Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 292 - Ted Naiman

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Dr. Ted Naiman is a board-certified Family Medicine Physician from Seattle, WA. Dr. Naiman is one of the leading minds when it comes to metabolism and has published tons of content on his low-carb approach to nutrition, the Diet 2.0, as well as the relationship between protein and energy expenditure. He is the co-author of the P:E Diet with William Shewfelt. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/shop.aspx?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Power%20Project for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 15% off your order! ➢Quest Nutrition: https://www.questnutrition.com/ Use code "MARKSQUEST" at checkout for 20% of your order! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

I have to tie two tape measures together for Encima's belly. What kind of joke is this? I don't get it. Well, I think it only goes like 60 inches, right? Yeah, it's like on a plane when you have to have the extender. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it only goes this long and people still need that. Yeah, man.

That's tough. That's tough. Anyway. anyway anywho anyhoot yeah um anyway um it's that time of year it's that time of year when everybody gets fat right it's that time of year when everyone goes off their diet everyone goes off plan but if you have food to taste good you don't have to go off plan. If you got some Piedmontese steaks, you don't need to worry about what's being cooked up for Thanksgiving or what's being cooked up for Christmas or you don't have to involve yourself with what everybody else is doing. You can keep it keto or keep that protein up nice and high with some Piedmontese steaks.

I cooked up a big old ribeye. Did you let it sit? I did. That's always tough. I was successful letting it sit. And I did a reverse sear, which I've never done before. I couldn't figure out how to do it either because the ribeye was gigantic. And so I was just like, I don't know what to put it in or put it on.

and then so i was just like i don't know what to put it in or put it on so i put it on like an iron uh what the hell those called a cast iron pan and i threw that in the uh in the oven cooked it like that for probably like 20 minutes because it was massive somebody just told me like oh you only need to do like 10 minutes but this thing was huge so i did 20 minutes and then when i took it out i cooked it for about another 5 on each side and it was just absolutely ridiculous. It was so good. I ate the whole thing. Well, I had a little help from Daisy. Oh really? You gave her some?

My little doggie. She helped me. One bite for us would be like half her body weight. I know. And I saved the dog bone. I put the dog bone in the freezer because her birthday's coming up oh that'll be cool you guys take a bunch of pictures for us hell yeah yeah so um if you guys want to check this stuff out like um piedmontese beef has been huge huge

for me with this whole shred down thing and when i noticed the biggest like eye opener was when i calculated piedmontese macros. And then I had, you know, just like I had ground beef and I'm like, oh, I definitely don't want that. I'd rather have this because I could have way better stuff here. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, during this month, we're actually not running a promo code with them. They are just giving everybody 25% off.

Damn. Yeah. So if you guys want to. They're getting serious over it. Yeah. Yeah. So if you guys want to. They're getting serious over there. Yeah. Yeah. So if you guys want to check this stuff out, head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com.

Everything's already 25% off. But if you guys want to support the show, use the link in the show notes right now. You want to try to keep yourself away from some treats, then, you know, the best way to do it is to, uh, give yourself a treat. That's a better option. You know, it's going with, uh, like a quest bar, the quest donut bar, or going with a quest cookie. Um, I have my, uh, I have where, where we go for Thanksgiving every year. I have that house stocked up, uh, full of quest bars and quest cookies. And that way, when I've seen somebody else diving into cookies

and whipping out the ice cream and desserts and stuff, I get to enjoy something too, but it's just something a little different. Yeah, we talk a lot about habits and stuff on this show, and it's a really cool thing. Andrew, I think you just said this, when you're potentially dieting and you're craving something, and the first thing that comes to mind is a Quest Hero Bar instead of a cookie or something else. Like that what you want to you know that's what you want to

have a lot of okay go for it and it's more uh it's not even like half and half at this point like it's not because like oh i want a healthier you know option like no i literally just want a hero bar because they taste that good like that's again i'm probably like i'm really focused on stuff right now with my body and my physique but i truly do just want like a hero bar that's it's it's it sounds silly but yes it is that damn good yeah and you're just trying to have habits that are a little bit better than what you had before that's where you're going to make progress yeah yeah you guys seriously do need to try out these Hero Bars, the chips. Everything is incredible.

Head over to questnutrition.com right now and at checkout, enter promo code MARKSQUEST for 20% off your entire order. And our boys over at Perfect Keto, I'm still mixing up that MCT powder oil. Probably about every other day because I don't do a regular fast all the time. Sometimes I'll do a regular fast and not have the MCT oil powder. Sometimes I'll just have coffee. But I've been mixing in the MCT oil powder.

It gives me a little extra burst. I also mess around with the instant coffee that they have that has MCT oil powder in it as well. And I also mess with the ketones that they have. So MCT oil powder in it as well. And I also mess with the ketones that they have. So I like that product as well. That MCT oil powder is really good. If you can, just when you go home,

grab a small little plastic bag. If you can just go into the salted caramel, put the scoop in the bag, and the next time we podcast it, it'll be great. It might be just half a scoop at gone yeah yeah days like today where i'm feeling a little bit more hungry because i've been fasting every single day uh days like today where i need a little extra something i reach for the mct oil powder and i'm a fan of vanilla so after this podcast i'm actually gonna mix coffee with the

the vanilla mT oil powder. I don't understand it. These two guys over here understand it. But for me, it just helps. The hunger goes away. I get a little boost of energy. I think that's probably because of the caffeine combination. But everything all about it, it's so damn good.

And nobody really likes black coffee. I think everyone just kind of thinks they do. Throw a little flavor in there. Throw a little something in there. That's true, actually. It's really likes black coffee i think everyone just kind of thinks they do throw a little flavor in there throw a little something in there that's true actually it's better with black coffee yeah it's better yeah it is better makes it better yeah if you guys want to get better head over to perfect keto.com slash power project at checkout enter promo code power project for 15 off your order you guys will not regret it it's like john cena's trying to like sled push the mic dude john cena's trying to sneak in a workout because every time like yesterday he kept hitting the ground i think he's trying to do push-ups yeah maybe yeah maybe he was doing burpees or he's trying to break the table he's pushing the earth down as he does push-ups him and chuck

norris do that somebody sent me a picture of john Cena the other day, and they're like, you're telling me he's natty? I'm like, I don't – he's my friend. He's told me he's natural for a long time. He has the tests on his wall, not tests like testosterone. He has tests that shows that he is within natural levels. They're on his wall in his gym. There's like 150 of them or something like that pasted all over his wall.

I believe it. I believe it. Call me naive. Anybody who's ever met the guy, it starts to make sense. You see him in person, you're like, okay, his wrist is like the size of my head.

Yeah. You're like, okay, he's got a 20-inch wrist circumference. I can buy into the rest of it. Wristicuffs. So as I send this Zoom invite, who do we have on today? We got Ted Niemann on the show today. Really fired up and excited to have him on the show.

We know him through a bunch of different stuff, but basically we know him through his ability to make a lot of noise in a positive way in the health and nutrition space. And one thing that I admire about him is I like the people that are really practicing what they're talking about. You know, I don't want to like go to like a fat doctor. You know, I want somebody who's practicing some of these things, who's implementing some of these things. And from the pictures and the stuff I've seen of him, he's pretty damn jacked. He's also friends with our buddy, William Shufelt, who we've had on the podcast kind of a while back. William is kind of a low carb proponent. And William's also the red, red Ranger. Yeah. I was wondering if you were going to,

but they, yeah, they, they wrote a book together and Ted's stance on diet and nutrition is different because he's not necessarily, you know, all about, you know,

just fat and protein or, or all about carbohydrates and stuff like that. He, he's kind of just whatever method will work, he's in favor of doing, trying. What's up, Ted? How you doing, buddy? What's up? Good to have you on the show today.

Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot. Yeah, so let's just dive right in. And first thing I'd like to start out with is how does an engineer get involved in nutrition and health and fitness? Oh, dude, I couldn't get a job. As an engineer? Yeah. Well, I, you know, I'm up here in Seattle and the year I got out of school, Boeing laid off like a thousand engineers or something and nobody, I had a mechanical engineering degree. I could not get a job to save my life. So everybody either went back to school or just flipped burgers or something like that. So you just tried to find a field that you're like, well, people look pretty dumb in

this field. So I'll go into this one. Exactly. Well, no, all my friends who were engineers just kept getting laid off every couple of years from Boeing. You know, I wanted to do aerospace, but Boeing just lays everybody off every few years. And I was so demoralized. I was like, oh, I'm just going to do something totally different. Cool. And then what was what kind of sparked your interest? Were you already into health and nutrition and stuff? Not really.

I never really wanted to be a doctor or go to medical school. I just didn't know what else to do. And my sister's a doctor and she's a couple years older than me. And so I figured, oh, you know what, maybe I'll try that out. And so it was just on a whim. I applied like the last possible day to medical school and I never even took general biology. Uh, and I don't even know how I got accepted. And there I was, yeah, medical school. It was just kind of like a fluke or a whim. I did not plan it all out. Believe me. That's crazy. So many people are probably so angry at you right now for saying that. That's very true. The only reason I got in at all is because I had an engineering degree. And if you have an engineering degree, the admissions committees add like a whole point to your GPA automatically.

Okay. And that's literally the only, only way I got into the medical school. One thing I like about a lot of the stuff that we found and I've been following you for, for quite some time is the fact that we hear a lot of people talking about carbs. We hear a lot of people talking about fat. And both sides are always kind of arguing with each other, you know, saying, hey, you can't eat any carbs.

If you want to be healthy and you want to look fit and you want to be lean, then you can't eat any carbs. And then we got the other side of people that do like bodybuilding and things like that. They're the ones that are kind of saying you can't build muscle, you can't stay lean, you can't look good unless you do have some carbohydrates in your system. And then you come along right down the middle with protein and talking about protein leveraging. And you don't really care which way somebody goes. If someone goes high fat or if they decide to go low fat, correct? Exactly. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. I'm really trying to be agnostic. The low carb community really needs to face the facts that a lot of people are successful with a high carb, low fat approach. No. I know. Right. And the low fat people need to wake up and realize

that the low carb people are onto something too. And honestly, the only way you have this perpetual low carb versus low fat, uh, war is if both sides are entirely correct. And that is the reality. Both sides are totally onto something. And so I'm just basically trying to cut through the low carb versus low fat war and point out the fact that both carbs and fats are just high energy carbon-carbon bonds that you're burning in your mitochondria. And so it almost doesn't matter in the big picture. And I think most of your bodybuilders will tell you if you get the protein percent high enough,

it kind of doesn't matter whether you backfill your energy needs with carbs or fat. It's not that big a deal. So when we start talking about something like insulin resistance, do you think that somebody that follows a low fat, higher carbohydrate diet, maybe even as they get older and maybe they start losing some muscle mass, do you think they could still avoid having insulin

resistance, type two diabetes, dementia, things like that? Well, insulin resistance is just plain and simple energy toxicity and having more energy in your body than you can store. It's really about just being over fat, period, 100%. And any diet that gives you enough satiety to remain lean is going to prevent insulin resistance, whether it's high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, doesn't matter. The secret is satiety. You eat the diet that gives you the highest satiety that makes you the leanest. And then you're going to be insulin sensitive no matter what your carb fat ratio is. And that ends up kind of with that scenario, you end up maybe shifting through different diets even.

