprah was a prominent figure associated with Weight Watchers and it was always 50 pounds in X time or we did this or I lost this many dress sizes in whatever time horizon versus that

conversation of, okay, and did we keep it off? Did we keep it off? And also it's not like we were pulling a blood panel on Oprah and saying, well, your thyroid hormone also did this and this is what happened as a result. So there is a problem here in one understanding, not all of her diets were successful, varied in time horizon. They certainly weren't sustainable because we're still having this conversation 20, 30 years later, right? I mean, and she looks good.

Like, obviously she's taken some approaches that have really helped her. She looks better now than certain decades past. Yeah. Right, so there's something going on for sure. I also wonder how much lifting, you know? Yeah, so actually this is a great point. Yeah, do you even lift?

How much you bench, Oprah? So the conversation around that. Well, just because we know that lifting can add some sustainability, like people that have lost weight and been able to keep it off, they've been shown to have certain types of habits. And one of them was lifting weights. I think another one was just like weighing yourself. Like there's a bunch of little things sprinkled in there. From the sustainability perspective, yes. Exercise is a great weight maintenance tool, but primarily, so nutrition is a key driver of the weight loss,

but exercise and resistance training are great tools to help sustain that weight loss over time or to build that capacity to eat more calories and sustain a reasonable weight range compared to before. A lot of people still have the mindset of I need to burn more calories. I'm reasonable weight range compared to before. A lot of people still have the mindset of, I need to burn more calories. I'm gonna exercise.

I'm looking at the Apple Watch to see what's going on. They're tracking their fitness and they're not looking at the calories. And so they over consume. So that's a problem. But yeah, for Oprah, I mean, we've never documented her exercise journey as much as we've documented her nutrition

and weight watching journey. Yeah, Mark. And like, how long should somebody be dieting and adopting this lifestyle? Yeah, you got to do it for a long time. You got to do it for as long as you can, really. So, you know, if you try a diet, I think it makes sense to try to move into some other nutritional protocol. You try one and it's not feeling right or it feels too restrictive or maybe some people do keto and it makes them feel sick or it messes up their stomach move away from that and move into you know research stuff look into something else and just continue to poke around you know years ago um stan efforting mentioned this recently on a podcast and i kind of even totally forgot about

it but years ago i created operation get less fatterist and it was something that I posted on Facebook. And what it was is it was a series of four different styles of diet. And you would do one diet per month over the course of four months, because I started to recognize that a lot of the people that I knew and a lot of friends, a lot of family, they tend to gain a lot of weight around the holidays. So I was like, if I start this maybe in like, you know, September or October or something like that, then by the time, you know, the new year rolls around, some of these people may not have the same problem they had in the past where they're gaining, you know, four to six pounds every year and not really even paying attention to it. And that included like a bodybuilding style diet,

keto diet, carnivore diet. And it was just kind of, you know, because I think you do have to find, you do have to figure out like what's going to suit you, what's going to fit you, what's going to feel good for you. Personal preferences are a large part of it. And I do think for someone, if they're newer to the industry listening to this, a lot of folks may be more seasoned

or they've followed a program before. This is where having an expert or having a coach in your corner can help bring awareness. Because a lot of people don't know what to look for to define if something is working or not, right? They don't know the statistics to measure. They don't know how, if you don't have that level of awareness, you need someone to help you along the way. Even if it's just, I mean, we're also just more likely to be successful when we are surrounded by people who are pursuing that same goal. So having accountability or having someone on our team. So whether it's a coach or not, or just someone who's along for the ride with you,

it does exponentially increase your likelihood of success. I do like the trying different things on for size. I think where some, you had already been in the fitness industry at that point and been consistent with your training and done a lot of things consistently, where I would worry about that rotational style diet. And this is why sometimes things like calorie cycling and or carb cycle, like certain approaches that work for some don't always carry over to others

is because certain people haven't adopted the ability to be consistent with the first thing. And so they're just starting to cement some of those behaviors and then they switch. It's why sometimes for less advanced trainees, it's helpful to actually do a deload versus like a full rest day or rest week. It's just like put some more reps in reserve or reduce the volume or, but I still want them going to the gym because we're cementing the pattern and the behavior of going to the gym, even if we're not training super intensely. So with nutrition,

I may not completely flip that on its head. If the person is just starting to gain some momentum, I think it could work for someone like Mark, because for you, it gave you a little bit of variety and you had also been in the industry long enough to kind of understand the inner workings from a fitness and nutrition perspective of what would make that successful and monitoring your intake over time. And some people need that variety too. That's another thing too. There's a lot of people who kind of crave that level of variance, um, where certain people I think would maybe fall off the wagon somewhere in there after the, the initial bodybuilding, the keto. Mm-hmm. And weight.