Right. Like maybe there's maybe there's a reason to utilize both methods. Maybe there's a reason to be keto for a little while. Maybe there's a reason to kind of come out of that, eat a little bit more carbs and reduce your fat. Wouldn't that be probably a good option? Now you're maybe getting the best of both worlds. Yeah. And I think, honestly, it makes a lot of sense to do something cyclical because that's definitely what homo sapiens have been dealing with. You know, if you look at it through an evolutionary lens, it really makes sense to have some sort of, you know, metabolic winter time where, you know,

your environment's pretty low in energy, maybe low in carbs and fats and your protein percent's really high. And then other times where you do have higher energy intake. So I'm kind of all in on some sort of cyclical approach, energy intakes. So I'm kind of all in on some sort of cyclical approach, but I do think it's good to be in ketosis on at least a cyclical basis. Yeah. Why do you believe that? Well, I think that a lot of people are, you know, your average American's eating eight times a day and they're eating over 300 grams of carbs.

And so they're basically eating carbs every two hours for a 16 hour eating window. And it's, it's a, it's a very specifically anti ketogenic diet. So the standard American diet is like really, really, really going out of your way to be anti-ketogenic at all times. And I don't think that makes a lot of sense just through the evolutionary lens. It feels like something that we would have never dealt with in our evolutionary past. You know what I mean?

Having this constant, never-ending stream of exogenous glucose. So I don't know exactly why like the mechanism, but I think it just makes sense for metabolic flexibility to kind of go in and out of this ketosis. Yeah. We had Dr. Ken Berry on the podcast not too long ago, and he was just mentioning that he feels that fat is the primary fuel source, or at least it used to be. And so more people should just get back to that. To me, that statement makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, it's just basically you want your body to be able to survive if you're in a low energy environment, which is probably

every winter time for, you know, most of our hunter gatherer ancestors. And really the only way to do that is to enter ketosis and also manufacture all your own glucose, mostly from protein. And so it makes sense to have practice doing those things and to be good at it. You know what I mean? Can you explain a little bit about like gluconeogenesis in terms of getting that from protein? Because I feel like a lot of people, especially the keto crowd that and the true keto crowd is scared of eating a lot of protein because they think it'll knock them out of ketosis. And is that like is that true or no? OK, the reality is your your liver is constantly making all the glucose you ever need via gluconeogenesis, whether you're eating carbs or not. So behind the scenes, your liver is just pumping out enough glucose to keep you alive at all times. It's mostly making

this from either the glycerol backbone of triglycerides from your stored fat or dietary fat or from amino acids or from lactic acid if you're exercising. But eventually, a lot of this glucose is coming from protein and your body is converting it into glucose and you are making enough to keep yourself alive at all times. When people eat carbohydrates, they raise their blood sugar above this sort of basal level that your liver is already making. So your blood sugar goes up, your insulin level goes up, kind of unnecessarily. And unbeknownst to everybody, their liver is already making the glucose they need to just stay alive at all times. And then you eat glucose and raise your blood sugar on top of that.

So gluconeogenesis is happening 100% of the time in everyone all the time, whether they're eating carbs or not. And then if you eat extra protein, you're not converting that into glucose. Your body deaminates the protein. You strip the nitrogen group off the amino acids, and then you oxidize the carbon skeletons in your mitochondria just the same way you'd burn any other substrate. So you really don't have to be afraid of eating extra protein.

It's not going to raise your blood sugar. And you really don't have to be afraid of gluconeogenesis because it's really happening 100% of the time anyway. You're just unaware of it. And it's also happening a little bit more as needed and not necessarily just because you ate more protein. Is that correct? Correct. Correct. Right. It's demand driven, not supply driven. We could dump a thousand calories of protein on top of your diet right now and your blood sugar very well might not go up even a single point. So this is not a, oh, I ate extra protein, so my blood sugar is going to go up kind of scenario. Amongst people that are healthy is blood glucose levels. Are they similar for

someone who's on a ketogenic diet versus someone who's not? Well, what you see is that if you have a lot of ketones in your bloodstream, it displaces out other forms of energy in your bloodstream. And so your blood sugar will actually go down and be lower. It's kind of like alcoholics. Like I'll have alcoholics who, you know, maybe 25% of the energy in their bloodstream is coming from alcohol. And so their blood sugar might be extremely low. They might have a blood sugar in the 50s. I've seen alcoholics whose hemoglobin A1c was in the 3% range because half the energy in their bloodstream all day long is alcohol

displacing glucose. So the same thing can happen if you're in a pretty deep ketosis, you'll displace a bunch of glucose and your A1C might get really low and your blood sugar might be really low. So I would say, no, you actually see lower glucose levels most of the time in people in a really deep ketosis. But still not maybe as big of a difference as people might think just because the liver is always generating glucose or is it a pretty big difference? Right, right, right. Yeah. If you're just, if you just don't eat for a day or something, your blood sugar is basically going to be the same no matter what. You're totally right. And then a lot of what I'm seeing from you is you're saying that the combination of eating carbs and fat ends up being very dangerous in terms of accumulating body fat. But correct me if I'm wrong, that's basically just in the presence of over-consuming food.

Is that correct? Correct. Right, right, right. If you're staying- You ate like one donut for the day, but your overall caloric demand was moderate or low, you would be fine. But if you ate in abundance and you had the donut, then the donut would be more dangerous.

Right. There's absolutely nothing wrong with carbs and fats together if you're isocaloric or hypocaloric. The only problem with carbs and fats together is the palatability and the addictive nature because it spikes dopamine so high in some people. So if you have any addictive chemistry, that donut's going to light up your brain quite a bit and just drive overeating. And that's really the only thing I'm worried about there. Okay. In terms of all of this, because you were talking about like not eating for 20 or 24 hours, I know that you do a lot of fasting and you implement that a lot with your clients.

How does that play a role here and why should people think about implementing that rather than having overall caloric restriction throughout the day? Well, okay, I don't do a lot of extended fasting. I mean, personally, I never fast over 24 hours. I usually don't recommend fast over 24 hours. I usually don't recommend fasting over 24 hours. Honestly, I think a 16, eight sort of lean gains protocol is the sweet spot for most people. That's basically what I'm doing. And I actually don't tell people to force themselves to, uh, intermittently fast. I don't want anyone to be starving and hungry and looking at

the clock and trying to push a meal out a couple hours. What I do find is that if you're eating high satiety foods and you're well fat adapted, if you're good at living off the stored body fat and you're good at manufacturing your own glucose and you're comfortable in this sort of low energy environment, then you naturally just sort of slip into a two meal a day, 16, eight kind of thing effortlessly. And that's what I want people to do. I want them to be eating such a high protein diet, such a high satiety diet and be so well fat adapted that they just naturally slip into this 16, eight, two meal a day gig.

So I almost find intermittent fasting to be the cart and not the horse. If you, if you know what I mean, it's almost a sign that you're really comfortable living off of stored body fat, making your own glucose and being in ketosis. You know, if you know what I mean. So I never tell anyone, okay, step one, just don't eat for a whole day until you're starving. Yeah. It's more like, oh, hey, you know, eat steak and eggs and then just wait until you're really hungry to eat them again. And then just being on a, on a low carb diet at times, I think people get more comfortable with making their own glucose and living in a lower-glucose state.

And as you get adapted to that, then I think you just sort of slip into this intermittent fasting. that you just said, you know, with a two meals a day type of regimen, if you were to eat things that were nutrient dense, steak, eggs, and even had some fruits and veggies, maybe a potato sneaks in there here and there, maybe some rice with dinner or something like that, then this would be a very manageable diet that would give you a wide array of foods that not only taste good, but foods that are really filling up your nutrient cup every single day. Is that is that correct? Yeah, exactly. I mean, in my opinion, food choice is everything. It's all about food choice.

And if if we put you on a desert island with just like salmon and eggs and grass-fed beef and some veggies. You know, it's not even going to matter when you eat, how much you eat. All of these factors like intermittent fasting and carbs versus fat and all this stuff just sort of fades into the background because you're eating nutrient-dense foods with high protein percentage. And then it's like everything else sort of takes care of itself. You know what I mean? So I think that food choice is pretty much everything here. Is that usually where you start with people as food choices? Absolutely. And,

and just from a psychological perspective, I like to accentuate what you can eat, what you need to eat, what you're going to eat instead of what you can't eat. Like if I just told you, okay, you can't eat any more carbs while you're starving, you're going to go eat a dozen Krispy Kremes like 10 minutes later. But if I say, okay, I want you to eat a pound of salmon and half a dozen pastured eggs and you have to fit that in your diet today. Okay. That gives you something to do.

It's something to focus on, something positive. It's something you're doing instead of something you're restricting. And then you're just not hungry and you can walk right past the donuts and the muffins and the bagels and all the bullshit. So, so it's more like, okay, this is what you need to target and this is what you need to do. And then it's a lot easier to, you know, not eat other stuff. Do you sometimes have a conversation with somebody? Do you maybe just say, hey, like, what are some foods that you like? And you kind of start from there. Like someone's like, well, I love cheese.

And, you know, they give you some reasonable, healthy options that they actually enjoy. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We start with what people like and then you just pick a really high nutrient density, high protein percentage food that fits into, you know, what you want to eat and you have to eat that. You have to target that. You have to wake up in the morning and say, okay, how am I going to eat, you know, a pound and a half of cottage cheese today? Cause that's a food I like that's high in protein and low in energy. How does somebody know that they're insulin resistant? How does somebody know

that they might be in trouble and they need to make some changes other than just they weigh a bunch? I love, love, love, love, love waist to height ratio. So you measure your waist circumference at the belly button, not your pants size, your waist circumference at the belly button. First thing in the morning, abdomen totally relaxed. You get out the measuring tape and you measure your waist circumference at the abdomen, divide it by your height. So waist to height ratio should be less than 0.5. Your waist should be less than half your height. And if it's higher than that, you're probably insulin resistant. And you can draw a graph of fasting insulin levels and hyperinsulinemia and metabolic syndrome prevalence versus waist-to-height ratio, and it's really perfectly straight

line. It's a very, very, very good approximation for what's going on inside. And the reason it works so well is because if you're over fat, if you've exceeded your fat storage, the next place that fat's going to go is right in your abdomen at the belly button. And so waist to height ratio is fantastic. I could replace a lot of the lab tests I'm doing with just a simple fabric tape measure. You know what I mean? You just measure your waist. If it's going down, everything else is getting better, guaranteed. protein percentage. And obviously we know that athletes will need more protein than your average American. But if we're looking at both populations, I know you can't generalize it, but if a person that's not crazy active is listening to this, what like, I guess, ratio of protein should they be looking at in terms of body weight? And then if an athlete wants to think about that,

what should they also be looking at? Well, ironically, your athletes can get away with a lot lower protein to energy ratio. Really? You know, if you're burning thousands of calories a day, you could probably eat a lot more garbage and still because you're eating so much and you're just burning so much, you're going to get enough protein out of what you're eating. So your athlete can actually get by with a lower protein to energy ratio. I'm more worried about somebody who's not an athlete and just sitting on the couch. That person really needs a higher protein percentage of their diet. They're not burning as much energy. They can't eat as much energy. They need the protein and they need the protein satiety. And so if you're a overweight diabetic sitting on the couch, I want your protein percentage, uh, in terms of calories to be

higher than an athlete. Uh, I really target 30% of, uh, calories in terms of protein. But I prefer to ignore calories and look at in terms of grams of protein versus grams of non-protein energy, carbs and fats. And you kind of want that to be higher than one-to-one if you're sedentary, if you're sitting on the couch. In other words, you want, you know, maybe if you weigh 150 pounds, you want to eat 150 grams of protein and under 150 grams of carbs and fats together versus an athlete could eat, you know, hundreds of grams more of carbs or fat and burn right through it. So, yeah, so it's, I think it's less crucial for an athlete. Even though they're breaking down, you know, during the workout, you don't think they need a little extra amino acids or something like that?

Well, the thing is, if you're, if you're burning that much and you're eating that much, even if you're eating a fairly low protein food, you're going to scavenge more than enough protein to meet your needs from that food. You know what I mean? Because you're just eating so much of it that your absolute protein intake might be fine, even if you're eating a fairly low protein food. Now, I still prefer that athletes target protein first and foremost and have a high protein percentage. And I think that's the most important thing to be eating. But then if you want to dump a lot of energy on top of that, sort of like a vertical diet or something, I think that's fine. You're going to get away with that. That's okay. But I really, honestly, I think athletes can get away with more crap because they're eating so much

more that they're going to get enough protein anyway. What do you think people should do with their children in terms of nutrition? So, you know, like I have a 12-year-old daughter. And what we do is we just make sure that all the food we have at home is really good stuff. She's just surrounded by really good food choices at home. You know, we always have pastured eggs and grass fed beef and wild caught salmon, and we have all this really good food. And, but then if she goes out, you know, if she eats at school, if she goes to a birthday party, if we're eating out, we let her have just whatever she wants, you know, it's completely unrestricted, eat whatever you want.

And then what ends up happening is it almost feels like she gets to this point where she just doesn't really like taste that good like she'll eat a you know cheetos or something and she's like wow that's kind of gross or um how do people eat this or oh wow this tastes way too sweet and it's it's interesting how all we have to do is go to the grocery store buy a ton of awesome food and have it sitting around everywhere. And then everything else just seems to sort of take care of itself. And I think that's the way to go. And what about in terms of like convenience? Because I know that like a lot of parents are kind of crippled by the fact that there's so many convenient, unhealthy foods.

Are there some convenient foods that are pretty healthy that your daughter enjoys or you guys just suck it up and cook for her every time? Oh, no, we have tons of like we have all these grass fed beef sticks that we get from, you know, Amazon or whatever. We've got the Nick's sticks. We've got the chomps. We've got all these like beef sticks and sugar free jerky that it's basically grass fedfed beef and some seasoning. And it's really clean stuff. It's sugar-free. We always have hard-boiled pastured eggs in the fridge. We have cheese sticks. We have hard-boiled eggs. We've got beef sticks. We've got low-sugar beef jerky. We have all this stuff that's pretty portable you know and uh it's really not

that bad um i'm not doing like tons and tons and tons of food prep and right um necessarily i mean i do sometimes but you don't have to and there's just a major thing there just to make sure your kids are getting protein just like you like they're just eating basically like you exactly yeah exactly and it's just kind of lead by example really that's awesome uh ted you mentioned pasture raised and grass-fed beef a handful of times have you um discovered like a like basically like a true benefit and like is it really worth it for us to kind of like uh you know advertise and say like yeah it actually is a better benefit for you if you guys go grass-fed versus non uh in my opinion absolutely i mean like like a pastured egg you have to eat 11 factory farmed eggs to get the

same omega-3 in one pastured egg. It's ridiculous. I mean, you just crack that egg open and look at a pastured egg versus a factory egg. And it's ridiculous. So, you know, the factory egg, it's got this pale, thin, anemic yolk that's really flat and stringy. But the pastured egg is this bright orange thing that stands up and just punches you right in the face, right? Like, you can't even even compare them it's the same thing with grass-fed beef you get so much better uh omega-3 to omega-6 ratio from grass-fed beef um so i radically prefer it i you always want to get the uh highest quality you can afford so I'm all in on wild caught seafood, pastured eggs,

and you definitely want grass-fed beef if you can afford it. Now, there's plenty of times where I'll just eat whatever I can get. It might be just really low quality, but that's the best thing I've got at that time. And I don't really feel bad about it. But I do think that you kind of want to buy the best thing you can afford. Yeah. Cause it's worth it. What's the biggest difference you've seen with protein? You know, when people are satiated from eating protein, do they tend to just make better choices? Like you had the example of your daughter. I think that's a great example right there

is the fact that she has all these kind of protein options. She's probably just continually eating more protein than the average kid. And then therefore, she doesn't care or doesn't have room for or doesn't even desire, you know, eating like Cheetos or something like that. Yeah, exactly. And I think it all starts with going out of your way to eat this high nutrient density, high protein percentage stuff on the front end. You eat a half a pound of smoked salmon and a four egg omelet or something, you're just going to walk right past the bagels and the crackers and the muffins and the candy bowls

and all this stuff because you're just not that hungry. And I think that's how you have to do it. You have to go way out of your way to eat a whole bunch of this ultra high nutrient density stuff. And then you're just not that hungry. You just walk past all the garbage. If you don't eat that stuff, you're just going to be starving and you're just grazing all day long. And I see this, you know, in my patients, they're like, okay, for breakfast, I threw away the toast and the juice and the cereal and the croissants and the bagels and the donut. And I just, instead I just ate my egg, my one egg, my one 60 calorie, six gram of protein egg. But then I was hungry, you know, two hours later and I'm eating, you know,

protein egg. But then I was hungry, you know, two hours later and I'm eating, you know, like frigging wheat thins and there's some muffins and I'm like, yeah, you have to take the stuff that's good and just amp it way up. You know, you have to, you should be eating like, okay, how am I going to get a pound of meat or, you know, a half a dozen eggs or, you know, you have to up the quantity on this good stuff and then you're just not that hungry. You know, a half a dozen eggs or, you know, you have to up the quantity on this good stuff. And then you're just not that hungry. You know, what I want to know, because you said you don't tell people what not to eat, but there are a lot of people that are listening that maybe they they're from the macro counting crowd. Right. And they're like, oh, well, you know what? I'm within my calories. I can make this fit. I can make this pop tart fit. So when we

think about that, what are the reasons why people would want to avoid these foods? The garbage that you talk about. Oh, right, right, right. So if you, okay. If you did actually hit your protein and mineral target completely, and you're just trying to backfill some energy, I do think you can get away with eating some garbage. You know, like your, you know, your carb night, cherry turnovers or whatever. I think there I think some people can get away with that. The problem with the refined carbs and fats like the sugar, flour, oil type stuff, like your Pop-Tarts, is that if you ate that all by itself without any protein or fiber, you really get into trouble with your incretins. So there are these things that your small intestines,

these satiety hormones that your small intestines secrete based on what you're eating. And if you're eating a refined carb and refined fat by itself, it's absorbed in the very first part of the small intestine, the proximal small intestine. And you get this sort of GIP secretion, this incretin that basically makes you hungrier. You get way less satiety. You might even get negative satiety where three or four hours later, you're really hungry versus if you eat a giant steak and a salad, it takes so long to digest. It goes all the way through the small intestine is absorbed from the distal or the end of the small intestine.

You get a lot more, um, uh, GLP one and you get a, basically a better incretin profile, which, which is like a satiety hormone that makes you kind of not hungry. And so I do think you can shoot yourself in the foot from a satiety perspective if you just eat a Pop-Tart, you know what I mean? I mean, obviously you can get away with some of that though. Yeah. And do you believe that your body maybe cries out for those things when you deliver those things to yourself and you are maybe used to that? Like I think – I see this with a lot of kids. They get so excited for – or even adults I see it. But they get so excited for the junk food and it – what I'm seeing is it seems like the junk food encourages the junk food.

And it seems like the healthy food encourages the healthy food. Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. And I think there's a lot of brain chemistry and brain reward and dopamine and addictive type stuff going on with the high energy density carbs and fats together. Like these foods are definitely literally addictive. And that's a huge problem for some people. I don't think that happens to everyone. But I think some people get just ridiculously addicted to high energy density carbs and fats together.

Your donuts, your pizza, your french fries, your potato chips. Some people, this lights up their brain like crack and they just can't not eat this stuff. It's a huge problem. With this being like addictive then, so for the individuals that these are actually trigger foods, addictive type foods, and they're trying to make a change, but they always find themselves getting driven back. I know we talked about obviously eating foods with higher satiety, but when something is addictive, it's difficult. So how do you approach that with your patients? How do you have them start to make that change gradually? Is it a cold turkey deal or is it like, let's just get away from this altogether? How do you do that? of all they need to eat more because they don't have enough protein and minerals they're eating this nutrient devoid food like garbage and they're they need you know protein and minerals so they have to overeat and then there's overeating because you want to overeat because the hedonic

nature of these carbon fats together because you're addicted to it and it's tasty and delicious and lights up your brain and you get this big dopamine spike and all that sort of thing. So I definitely start by trying to crowd out the bad foods by eating more good foods. And I'm hoping that people hit this sort of protein and mineral satiety first, and then they're just not as hungry and they don't need to eat as much. You know what I mean? So step one is taking care of your nutrient requirements with some sort of high protein high mineral nutrient dense food and hit your nutrient satiety first um but then you know i think that there is i i don't want anyone to ever be to the point where they're like okay i can never eat this food ever again and i don't think that's realistic i don't think that's ever be to the point where they're like okay i can never eat this food ever again

and i don't think that's realistic i don't think that's ever going to happen so i try to tell people to maybe just eat uh a cheap food you know once a day let's let's start limiting yourself you know i mean okay once a day you can have food, but only after you've eaten protein and minerals and nutrient-dense foods. And then it's like, okay, well, don't buy it and have it in your house. You have to go out and just buy one of them and eat it that way. So like you're at a restaurant and you get a dessert or you go and buy one donut and eat it and make it social. And then I tell people to be really mindful of that sort of thing. You're like, okay, I know this is a cheap food and I know it's not optimal, but I'm going to

eat it anyway. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to be mindful about it. It has to be something really special. It has to be something really good. It's going to, you know, hopefully it's a social event. Other people are there. You're eating it away from home. You're just buying one. And there are these ways to sort of not deprive yourself or say, okay, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever again in my life eat a donut. I just don't, I don't think that's probably going to happen. So now it's like, okay, once a day I can eat a donut, but only after I've eaten, you know, salmon and salad. And then I'm going to go out and buy it've eaten, you know, salmon and salad. And then, um, I'm going to go out and buy it and, you know, it's going to be a social thing and an outing and, you know, you just have to be more mindful and, uh, that kind of thing. Okay. Do you feel that, uh, counting calories

is maybe a, is maybe flawed or do you utilize that in your practice? What are some of your thoughts on that? So the reason that calories are broken is because protein calories don't count, right? Protein, you can't overeat protein. You're not going to gain weight overeating protein. Protein calories don't really count. And so the only calories I'm worried about are non-protein energy calories. And that's why I like to look at it from a protein to energy standpoint instead of a calorie standpoint. So the problem with calories is a lot of your

super high protein foods have a fair amount of calories in them. But I just don't want anyone restricting them. I don't want someone to look at a piece of steak and say, oh, I can't eat that. That's a lot of calories. You know what I mean? You know, I can't eat a pound of steak because that's 750 calories. Well, what they're not thinking about is that if you eat a pound of steak,