Oh, that was literally it. It's like that was it perfect well what do you think are um you know if you had to kind of sum some of this up um um what are some what are like a couple key ingredients you think with somebody having some sustainability and being able to lose weight so when i look at that, I kind of, so you and I agree on protein as a big one. So when I go back through the five Ms I mentioned earlier,

and this is how I kind of break it down in Metabolism Made Simple, is we have to have things, because if we're constantly hungry, if we cannot manage our appetite, we're going to struggle with any particular diet. So there's a level of personal preference, but then also understanding what works from both research and practical application

to drive success. So I have to be able to manage my appetite and I have to be able to do something that is preferential to me. So there's this idea of flexible restraint that's been discussed in research. So it's, I have a little bit of discipline and a little bit of structure, but I also have the ability to rotate certain foods within that structure. So that's also something I talk about in terms of personal preference. So if we're kind of breaking it down, first I need key ingredients. So when it comes to managing hunger, for example, attentive eating is a big one. Adequate protein, hydration. There's a lot of people who are not adequately hydrated

that feel like they are actually hungry. Is there anything more to attentive eating than just like paying attention? So lack of distracted eating, chewing your food. So I would view it as some people just miss like very accessible big rocks. So like they're driving and they're eating, right? That's like, let's wait and try to actually enjoy the meal. Another thing could be, um, even the like size of

plates and bowls and things that you're using and actually, you know, sitting down and enjoying that meal. I think community, there's a lot of, um, both anecdotal and research or clinical evidence around, uh, people consuming food with loved ones and that having a positive effect as well. I realize that's not for every single person practical at every single meal, but when you can enjoying something with a friend or family member or even a coworker that you like could be something that works. The main thing for attentive eating though is yes, like getting off of technology, not binge watching Netflix while you're eating your largest calorie serving of the day, chewing your food. Those are really the biggest ones. And then some of the actual components of

nutritional structure would be this idea of like flexible restraint, protein intake. You know, fiber is a topic of debate, I think recently between folks who have gone like full carnivore and then you have plant-based people where it's like, we think fiber is amazing and then other people are like, you don't need fiber. So I think there's finding a sweet spot based on your digestive tolerance of not everybody can handle like super, super high fiber intake. It'll lead to digestive distress. But if you have no fiber intake, that's probably not great either. So there is a middle ground. Fiber can be important for overall digestive health, but also managing that appetite as well. So those things will play into the overall

nutritional success. And then I think carbohydrates and fats, we're going to shift based on activity level and personal preference. So some people enjoy more of a protein and fat-based diet. You've referenced using that in the past. Other people who enjoy more of a protein and fat-based diet. You've referenced using that in the past. Other people who enjoy carbohydrates, we're going to adjust that dietary fat intake, but we still want to be mindful of our omega-6 to omega-3 ratio and getting the appropriate amount of monounsaturates, polyunsaturates, and saturated fats. So this becomes a different conversation if we're speaking in terms of athletic performance, health optimization, and longevity, or are we talking about we're speaking in terms of athletic performance, health optimization,

and longevity? Or are we talking about we're just doing this for physique goals, aesthetics, hypertrophy? Because there's going to be a slight shift in dietary style to accomplish those goals. And it's very hard to chase multiple rabbits. So it's like, let's pick a priority. And then the common themes across those are gonna be the things we discussed today. But as you get more refined, you can get in the nitty gritty of, okay, what are we doing in terms of carbohydrates? The type of carbohydrates, dietary fat, are we combining,

like are we having mostly protein and fat meals? Are we having higher protein and carbs around training? That's going to impact someone like an athlete significantly more than someone who's just like a lifestyle dieter trying to keep their weight off. So depending on how in the weeds you want to go, we can certainly chat about that. What's the strategy for the individual who has dieted themselves into oblivion? So let's just say that they still have 75 to 100 pounds to lose, but they're currently eating 1500 calories and the weight is not dropping.

Because a lot of people, they've gotten to the point where like, I'm still eating so little and all I can do, the only place I can feel is I can just eat less food, but I'm barely eating. What do they need to do now? So this is where there's a conversation and our industry has different terms for it,

but this is the idea of like a recovery or reverse diet, maintenance phase, or just periodization as a whole. Sometimes we also need to divide that out into, there's going to be different individuals in that camp. There's people who are accurately tracking their food, who truly are eating a very low amount of calories. And I have a sensitivity towards this because I've been a person who has worked with and coached individuals who had other coaches be like, I don't believe you're not doing this. And they're tracking their food. They're taking pictures of their food. They're like, it's on the food scale. And the person's like, you're lying. You're doing all these things. And that's really, really bad from that

perspective. So you need to kind of trust and verify there. So we want to look at someone's overall understanding of moderating their intake. And are we missing like condiments, liquid beverages? Like, do we have a decent idea of portion control? And then there's the conversation of exercise. Some people eating 1500 calories are not training to where the reason it's so hard for them is we haven't gotten our energy expenditure

in a place where it's easy to lose weight. So this is a conversation of both increasing energy expenditure, but also if we have been a season of dieting for a long time and we've been training, we may want to take a little bit of a break from that and then re-approach. So some people will need to stair-step their weight loss loss they will have periods of and you even see this with like other areas of life like building a company sometimes you have more rapid growth sometimes you're going to stabilize sometimes you're going to more rapid growth you're going to stabilize with weight loss people expect it to be this super linear straight down thing and it's not always that way sometimes you will plateau sometimes you need to stair step your