you're not hungry again for the rest of your life. And so that you get this massive amount of satiety from that. And it's so disproportionate to the calories. You know what I mean? Somebody might say, oh, well, I could eat a couple donuts and it's the same amount of calories. Yeah, that's not going to work. So I don't like calories. I think calories are broken because there's protein calories. Uh, and then there's energy calories and it should really only be the energy calories that we're

focusing on. On that note, on the energy calories, I'm curious, um, about your thoughts on this, because you said, uh, you can either go, you know go very high fat, low carb or no carb being keto or higher carb and moderate low fat, right? What I've noticed is when I've worked with individuals, let's say they're bodybuilders or even non-bodybuilders, especially men, when they go higher moderate carb and they have very, very low fats. And I felt this for myself in the past. Things like the libido, they start to feel more tired, lethargic, et cetera. So it seems that there needs to be kind of a minimum fat amount. I'm curious, do you know what that minimum fat amount would be as far as total energy calories, like how someone would go about finding that out for themselves? Right. So I typically don't recommend going below about 30% of calories from fat because

you're going to see lower libido, lower testosterone. It's definitely going to be a problem. You really don't want to go lower than 30% of calories. But then it's weird to think about it in percentage because if you're an athlete and you're burning a bazillion calories a day, it's really more about absolute fat grams because you could eat a 20% fat diet, but you're eating 10,000 calories a day. So your absolute fat amount is nice and high. so there's sort of some gram limits you never want to go below i never recommend someone go below 30 grams of fat a day period because you're going to get uh bile stasis in your gallbladder your risk for gallstones

um so you just you really don't want to shave the fat grams any lower than that probably most people don't want to go below you know 50 or 60 grams of fat but 30 would definitely be an absolute minimum for me and then what percent that is kind of depends on how sedentary you are and how many how much food you're eating overall you know i mean if you're a super active athlete that could be five percent of your diet you know but if you're if you're just sitting on the couch and you're 80 years old and your whole basal metabolic rate is 900 calories a day that might you know that's going to be 50 of your calories so it's a little bit weird that way depending on how much you're eating. But yeah, there's absolute flourish. You never want to go below on fat. Got it. And along with that, because there are obviously a lot of women listeners to that are

listening here. Are there, I guess, things that they need to think about differently from men, as far as these levels are concerned? Or is like, one thing that I noticed is that like, it tends to be that a lot of women tend to like higher carb diets or feel that, oh, I need that. Um, how should they go about that? Well, I, so I honestly don't think that the optimum level of any macronutrient is zero. So I typically don't recommend zero carb diets. I don't think that's optimal. I think people are going to feel a little bit better with a little bit of carbohydrate. It might be an ergogenic aid to, you know, they might have better workouts or better energy levels or something like that. So women in particular, I don't recommend super extreme zero carb or super low fat.

I think either way is going to be bad. I think it's a U-shaped curve for both of those macronutrients. I also think that you really don't want to push it to the very extremes, especially in women. I don't like extended fasting in women. I don't like zero carb, pure carnivore diets necessarily. I think that they're a little more sensitive in terms of reproduction and hormones to extremes in fasting and calories and total carb or fat deprivation. So it's just not optimal.

All of this stuff is on a U-shaped curve. And so you want to be sort of a little bit low carb, but not zero. And you want to be a little bit low fat, but not zero. And you want to be a little bit intermittent fasting, but not extreme. So, you know, everybody's different. And it's, you know, what's going to work best for everybody. I don't really know. But, but yeah, you don't really want everyone for some reason, humans just always go for the extreme, right? Well, if carbs are bad, zero has to be the best, right? Or if fat's bad, I'm going to eat absolutely none at all. And it just doesn't work that way with anything on the planet. Everything's on this U-shaped curve where there's too much and then not enough. And it's a little hard to figure out exactly what's perfect. If you were working with someone that's low carb, what style of carbs would you recommend

if you're trying to have somebody be like keto-ish? Well, what I like is manipulating carbohydrate frequency, right? So I'm all about, okay, let's drop your carb frequency and not sweat the quantity so much. You know, maybe you don't eat carbs for breakfast. Maybe you don't eat carbs for lunch. Maybe you just eat carbs once a day with dinner or after dinner, and you're doing this cyclical ketogenic thing. And I think that works really well. So there's times where you're clearly in a completely carb depleted state. And then other times where you're eating carbohydrates

and you have to get really good at both ends. You have to be good at handling a carb load, but then you have to be good at living in this carb free environment. And so I like manipulating carb frequency. I like once a day. I think that's a really good option for a lot of people. And yes, that basically is, you know, carb night or carb backloading or something like that. But I think there's a lot to be said for this sort of carb frequency manipulation. And in terms of the cyclical approach, because you actually talked about that earlier in this episode, how you follow a cyclical approach during the year. How does that work for you? Like, how does your diet change throughout the year? Are you generally pretty low carb? or trying to you know mimic uh the uh evolution by like all winter just being super low carb and then eating much carb in the summer but but what i am aware of is you know my body fat percentage

and how much i weigh and if i feel like i'm gaining too much body fat i will just intentionally do a cut where I'm basically mimicking a lower energy time of the year, so to speak, or whatever, where basically I'm low carb and low fat. The protein percentage is high. This is the way homo sapiens would probably eat in the wintertime. You know, you just basically kill an animal and eat the whole thing. And that animal's also starving for energy. So it's fairly lean and very high in protein so there are cyclical times where i'll eat you know maybe it's just a few days where the protein percentage is very high it's low carb and low fat yeah and then there are other times when i might um be you know fairly lean feeling hung, and I'll just go ahead and eat higher energy cheat meals or

cheat, something like that approach, you know, and it ends up being this kind of cyclical thing, which I think everyone does naturally, on some level or the other, just on their own. And I think this sort of cyclical thing is sort of the way to go, honestly, in my opinion. What you're referring to, is that, um, kind of like, uh, the protein sparing modified fast that we've heard about before? Yeah. If you, if you take it to a pretty good extreme, that would be considered a protein sparing

modified fast. And that would just be something you would do for like just a couple of days or something like that. You wouldn't want to do because it's the protein sparing is you're predominantly eating protein, correct? And then not eating much fat, not eating much carbohydrate. Right. And then for me, it's not really like it's sort of on a spectrum. Like you could have a light protein sparing modified fast you know what i mean where you're just slightly upping the protein energy ratio or you could go extreme and just eat you know white fish and uh salad and uh but it's sort of on a spectrum and it all depends on what people

can tolerate and how long they can tolerate it for. And it might be as simple as just changing out the meat that you're eating. Like maybe you normally eat two steaks a day and maybe you switch it up with one steak meal and one chicken meal. And that's like, that's a leaner choice, right? Exactly. And that's what I like to do with patients. I don't like this really extreme stuff with a stop date. I'm like, okay, why don't you just bump up the protein to energy ratio a little bit and see how long you can sustain that? I mean, smaller change, more sustainable. You're just incrementally progressing this protein energy

ratio of your diet in a series of small food swaps, just like you said, okay, maybe I'm going to go from bacon to turkey bacon. Maybe I'm going to go from ribeye to sirloin. And you make these little swaps and you're just slowly incrementally maneuvering to a higher protein energy ratio and hoping that you get a better result there. You know what I mean? I know this is going to be a small sect of the listeners because i mean of the way we are but you know the game changers just came out and there are a lot of individuals that are vegan or vegetarian for um say philosophical type reasons now how do they need to i guess deal with or modify things for themselves so that yeah

you can get a lot of protein from those diets, albeit it's a little bit difficult, and still remain, I guess, healthy, athletic, et cetera. Well, you can totally make a vegan or vegetarian diet work. Absolutely. I have patients who are doing this. They're really smart about it. They're very successful, but you have to go out of your way to target protein. So you want to be eating soybeans, soy, edamame, tofu, something soy. You want to be eating lentils. You want to be eating maybe even some plant protein powders, hemp protein, rice protein, pea protein. You want to be combining proteins. You don't have a lot of room for junk because you're already getting such a carb load from all your protein sources. They're inherently lower in protein-energy ratio, so you're already getting this fairly high carb load. So you really don't have as much room for the Pop-Tarts and that sort of thing.

And also, once again, I see athletes getting away with it a little bit better. Because if you're eating a fairly low protein energy food like lentils, but you're burning 10,000 calories a day, and so you're eating, you know, 50 pounds of lentils, you're definitely going to get enough protein out of this food. It's somebody sitting on the couch who's not burning much energy, who's really in trouble. Because in order to eat enough to get adequate protein, you're going to massively overeat energy. And that's going to be a huge problem. So I actually think athletes might be able to pull this off better because they can dispose

of the carb load that comes along with these proteins. But my advice to anyone who's, well, if you're a vegetarian, I'm begging everyone to find the few animal foods you do eat and eat the hell out of them. And if you're a vegan, you really just want to target protein like it's your job. Every meal has to be centered around tofu or soybeans or edamame or lentils or something that's, you know, reasonably high in protein. It's possible, but it's not optimal. And you have to be really smart about it. And you have to take your B12 supplement. And most of the vegans I see are deficient in a lot of...

I have a bunch of vegan patients and they're almost always low in iron, low in vitamin D, low in DHA, low in B12. There are a lot of things that you have to supplement and it's an uphill battle, but you can do it. Got it. Um, how, just how sick and how fat is America? Like in your practice with the patients that you're seeing, like have things gotten worse over the years? Are things getting any better? I mean, there's more, it seems like there's more experts, seems like there's more information, there's more information at our fingertips, there's more people talking on Instagram and YouTube and platforms like this and TED Talks and all these different things. Are people getting any healthier from this?

Or what's the disconnect if people are getting sicker? No, we're screwed, man. We are totally effed. Like, it's bad out there. I am a boots-on-the-ground doctor in the trenches, and it's brutal. The average American male is five foot nine, weighs one hundred and ninety nine pounds and has a 40 inch waist. I mean, it's bad. It's bad. The average woman is five foot four and weighs one seventy eight.

Yeah, it's literally half. This is this is something I don't really hear people talk about much, and it's not to make fun or anything, but I just think it's something that people should be talking about. It seems like women are heavier than men. It seems like women are almost worse off in a way. Do you see that, or am I incorrect? No, you're correct. Obesity is worse now in women. It's a huge problem.

And obesity has hit 40%. Prediabetes has hit 50% of adult Americans. Everybody who walks in the door is prediabetic, obese, fatty liver. It's just beyond epidemic. It's the largest epidemic, you know, homo sapiens have ever faced. It's a complete disaster. Yeah, it's bad. It's getting worse instead of better.

The plant-based movement is not helping if you calculate how many calories you get for per unit of protein um if if tomorrow everyone instantly went plant-based we would all have to eat about 40 more energy calories just to get the same amount of protein. And we would be screwed. I mean, we're already screwed, but it would be so much worse. If I just flipped a switch and everyone was plant-based tomorrow, we'd instantly get significantly fatter. It would be a total nightmare. Let's say I'm 25 years old and I'm just kind of eating the way I want to eat. I'm exercising a little bit here and there, but I'm definitely, you know, fatter than I should be.

Why would I be so concerned about insulin resistance or like diabetes? Like it's not going to happen to me. Like I'm, you know, I hit the gym here and there. But, yeah, I enjoy some beer with my friends on the weekend. I love watching football. I eat some buffalo wings, stuff like that. Like why would I be concerned? What's the, what does insulin resistance do? How bad are some of these diseases that might be headed our way? Well, every single chronic degenerative disease you can

mention is associated with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. I mean, everything, heart attacks and strokes and cancers and Alzheimer's and all your autoimmune diseases, all your arthritic conditions, all your cancers and strokes and cardiovascular disease, they're all pretty much linearly associated with metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance, which is all just energy toxicity, which is all just being over fat. So being over fat pretty much drives every single chronic degenerative disease you could mention. And people are living a pretty long lifespan in this country, but their health span sucks. Like everyone is just, um, you know, everyone just expects to get Alzheimer's and everyone expects to end up in a nursing home and everyone expects to be frail and diabetic and have all this, uh, degenerative stuff going on.

And the more over fat you are, the faster all that happens to you. So yeah, we can keep everybody alive till they're 80, but your health span is going to be awful. And that should be everyone's number one concern. And if we do this correctly and if we take care of ourselves, maybe we don't have to be on medications from the time we're 45 till our death, because that's what I'm seeing. I'm about, I'm going to be 43 coming up. And there's a lot of my friends and a lot of people that I know, it's very common for them to be on cholesterol meds and blood pressure medications and all kinds of different stuff. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, like I,

you know, I'm glad that I've been so attached to fitness for so long because I don't see that in my, in my near future anyway. Yeah, no, absolutely. You're totally right. It does seem like people are not necessarily living longer, but maybe dying longer. You know, these things are going to, like these things are going to kill us slowly. I think, you know, if you were to think about it, like if a terrorist organization was to come over here and infect 50% of the population with something that would kill them very slowly over the next several years,

we'd probably go do something about it. We'd probably devise a plan, you know, and it's just sad to see that there's not a cohesive plan, you know, being developed here in the United States to really try to attack this situation. But I don't know what the answer would really be. Like, I don't want, you know, I don't want to necessarily see all these yummy foods like automatically disappear, you know, like that doesn't seem great either. So it's hard to, it's hard to have a solution to it, but hopefully we can get knowledge out to people

and hopefully people can understand how important it is for them to teach their kids and for us to teach the younger generation on how important it is for them to stay out in front of it. You know, my hope for my children is that they don't really ever have to be on like a quote unquote diet. They just are like, hey, like, what's a good source of protein for me to eat? And then they just sort of go from there with the rest of their day and the rest of their

life. Yeah, no, I like that. I really do. That's hard. I also think that the, the very, the, the, if I could just do one thing, like one public health um sort of approach to try to reverse all this it would be protein percentage if you can get protein to 30 of your calories you're going to reverse 100 of pre-diabetics automatically like they will just automatically eat less and they're no longer pre-diabetic we have studies demonstrating this so protein percentage is probably the single most important public health

factor out there for this diabesity epidemic if you can just get protein to 30 and you do that by centering all your meals around protein. And every time you eat, it should be, okay, what protein am I eating? And I think that's our only hope. That's our only hope with the diabetes epidemic. I think you said average person eats like 14% or something like that, right? It's 12.5% in America right now. Hunter-gatherers are at about 33% protein by calories worldwide, hunter-gatherer macronutrient estimations right now. And worldwide, we're at about 14%, but the US has dropped to 12.5% over the past 60 years of the obesity epidemic. And if you look at specially designed obesogenic rat chow designed

to get omnivore mammals like mice and rats as fat as possible, it's usually fixed at about 10% protein. And we've slipped down to 12.5% protein in the US. So we're just a couple percentage points shy of peak obesity, maximum overeating, the recipe to get as fat as possible. And that's where we're headed. You know, it's funny how I still get messages from people wondering about eating excessive protein or dangers of eating excessive protein. A lot of people still get, like I've heard of guys getting, like their doctor saying, don't eat too much protein. It's going to be bad for your liver, et cetera. Now, a lot of people still get fed that information.

Why is that potentially not true? Or what is the truth to that? And what does it matter? So, okay, it's impossible to overeat protein. You can't eat too much protein. In 20 years of medical practice, I've never looked at someone and said, you're eating too much protein. You can't eat too much protein. In 20 years of medical practice, I've never looked at someone and said, you're eating too much protein. We have zero case reports in the entire history of bodybuilding on someone eating too much protein and damaging their kidneys or their

bones or something like that. There are some very, very rare people with a genetic disorder where they can't deaminate um a ton of protein and you might get some sort of toxic ammonia buildup if you massively overeat protein this is extremely rare and uh there's very very few case reports of that happening but the average person they literally are not capable of eating quote too much protein. There's nothing bad will happen to you. Um, I, you know, I just defy anyone to try to eat a dozen boneless skinless chicken breasts. You know what I mean? You just, you literally physically can't do it and nothing bad is going to happen to you. So we have all these protein overfeeding studies and nothing bad happens.

We have the whole bodybuilding community with insane protein intakes and nothing bad happens to these people. And unless you have some crazy genetic weird disorder, then you're really not going to have any problems from, quote, overeating protein. It's really not even possible. Got it. I wonder how many people too are undiagnosed with insulin resistance. You know, we have the number that says about half the population, but it's, it's probably even, it's probably even worse than what we're already seeing. Cause there's probably a lot of teenagers and probably a lot of young people that haven't gone to the doctor to get anything checked up on because they haven't needed medical or haven't felt like they needed anything medically. So there's probably a lot of people undiagnosed as well, right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. What you got over there, Andrew? what you got over there andrew um i'm just thinking about like the the person that maybe received this video link from you know somebody who might be more knowledgeable when it comes to diet and nutrition or maybe they got the audio link and um this person they they're they want to lose weight they don't really know how i think of the person that's like tried everything right

um one thing that you've talked about like on your website and stuff is kind of like eating for the the body weight that you want can you kind of like simply explain that for the person that just that that's the first time that they've ever heard that statement before oh yeah okay so like if you're trying to guesstimate how much protein you should eat, it's roughly a gram per pound of your ideal weight or your desired body weight or what you should weigh or what you want to weigh. You know what I mean? So I'm, you know, 5'10". If I look up ideal body weight for a 5'10 male, it's 160 pounds. So I should probably target 160 grams of protein a day. And then if I'm trying to lose weight, I want to keep energy grams, that's carbs and fats, less than protein grams. So if I'm 5'10 and I'm overweight and I know my ideal weight is 160, I should eat at or over 160

grams of protein a day. And then I should eat under 160 grams per day of energy, which is carbs and fats together. And so that's just my really quick and dirty protein over under using your reference weight or your ideal weight or what you should weigh or what you're supposed to weigh for your height and then calculating how to eat protein grams higher than one gram per pound and energy grams lower than one gram per pound. In that scenario of the 160, you're dividing it out over the two, over carbs and fat, correct? Or shifting one more one way than the other, right? Or shifting one more one way than the other, right? Yeah.

I mean, honestly, you could have a higher carb, lower fat, a higher fat, lower carb, a little bit of both. The reality is everyone's going to be eating some of both. And so the general point is just prioritizing the protein over the energy. Cool. I know that we've had a lot of guests that have talked about this on the podcast before but a lot of individuals seem to be worried about their cholesterol when eating high fat and higher fat foods um can you talk to us a little bit about that so anything that makes you thinner anything that decreases your waist circumference is going to improve your lipid parameters. Your cholesterol

to HDL ratio is going to go down. Your triglyceride to HDL ratio is going to go down. Your particle sizes will improve. Your lipid particle insulin resistance scores are going to go down. Your fasting glucose, your fasting insulin, your A1C, everything you can measure is going to go down. You're fasting glucose, you're fasting insulin, you're A1C. Everything you can measure is going to get better as your waist circumference goes down, except your total cholesterol might actually go up. Now your cholesterol to HDL ratio is going to go down, and most doctors think that's more important. So the one and only thing that might go up on this sort of diet would be total cholesterol uh which is kind of part of why so many low carbers feel like total cholesterol is a bit of a joke because uh how could it be that every single parameter you measure gets better and total cholesterol goes up and somehow that's bad.

The other factor is I can take anybody on earth and have them fast for a couple of days and their total cholesterol will go up. I can take anyone on earth and make them do a bunch of exercise and their total cholesterol goes up. And I'm just not convinced that that's going to clog your arteries or be a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And so that's why total cholesterol is kind of a joke. And it's not correlated hardly at all with cardiovascular disease. And so all the ratios that really matter are going to get better and better and better as you get thinner on any diet. And if you're eating nothing but steak and eggs, the satiety is so high that you're going to eat less and your waist circumference is going to go down and everything you can measure

is going to get better. And so it's really, it's really not about what you're eating as much as about how thin you are, to be honest. And a lot of times with people that just have lost weight, a lot of times we'll see an increase in cholesterol too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Weight loss, cholesterol typically goes up. All these positive health behaviors make your total cholesterol go up. And so I think it's kind of a joke.

Got anything else over there, Andrew? Again, just kind of going back to the less knowledgeable person, that being me on this podcast right now. No way. Yeah. And SEMA is helping me out with my diet right now. I'm currently counting everything that I'm eating because I'm trying to shred body fat. And one night I was just like, you know, know man i'm still kind of like i want a little something extra i'm like oh let me have this banana and i'm eating it and then i start

like you know putting it into my uh my calculator and i'm like oh my gosh this has 27 grams of carbs like what am i doing right now um so when it comes to fruit carbs like do you give people the green light or do you tell them like i I mean, I'm pretty sure the answer is in moderation, but do you even like try to pull fruit away from people? So, okay. When it comes to fruit, I tell everybody to eat the hell out of low sugar fruits. What's a low sugar fruit? That's cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, avocados, olives. These are all botanically fruit.

Pumpkins, squash, zucchini, they're all fruit botanically. They're very high in nutrient density. They're very low in sugar and energy. And I think everybody should be able to eat these in an unlimited quantity and probably not even track them or worry about them. The problem is when you get a fruit that's been bred for maximum energy yield. So we've bred all our fruit for maximum carbon energy yield. So your wild banana looks like this tiny little thing with five grams of sugar in it. And then your grocery store banana has 27, 29 grams of sugar in it. banana has you know 27 29 grams of sugar in it so i think people can get into a little bit of trouble with the maximum energy yield super high sugar fruit although honestly even there

uh it's so much lower energy density than like a candy bar that you're just not going to get into as much trouble. Like if you try to eat the energy from a candy bar from apples, I mean, you have to eat like 18 apples to equal the energy in one candy bar. You're just never going to do it. So you just can't get into as much trouble with fruit because of all the fiber and the water and the volumetrics. And you're going to get all this satiety from that. So when it comes to fruit for me, I'm like, okay, low sugar fruit, go crazy, eat your body weight and that stuff every day. Who cares? Higher sugar fruit, maybe, you know,

treat it as like a dessert. Um, but it's so much better choice than any sort of refined processed sugar, flour, oil, you know, refined processed, high energy, density carbon fat, like compared to a candy bar, your high sugar fruit is a million times better choice. So I'm like, yeah, please eat an apple or banana for dessert. That's a really good option. It's so much better than the candy bar. I think a place where people need to also just pay attention

is that anything that's designed to make money, like whether it's a, even if it's a quote unquote healthy snack, that healthy snack is designed for you to over consume. And so you may have a tendency to over consume those things. And this is just like some small areas where I see some people slip up in their day to day. It's still a way better choice. It's still kind of

like halfway on plan, but it's still something that's a small deviation from their typical diet. And they would just be better off in terms of their continued weight loss and their continued progress without some of these things. So I see some people making those mistakes too because it's like anything that's designed for like keto or anything that's designed to fit your macros on something else, it's still going to be hyperpalatable. They're doing the same thing that the food industry has done to get you to consume these things in overabundance. So even on those healthy snacks, you still have to be you to consume these things in overabundance. So even on those healthy snacks, you still have to be a little cautious on how you proceed. Yeah, no, I totally agree. You're totally right. Absolutely. I'm really curious because like you work with a lot of people now,

but was there, when did you start doing this for yourself or eating this way? Has this been something you've done for just the longest time or did you switch? I was introduced to low-carb about 20 years ago, and I started doing that then. I started eating low-carb then, and it was pretty magical for me because I used to have just the worst hypoglycemia you've ever seen. I was a vegetarian, and I would have juice and toast and cereal for breakfast. And a couple of hours later, I would just get so shaky. I thought I was going to die. So going low carb for me, I've been doing it for a couple of decades. It's been really helpful for flattening out my blood sugar. But I would say only in about the past decade, have I really gotten into the, uh, higher protein zone, like this sort of higher protein to energy type thing.