way down you'll definitely gain weight here and there too. You may gain weight here and there. Sometimes it's just water and sodium differences or a little bit of inflammation, or maybe you ate a meal later than normal, or you change times at like all these different things, or you haven't pooped yet today. For women, your menstrual cycle can impact your weight. So understanding there's little things that are going to drive that difference. But if you've been repeatedly restricting calories and you've hit a point where you've hit a bit of a plateau, it may be a good idea to adjust your intake and maybe increase it ever so slightly or work back towards whatever your new maintenance might be. The problem is the longer that we push in one direction, and this is where we lose steam and we run out of runway. If all we're ever doing is

eat less exercise more versus if we spend a season and let's eat more, uh, but exercise more. So increase expenditure. Then I also have the ability to come back to a, a different stimulus of maybe I'm actually going to reduce training stress a tiny bit, but I'm going to bring food down as well. And then maybe I increase things like walking, non-exercise activity, and then, or I change, maybe my resistance training is a little less intense, but I have some cardiovascular exercise coming into play. So we can use all of these as tools and then match them up for the best stimulus for the person. But the problem usually in the case that you're describing is either we've been absolutely kind of smashing one particular stimulus for a really long time,

or we actually have some inaccuracy in what we're doing and that's impacting the result overall. Yeah. I think you want to work your way towards being like an output machine, you know, being like, being sturdy, being strong

and being able to exercise hard, being able to put in a good effort. Like just on my run today, it's a wazer for me to run faster yesterday and today because both days I had 75 carbs and around 75 grams of protein before I, you know, about an hour and a half before I ran. And so having a little extra fuel, just a little small bump up in not even necessarily calories, because that wasn't really super calorie dense, but just getting just a little bit of extra energy somewhere in the day can really solidify having much stronger workouts. Yeah. So, and you're also someone I would put in more of an athlete camp, right? With your training history, you know, you've certainly got a lot of training experience and your training age is going to be very different than some of the people who are,

you know, watching that content in terms of Oprah. So this is where the context of nutrition comes into play for you. Peri-workout nutrition, probably pretty important. What you eat pre or post training may impact that because you've already got the other 24 hours of the day figured out where now we can move into this more specific conversation around what is optimal for Mark's recovery. What is the best pre-workout meal that seems to feel good to where we perform really well? We have stable blood sugar and you can start to get into these more individual considerations of nutrition. Some people have never been consistent enough across a 24-hour container or seven-day container to begin to work on these smaller items like the

75 grams of protein and 75 grams of carbs per training, observing how you feel and then monitoring it. Most people never get that far, which is a super common issue. I do agree with the output machine minus the caveat of maybe there's a small percentage of the population where they view output machine as like, I'm going to go to orange theory with my friends, like every single day and do high, you know, high intensity interval training. Yeah, not overdoing what you're prepared for. Yeah. Yeah. Not, you know, not exceeding our recovery capacity there most of the time. And so for... I think there's a little knob on the side here. I think your mic, your mic got a little flaccid,

I think. You can do it on both sides. So if you just... It happens to everybody. Thank you. Got it. To where, you know, for that population, there are people who are, their output is not necessarily the right output for the type of goal they're trying to achieve. So if we're just looking at aesthetics, physique, weight loss,

combination of resistance training, you may need a little bit of cardiovascular exercise sprinkled in here. And then nutrition as a driver for restricted calories overall. But some people are kind of abusing that and they're hammering that stimulus of like, think group exercise classes or high intensity trainer. They're always doing intervals or it's always a bootcamp

versus actually building that strength base and building muscle mass over time. Because we do have a lot of people too in this conversation around obesity, they are under muscled. It's not just a body fat issue. It's also we're lacking muscle tissue and that's impacting overall resilience too. So we do need to build muscle because it does have those benefits from the chemical messaging perspective, but it's also helping from an insulin sensitivity perspective, a longevity perspective, frailty as we age. And you've even seen this physically in how someone shows up.

When you're well-muscled, even if you have a little bit of body fat, very, very different than if I'm just storing a ton of fat around my midsection, I have a lot of visceral fat. So visceral fat is incredibly problematic, excuse me, and detrimental towards your long-term health. So when we look at that- That's fat around your organs, correct?

Yeah, fat around your organs is really gonna be a problem. And so for a lot of the people that we're talking about within the context of GLP-1s and stuff, that is a risk factor for their long-term health. So different conversation around the fat storage and just the metabolic advantages really of building muscle. Thank you for your time today.

Appreciate it. Where can people find you? So people can find me. I am Sam Miller Science on just about every major platform. That's also my podcast as well. So sammillerscience.com. The program I reference for health and fitness professionals is Metabolism School.

So that's metabolismschool.com. And then the book is metabolism made simple. If you guys want to check out an audio copy, I checked with my web guide before I came here. I was like, dude, we need this to actually work. Don't crash this. A free nutrition book.com should get you your copy of metabolism made simple. If you have any issues, guys, you can send me a message. I'll try to help you out. That's the audio version. If you want the paperback, you can go to metabolismmadesimple.com for that. And that's pretty much it, guys. I appreciate you having me and letting me share with your audience. Thank you so much. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.