And, uh, I've definitely had some body composition benefits from that. And, uh, so I would say I've been, I've been eating this way for, you know, better part of a decade. Okay. You mentioned earlier about, you know, the importance of eating protein and how it can help people manage the rest of the calories that they intake. And you mentioned having research and tests and things like that and studies to back that up. What kind of studies and research have you seen in that regard? Well, okay, I'm a huge fan of Drs. Raubenheimer and Simpson. These are two Australian professors who've done a lot of research on the protein leverage hypothesis to obesity.

And they took about 150 studies where humans ate ad-lib amounts of food. Basically, you ate as much as you wanted, but somebody tracked all their macronutrients and they graphed this out. And what ends up happening, if you graph out ad-lib human eating versus macronutrients, you get this ridiculously narrow line of protein prioritization where every human on earth is eating until they get a certain amount of protein. But if it's a low protein percent food, they're going to massively overeat energy, maybe an order of magnitude more energy, maybe 10 times more energy than a really high protein food. And it's this perfectly straight line on these protein prioritization graphs that really, really makes it hit home for me. And these researchers have done these studies

in a whole bunch of different animals. They've done this in rats and mice and fish and insects and birds, and it's just very well conserved. All of these animals will eat until they get enough protein. And that's just what's driving a lot of their eating behavior. If they're eating a low protein food, they automatically have to massively overeat energy calories to get there. And this is such a universal phenomenon that's so well conserved and so well demonstrated that you just can't ignore it. I mean, I personally think it only explains half of the obesity epidemic and the other half is the addictive nature of high energy density carbs and fats together like donuts and pizza and chips being addictive so i think half of the obesity

is we're forced to eat more just to get enough protein because of protein dilution from carbon fat energy you know sugar flour oil the other half is the addictive nature of foods. But there's really enough evidence in the medical literature to completely support half of all obesity being due to protein dilution, low protein foods. What do you think of like trying like a trick, like, you know, eating a chicken breast, you know, let's say you were to eat a chicken breast before you had like a donut. Over time, would the protein win, do you you feel like because of these studies that you're mentioning? Oh yeah. And well, there's a lot of preload studies, right? They do these studies where they have you eat a snack and then two hours later you hit the buffet and they weigh and

measure how much you eat. And protein is the best preload by a mile. If you eat a protein snack and then go to a buffet two hours later, you're literally going to eat way less than if you have a donut. A carb plus fat, low protein preload is the worst, of course. So you eat a donut, two hours later, you're going to eat the whole buffet. You get a chicken breast, two hours later, you're going to eat way, way, way get a chicken breast two hours later, you're going to eat, you know, way, way, way less. It's, it's pretty dramatic. We have a ton of studies on this and it's a very, very real thing. What a protein shake have a similar impact or is it because it's not eaten and chewed up? It might not have the same impact. Satiety seems to be lower with, um, drinking protein versus eating it.

So it's not as good, but it's still probably better than other preloads. It's like the bros were right. Like it just honestly seems like a super simple idea. Just end up eating more protein so you can under eat the rest of the food you want to eat. It's a very easy fix, honestly, but that's oversimplifying it, I guess. I think you're totally right though. I think it really is that simple. And everyone else is like, oh no, you know, obesity is so complicated that it can't be understood by, you know, even the smartest obesity researchers. But no, it's like super dumbed down and basic. Like your dog is fat because you fed it cheap dog food that's got a bunch of grains and potatoes and peas and stuff in there.

And it really just comes down to food choice and protein dilution. And if you were supposed to be eating, obesity just goes away. I mean, this works in dogs. It works in cats. It works in animals in the dogs. It works in cats. It works in animals in the zoo. It works in people. It's really that basic and we've massively overcomplicated obesity. Do either of you guys remember the name of the documentary a few years ago? It was a nutrition documentary. I remember vividly a lot of people were like starting to say protein causes diabetes because of this

because of this documentary it was god it wasn't like what the health or anything like that it was what the hell okay yeah it was what the hell yeah and then i started seeing a bunch of posts people like oh god protein causes diabetes and my my mind exploded i was it's like? What's going on here? Yeah, that was a good propaganda piece. Lord. Okay. Yeah. That's, wow. Yeah.

Where do you usually start when somebody comes to you and they're sick and they have fatty liver and they have insulin resistance? What's a place that you start with them? Do you encourage them to exercise and things like that? I know that you're into exercising, but you don't really, I don't think you lift very often. You do more like calisthenics. What are some recommendations you give to other people? Okay, it has to start with diet. Like if you're at the point where you're partitioning all your energy every day into

just storing fat, you don't have energy to exercise uh these people don't feel like exercising they're they're just barely making it through their day and their whole day is just partitioning everything into into fat storage basically so it has to start with a diet and it has to start with upping their, anything that they happen to eat that has protein in it. So we, you know, we do these 24 hour food recalls, we find out what people are eating. And then we're like, wow, you know, you're eating 60 grams of protein in a day, and you know, 400 grams of energy, and you need to flip that around and reverse it. So what is it you eat that has protein in it that you like, and then you just you have to flip that around and reverse it so what is it you eat that has protein

in it that you like and then you just you have to make yourself almost eat that um and crowd out the energy you know what i mean so step one uh it starts in the grocery store you go to the store and you buy all these super high protein foods that you are willing to eat or that you like to eat it might be turkey bacon it might be chicken breast it might be fish uh it might be lean beef it might be whey protein shakes it might be tofu if you're a vegetarian or vegan but you're buying a lot of this stuff like way more than you've ever bought before and people are like i'm i've never bought, you know, I've never cooked just like a pound of meat. And I'm like, well, yeah. And that's

probably why you're overweight. And if you want a different result than what you've always gotten, you've got to do something radically different. So it starts in the grocery store. You buy an insane amount of protein. And every day when you wake up, you're like, okay, I need 160 grams of protein. That's over a pound and a half of lean meat. How am I going to get that? When am I going to cook it? How am I going to eat it? And it's really just procurement and logistics of high protein foods. So that's how I start with everybody. I'm like, you need this much protein. That means you have to go to the store right now and buy it and cook it and eat it. And yes, I know that's weird.

And I know that's different. I know that you're not used to that. But that's what you're going to do. And that's how you're going to get a different outcome than you've always gotten. And so step one, the high protein foods. Step two is then like not eating a bunch of crap. But that happens naturally and organically after you've eaten the stuff you're supposed to be eating.

And then exercise like, you know, weeks down the road when people start feeling way better, you just see their energy levels go way up. If you were partitioning all your energy into storage all day long, but now you're not, now the energy arrow is going the other way. It's coming out of storage. People just spontaneously start working out. And I have people tell me,

I'm warmer all the time. I don't have to wear a coat. I just feel this energy. I'm spontaneously going for a walk. I'm fidgeting more. I'm just moving more. Suddenly people aren't partitioning all their energy into storage and they've just got more energy available to do stuff with. And I almost feel like the intermittent fasting happens organically on its own. The exercise happens organically on its own. The not eating crap happens organically on its own. And it just starts with getting the high protein and eating it. And that's really the biggest factor, the biggest step. Somebody has like severe hunger, severe cravings. Do you just suggest that they overeat on protein? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Yeah. Because you, you almost can't do it. And then also this person

probably needs that protein. They're probably that hungry for a reason. They probably need the protein and the minerals and they've been, um, you know, they've just been triaging protein all this, all this time. And that's why they're hungry all the time. And so that's definitely going to help on your site. I see a lot of like these really awesome images of all the foods you're talking about. And obviously if an individual eats this way, they're going to get a lot of nutrients, a lot of vitamins, minerals from these foods. But is there anything that you still suggest that individuals supplement like vitamin D, et cetera? Is there anything you still suggest they get from the outside along with eating this way? they get from the outside along with eating this way?

I mean, sunlight. Yeah, you definitely have to get sunlight. But I'm not, I am honestly, I'm not a huge supplement fan. I never take any supplements. I rarely recommend them. Even, you know, vitamin D supplement. We have this, you know, huge study on 25,000 people randomized into D versus no D for 15 years, and the outcomes were not different.

Now, we know that low vitamin D is a sign that your health sucks, and it's associated with all this bad stuff. But honestly, people with metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance have low D, and you're not going to fix that with a pill. It's fix your diet, fix your weight, maybe get some sunlight, how about it? And then you really don't need the supplements and I'm not recommending a bunch of supplements on a regular basis.

I mean, sometimes I will see individual deficiencies and I might recommend a supplement for those persons, but just on the whole, I'm not a big supplement fan. I'm not telling people to take them. It doesn't seem necessary if you're eating everything the right way. So that makes a lot of sense. I mean, supplements are a joke. Yeah. I mean, we've only had supplements for a couple of decades. Obviously humans did not become the dominant species on the planet because we had supplement pills. And the reality is every single supplement on earth exists only to make money for that supplement manufacturer. And the reality is every single supplement on earth exists only to make

money for that supplement manufacturer. And I'm not really a big fan. I mean, it's kind of not good. You know, I think this is something that people may not have heard of before, but it's my understanding that when you start to have lower energy requirements, you will also have lower requirements for minerals and stuff like that, too. Is that correct? So like if you – somebody who is unhealthy and they're eating carbohydrates all the time and they're consuming a lot of food each and every day, those people may have a different requirement for vitamins and minerals, but your body is so smart that it will partition things out in accordance to the way that you eat.

So your body will hold on to magnesium and potassium and zinc and all these things better with the less negative impact that you have on your metabolism through food. Is that correct? Or am I misunderstanding that? No, that's absolutely correct. Like a lot of these are cofactors for different things happening in your body. And you might have a higher requirement for them if you're just eating a ton of garbage. Also, people who are insulin resistant or diabetic are actually burning through more

amino acids for gluconeogenesis because their hepatic glucose output is higher. So you actually have higher protein and vitamin and mineral needs if you're overweight and unhealthy and pre-diabetic or diabetic. So you're right. The thin, healthy athlete can actually get by with lower protein and lower nutrients. And so it's even more crucial for people to get this nutrient density if they're unhealthy. Wow. Awesome.

Where can people find you? Well, you know, I've got a couple of websites. There's the PE Diet, which is where we're selling the book, the PE Diet. And I think that's probably the best place to pick it up. The book does not exist as an actual book on paper because it's 328 pages and like 500 full color graphics and photos. And it would cost the book's 20 bucks and it would cost more than that to physically print it. So it's not an actual book, but if you want to check out the book,

you can download it from the P E diet.com. And then I'm mostly on Twitter at Ted Naiman. That's probably the best place to find me. Awesome. It's great having you on the show today. Appreciate your knowledge. Appreciate you sharing that. I think this gave a lot of value to our listeners and especially to us three.

Gave us a lot of value and stuff to think about. So really appreciate your time. Oh, wow. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. All right, Ted. Have a good rest of your day all right you too thanks a lot awesome damn damn that was some good stuff that's a lot of it's i like that it didn't get too

complicated i mean there was in the beginning you know he did he did did talk some medical stuff, which is always a little hard to get past for some people that just haven't heard the terms and stuff before. But he kept it really simple. And then the waist-to-height ratio, it's like just your height in inches and your waist circumference to find out if you have some insulin resistance or if you're just not heading in the right way in the right direction i mean that's just that's just so simple i mean what about just measuring your waist like once a year just a quote-unquote gut check you know yeah just to see where it's at i mean it shouldn't be i mean i've said this before like how about you just don't get any fatter you know like people are always talking about losing weight but what if from the time you were I don't know

14 or something like that or 18 whenever you're kind of fully grown you just kind of stayed around there even if you are a little heavier but if you just didn't continue to get heavier and heavier as you got older you probably wouldn't see as much illness and as much sickness. I think it's just absolutely insane the percentage of people that are overweight and the percentage of people that are sick. I guess the overweight part I can get on board with, I can understand.

It's very understandable to have accumulated an extra 20 pounds or maybe even like an extra 30 or 40 pounds yeah but to have accumulated so much and to have done so much damage to yourself over such a long period of time that you're uh very unhealthy 10 20 30 years before you're supposed to that really sucks man it's really sad it's really sad to see it is and the thing is is like when you look at this let's just say you take all the science out of it just from an application point It sucks, man. It's really sad. It's really sad to see. eat more food it's almost like force feeding like andrew you're noticing that right now as you're dieting right when you haven't eat all that protein like you're like you're looking at the rice you're just like well so like last night for example like you know it's this just like you know cements it even more in my head but you've been talking to me how important it is to

get my fats in yeah so last night i was like way behind. So I'm like, okay, let's have some ground beef because not only is it going to be delicious because I've been having nothing but chicken, but it's going to be a great source of fat for me. So I had just your classic traditional monster mash. And then what I've been doing is I will actually input the meals before I have them to see where I need to get to, how much I need to eat. And it's sort of like planning your day. You're going to schedule your whole day before it

happens so that way you follow it. So I'm going to schedule all of my meals before they happen so I follow them. And then as I'm tinkering with it, I'm like, okay, I got to eat. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to try to go for 12 ounces of lean ground beef, 91.9 and two cups of rice. And I'm like, I could probably do that. And then when I got the bowl, I'm like, no, I need the bigger bowl. And then I put it all in there. I'm like, oh boy, this is going to be hard. I got through it. I was fine. There's lots of salt. That's what helps me get through the food um just what i've learned in the past but yeah i was full like i did not feel like i was on any diet i felt like i was almost force feeding myself at that point which you know is

also not good because it's like having all of that in one sitting for my body is not a good move but you know i kind of i don't know i was pretty hungry and I wanted to give it a shot. And, you know, I feel great today. Like, you know, I took some pictures. I'll show you guys in a little bit. But, like, I felt, yeah, I felt like, yeah, dude, like, this shit's working. I think overeating is totally fine. I really do.

Especially when you're overeating on foods, when you're intentionally overeating and it's overeating on stuff that's, like, good for you're overeating on foods, when you're intentionally overeating and it's overeating on stuff that's like good for you because you're just like, well, I have a few more ounces of steak to go. I may as well just kind of kill the whole thing. Correct. I mean, I ran into that last night where I was just like starting to feel like I was going to die eating this tomahawk ribeye. I was still just like slicing through it. I'm like almost halfway asleep, like going through it. I'm like almost halfway asleep, like going through it. But I think the human body is designed for that. We're designed to overeat.

What we're not designed to do though is overeat on something like donuts or cookies or something like that. That's when all kinds of crazy things can happen inside your body. But I think we're designed for feast and famine. I think that it just makes sense. I think your body will figure out, maybe not to do it all the time, you know, but your body will figure it all out. Yeah. Like I wasn't in pain or anything like it was for Thanksgiving, right? Like I didn't feel that. I just felt like I am really, really full and I still have a couple more bites to go, but I felt good. I just did, you know, when I mean like I overate for myself, meaning like too much protein in one sitting for my stomach the way it is but again like i woke up this morning and you know i felt felt totally

fine it felt good let's keep this in mind man like you're in a deficit of calories you're dieting you're getting leaner and you're not like you're not having crazy cravings that's like something that happens to a lot of people that's something that they feel they're like oh i can't diet because i feel like i'm gonna i'm gonna suffer i'm gonna feel hungry all the time that is that the case for you right no no the the um again like i'm gonna get i'm gonna hit some uh some bumps in the road and they're gonna be some growing pains right um i had asked you the other day about a like a zero calorie um bcaa drink right like it's totally fine right like the the nutritional facts on it are totally good it's a high quality um bcaa so after the step mill this morning i'm like you

know i'm gonna go hit up another workout i want to refuel a little bit and i want to you know crush the next workout and what ended up happening by having something some kind of flavor yeah i'm sitting here i'm like man like i don't know if you guys could hear my stomach growling this whole time but like it was making sounds over here and i'm like what's happening like i'm trying to recall like okay yesterday was a pretty chill day like this morning i did get after it like on the step mill i went a little bit faster mark kind of encouraged me to uh not make it so comfortable anymore and i'm like dude what's going on here? And I'm like, oh, I bet you it was that.

So that's something I'll probably cut out. But as far as like cravings, no, I mean, a lot of it has to do with because I am so focused. I'm not even allowing the cravings to happen. I will crave a hero bar from here, you know, from time to time. uh, I will crave a hero bar from here, you know, from time to time, but no,

like, uh, there's, there's nothing that's kind of gotten in my way, you know, to stop me really right now. Crazy talk. You're talking about craving a protein bar,

bro. So I was just thinking. It's a really good protein bar, but, uh, I mean, yeah, I think I,

yeah, I asked him, I'm like, Hey dude, can I have like peanut butter? Like I can get some more fat in that way. And then he's like, that's a slippery slope. And I'm like, hey, dude, can I have like peanut butter? Like I can get some more fat in that way. And then he's like, that's a slippery slope. And I'm like, okay.

Yeah, you know, the human body is really, it's just so damn intelligent. You know, it can't really be fucked with. You can't just be like, oh, I'm going to have more fat. And so you just, you know, have a scoop of olive oil or something. Like that's not going to really sit very well with you. And it's just not a great idea. And then also it's not going to digest the same as if you, you know, ate a steak or you had some olive oil on a salad or something like that. It's just, it's going to be consumed over a longer period of time. There's some chewing going on. Like

you really, you know, people talk about these like biohacks and there's certain things that can kind of override the body. Like there's certain things that can override your hunger hormone and kind of encourage overeating and encourage you to like eat way too much on calories and things like that. But it's hard. It's hard to trick your body. I really like the idea of just eating protein. Just fucking eat protein. I can't tell you anything else. Just fucking eat a lot of protein.

Eat a good amount of protein every day. Even if people just got close to, if someone weighed 300 pounds and they were trying to eat 300 grams of protein per day or trying to eat 250 grams of protein per day, even if they got within 25 grams or 50 grams of that, that would be a great start. Yeah. And I do think it's important that everyone listening remember if you're trying to diet or if you're already lean or whatever, he did mention if you're going to do higher carb, go lower fat. That's probably the best idea because when you do high carbs and high fats, that's when a bunch of overeating starts happening. So that's-

Yeah, and that's been my concern for people on the vertical diet, making the monster mash. I'm like, ah, like, just because I know how I am. I'm like, I'm going to like only listen to some of what Stan said. I'm not going to listen to everything. And I'm going to buy the 80-20 beef. I'm not going to listen to everything. And I'm going to buy the 80-20 beef. I'm not going to listen to him about buying the leaner meat or buying the, you know, bison or whatever it is, right?

And I'm going to just continue to, you know, overeat on these foods that that's pretty damn healthy, right? That's a really good choice. But you let me do that, you know, several times a day. I'm not going to be able to lose weight, you know, and I think a lot of other people the same. So you have to really pay attention to some of the details of what people are communicating. And if you listen to Stan, when he talks about racing those carbs, talking about the same thing, you got to lower the fat. But now we're also not getting rid of fat. We're not like on a, you know, bodybuilding prep where you might be down 40, 50 grams of fat. You're still probably, you know, power lifting and you still want to just be big and strong.

So your fat grams could still be at like 100, which is a pretty good amount to be within that range. Isn't part of the vertical diet meant to get people bigger though? So like part of the reason why you're doing people bigger though? Yeah, a lot of it. So part of the reason why you're doing that is so that you can overfeed? Right. But if you listen to him when he does seminars and stuff, he does specifically talk about approximately how much fat you should be eating. And I would just estimate it's probably way lower, probably about three times lower than what people are probably doing and registering. They're not really paying attention to the details i've given you yeah when he was here

basically i'll just you know the same old question like how am i going to gain weight and he just said you know okay do the one-to-one ratio do you weigh the same or more you weigh the same okay now do a cup and a half of rice to the cup of meat he's like do you weigh the same or more he's like do you want to go up or down that's how you can you know kind of uh configure how much rice and meat you should be eating yeah um but it was super funny so i i dropped the second episode of shred again and in that episode that's where i i explain how in 73 days i'm not going to eat for 48.6 days out of the entire series so naturally a couple people got triggered and other people were like wow this is really extreme but uh sully guy who

works here at the gym was like 48 days like i don't think i've not eaten for 48 seconds i'll just crack it up because i'm like yeah that's that monster mash live son well also to four you know 48 days yeah it's it's a uh it's anown, bulked-up number because a lot of people probably aren't eating for eight hours every single day. So you could take the number and you can basically kind of almost chop it in half. Yep. And you could say 24 days, right? Like your average person, you know, as they go through each and every day, if they're not waking up in the middle of the night, they have some duration of fasting going on as well. But you're just simply pointing out the fact that, look, yeah, this is how much it accumulates to. This is the result of it. And

it's double, which is still of significance. It's double of what somebody might normally do. On top of that, you have other precautions and methods and styles that are baked into your day-to-day yeah and i explained also it was like for shock value yeah right right you know what i found interesting what what um ted was saying he was like yes people approach the food first and then they naturally end up fasting and then that sense but when i thought about, like the way I did it, when I started intentionally doing fasting, but that also led me to eating much lower carbs, much higher fat and a lot of protein. Like my, I kind of shifted in that sense. I wasn't eating,

I didn't want to eat a lot of carbs. It made your food choices for you kind of. It made my food choices for me. So I feel like it's an, it's a, it ends up going both ways. If you eat this way you're going to end up like eating less and then doing more fasting or if you start fasting your food choices might change for that period of time that you actually need to eat in terms of what you actually want to eat something that he said that i thought was kind of cool i don't even know if he realized he said it um but i just thought this was kind of weird. It just made me think of like how much habit driven, like this is so habit driven, you know, our problems with eating. And he mentioned cooking

up a pound of meat and how when he recommended that to people, they were like, I've never done that before. And it's like, I can almost guarantee you most people that have cooked up a pound of meat that that aren't that's not a mom that's cooking for the family, most people that have cooked up a pound of meat and have eaten it are probably not fat. It's crazy because if you had a relative come over, like if we popped into Encima's house and we had a camera and it was 7 p.m., we'd probably catch him cooking up this big old thing of meat. And then somebody might look at that and be like, how the hell is he so jacked? How is he in such good shape eating all that food? Like,

isn't there a lot of fat in there, but it's pretty much just eating like a thing of meat and maybe a, a potato, but pop into your average person's home at seven or 8 PM. And what are they doing? They're probably on the couch, probably eating something that they shouldn't be eating. Um,

you're just probably doing some stuff that you just shouldn't be doing. You might be able to figure out some stuff that you can eat instead or something you can do instead. Maybe you should be just getting ready for bed, as boring as that is. Maybe your TV is kind of encouraging and influencing you eating some of these junk foods, but maybe you could reach for you know some yogurt or maybe you can reach for some cheese or some sort of protein thing or end your day with something sweet and have a you know some fruit that's sliced up or something like that but most of the time i think most people are really just most of the people that we know and i think a lot of people who listen to the show can admit to being guilty of just really fucking up at the end of the day.

And that's probably been the biggest change for you is just that you're straight through the whole day. You plow through pretty much the whole day at like a 9.5 or a 10, right? Yeah, absolutely. And for sure, the nighttime is the difficult time, but not because we're around the tv and you know like oh shit stephanie just made homemade popcorn like that smells amazing that's like of course i want to dive in but yeah i don't have that issue the issue i do have is like oh my gosh like i'm still under on my fats i'm still under on my protein like i need to consume more food and that's just that's just been the biggest struggle uh thus far is trying to hit my numbers because i'm under eating and

that's because you're fasting though too like correct you know you would be at night so the reverse of that is terrible you know to to be like oh shit like i'm so hungry and all i gotta do is go to bed yeah or even just feeling a little guilty because you're a little over you're like oh i kind of fucked up i'm a little bit over yeah after you did the math if you did it afterwards you're like oh whoops yeah i kind of celebrate when i like see the numbers on my my calculator like oh like i went a little bit over on fat today like cool that means i i did a good job obviously it's not like 30 grams over it's like anywhere like it's under it's single digits yeah yeah yeah but the because you've said this in the past because you

i think you said that a bunch of your friends have said this before but he's the first person or first guest i think i've heard actually say these words that protein doesn't count like that kind of flips a lot of shit on its head man yeah it does especially when people think about counting and stuff when they say protein doesn't count that that yeah think about that like oh i could eat as much as i motherfucking want yeah yeah i wonder i mean right that that changes like the overall macros then at that point right like okay so if i'm going for 2000 calories or whatever it is in a deficit so now does that mean I'm actually going for only like a thousand? Like, you know what I mean?

Cause if you're, you're cutting out all of those, uh, you know, calories, because if protein doesn't count, then we don't track them anymore. Therefore we can't go for it.

Yeah. Like, like I was like, you're eating 240 grams a day as a 100 and how much pound man? You're like one. New PR today, 174. Oh, my God. You're the same weight as an obese woman who's 5'4".

Correct. I have something in common with the 5'4 obese woman. Oh, man. Yeah. One thing that, Mark, you said, I'm sorry if you said it in the past and i've never had my ears open to it but you said we're not living longer we're dying longer yeah i was like holy shit mark yeah that's crazy we are man we are people are fucking sick you know i think with uh 250 grams of protein that's about how much you're eating? Is that what it is? 240, yeah. So in that range, that's what, a thousand

calories, right? It's just really not, it's just a thousand calories can be pretty significant, but I think if he didn't take anything else from Ted, I think a really important thing that you should take from him is the fact that

you can choose to run a little bit more off of carbs if you want, or you can choose to run off of fat, but you shouldn't really be eating an abundance of both. And when you do have foods that have both, you're going to tend to want to overeat on them because they just fucking taste really good. And then this I thought was huge. When he talked about the 160 pound person, you would have about 160 grams of protein, or you can go slightly higher if you are hungry and want to overeat. And then you would take an additional 160 and you would spread it out between the carbs and the fat, whatever way you decided you wanted, you know,

if you wanted to eat, you know, a hundred grams of carbs, you could have 60 grams of fat. You could, you know, you could decide where you want your energy to come from. But I really felt that, I just felt that that really simplified stuff a lot. And I think that if I was to talk to a family member and I would say, hey, listen, I love you. I want to see you make improvements. Here's what I think we should do. I have two options for you. If you really like carbohydrates, we can go this way. If you don't really, you know, if you don't think you need them and you like eggs and like steak, then we can go this way. And we can monitor it and we can see what it looks like for a little while.

But you're going to be eating plenty of food. You don't have to be scared about that. We're not really taking anything away. I'm just going to encourage that you get this one gram per pound of body weight and protein, and then we're just going to go from there and decipher everything out from there. But I thought that that was really cool. I've never heard anybody really split things up like that before. I've heard some great speakers in the past, Simon Sinek and a few others say like that they shouldn't even have a job, you know, and I feel like that Ted Neiman shouldn't even have a job when he's able to explain something that simply. He should be able just to drop the mic and head on his way and be like, I'm done. Like, I don't have to ever repeat this again.

You heard what I said. Hopefully you wrote it down or hopefully you bought my book and i shouldn't have to say it again but like that is a huge problem solver if people just actually enact it people just actually do it i think one big thing i know this is it this is how it is for like a lot of people i guess in in my personal life is dismantling their fears of a lot of meat because they're still like they're still fed. Oh, if you eat too much red meat or eat a lot of this type of meat, that's not going to be good for you overall. It's going to be bad for your health. And it's very hard even when they hear something on the contrary side for them to actually be willing to do that because it's good. Like it like it tastes good at whatever, but it doesn't feel like it's healthy for them or they don't feel like it's good. Like it, like it tastes good at whatever,

but it doesn't feel like it's healthy for them or they don't feel like it's healthy for them and trying to dismantle that. I still can't for some people. Yeah. Well, it's definitely healthier than what they're probably currently doing. Right. Yeah.

But that's the thing. Like what, like what a lot of these people are currently doing is eating a lot of health foods. They're eating foods that have the little heart on them and all that stuff that are in the grocery store. Yep. And the grocery store, you know, shouldn't have about 80% of what's, uh, of what's there.

Andrew, how much meat do you think you eat in a day right now? How many, like you, you have 12 ounces, like four times a day or three times a day. Um, so I'm doing, uh, let's see here. I'm trying to, he's got a spreadsheet. Yeah. I mean, I could just pull up my phone, but I strive for two meals here before I go home. So that that's each one is eight ounces of chicken breast and half a cup of rice. And then at home, I'm doing another one.

So that's, let's say three. So then that's, I'm not getting whatever. So you got like 24 ounces of meat a day. three. So then that's, I'm not getting whatever. So you got like 24 ounces of meat a day. And then another meal of dinner, which could consist of a Piedmontese steak, but I ran out. So then I've been having the ground beef just because I have something to look forward to. So you're eating four, are you eating about four times a day? Yep. Yeah. So you have about, from what I've gathered, you have about like 30 to 36 grams or 36 ounces of of meat per day yeah i don't you know i don't just don't think that that's excessive i i do think like um i i do like what he said

and it's something that i'll take to heart because i like i i like experimenting i like diving all in and really trying like all right zero carbs let me see what this is going to yield let me see what this is going to do but if i was what this is going to do. But if I was to be just extremely, just try to be extremely logical about everything and to just think like, like, I don't necessarily think that vegetables are exponentially any healthier than anything else. I think that meat and vegetables and fruit, I think are all approximately similar. They're all about the same in my view and my estimation. However, if you were just to eat a little bit more vegetable, would it prevent you from over-consuming meat? And can you over-consume meat? I don't really know if you can over-consume

meat. According to Ted Nieman, he doesn't feel like you can over overconsume protein, but that's maybe slightly different than meat. Like if I was to eat five pounds of steak every day, like that just doesn't – like from a logical perspective, that doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense. But I don't know – your digestive tract, can it handle all that? So what if I was just eating a little bit more vegetable here and there or a little bit more of something else, even just a potato? Just to have something else to mix it up just to prevent me from kind of overdoing that one food. I kind of am a believer that you can overdo just about anything, whether it be good or bad. You can overdo exercise. We've talked about a lot of these things before.

So I like the fact that he was like, yeah, you should probably blend in a little bit of something just so you're not at zero. I like that a lot. I also like on one of his websites, it just says the meal diet, meat, eggs, added leaves. How simple is that? Him and what's that one guy's name? William? No, the meat is a condiment gentleman would have a great conversation oh yeah joel firman firman yeah oh that guy he was hey he was

a good guest he was great having him on just i just don't agree with what he was saying he was different yeah yeah but um man it's what i wish is like when i did do my um when i was prepping for my show i think one of the big reasons why i had like the libido problem towards the end is because i was just like i was i was i was told to eat really low fat and i was eating like 35 to 40 grams of fat as a 229 pound guy like that i think that's the main reason i had a lot of those issues because right now like being as close to sholeen as i was like at this point in my diet before i was having libido issues like i that wasn't happening i i wasn't having i was having a sexual attraction to food not to the person i was with

like quite literally not to the person i was with. Like quite literally, not to the person I was with. Watching food porn with a different mindset. Seriously, man. So, I mean, that's why I asked him that question about like minimum amounts of fat, because that makes a big difference if you are dieting and you do want to go the higher carb route. Get those fats up. Get those fats and get that protein really, really high because that will probably, I guess, negate a lot of those effects that a diet may have on you that a lot of people report. Yeah, I'm so grateful that you explained to me why I need to keep – if I want high carb, just, hey, that means you got to go have low fat because everything I've been learning is fat doesn't equal fat.

And so you're like, well, stupid because you why am I doing this? And you're like, well, stupid. Cause you like to have carbs, right? I'm like, yeah. And by no means am I having refined carbs. I'm having,

you know, rice being the worst potatoes being probably the better. Um, but yeah, I, I feel really, really good. Like,

I feel like this is how I should have been eating for a long time. Yeah. Once, you know, this, this, this thing is over and I've, I for a long time. Yeah. Once, you know, this, this thing is over and I've, I've gotten to a, a better physique,

you know, something I, what I want to say, the one I've always wanted, cause it's always going to be like, Oh, just a little bit more, just a little bit more,

but I will be, um, happy to have a little bit more fat once this, this thing is done. Yeah, man. I know when you told me how you hit 174, my butt literally clenched out of excitement and it wasn't like, it wasn't me being, you know, I wasn't exaggerating. Yeah, man, I know. When you told me how you hit 174, my butt literally clenched out of excitement.

And it wasn't like, it wasn't me being, you know, I wasn't exaggerating. It's just, I really got excited for you, bro. This is gonna, y'all don't understand what Andrew has done. You don't know. And when you see it,

oh my God. Thanks, dude. God, man. I'm excited. Yeah, with your guys' help, for sure. All right, we out of here. Strength is never weak. Thisakness is never a strength Catch y'all later